Carving Out Traditions

It’s the week before Halloween! This is going to be an interesting week, I think, as the normal weekly schedule of events is swizzled around from the regular sequence and events are more firmly scheduled and mandatory.

So, no rest for the wicked if the house is to be properly decorated for the proper Ides of Autumn mindset! I’ve laid out the seasonal T-shirts — I’m currently wearing a black T-shirt with the Le Chat Noir printed on it — and the obsidian, onyx, hamsa, and glow-in-the-dark bracelets. I will have to alternate between singing “This is Halloween” and “Making Christmas” to get through the week.

Since I’m the one in our house that likes Halloween, I have to be the one doing all of the decorating. I do agree with Mark that the week before is the time to do the decorating, and that putting out the oversized skeletons and the huge, inflatable pumpkins on October first is a bit much. The strategy for not being overwhelmed is to schlep all of the decorations out of the attic and have them accessible so that individual items may be deployed over a week-long period. A paper bat a day keeps the weariness away!

I purchased a ten pound pumpkin — on impulse — Saturday when I was doing an out-of-band, early-morning banana run for my Elderly Parents. My latest pumpkin carving technique (used several years running) has been to carve a small, serrated disk around the pumpkin’s stem for a lid, and then carve a larger jagged ring around the lid, flip the ring around so that it makes a crown, and then carve a kind of armored mask face underneath. It’s effective and artistic, and I am trying to figure out a way to do something different this year.

Maybe I’ll carve bananas on this year’s pumpkin. Or a Medicare form.

Last year I carved a bat shape out of the back of a jack-o-lantern and managed to project a bat shape onto the wall behind the jack-o-lantern. This was also a craft that caused me to be pleased with my own cleverness, and… maybe I’ll try cats this year in an attempt to sidestep the “been there, done that, got the T-shirt” aspect (looks pointedly at the Le Chat Noir T-shirt he’s currently wearing).

We’ve received our mail-in ballots for the mid-term elections. I suppose for a public service, I should carve “vote” into a pumpkin.

This year Halloween is on a Saturday. I feel like I should have gotten an invitation to a Halloween Party or a ritual or something, but nothing has materialized. I’m thinking that I may have to figure out a gluten free shortbread and make bat cookies for a Halloween cookies and tea time for myself and Mark. Maybe I’ll carve an empty party table onto the pumpkin.

October is also insurance enrollment time; this year our options have been reduced and folks are having to choose between more expensive coverage with local healthcare providers, or cheaper coverage that requires an hour-commute to a doctor’s office. Perhaps I can create a design for a caduceus that is also a dollar sign and carve that on the pumpkin.

For me the season is about mystery and masks, of transitions and transformations, of the intersection of enclaves and frames. As a cross-quarter time, it’s the most interstitial of interstitial periods. I’ve always focused more on the intuitive, divining, secret, regenerative information aspect of Halloween and less on The Ancestors and The Dead (and I suppose by extension The Unborn) aspect. I’m not sure if this makes me practical — because I’m pretty sure most of my dead friends and relatives wouldn’t like to be hauled back from Whatever Otherlife to participate in a (gay, cis-male) Northwestern European, Wiccan-flavored ritual, and I have enough problems trying to gather live folks — or if not focusing on The Ancestors during Halloween makes me an ungrateful and unfeeling lout. (In my defense, I test out as an ENTJ.) I think we’ll put up photos of deceased relatives on the mantel and skip a ritual summoning or dumb supper.

Perhaps I should carve a family tree onto the pumpkin.

Oh! Right! Daylight Saving Time ends on Halloween. Maybe I’ll carve the pumpkin into the shape of a clock and lost hours.


Waffles and Dragon Dancing

Monday, I was shuttling my dad to the Urgent Care in Corvallis, and the whole process was taking hours and hours. (My Dad is fine. He’s fine. He’s Old.) I texted Mark to let him know that I wouldn’t be home in time to Feed The Animals.

He texted back that he’d probably be passed out on his work computer.

“Just make sure you don’t get waffle-face from the keyboard!” I texted back.

“Oh! Waffles! That’s a great idea!” he texted.

So I wasn’t too surprised when I walked into the home filled with the smells of gluten-free waffle batter and maple syrup. And raspberry preserves. And Nutella. For Dinner. And Second Dinner.

There were various digestive consequences, but I’m sure it was worth it.

Thursday night I had a tension headache (not sure if it was from computer work, or driving, or a sugar-crash), which I resolved to address with some Dragon Dancing in front of our house. The evening was clear (the First Real Autumnal Deluge has not occurred yet) and I wanted to dance in the twilight outside with the Dragon Poi LEDs on instead of under the covered YMCA patio, which is harshly lit with canister lights. Also, using the patio sometimes requires negotiation of the space, as Dragon Dancing can take up a quarter of the patio if I let it (and it would be poor form to whap a yogi or kettlebeller if I got carried away).

