Category Archives: Spirituality

Coincidence? You Decide

Those of my readers who have read my NaNo 2003 excerpt know that my novel poses the question, “What would you do if a goddess from classical antiquity showed up in your living room?”

The particular goddess in question is Hekate; or, if you prefer the Latinized version of her name, Hecate. (Yes, it’s a hard ‘k’ sound; the Greeks, like the Celts, didn’t have a soft ‘c’ sound. Which means that when I have discussions about Circe, and I pronounce it ‘Kir-kay’ no one knows who I’m talking about, and I have to swallow a sigh and politely say ‘Sir-say’, which makes my spine crawl.)

Anywhats. Revenons a nos moutons.

Those in the know are also aware that through an aural misunderstanding at a pre-November coffee meeting, the idea of the Psychic Ferret arose for as a gag challenge for Montreal NaNo participants. The ferret belongs to a family of mammals which includes otters, badgers, weasels, and so forth.

So when I ran across this little tidbit tonight, I just had to share. It’s too perfect.

HEKATE & THE WITCH GALE

I have heard that the land-marten was once a human being. It has also reached my hearing that Gale was her name then; that she was a dealer in spells and a sorceress (Pharmakis); that she was extremely incontinent, and that she was afflicted with abnormal sexual desires. Nor has it escaped my notice that the anger of the goddess Hekate transformed it into this evil creature. May the goddess be gracious to me: fables and their telling I leave to others. – Aelian On Animals 15.11

[Also told as:]

HEKATE & HER COMPANION WEASEL

The Moirai were aggrieved […] and took away the womanly parts of Galinthias since, being but a mortal, she had deceived the gods [by tricking them into allowing the birth of Herakles which they were preventing]. They turned her into a deceitful weasel, making her live in crannies and gave her a grotesque way of mating. She is mounted through the ears and gives birth by bringing forth her young through the throat.

Hekate felt sorry for this transformation of her appearance and appointed her a sacred servant of herself. – Antoninus Liberalis 29

So Hekate had a weasel as a servant. Or a servant who became a weasel.

Coincidence, or a Divine someone-is-trying-to-tell-me-something? You decide!

NaNo 2003, Day 10 recap

Thanks to Ceri’s presence yesterday, I hit 14,448 words. Yes, that’s about 5,500 words in one afternoon. There’s nothing that makes you write like the sound of someone else madly typing. I wanted to double my word count, but hitting 18,000 was a dream; I was so exhausted by seven o’clock that I had to admit defeat. Still, 5,500 is just shy of two-thirds of my goal, so I’m pleased. Ceri made me a little sticky-note with a secondary goal of 15,200 words on it on it, and I almost reached it. Granted, these goals were deliberately exaggerated, but they certainly kept me going! We also discovered that the perogies from the Russian shop nearby are absolutely delicious (thanks for the tip, Bev!), so the day was a remarkable success all around. Ceri made yummy spaghetti sauce for dinner, too.

I woke up feeling somewhat human this morning, which is a really pleasant switch from the sub-human feelings I’ve been experiencing lately thanks to this cold. I passed up the Remembrance Day services downtown at Place du Canada in favour of staying home where it’s warm; I’m not going to risk a relapse when I’m so close to getting rid of it. Every year I do a small ritual for Remembrance Day at eleven o’clock if I’m home, and this year was no different. I burn rosemary and a yellow candle, and marvel every year at how the beginning of November is full of ceremonies honouring the dead: Samhain, All Souls, Day of the Dead, Remembrance Day. CBC Radio Two sucker-punched me this year by playing the ‘Nimrod’ movement from Elgar’s Enigma Variations directly after live coverage of the Ottawa ceremony, reducing me to tears. This is a piece of music that unabashedly rips your heart to bits, and playing it with my second orchestra this year has only made me more sensitive to it.

On to writing! Let’s see: got my tea, my afghan, my laptop, my cats, and my stuffed ferret. I’m set.

Slowly But Surely

Ah, the first cold I’ve had in months. I so have not missed being sick. The general ache, the out-of-it feeling due to the sinus pressure, the boxes and boxes of tissue….

Thursday night I had a dynamic pair of students in a workshop, which was an enjoyable switch from the usual silent note-taking type. Friday night I got to make a flying visit to the first Montreal NaNo coffee gathering and met some terrific new people while re-acquainting myself with terrific people I’d met last year. And, as a result of a highly amusing misunderstanding, I have resolved that my story will have a psychic ferret involved in it somewhere (you just had to be there). (And I called Tal insane. Ah, well. There’s a reason we’re related by choice.)

