February Blues

Lately it feels like I'm walking a labyrinth—and not the fun type where you find serenity waiting for you after an arcing, meditative walk; or the exciting type where an animal mystery is at the center; or even a magical one with singing Muppets. No, I'm talking the anxious, mirrored labyrinth where the strings you tie to milestones break after you go around silvered corners, leaving you unable to navigate back to places you can only see through the reflected turns. All you have are broken strings in your hands and troubling redoubled likenesses of things yet to pass. Occasionally, you return to a milestone knotted with with broken strands leading in multiple directions. Walking backward won't help.

I obviously need to spend more time making art, gardening, and spending more mindful time with Mark—and less time on social media.

Frazer and The Scapegoat

I continue to read “A Century of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.” Last week’s humorous moment occurred when I was in a discussion where folks were tossing around the words “ontology” and “epistemology” and I was glad that I had been obliged the day before to make a study glossary with those very words in order to follow an early chapter, “Hypothesis and Theory.”

The latest chapter I’m reading, "The Hebrew Bible Scapegoat: Complicating a Frazerian Typology,” explores the connections (or not) between the Greek pharmakos expulsion tradition; the Leviticus 16 goat pair—one for YHWH, one for Azazel; Frazer’s interpretation of the scapegoat; and surrogate victim concepts in Joshua 7. The gist of this chapter is that Frazer popularized the 16C through 19C misinterpretation of az, “the goat,” azel, “that goes away” (i.e. the scapegoat) as a victim saddled with the sins of a group or community.

The most surprising (and Metal) passage concerned the Leviticus 16 ritual of purification, which involves sprinkling the Ark of the Covenant with drops of YHWH's sacrificed goat’s (and bull’s) blood from the high priest’s fingers (followed by more blood sprinkling around the Tent of Meeting).

As a fantasy fiction writer, usually I think of the blood in Blood Magick as a magical power source or a substance valuable to demons or other-world beings, not as a ritual detergent. Although, now that I think a little harder, I have written a story where blood was used as part of a ritual barrier.

(Pause to wonder what demons would use somebody’s blood for, anyway... and now that I think of it, what's the magical difference between a virgin's blood and a non-virgin's blood... I mean, has there been a double-blind study with virgin and demon control groups to see if just insisting that one is a virgin (or a demon) is a placebo?)

After reading this latest chapter, my new favorite word is caprine; followed by pharmakos (the Greek expulsion ritual), which is related to the words pharmakeia (medicine) and pharmakon (drug, poison, spell).

A Long Awaited Book

I had been waiting for two weeks for a book to arrive. I'd read that it might take up to twelve business days, so I was slightly annoyed when I got an email thirteen days out that the book was getting ready to ship.

Waiting turned into a game I would play with the dog: whenever she would bark at the door and try to inhale any air diffusing in from underneath the door (because wicked monsters are obviously advancing upon the house with dirty work in mind), I would say, "What? Is it my book? Are you telling me my book is here?"

When I came home from work a few days later and there was a package leaning against the door, I shrieked, ”It’s here! It’s here!” Then I had to let the dog sniff the package so she would know that there were no dog toys in it.

Gleefully anticipating the revelations of poetical back-projection onto the historical and archeological records, and the wholesale fabrication of ancient spiritual practices, I placed the spine of "A Century of James Frazer's The Golden Bough: Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough" flat on the table and went through the process of folding the first and last pages against the inside covers until I had reached the center of the book.

Then I sat down with tea, pen, and Post-it Notes to enjoy and annotate the book, which is a collection of essays from a symposium on the impact of The Golden Bough on folklore, comparative religion, and anthropology. The main question of the book is, "If Frazer's The Golden Bough is so flawed, why are academics in the humanities still using its methodologies?"  

So far I'm only fifty pages in, and the arguments are, 1) not everything in the Golden Bough is wrong, 2) there are some universal human social structures, 3) if we look at it as a work of historical fiction, it presents some useful and inspiring metaphors, and 4) the massive ethnological record Frazer and his predecessors was a work that should be reassessed, but not ignored.  

I think my favorite part so far was the part in Ronald Hutton's essay, wherein he pointed out that Frazer wanted to turn people off of the folly of religion (both Christianity and its perceived Pagan roots), but, ironically, Frazer wrote so luridly of the sex and violence in the prehistoric and savage rites that his readers were entertained and titillated by it.

How I laughed and laughed as I wrote the Post-It note annotating that entry—Oh Horror! I've just discovered that Post-It Notes are not that great for books!  (Looks in dismay at shelves of annotated books in his research library.)

Book Review: Solving Stonehenge

I’ve just finished reading Anthony Johnson’s “Solving Stonehenge: The New Key to an Ancient Enigma,” first published in 2008. The basic gist of the book is that the primary astronomical alignment of Stonehenge is a reflective axis along the winter solstice sunset / summer solstice sunrise; the placement of the fifty six Aubrey holes, the thirty stones for the sarsen circle, and the upright stones for the five trilithons can be described—not by alignment with whatever star is handy—but by using a regular octogram of two squares to fix the position of key points and deriving additional stone points from arcs built from the octogram’s vertices. No need to conjecture Megalithic Yards for the accuracy of alignments; it’s all done with circles, squares, and simple peg-and-rope geometry.

