Monthly Archives: March 2004

Hail Spring!

In another one of those synchronous miracles that really isn’t because I believe that we create our own coincidences, I taught a class yesterday that compared and contrasted group work with solitary worship, and the students asked very perceptive questions about the group mind and how it forms. Then I came home to a ritual with my new still-gelling group which celebrated the group mind and the wonders of being an individual, while simultaneously being a part of something greater.

It was a fabulous ritual which took the concepts of balance (Vernal Equinox, equal day and night, God/Goddess), co-operation, frolic, and reverence, blended them together, and created a terrific experience through which everyone learned something about themselves and each other. And all this came from an individual who had never written/led a group Sabbat before. (I might be wrong, but I am fairly certain I’m not. If so, then the individual had certainly never written/led a Wicca-based rit for a group.)

Heck, yeah. The invocations raised chills, the raising of energy focused on control instead of quantity, and the whole thing took less than half an hour. That, dear readers, is a sign of a well-managed ritual. Focused, moving, thought-provoking, engages emotional-mental-physical levels, and doesn’t drag on.

And every single one of us walked away with a new understanding of the words “spring” and “balance”.

The group mind. It’s the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts entity/identity that arises independently from the regular interaction of a group of people. Your clique in high school had a group mind. Your family has a group mind. Your softball team has a group mind. A group mind takes a while to form while everyone gets to know each other socially and within the context of the group’s performance, but when it’s there, whoa baby, it’s a powerful thing. Yesterday’s exercise in circle did a lot to demonstrate that a group mind can not only be formed sooner with intention, but refined through attention and careful management.

I’ve also discovered one of the uses of a coven Book of Shadows. It’s a HPS’ brag book and scrapbook. Years from now we’ll go back over it and say, “Do you remember the day so-and-so led such-and-such ritual?”

So yes: spring. The celebration of new beginnings. One of the affirmations used in yesterday’s ritual was, “I’m glad you’re here.” I’d like to take this opportunity to say to my coven dedicants who have chosen to study with HRH and me: I’m glad you’re here.

And, dear readers, I’m glad you’re here too. After all, what’s a regular literary exploration of words and ideas without an audience?

One Word Makes All the Difference

I found this phrase on someone’s website:

Wicca centers around reverence for nature as seen in the Goddess and the God.

Except I misread the fourth word as “revenge”. And you know, I had two simultaneous responses: the first, acceptance (well, yeah; I just so happen to work with two severely justice-oriented deities), and the second, a major double-take (people usually define Wicca as love and light and tolerance, blah blah blah, and forget that Nature encompasses both light and dark).

Revenge for Nature would make an interesting title for an environmental-oriented book on Goddess spirituality, though.

Serial Stories Taken to a New Level


NOVELS DELIVERED TO YOUR PHONE: E-mail Opens New Possibilities for Old Medium.

Nowadays the sight of people passing time on the train by sending e-mail with their mobile phones is an everyday occurrence in Japan. This technology has now led to the emergence of a new and unexpected phenomenon: people reading entire novels on their mobile phones.

How… novel.

Synchronicity Strikes

I keep a Hanson-Roberts tarot deck on my desk to play with when I get stuck on something. A couple of days ago I shuffled and drew three cards: Justice, the Empress, and the Star.

They’re still on my desk, because something’s been niggling at me. Namely, the fact that as soon as I saw the Empress, I said, “Ooh, Brid!”

Now, Brid is usually seen as a Maiden figure. (Paradoxical association has Saint Brigit being a matron of pregnant women. Go figure.) She is associated with the first stirrings of spring, creativity, healing, and crafts, among other things. The Hanson-Roberts deck (which isn’t my favourite by a long shot; it’s just slightly smaller than the average tarot deck and fits my hands comfortably) portrays the Empress as a golden brown-haired woman crowned with twelve tiny flames, gowned in a dress of brown-red, white, and soft blue, sitting in a chair that has a back with a large round headrest. The blue headrest is outlined in gold, and provides a frame for her face. Traditionally the Empress indicates a woman of mid-age, and is associated with fruitfulness, family, motherhood, abundance, progress and such things.

So my immediate recognition of the Empress card as Brid stumped me for a moment. Then I looked at the card again, thought about my research, and began to understand why.

I’ve been doing some key research on the concept of Brid as figure of Sovereignity, a representative of the energy of the land itself. In that respect, the figure of the Empress and her associations of fertility and abundance work quite well. The tiny flames crowning her head are of course associated with Brid’s fire aspect. The blues of the card call to mind Brid’s water affiliation through her healing aspect. The grain growing around the Empress is not only used to feed the people of the land, but the cattle and other domestic herds who are under Brid’s protection also. The round disk of the chair back brings to mind the possible solar connection Brid has, as well.

If someone had asked me to choose a Major Arcana card to represent Brid before this happened, I’d likely have chosen only the Star. I’m a writer; I tend to relate to Brid in her creative aspect first and foremost. These three cards together, though, seem to show me the three sides of Brid: the brightness of inspiration in the Star, the fertile Sovereignity aspect of the Empress, and the rulership/warrior aspect of Justice.

A good writer and researcher keeps her mind open to possibilities. And since in my world I choose to believe that there is no such thing as coincidence, and since it was the Empress card that really jumped out at me, I think I’ll be following this line of Sovereignity research for a while.

Noooo!

I left my printer paper and brand-new sticky tabs at work last night.

I think I’ll go back to bed. Or make a cup of hazelnut hot chocolate and curl up with an Anne Rice novel or something. You know, the complete antithesis of academic application.

Research Crisis

I woke up with way too much pep at a ridiculous hour this morning. Got up, dragged all my notebooks and research texts and my pencil case to bed in order to work…

and discovered that I had only one coloured sticky index tab left.

Woe!

You cannot possibly imagine the depths of my despair, because you’re not me. I’m a stationery geek – no, not as in immobile, that’s stationary. I mean stationery as in paper and office products. Notebooks, pens, pencils, staplers, paper clips, Post-It notes, coloured sticky index tabs that you position on a page to indicate An Important Point You’ll Want to Refer To Later.

These things have been my life lately. Yellow for references to the Brigantii tribe; red for references to the goddess Brid; green for healing references; purple for general goddessy stuff I’ll work in later. Blue for whatever. It’s a system. Every academic has his or her system. Ceri has index cards. I have sticky tabs.

When I’m stuck for inspiration, I buy a new pen. When I begin a new research project, I buy new coloured sticky tabs.

I ought to look upon this crisis as a Meaningful Milestone, namely that I’ve done so much research that I’ve come across a couple of hundred important points. At the moment, however, I’m just glum. Even promising myself a trip to Bureau en Gros on the way to work isn’t brightening my day as much as it could.

Although I do need new highlighters; my current ones fade out after thirty seconds of use. And I need a new package of paper for the printer, too.

Well, fine. So I’ll stop and pick things up. If I leave now. I’ll have an extra twenty minutes to poke about before I have to be at the store for noon for my shift.

The Other Side of the Fence

Isn’t it ironic how when we begin a cold, on our way down we hit a certain stage of illness where we operate at 80% efficiency and we moan about how I feel just awful, awful. Then when we hit the same efficiency level on the way to getting well again, we rejoice and say, Isn’t it wonderful! I feel so good!

It’s all relative.