Category Archives: Spirituality

Standing Still

Lowest voter turnout ever. Well, since 1898. I’m disgusted.

We spent election night drinking Quebec ice cider, Nova Scotia beer, local venison-cranberry pate, and baked local Brie. How much more Canadian can you get?

Far more interesting than the Official Federal Election In Which Nothing Happened was the Student Vote program, a project designed to educate children and teenagers about the election process and the structure of government. Students assessed platforms, debated, listened to candidates who were willing to meet them, and finally ‘voted’ and ‘elected’ 100 Conservative seats, 66 NDP seats, 54 Liberal seats, 44 Green seats, and 24 Bloc seats. Take a good look, people; these are tomorrow’s voters.

In other news, we had an absolutely lovely weekend with my parents. The weather was lovely; the food was incredible (as always). The only drawback was Liam coming down with a cold and his first case of conjunctivitis, which we caught right at the beginning before it got bad and thus was cleared up before we left for home. (Well, okay, there was that other drawback of having to wade through two hours of traffic to get out of Montreal, and experience so awful that we came very close to turning around and going home. Except to go home would have taken us the same amount of time that continuing to get out of the city would take. You know, that whole ‘I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er’ thing. And had it taken any longer there very well might have been blood.)

Naturally I have the cold now too, and mine are always worse than the boy’s. It’s like he amps them as he passes them along. He stayed home yesterday and we ran errands together. “We’re going to vote for the government!” he told everyone with great excitement when we went to the bank, the grocery store, the place where I bought pants, and where he got his hair cut. The actual voting was anti-climatic for him though once he’d helped me find the polling booth by number (although he kept trying to steer me toward 126 instead of 136). We were in a school gymnasium, and he was very distracted by the climbing bars and the benches against the wall. I voted very quickly in order to lunge and catch him before he got more than a foot off the ground and up those bars.

After a very overcast day, the sun broke through for the most glorious autumnal end of afternoon glow. There was a warm wind all day. It was a beautiful full moon last night, and when we lit our Happy Full Moon candle at the altar before the boy’s bedtime he chirped, “Thank you, Goddess, for all the things in the world!”

Also, I found three pairs of jeans that fit me that were all on sale. And I only have to hem one of them.

On Voting

I don’t talk about politics very much here because it’s my journal, and politics annoy me because they’re not what they ought to be.

But after watching highlights of the French leadership debate, overhearing bits of the English debate (notably the crack of “Where’s your platform, under the sweater?” which I heard clearly all the way in the bedroom), and reading about the various statements that leaders have made while on tour, I have this to say:

I represent Stephen Harper’s worst nightmare. I am an educated woman with a post-graduate degree. I am an artist, one of those people who drive a significant portion of the economy. I happen to practice an alternative religion, think that the environment needs a hell of a lot more attention than it’s getting, and think that the long-term effects of policy are more important than short-term effects. I read policy (when platforms have actually been released) and make my own decisions, factoring in track records regarding how planned policy is carried out.

And I’m now registered to vote in my riding. Nice try, switching my husband’s riding but conveniently not switching mine. But I’m not taking it personally, even though it’s happened every single federal election since I’ve been married/earned that post-grad degree/stood up to be counted as someone practicing an alternative religion. I’m sure it was just an oversight.

You can be damn sure I’m not going to vote for someone who has repeatedly insulted my intelligence, that of the majority of my friends, and that of the entire country. And this isn’t limited to the current party in power.

Not The Official Festival Report

Am exhausted. Ran out of spoons mid-Saturday, not long after it started to pour buckets of rain upon the fest. Fortunately, the energy ran out after my workshop; unfortunately, before the other workshops and rituals I’d planned to attend. Sleeping badly all weekend plus two seven-hour car rides did not help. Neither did the energy-sapping damp weather. It’s going to take me about three days to get back into some sort of normal operative mode.

Workshop = success. Yay me. Yay workshop attendees. Yay festival organizers for being an awesome team of awesome people. Love them all with much love.

Sold some books, even. Was also asked to do an article on hearthcraft for Circle Magazine.