Although he does throw some shade on “Stonehenge Decoded,” Johnson’s crankiness about astroarchaeology (and computers) comes through as an exasperation that never quite reaches entertaining levels of snark.

The first several chapters are a historical review of various scholars, antiquarians, myths, speculations, and archeological theories around Stonehenge, with a focus on survey work. There’s a brief pause to question the racial distinctiveness of the “so-called Beaker People,” and a later a detour to discuss the geometric design elements of the Bush Barrow lozenge (~1750 BCE). Arguments, more like geometry demonstrations, for the underpinnings of the monument aren’t given until chapter 8, on page 207, about two-thirds of the way through the book.

Johnson is more interested in how the builders of Stonehenge built the monument, but not on why they did it—which is fair, since Johnson is a surveyor and the ancient builders left no written records telling us why. The conclusions of the book are 1) that the geometric steps that can be used to construct the pattern on the Bush Barrow lozenge are similar to the steps which can be used to construct the placement points for many stones and holes at Stonehenge; 2) searching for astronomical alignments within the monuments is unnecessary and distracting; 3) the stones can move or be moved around a lot in four thousand years; 4) that despite incorporating pagan mumbo-jumbo and Druids into it, John Wood’s 1740 survey of the monument is Very Good; 5) “there is absolutely no way that the master design of the central sarsen structures or even the earlier arrangements can simply have been worked out ‘on the ground’ without first having been drawn on a prepared surface…”.

“Solving Stonehenge,” is dry, but interesting; I’d say Johnson is writing for amateur surveyors and archeologists and Stonehenge historical enthusiasts. It’s a more scholarly book than some of the much briefer (but much more woo-woo) Wooden Books publications on geometry or astronomy that I own. I came (and stayed) for the Stonehenge parts, and the book’s focus is more on the geometry of surveying. I appreciated that Johnson showed his work in the earlier chapters, but I could have been satisfied with a summary of chapters six, seven, and eight. Mark, of course, accuses me of giving resources to the “Stonehenge-Military-Industrial-Complex,” and opined that I should be reading a peer-reviewed journal covering archaeoastronomy instead.

While I was reading “Solving Stonehenge,” someone asked me what it was that I found so compelling about Stonehenge. I had to pause and think about it for a while before I came up with an answer that was satisfying. There is no one answer. Part of it is the mystique surrounding the site (and being able to sing along with Spın̈al Tap about the Druids); who wouldn’t be drawn to the wonder-stories woven into the tapestry of the Matter of Britain—it’s magical. Part of it is that the stones of Stonehenge and the site itself, which I’ve been fortunate enough to visit, are beautiful and impressive; four thousand year old neolithic architecture does have its physical charm. Another part is that the arches imply portals and the romanticism of being transported to an other place or when. Part of it is how the placement of the stones interlocks with the sky’s geometry, which appeals to the part of me that builds sculptures out of forks interlocked by their tines, tracks the motion of the sun and moon on a home-built portable Aubrey hole pegboard, and owns pierced gnomon spherical sundials. But I think the main reason I find it compelling is that Stonehenge is massive statement about human participation with and appreciation of the site’s locality; it’s a place that draws one’s attention to the sun’s (at least) motion and the land’s response, and in doing so becomes an axis mundi.

Adventures in Teen Mortification

What's Been Keeping Us Laughing for the Last Two Weeks

Scene: 5:30 pm.  A local McMenamins, we join our family seated in a booth, gazing at menus.

The Child: “I guess I’ll get an RC.”

Mark: “I think I’m going to order a Grapefruit Pom Nom Paloma.” (To John) “Are you going to order a drink?”

John: “I don’t know… (Thinking about how it’s early, but it’s still a school night, and he would have to figure out how to get home.) I don’t usually order booze when I’m here….”

Mark: “Why not? You could order a margarita.”

John (Holding up his index finger, swishing his shoulders, and launching into song): “Give me one mar-”

The Child (practically launching out of his seat and thrusting his palm across the table, a look of horror on his face tempered by the look of relief that we’re the only ones in this section of the restaurant): “STOP!”

(John and Mark trying and failing to keep straight faces and barely concealing their laughter.)

John: “Whoo! I didn’t even get past ‘margarita!’”

The Child: “What? That’s a weird song.”

Dreams and Dating in 1997

Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 23:40:30 PST
Subject: What's up?


OK.

First off, I'm fine; the deer is fine; and my car is fine. You can say prayers to the spiritual guardians of your choice. ("Oh blessed Diana, patron saint of Deer and Automobiles...") Or not, as the choice may be.

I suppose that there were two impulses fueling the events of Monday night. On one hand was the need to get to Eugene to pick up my AIDS test and share the results with Mark (ah, dating in the nineties). On the other hand, my Deer Voice (which has successfully warned me about deer in the road twice in the last six weeks) was retelling me the story about when my Mom drove home with a shattered grill on her car after she hit a deer (on the same road I might add).

I've listened to the Voice which reminds me that the deer are migrating and I've driven through Monroe and am just about to conclude that "Oh, this time my Deer Voice must have been wrong" when all of a sudden a deer springs out onto the road from the left and decides to dash across the road in front of me.