The new crescent moon was playing hide and seek with some fir trees behind our house, and so I did a little dancing with it. There’s not too much traffic on the street, but I did have to occasionally retreat to our driveway, Dragon a-flutter. Spotting the cars usually isn’t too much of an issue, but there are times when I miss having a bunch of compatriots out in the street with me, ready to shout “Car!” and make everyone scatter to the curb (and it would be poor form to get whapped by a car if I got carried away).

The sky purpled and the first few stars came out. As I was dancing I saw a lone figure walking up the hill in the street. It was Mark coming home from a late afternoon yoga class. I whirled the Dragon over my head and around my body in wide arcs. Then I stepped forward, clasped Mark with one arm, and kissed him while the Dragon’s illuminated body wheeled around us like a comet.

I’m pretty sure this counted as a Moulin Rouge moment — even if the neighbors did not pop out of their houses to engage in choreography.

And nobody got whapped by anything.

Shadows of Prognostication

I got a COVID vaccination and a flu vaccination this Friday. I timed it for ten in the morning so that the chills wouldn’t hit me until around midnight. My body must be getting used to the COVID vaccine, because the chills and fever response has been getting less extreme every time I get the shots. At least this time I wasn’t cold and shivering for what seemed like forever and wrung out with sweat afterward. This time it was just some minor random chills, no real fever (I never felt hot enough to take my temperature), and a desire to sleep through most of Saturday, with bouts of comfort reading old Mercedes Lackey novels (“…for Evil’s still lurking / and that’s the next book!”).

The act of sleeping while my body generated new antibodies seemed appropriate for Saturday’s new moon, and gave me an excuse to feel tired and like a not-very-creative, inactive lump. In sweatpants and my bathrobe. And a hot bath was in there, somewhere.

Coincidental with the new moon came the news that one of our friends has a serious health issue. I’m still processing it, and thoughts, feelings, and images — departed friends; memento mori; actuarial tables; appropriate rituals; the tension between wanting a long, healthy life and knowing that living beyond ninety means that one could be the last of one’s old friends left standing; the Six of Cups, the Eight of Swords, the Hanged Man, the Tower, and various other imagined tarot cards — have not settled down into static clarity. As our friend texted, “treatment is going to suck.” This is one of those things one does not want to Google. I’m not ashamed to say that I ran to my health app to double-check my records for various tests, and I guess I’m glad after all that my recently retired primary healthcare provider was old-school and lab-panel-happy.

I suspect tonight’s scrying ritual and meditation for the new moon will be interesting.

Ten Days Without Mark

Mark is in Mexico on a ten-day Road Scholar package to learn about chocolate and mezcal. For the last six weeks or so, he’s been brushing up on his Spanish and learning about the historical cultures of Mexico (think Maya, Zapotecs, Toltecs, and Olmecs). He wasn’t quite sure if this was a good idea when he first got there, but after the first cooking class he’s pretty impressed with the program. He has made several canine friends in Oaxaca.

The Road Scholar Trip to Mexico is a dry run for things Mark wants to do when he retires and for packages in other places, possibly Egypt.

Aoife stayed up half the night when he first left wondering when he would return. She’s figured out that he’s gone, but I’m pretty sure she still wonders if Mark is going to magically appear at the dog park. Cicero displayed stereotypically feline indifference (there was only one upchucked hairball).

Mark’s absence is reminding me that I need to expand my social networks and increase the time that I am physically visiting with people. I think folks in England do this through the institution of The Pub. Which, of course, makes me think of the scene from the movie, “Educating Rita,” where the titular character asks her mom why she isn’t singing along with a song in a pub, and her mom answers along the lines of, “I’m waiting for a better song.” The response from Rita’s professor upon hearing this story is, “No. She’s waiting for a different song.” Visiting English pubs would be an option if I weren’t in Eugene.

And of course, imagining Eugeneans in a would-be English Pub while singing songs makes me think of Anna Russell’s monologue about folk songs where the singer is wishing they were anywhere else and “weren't in this horrible place, but were in their dear old native land.” Instead of singing songs to cope, I’ve decided that I need to pronounce Eugene (uh-ZHEN) with a French accent.