Both HRH and I came home from the festival with new blades from Helmut’s Forge. I also acquired a stunning kyanite pendant from Shan, a highly polished cabochon the size of my thumbnail that looks nothing like that Wikipedia photo of the mineral. (Oh, this site has a gallery of cut and polished stones; much better.) Websites variously tell me that kyanite is used for stimulating energy, encouraging clarity and intuition, dispelling anger/confusion/frustration, protecting in energy-sapping situations, facilitating communication, and promoting tranquillity, among other things. We just bought it because it looked pretty.

Stopped by t! and Jan’s new home on the way back yesterday to run around the place (okay, the boy did the running, I did a lot of sitting and drinking a glass of water) and generally admire their house and land. The boy smashed the cats’ water goblet in one of his enthusiastic turns through the kitchen. Sigh.

Finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle last night. Would have been life-changing had I not just read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Started Neal Stephenson’s Anathem this morning and love every word of it.

The boy has a cold; his chest seems congested and he coughs now and again. (Travelling with him was not much fun yesterday.) He stayed home with me till we verified that the preschool takes kids so long as they are not feverish or diarrheaic or have streaming noses, drove him in for ten, dropped the car off for HRH, and metro/bussed home. Walked through the front door at 12:30. Lay down for a while, then hauled myself here to assure you all that no, I is not ded.

Except now, having seen that the world and the Intraweebs did not blow up in my absence (the remnants of Hurricane Ike smashing into the back of the house last night notwithstanding) and my inbox holds nothing of dramatic deadline, I will drag myself off to lie on the couch again and read more Anathem, because I have the energy for nothing else.

Quickly

I love the Hamilton pagan community and want them to adopt me.

I have just finished a last go-over of the workshop (Whose brilliant idea was it to present a workshop I’D NEVER GIVEN BEFORE? Gah!) (Oh, wait, that would have been me.), have signed all the books I brought for sale, have separated all the postcards with the book and contact info on them… now to go get changed.

There is so much happening today, so many talks I want to sit in on, and there are so many people I want to sit down and talk with one on one. And there’s a family gathering once I come home for dinner too.

Off I go!

Workshop Wibbling, By Me

Once upon a time when I prepared lectures/workshops, it went something like this:

1. Oh my gosh! I’m not going to know what to say at all!

2. I know, I’ll outline it extensively in point form.

3. That can’t possibly be enough to fill ninety minutes. I’ll add more.

4. Oh no, we’re going overtime! I’ll try to squeeze the last trillion bits of info into the following five minutes.

Now it’s more like this:

1. Oh my gosh! I’m not going to know what to say at all!

2. I know; I’ll put handy book extracts on a couple of pieces of paper.

3. Oh my gosh! There are TEN PIECES OF PAPER! With wall to wall type on them! This will never work!

4. I will reduce it to point form. Even if I think I won’t remember what to say.

5. I’ll bet this would take an hour and a half to cover. I should cut more out.

6. I AM GUTTING MY LECTURE! This will never work!

7. Maybe I should aim for a half-hour lecture, then it will actually fit into an hour.

8. I cannot possibly choose what to leave out!

9. Oh, fine. I’ll cut those three pages.

10. This will never fit into an hour.

11. I give up. I’ll use these two pieces of paper, and we’ll just go where it takes us.

12. I should probably print this out…

Note: I am currently around step seven and step four. Yes, at the same time.

ETA: I give up; I’m printing what I’ve got. I need to highlight things and write little notes in by hand to properly satisfy my need to make changes. Also? Eleven pages. Oy. The last two are just-in-case-we-have-time. But we won’t. I’m becoming a lot more comfortable with what I’ve got down, which is good too; I think that’s what I was most concerned about going into this. You know, the whole ‘I handed in the book and all the info promptly fell out of my head’ syndrome that pops up every time I finish a manuscript? That. I’m much better now, though, because I’ve been talking through what I see on the monitor. (I’m sure this completely reassures you.)

Orchestrated Update

Total word count, Orchestrated: 7,390
New words today: 2,197

So this is what happens when I actually leave the document open all day and remember to put words into it…

Of course, I didn’t do any work on the workshop for the weekend. Which means that’s what I have to do tomorrow afternoon, and finish it on Thursday. Which, in turn, means no more Orchestrated until I’m home from the festival next Monday. Sigh.