I slam on the breaks and veer to the right. The tires screech in the rainy night. The deer tries to outrun me (while still crossing the road). I see it sort of dive on my left—dark eyes, brown coat, no antlers—suddenly bright past the perimeter of my headlights. "This is it," I think to myself, "I'm going to see hoofed feet doing cartwheels across my hood and end up with a deer through my windshield and in my lap." I close my eyes when I hear the BHMPF!

The car and the screeching tires stop.

I'm at the side of the road. I turn on my hazard lights. A car passes me. I get out. I go to the front of the car. No blood. No dents. No deer. I look around.

A large truck comes from the other side of the road and I see the deer lying down on the left shoulder of the road. As the truck gets closer the deer rises in one sustained motion and, as I watch, bounds over the ditch and away into someone's garden, where it apparently begins to munch on someone's harvest as if it hadn't just lost a race with a two ton 'Merican box of metal on wheels.

"Thank you," I say, and continue on my not-quite-so-merry way.

The mad rush to find parking in Eugene, and the wild dash up the stairs before the Health Department closes, and my negative test results, and Mark's negative test results, and the pizza, and Mark's light teasing about people with "agreements" with wild animals, and the discussion about AIDS testing as a form of homophobia, and other events crammed into Mark's 20 minute break are left to your imaginations.

So, I come home on I-5. Despite fog and some stupid drivers, the drive is uneventful. But as I pull in, what should I see dropping out of a tree but a raccoon. This is the first time I've seen a raccoon at our house.

"Aliens disguised as raccoons!" I say to myself, and then remember that the night (6-28-97) when I decided that I would simply just forget about ever falling in love, ever (and die Artistically Single, too). I was "rewarded" with a dream of Machka (my missing cat) leading a raccoon into my house (a weird dream house made of canvass). I didn't want a raccoon in my house because raccoons are wild animals and they might have rabies, and after a few futile attempts to lock the raccoon out of my house, I wound up accidentally killing it. (And what do you think rabies is a dream metaphor for; oh, I don't know, could it be, maybe—AIDS!?)

I watch the real raccoon retreat away from my headlights and into the brush.

"Is this some kind of vision-quest algebra test with power animals?" I ask, and begin to imagine story problems: "Deer gets on a train heading North at 50 mph in Eugene. Raccoon gets on another train heading South at 35 mph in Portland. Assuming they both start at midnight, what time will they meet with John's Car, and how many metaphors will he write about their meeting?"

Because everywhere you look at the intersection of cars and animals another metaphor for emotions and society springs up, begging to be used in a novel or at least some dippy-hippy new aged book by someone named Moonhawk Studmuffin. Animals rushing out of the margins and rebounding after a brush with the bright lights. AIDS. Health reduced to a piece of of paper stamped by the state. Did I say health—did I mean romance? dating? happiness? Masked bandits coming out of the woods and right into your house. Wild animals and domestic animals and cute animals and not-so-cute animals.

I expect that I will dream something very rich and strange tonight.


- John

 

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Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 23:44:42 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Eeek, an essay by John


OK. 

It's late and I've been channeling Marge Boule (or someone). In any case, I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing. So my questions to y'all are:

What do you think? AND Would you send something like this to your parents?



There was a deer and a BHMPF. But when I got out of my dentless, bloodless car, the deer got up and bounded away. Thanking my guardian angel, I drove on in the rain.

The AIDS test was negative. I was pretty sure that it would be; but still in the back of my mind was a swirl of old information and street lore about how the virus spread. My partner's test was negative, too. He was pretty sure it would be; but had agreed to the test because he knew that it would make me feel better.

I drove back home. A raccoon, startled by my headlights as I pulled in, dropped out of a tree and ran off into tall grasses. This reminded me of dreams of raccoons entering dream houses of canvas, and also of wild dream panthers entering through houses protected by unlocked screen doors. In both dreams I kill the animals.

I now own a scrap of paper from the health department which says I am healthy. But I have to remind myself that the clear AIDS test result is like a ticket to a safari—and not to mistake a safari for a trip to the zoo.

In bed we create a safari. In bed we drop our human masks, shed our human skins, and get in touch with our unenculturated wildness. In the darkness behind a closed door—in the shadow of a candle—we dance with the shades of wolves, bison and mamoths; harts and hinds; horses and dogs. I have to watch out for the wild raccoon behind his mask, though; he's cute, but never mistake cute for tame.

There's an assumption that the certificate means you're safe (and some folks mistake the certificate to mean they will always be safe); but an essential part of remaining safe means negotiation of boundaries. Leaping deer flash across the inroads to our wildness.

We are animals. But we are angels as well—and so our angelic selves wrestle with our panther selves in an attempt to see who is the safari ticket holder, and who is in a zoo cage. Sexual orthodoxy demands that we be one or the other, not both; so in my dreams the house of canvass becomes the stone cathedral filled with pews which restrict movement. Sexual orthodoxy demands that we become "men who love men", "women who love women", "women who love men", and "men who love women."