It was a lovely Thanksgiving weekend (apart from the cold, of course, which ensured that I couldn’t taste my in-laws’ wonderful harvest feast to the degree it deserved), with a nice gift at the end: Salem, my favourite local cat-who-is-not-mine, ate about 30 ccs of food after refusing to eat for a period of days. Sure, it took three of us to hold her (including one and a half animal techs), but she ate; she even ate willingly after being force-fed a bit of it. Then I got to cuddle a corn snake while I watched the new trailers for Matrix Revolutions and The Return of the King.

This afternoon is a legal presence at the Palais de Justice (no worries, it’s all good), and then an intimate get-together at Hurley’s to celebrate a few different milestones achieved over the past three months.

(Palais de Justice, for our non-Quebec-resident readership, is the fancy French term for the city courthouse. It does not, in fact, have anything to do with a superhero team. More’s the pity.)

Slowly but surely, I’m getting my mind back into the writing mode. I managed to get my printer working again (using the popular kick-it-hard method combined with replacing an ink cartridge) and printed out the existing copy of two half-finished stories, then took them to the Second Cup with me Friday afternoon to edit and add to them. Re-reading work that I haven’t touched in months is a remarkably good carrot to use when I’m stuck; it’s often better than I remember it being. Must stop drinking lattes and mochas while doing it, though. Herbal tea all the way!

Red Letter Day

Six thumbs up for Ceri’s apple pie. Not too tart; not too sweet; not too gooey. Perfect pastry. Her Nanny would be proud.

My husband enjoyed another piece for breakfast and says it was just as delicious the morning after.

Over tea last night the topic of ancestors came up, and I was thinking about it this morning. It’s always such a pity that by the time we’re old enough to appreciate the stories and the knowledge that our grandparents possess, they’re gone. It’s some sort of comfort that my spiritual path involves honouring my genelogical ancestors, and my spiritual ancestors as well. I have a connection to the past that extends past the living face-to-face exchanges, and I value it greatly.

I also have an adorable black kitten who actually jumped up on my lap for a cuddle when I got home this afternoon. And I was initiated into the mysteries of making perfume waters at work today. I even labelled them, and they look just like the ones on the shelf. I am terribly proud of myself. I picked up my beautiful, pristine, luminescent copy of Neil Gaiman’s Endless Nights this afternoon as well. So, all in all, quite the red-letter day.

Now, if I could only get news of how the submission of my contract to the publishing board of the US publisher went today, my happiness would be complete.

Family

I hate it when insecure people create issues out of nothing.

I made a statement regarding the concept of chosen families and blood family in someone’s comments, and someone else took issue with it — not with me, but with the blogger. They took a neutral statement and read valuation into it somehow, despite the lack of positive or negative terms, and imposed a whack of stress upon the poor blogger.

The whole thing arose out of the concept of family.

Now, sue me if I’m wrong, but last I looked, the biological unit of mother/father/offspring didn’t have an exclusive right to the word “family”.

When the blogger sent me a private plea for help, one of the options suggested was retraction. Nuh-uh. I don’t retract unless I’m wrong, and agree that I’m wrong. Instead, I wrote a clarification, which included the following:

We form several different ‘families’, or tight-knit communities based on common interests, throughout our lives. At any one time, an individual may have an academic family, a social family, or a spiritual family in addition to his/her own geneological family. No one family is more important than another; they all perform necessary functions. Taken together, these families create a complex context for the individual’s growth and development.

These families exist in different dimensions, but no one family supersedes another. There exists no hierarchy. Rather, there exists a harmony through which the individual is nurtured.

On a practical level, there are no negative words in the phrase I wrote, and it was written thusly in deliberate fashion. ‘Different’ does not mean ‘better’ or ‘worse’, ‘higher’ or ‘lower’; it simply means ‘different’. None of the words in the phrase indicate a value judgement in any fashion, and to seek to interpret them as such is to create a false statement.

What I didn’t say was that anyone who chooses to create mountains out of molehills and put a guilt trip on someone else is more than likely operating out of fear or narrow-mindedness, and obviously needs a hobby like knitting or basket-weaving to fill the time they currently spend in making people miserable.

What amuses the heck out of me at the same time is that my irritation with narrow-mindedness arises from my (admittedly) liberal views. I become severely annoyed if someone can’t step out of themselves for a moment and use their stunted imaginations to pretend, just for a moment, what it’s like for the other guy. This has always been a strength and curse for me. In an argument I can usually see both points of view. When it comes to someone deliberately closing their minds to the fact that truth is subjective, though, I get downright grr.

Ah, well. Things like family, emotion, religion, and politics are always accompanied by a short fuse. The whole issue of same-sex marriage is currently revolving around offspring — why else would people insist that marriage be defined as the legal union of one man and one woman? Perhaps the time has come to realise that the term “family” does indeed mean more than the biological unit.