ETA: Except I did half an hour of moving things around and consolidating thoughts in the workshop file, and huh, look at that, I have the bones of a coherent workshop emerging. Again, the problem is going to be keeping it to one hour; I’m used to workshops being two hours. I suspect once I’m there I may toss everything out and just talk about why home-based spirituality is important and how to recognize/add spiritual elements to daily home life.

Weekend and Book Roundup

I am drinking the most excellent jasmine green tea this morning and feeling very happy about it. It’s Mighty Leaf Mountain Spring Jasmine, one of three remaining jasmine tea bags I’ve been hoarding from the huge sampler box ADZO gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It makes the morning very, very good indeed.

The weekend was lovely. There was the trip to the luthier on Saturday morning (see below for associated cello-squeeing), house tidying and general upkeep Saturday afternoon, a two-hour dinner prep and cooking Saturday night (in which I winged a roasted garlic-mushroom-onion-chicken thing that I served over pasta), the annual M&M birthday party Saturday night (at which we saw many many people, huzzah!), a trip to the Marche de l’ouest for fruits and vegs (we ate all the berries on the way home in the car, though, oops; but hey, it’s fruit) and then the bookstore on Sunday morning, groceries Sunday afternoon, and homemade pizza Sunday evening. The only thing I forgot to do was go to the bank to deposit a tax refund.

There’s been a lot of book reading lately. (Not that there isn’t usually, but it just seems more intense than usual.) I might be the only person I know of, or at least within three degrees of separation, who geeked out in absolute excitement over receiving my secondhand copy of the out-of-print Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations, 1525-1855. Gods bless Jane Baldauf-Berdes for writing exactly the book that I needed, fifteen years before I knew that I did. I devoured Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps and Last Days in an afternoon and evening, and will cheerfully lend them out to anyone looking for a decent and believable vampire story for teens. Ceri lent me her copy of Charles de Lint’s Dingo, which I also read in an hour in a half. I also finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma this weekend, and it was excellent. I looked for The Botany of Desire in the bookstore Sunday morning but of course it wasn’t in stock; if I’d wanted In Defense of Food I could have had one of twenty-three hardcover copies, but I wanted Botany. I don’t try to be difficult, really. (I also went with the intent of picking up Neal Stephenson’s new Anathem, couldn’t find it anywhere, was absolutely mystified at how they couldn’t have a single copy in stock when Stephenson is So Damn Big, then checked a terminal and discovered that it doesn’t come out in North America till Tuesday. Argh. Should have ordered the UK version that released on September 1 [obviously why I thought the NA edition was also out]; I could have had it finished by now.) Since they didn’t have the Pollan I wanted I picked up Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle instead, which has been on my to-read list since its release.

I read the boy the first half of the first chapter of The Wind in the Willows while he ate his after-dinner ice cream cone last night. I’m stunned that he sat still for twelve pages of text with only the occasional pen and ink sketch tucked among the words. I’m looking forward to sharing this with him, a few pages at a time.

Speaking of books, I have to reread the hearthcraft book today in preparation for drafting this weekend’s lecture. I suspect everything I’ll need for this hour-long intro-to will be in one particular chapter, prefaced by a quick definition of the subject and the importance of addressing home-based spirituality. The problem will be keeping it to an hour! Those of you who won’t be coming to Hamilton for this festival (and really, that’s 98% of my readers here) can assuage their trauma with the knowledge that this lecture will be a condensed version of the extended one I’ll be presenting next spring at the Avalon Centre, and most likely at Le Melange Magique as well, to celebrate the release of the hedge witch book.

Time for more jasmine tea, then it’s word-making. I think I’ll work on writing till noon, have lunch, then do a rough patch of the hearthcraft lecture from the bits in the book I want to focus on. Tomorrow I can add and remove things, make it pretty, then remove elaboration till all I have is a bulleted list of points to make and talk about. Okay, that won’t all happen tomorrow, but it will happen over the next couple of days. I’d do it from memory except I know that I wrote things down in the book that I won’t remember off the top of my head while drafting a lecture.

To work! And more jasmine tea!