Eros, agape and amor are not so easily tamed, however; and despite orthodoxy's attempts, we have people who love people, sometimes more than just one at a time. In the grip of the sexual act, our bodies leap over the stalls put up by our minds. The tabernacle becomes a canvass tent, the rows of pews are not enough to catalogue the passions of the human heart. In a spasm of a few seconds, we are between ordered universes. Like water poured from one cup to another, we switch between the domesticated, the feral and the wild. We reduce our concentration down to where the house cat, the barn cat, and the panther, become one; become us.

And so in my dreams the panthers come through the screen doors. The raccoons come through the windows. In my dreams my bedroom is a cathedral with the Sword of Chaos over one cot, the Sword of Order over another, and the Sword of Pleasure is unsheathed by my anima.

It's not a fairy tale ending, though. My anima is soon contacted by Death, who wants her to become his side-kick. In real life, the raccoon runs from my headlights. In real life the deer staggers to her feet and bounds off into the night. I am unable to be at one with the deer on the road without disastrous results.

But it sure beats being in a cage.

No Comets Here

The week-long spell of fog broke this Saturday and there was a possibility that Comet ALTLAS G3 would be visible in the Northern Hemisphere, at least according to the photos shared on the EarthSky website. A secondary web ephemeris painted a less rosy picture, and an app on my phone split the difference.  ALTAS G3 was there, and maybe, just maybe, it would be visible from Eugene.

Thinking that I would kick myself if I missed a chance to get a viewing—and photograph—of the comet, I bundled up against the 38F temperature, loaded up my camera and tripod into the car and sped off to Spencer Butte. I was pretty sure that if I tried to see the comet from the top of our local hill, the comet would be behind the South Hills of Eugene.  Or someone's house.  Or a streetlamp.

Spencer Butte isn’t that far away, but it’s about a 25 minute mile hike to the 2054 foot summit. Eugene spills out to the northeast, there’s a good view of the Cascade Mountains to the east, and the Coastal Mountains to the west. When I got to the butte's parking lot around 4:30,  it was packed. I rested the tripod and camera against my shoulder and began the assent. It’s been a few months since I last climbed the butte, my not-quite-huffing-and-puffing was a reminder of how I’ve gotten out of shape.

The setting sun painted the west sides of the pines and shrubs ruddy gold.  A little over halfway up, there was something like white ash on the trail, and occasionally, white flakes of not-snow fell.  I reached over and touched a frosty white branch of underbrush.  The water drop hanging from it was rigid ice.  Closer to the summit, the sun turned the frost golden. I paused for just a moment to take a photo with my phone, then I continued on to the final steps along hewn stone stairs.

The sun had just gone below the horizon around 5:00 when I unfolded my tripod just below the old observation point at the butte’s peak. A wind from the north whipped loose strands of my hair. Haze from the week’s inversion smudged the edge of the sky, and low clouds on the horizon glowed pink and crimson. 

The sky was way too bright for any comet to show up.

I was under the impression that the parking lot closed at 6:00, which meant that I’d only have about a half hour to get any good photos. I scanned the horizon, thinking that the comet might be at a magnitude to be visible, but all I saw was a really nice twilight glow and one striking cloud formation that looked like a trireme. The comet might have been behind a band of clouds, or it might have been much dimmer than I thought.

Venus became apparent, so I snapped a photo of it. The layer of haze from the inversion also became apparent.

A young woman—I wasn’t sure if she was in high school or college—asked me, “Is that a camera?” I was a little puzzled by the question—maybe she thought my camera was a telescope, or maybe she meant to ask “What are you doing?”—but I explained that it was a camera, that I was hoping to spot ATLAS G3 (here I whipped out the astronomy app), but that so far all I was seeing was Venus, and that as the comet moved away from the sun, it might be in a better position for viewing, but that it might get too dim.” This seemed to make an impression on her and her female friend, and they left with a benediction of good wishes.

More and more folks left the summit.

I pulled out my iPhone, which sometimes can capture traces of auroras and comets that I’m missing, and snapped a series of photos along the horizon. At 5:30, I checked the astronomy app: it showed ATLAS G3 setting. I took some more photos of the area of the sky where I guessed the comet might be, thinking that seeing the comet would have been much easier from Australia or Ecuador or some other place other than Eugene. 

Then it was time to head back.

The darkness grew. I had rushed out of the house without a proper flashlight. This wasn’t so bad; I could have used my phone’s light, and in any case, I like to walk at nigh without a light. The stone stairs weren’t too much of a problem, but I was glad that it wasn’t too dark when I descended. Two (different) women about thirty feet ahead of me walked with a cell phone light, so it was easy to see where the dark path was going.

As I followed, I thought to try to really listen to the woods as I walked (and not think about cougars). I caught glimpses of Venus through the shadows of the tree trunks. Eugene traffic noises floated up from the city. I became aware of brain chatter, and a soundtrack in my head. When I tried not to name the trees or Venus, I heard Ursula Le Guin reading a passage from “She Unnames Them.” I never really got rid of the soundtrack. I did change the brain chatter to “crunch, crunch, crunch” to match my footsteps on the gravel path, but it was still getting in the way of a zen moment in the woods.

The most challenging part of the hike was returning to the parking lot, which was illuminated by a Very Bright Light that blinded me and made staying on the pathway difficult.

And the mounting socket on the bottom of my camera fatigued off when I set the camera against the car's seat.  This will make using the tripod to take pictures of stellar objects difficult.

At home, looking at the photos on a larger screen, I might have gotten a picture of the comet, but its much more likely a bright cloud lit up by the setting sun.  

Dream Shack Magic

Dream from November 2024:

I was one of four kings in a play; naturally, I had somehow missed the rehearsals and I was anxious about not knowing my lines. The lines were to be spoken on the slopes of a river bank, and we were on a boat traveling to it.

A bunch of us were in a wooden shack or cabin. The house was in the middle of a dry place, like eastern Oregon. The ground was dry and sandy, but there were pines or cedars growing here and there. I recall a window with a grid of window panes or a grate over it. I think there were curtains or hanging ornaments in the window. I have a sense of arriving at the shack at sunset and spending the night there.

There was a grimoire that I read my name in, but then I lost my place in the book and I kept flipping back and forth through the pages to try to re-read what it said.

There was also, for want of a better word, a witch (like someone’s witchy mom) in the shack.

I think we may have gone shopping for groceries at a Walmart or a Winco or maybe even a Safeway.

I might have dealt with the witch. Who as a result might have revealed there was a troll in the shack; troll’s not the right word, it was a spirit, a guy, kind of large. Sort of like a trailer trash dad.

I was telling the either the witch or the troll they had no power over me.

Near the end of the dream was a small cold sprite or spirit or gnome. It was trying to be brave in the face of the troll. At first this worked because the troll tried to freeze it with winds or just by being scary. But then the troll tripped or tricked the gnome into a warm fireplace and the heat of the hearth singed the gnome’s head painfully.

Dream: Ritual Settings

In the dream, it was something like 5 AM. Mark wanted to go on an outdoor hike, so we hopped into our car, which was a dream admixture of our Ionic and my dad’s Tesla Y: the interior had a screen and controls similar to our white Hyundai Ioniq, but the body and red exterior was more like the Tesla Y. Mark was driving us through the streets of Eugene to a wooded, park-like destination. It was dark; I don’t recall if it was cloudy, but it wasn’t raining. The dream streets and destination don’t really map to actual places in Eugene. I have a sense we drove through a kind of industrial and residential area like West Eugene. After a shortish drive, we arrived at a park on the outskirts of Eugene. I think I might have been trying to dream about Delta Ponds, because the shrubbery was like that, but it wasn’t Delta Ponds; I couldn’t tell you where, exactly we had been driving.

Mark parked the car at a wooden structure with a peaked roof, maybe like a pergola, only long, sort of like a covered bus stop. It was still dark, and I have an image of our headlights shining brightly on the bushes and the bench in front of us. Large bushes, like laurels and rhododendrons, and simple wooden benches dotted a walkway running underneath the pergola. Now that I think about it, the shrubbery was green; so either it was evergreen or else it wasn’t winter. I think the path started out as a simple path, maybe graveled; but during the dream the setting transformed and the pathway gave the sense of being paved.

We got out. Mark had some 80’s or 90’s rock music playing on the car’s stereo, which he left on (in waking life I’m wondering if a newspaper delivery person was driving by with their stereo on). I pointed to a dark car parked a few stalls over and said something to Mark about how the lights and the music might not be appreciated by other people using the park. I don’t recall how, but eventually the lights and radio turned off.

Mark strode down the path to the right and I followed. Eventually, we got separated. I met a middle-aged woman going the other way on the path; this was surprising, because it was 5:30 AM and still dark. I think I knew her, but no one besides Mark in this dream presented as themselves, and instead were a mish-mash of general Eugene folks, who I recognized in the dream, but on waking, weren’t really anyone I know.

I met more folks in knots of two or five. They transitioned from wearing generic grungy/frumpy/shabby Eugene garb to flowing Pagan robes. A creek or inlet appeared. Across the water I saw more people in robes. The day got lighter, but foggier. I realized that we had somehow driven to a pagan fair or ritual.

The folks on the other side of the water formed circles and were dancing. I’m not recalling any music or drumming or chanting, which in waking is odd because they weren’t that far away. The folks on my side of the water seemed to be waiting for other events to begin. I ran into a fourty-something woman with wavy reddish hair (who might have been B.P.) and I think she informed me that the folks on the other side of the water had paid extra for the event and were holding a private ritual. There was a sense that an unnamed someone or someones were trying to undermine Eugene pagans by introducing class resentment.

I continued to walk along the path. At some point I found Mark laying down, wrapped in a warm green blanket (which usually lives on our couch), and napping on a bench. (In waking life, I’m recalling that I saw him yesterday wrapped in our green blanket and napping on our deck furniture during an unseasonably 50F and sunny January day.) I had a vague notion that I should move away from him so any conversations I had wouldn’t wake him.

The covered walkway turned into a interior hallway, like a convention center (or, the more I think about it, the EMU at the UO campus); it was open, and fairly light (or at least the walls were painted a light color and the wood was a light blonde stain. I saw a gay man I knew walk out of a room in a leather harness and a flowing loincloth and join a group of other vaguely-Paganish-vaguely-gay men. They were in a kitchenette or breakfast bar or niche; I remember a small, head-level window that let in foggy, overcast light. I joined them and there was a group conversation about hiking or ritual or something; I think I was trying to dream about the Eugene Radical Faeries and the old Eugene OUTdoor Group and mushed the two groups together.

The group broke up; the man in the harness left (who might have been R.U.) and reemerged from his room in academic-casual wear. I was speaking with someone tall and blonde (who might have been M.H.). Suddenly, I became aware that I had a lot of stuff—like a box of papers, my backpack, my cloak, a shoulder bag, etc.—that I needed to schlep back to the car. Tall-and-blonde said he’d stick around and watch my things; I have a sense that he was putting away dishes and cookware.

I returned to the parking lot. The car wasn’t there. Mark had (presumably) gotten board and left. He had texted me that I could text him and he’d come pick me up. There may have been some more about the dream involving loading up the car, but the dream recall ends here.

---

This dream seems like it wanted to turn into a crossing into another realm dream with the water, but didn’t—thinking about it some more, those dreams usually involve crossing over the water and/or an animal like a white horse or an otter. I think it’s interesting that the car was an amalgam of a red and a white car, which suggests the tarot trump card, “The Chariot” to me. I’m not sure why Mark and I were the only folks in the dream who were themselves; everyone else had a simultaneous I-am-X-I-am-not-X feel.

Harp Time Capsule

The low A string on my harp has broken and I need to get a replacement for it. I took the harp to a local musical instrument shop, but they didn't carry any strings and were unable to order any for me. The hunt for strings continues, and I may have to order them on-line instead of patronizing local music stores.

While I was looking inside of the harp, at the underside of the sound board where the strings are knotted in, I discovered a large slip of paper. When I pulled it out, I found the slip was really three cancelled checks from 1989.

The first check was dated May 7, made out to Here Inc. for $275.60. It was the check I wrote for my harp! I'd gone to an international folk dance festival in Minneapolis with some friends. On a long table in a hall outside of the main performance area, there was a collection of various nylon- and metal-strung NeoCeltic harps. I strummed a few, decided that the sustain on the metal-strung harps was cool but too long, and on impulse picked out my harp. 

(Cue Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero": "... he saw stars in his eyes / and the very next day / bought a gut-strung lap harp / from a funky folk store / didn't know how to play it / but he knew for sure / that one lap harp / played on the floor / was a one-way ticket / only one way to go....")

This set the stage for folk music performances; playing ritual music; Renaissance Faire busking; and moonlit desert nights in a white cotton duster, holding up my harp to the winds for an Aeolian concert.  It also set the stage for when Mark met me harping underneath the full moon during a gay men's spiritual gathering.

The second check—written in green ink—was from May 1, made out to Northfield Sports for $211.95 for my black-with-yellow-neon-highlights RollerBlades! 

In no time, I was RollerBlading backwards while juggling three koosh-balls by daylight and donning my big black-and-purple-cloak and glow-sticks and swooping around the Carleton College campus by night. There's nothing like a twilight RollerBlade humming Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre while bats flit overhead; or RollerBlading on a foggy December solstice full moon in a black cloak holding holly and a wooden skull in one's hand (and surprise gifting the holly to a corner store filled with Eugene hippies); or RollerBlading on Halloween wearing homemade cardboard owl wings and a white poet's shirt. And these were the Rollerblades I wore on a Rollerblading date through the parks of Eugene with Mark.

Sadly, the plastic boots fatigued and broke during a Halloween mishap in 2016 involving a lit pumpkin and a pile of leaves piled up against a street curb.

(Cue Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero": "...he saw stars in his eyes / and the very next day / bought some beat-up knock-offs / from a second-hand store / They weren't his old RollerBlades / but he knew for sure / that RollerBlades / laced up real tight / were a one-way ticket / into the pale moonlight....")

The third check, from July 22, written out in pink ink to Jacobson's for $33.87 records the purchase of a red-and-white polyester gingham picnic spread and napkin set, and possibly a picnic basket.

Jacobson's was a general mercantile store that sold household goods, some clothing, and possibly paper products. I'm pretty sure it had a portal to Lake Woebegone in it. This purchase involved 1) a younger, hopelessly romantic (or was that infatuated?), not-yet-out-to-himself version of myself (who wrote a lot of the kind of poetry one would expect from a self-closeted, twenty-something, hopeless romantic); 2) one of the women from Reed College that I had a huge crush on; and, 3) an airport layover where said woman-friend was flying away to start her Peace Corps mission (back when one could haul a picnic basket full of food and utensils right to a departure gate).  

This particular picnic spread and napkin set was sold to me by "Old Man Jacobson" himself, who after learning that I was looking for picnic supplies (and possibly reading the stance of a hopeless romantic heading off to one last Noble Farewell Forever), interrupted my browsing with his boney hand on my boney shoulder and the question, "Is she a classy gal?"

At least three replies—from snarky to star-crossed—flitted through my mind, but I settled on "yes."

"Then this is the package for you!" he said, and presented the red-and-white polyester gingham picnic spread and napkin set from behind his back.

"I'll... take... it," I said, and set the stage for a short picnic on the International Airport Hubert H. Humphrey Terminal concourse. Some stewardesses gave us two thumbs up as they walked past us. My friend flew out of the country, and I returned to Northfield.

I'm not sure what's happened to the spread or the basket, but some of the napkins still lurk in a linen drawer in the kitchen.

I played my harp at her wedding (in Oregon) ten years later. 

At the reception, the bride and her mother disappeared for a moment.  While the folks around our table speculated, Mark quipped, "They're having 'The Talk.' You know—'Honey, now that you're married there's something I need to tell you. They'll beg and they'll plead but you have to be firm: you need to keep separate checking accounts.'"

At this point, the bride reappeared, perturbed look on her brow and checkbook in her hand. We dissolved into laughter as she walked by.

Mark and I still keep separate checking accounts.  I'm pretty sure Mark does not keep any of his cancelled checks in any type of musical time capsule.

Winter Storms, Waterfalls, & Holiday Lights

I can't believe that just last week Mark and I were running around on the Oregon Coast in an early celebration of my birthday. Normally, when we go to the coast, we visit the stretch between Florence and Newport. This time around, we went south to the North Bend area.

We visited Silver Falls and Golden Falls, located at the end of a windy, sometimes narrow, road following the Coos River to its tributaries. The atmospheric river fed the falls, and the falls were trying to return the favor with a fierce spray of mist. Even though it wasn't raining at the time of our visit, we both got soaked. The geology was interesting; we weren't quite sure where all of the house-sized boulders came from. The falls looked great, and I imagine that I would enjoy them on a hot, dry day.

Afterward, we found our way back at the Pacific and Shore Acres State Park. It's been about twenty years since I was at the Shore Acres Gardens, and all I recalled was a fountain with lion's head spouts (I remember them looking more like lions and less like lumps of corrosion). We took a path to the beach where the surf surged dramatically against the rocks. The day became increasingly grey. When we went to an overview, the wind picked up foam frothed up by the pounding surf about thirty feet below, swirled it around like a murmuration of birds, and dropped it around us like dirty clumps of New York snow. As I looked south, I saw armies of clouds slowly creeping north and dropping curtains of rain.

Mark arranged for us to view the holiday light show at Shore Acres, but as it wasn't quite time for the show to start, we killed some time finding a local fish market where we picked up some "cold" clam chowder (the clerk had just turned off the burner, and the chowder was still hot) and some smoked salmon. Then it was back to the garden's light show. And the rain.

We both enjoyed the lights (even if I did have to keep my camera under my coat to keep it from getting too wet), and thought the local groups who created the displays did a good job. I think our favorite displays involved fish or whales.

2025 New Year's Dream

New Year's Day I dreamed, among other things, that I was trying to fit into an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.  The sarcophagus was more like a storage crate with a fancy faience and gold lid; it was narrow and short.  I was scrunched up; I have a sense my knees were drawn up against my chest, and I clearly was too large to fit the cover over the sarcophagus.  I think if this had been an anxiety dream, I would have felt claustrophobic, but as it was the tone of this part of the dream was more like, "Well, this isn't going to work."

I woke up for real, wrapped in the sheets and sandwiched between the dog, a cat, Mark, and the edge of the bed, with my left shoulder numb—so I'm pretty sure this part of the dream was inspired by an uncomfortable sleeping position.

I migrated to the couch, because this was about the third time I'd woken up in an uncomfortable sleeping position, and I didn't want my tossing and turning to wake Mark.  Cicero joined me, which was cute, and somehow did not interfere with my rest.

As far as Auspicious New Year's Dreams go, I suppose this means 2025 will be about recognizing gilded, but constricting circumstances.  That and I need to arrange for better sleep.

A Writer's Solstice Altar

I’ve connected with a writers’ Zoom session to write. I’m writing a blog entry instead of working on a short story because it is easier to write a blog entry. I am supposing that instant gratification is in play—and in any case, writing a blog entry is better than staring at a paragraph and spending an hour researching on the web to polish a single sentence; or going back-and-forth on cutting-and-pasting the opening paragraph of the moment; or, worst of all, staring at a blank screen and not writing anything.

Today is the Winter Solstice. It’s hard to believe that this time last year Mark and I were walking around Las Vegas. The Solstice Spiral Walks that I helped to facilitate with C.N. aren’t happening at the local UU Church any more, so I won’t be drawing chalk spirals as a guide for fir boughs and candles or playing a tone drum in the pouring rain while congregants walk a spiral and contemplate the returning light. On one hand, it’s one less thing to do; on the other hand, I miss holding contemplative ritual space, even if the only folks I really knew at UUCE were C.N., G.M., S.H., and some other acquaintances.

A couple of days ago, I attended a Starhawk-Wiccan Solstice ritual (and potluck) at a pagan friend’s house; they conduct rituals for the greater Eugene pagan community. The ritual reminded me a little of the ritual Sunday services at UUCE: there was a lot of singing and swaying in place. As we stood in a loose circle and sang songs about the Children of the Goddess, the joke “Why can’t Unitarians sing? / Because they’re too busy scanning ahead to see if they agree with the words” came to mind. During a moment of ritual contemplation, I was thankful to be married to Mark. I did not sing “Nobody can hold back the dark,” during a closing chorus, but it was a near thing.

I was going to say that it looks too rainy and grey this Solstice morning to focus the sun’s light onto a candle, but as I looked up from the computer screen, wan sunlight shone onto the kitchen nook. Perhaps, I thought, there will be a break in the clouds later for strong enough sunlight to shine through. —And as I watched, the sunlight strengthened.

Recognizing that there’s no time like the present when it comes to ritual (or astronomy) and the Oregon sky, I leapt up from the keyboard and away from the writers’ Zoom session, scooped up my Anubis matches, the giant magnifying lens, and a beeswax pillar candle in a copper cauldron. (Why, yes; I do have ritual tools readily handy at my house, doesn’t everyone?)

I hurried outside to the deck. There was honest-to-goodness blue sky above. The sun shone above a thick bank of grey clouds and grazed the roofline of our southern neighbors’ house. It’s winter solstice, and shadow of their house stretches across the yard and brushes up against our foundation. The wind gusted.

“Behind you.” Mark was entering and exiting the house to do some yard work.

The deck was relatively dry for a damp, Oregon winter day. I set up the candle on one of the four round outdoor end-tables I originally bought to use for altars and attempted to focus the sunlight onto the match held against the wick. A spotlight circle of sunlight shone on the outside of the candle; the wick was deep in a thin shell of beeswax from previous candle burnings. I broke off most of the wax, turned the candle, and tried to shine focused Solstice sunlight again.

“Behind you,” Mark said.

I stood over the candle looking down on it; a thin wisp of smoke rose from the wick. Then my hair fell forward in a curtain, which made it hard to see what I was doing and risked making Mark’s dire predictions about solstice fire, candles, and really any sort of combustion, come true. I riffled my pockets for a nonexistent hair tie, all the time watching the sun, the clouds, and the shadow of our neighbor’s house.

I pulled my hair behind me, crouched down, and refocused the sunlight. The wind gusted again. The magnifying lens projected an upside-down tree onto the white smoke of the smoldering wick; I moved the patio furniture altar out of the shadow of tree branches.

Mark, who was picking up dog poop from the yard, asked, “The sun’s pretty low. Have you ever done this this early before?”

“No,” I said, watching the cone of sunlight waver as I tried to place its focal point onto the wick. This was technically a ritual, and I hadn’t grounded, invoked a proper circle, or invited the four directions. I hadn’t reflected on the hinge of the year, or the returning light, or numinous and immanent Earth processes. I hadn’t taken a moment to dedicate or rededicate my life to anything in particular.

I quietly sang, “Bring from the center of the sun…” and flame sprang from the match and wick. The wind guttered the candle; I picked it up, held it close, went inside, and brought the candle to the desk—in the writers’ Zoom session, I saw myself, long haired, in red plaid, holding a copper cauldron with a flaming candle in my hands.

I placed the candle next to my keyboard and mouse. Happy Solstice, I thought, and returned to the writers’ session.  The sun dimmed as the grey returned, but I had Solstice Fire on my desk.

Sexagenarian

Soon I will be a sexagenarian. I think this requires that I get a faux ivory figurine of Death blowing bubbles with the legend “Momento Mori.” When I entered the cohort of pentagenarians, it was much easier to pretend that I was still forty-something—and in any case, I still had half a lifetime in front of me to write and create and be generally crafty. Now The Great Transformer feels much larger on a horizon that seems much closer. And the ancient Egyptian impulse to have spoken prayers for the spirit of So-and-so is more relatable. I suppose I will also need to get a faux ivory figurine of Ozymandius.

So far about the only thing that about reaching the milestone of sexagenarian is that I am looking forward to is being able to work the phrase “putting the sex back into sexagenarian!” into conversations. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that I will age better than repeatedly saying “putting the sex back into sexagenarian” will. And I’m not sure how well the phrase will play in a decade when I am no longer a sexagenarian: “putting the sex back into septuagenarian” just doesn’t have the same ring and “putting the septum back” sounds unappetizingly medical. I suppose I will have to quote Calvin and Hobbes and say, “You can take the tiger out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the tiger. / The question is ‘can you put the tiger back into the jungle?’”

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there, somewhere.

When The House Feels Empty

Mark has been away helping his mother and family for the last few days.

It always strikes me how our small little house feels so empty when he’s gone. The cats and dog help to fill the space, and The Child (and his cologne) is back from school, so it’s not like I’m completely isolated. The honeymoon period where I can do things that would annoy Mark is over—there comes a moment when you realize that you can only enjoy so many Marvel, Disney, or Pixar Movies (which Mark could live happily without viewing) that you can watch and only so much electronica or Mediaeval Eastern European music (which drives Mark crazy) that you can listen to because it doesn’t make up for the fact that your man is in another state. And the New York Times games aren’t as fun because Mark’s not there for us to play them together.

When he comes back, we’ll decorate the house for the holidays. This will involve moving large pieces of furniture and pulling out the seasonal table cloths and decorating the house with extra lights. 

And digging out the Christmas music that we can all tolerate.