Since Mark was away and couldn’t attend, I took The Child out to a comedy club to see a “psychic comic.” It was a funny show and the comic was entertaining; he likely has a very good memory, has excellent skills at observing people, and is mentally quick. (Cue the Animaniacs singing, “So urbane-y / Shirley Shirley MacLaine-y”). The audience was fun enough, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of the very cringey audience from when Randy Rainbow came to the Hult Center a few years back. I suppose that when a comic is choosing audience stories and questions as prompts to interact with, there’s more mileage to be had from “Should I get a boob job?” or “Is my cat my sole soulmate?” You know the cringe is strong when the audience collectively sucks their breath through their teeth and goes “Oof.” Several times. It’s a credit to his skill that his answers were both funny and gentle.

As we were getting into our car to leave, a woman in her mid-thirties hit on The Child. This was the same audience member who, during one of the final psychic moments of the show, revealed that her idea of fun was to try to get dizzy (which apparently is hard for her to do), and during her last attempt, she drank insane amounts of alcohol and had her friend’s son twirl her around on playground equipment so hard that she flew off into the air and landed on her face, receiving a mouthful of bark mulch and her tenth concussion. The Child was seemingly oblivious to how her body language abruptly shifted from slouching to her car to one foot forward, shoulders-back-breasts-engaged, and a demi-toss of her long hair as she told us her name.

We wished her a good (and safe) night and drove away.

I did not take The Child dancing at the local, pink-themed, gay dance event a few nights later. I’m not sure which he would be most uncomfortable with: the various couples making out on the dance floor, the sweaty Go-Go Guys dancing in their underwear, the not-always-softcore porn clips playing behind the DJ, or my Doctor Strange dance repertoire (sixty-year-olds are so cute when they try to do their solitary ritual aerobics).

The current dance venue, which wants to be an occult-adjacent English Pub, just lost its liquor license. I’m not sure if there were more or fewer drinks spilled onto the dance floor. If I were pressed, I would say that instead of many small sloshes of alcoholic drinks there was one large non-alcoholic drink that got dropped.

The dance was simultaneously fun and a let-down. The DJ and the event photographer are always welcoming and inclusive. I liked the dancing part and the music for the most part was danceable. I didn’t have any mystic dancing down the moon on the moon paths moments and had to settle for a Dance Meditation while fixing my gaze on the red-lit disco ball and asking myself “Is This a Tree of Life Vision of Splendor, a Vision of Victory, or Have We Collectively Even Gotten Past the Veil of Maya and onto the Higher Astral?” and “Is This Experience Like The Lovers, The Devil, or The Moon Tarot Card?” The rising crawfish in The Moon seems to be resonating with me as a symbol of an awareness of unseen, possibly imaginary, currents at the beginning of a path that starts with a dog and a wolf facing each other—and there was someone in a leather pup mask, now that I think of it.

Everyone there appeared to be with a partner (“Let’s Play Master and Servant,” “I Am So Into You,” “You Can Ring My Bell”) or group (the College Kid Friends, the Women Who Say Whooo!, The Leather Harness Dudes, The Go-Go Guy Posse, HIV Alliance Volunteers) and I felt like I was the only single person there (“Dancing with Myself”). Usually, there are more singletons—maybe this time they were all hanging out on the smoking patio.

I got my aerobics in and when the music shifted from a fun dance tune to a slower, cool-down tune, it was time to leave. I wished that there was someone there that I recognized, because it would have been fun to chat; but the music is Very Loud, and it’s difficult to talk on the smoking patio. I’m hoping when the dance moves to the new venue it has a quieter space for discussions—although the new venue’s right on the edge of campus, and I suspect more undergraduates will make an appearance.

I came home to Aoife and Cicero. Who woke up enough to see if I was going to put any midnight treats in their food bowls. Mark comes home in four days.

New Book of Art (Again)

Once again I’ve filled up (mostly) a small blank journal, called “The Book of Art,” with drawings of characters, fantasy maps, geometric sketches, event tickets and flyers, dreams, story drafts, Tarot readings, and words that don’t make it to an electronic format. Not that there are too many deep dark secrets (or any dirty pictures) lurking in the margins as I believe if you truly want something to be a secret the last thing you should do is write it down; but writing (and drawing) for an audience of one is an antidote for self-censorship.

The journals used to get beat up quite a bit—so much so that sometimes sections of pages pulled loose or the end boards tore away from the spine—until I was gifted with a leather book cover, with a leather tie, to protect them. The leather cover is embossed with a reproduction of the Flammarion woodcut: an old design of celestial phenomena over a landscape while a robed sage in the corner pushes through the curtain of heaven and gazes at the spoked wheels of the empyrean hidden therein. The cover’s sleeves also make handy storage for small rulers and shape templates.

I opened the old journal extra wide, slipped it out of the leather cover’s sleeves, and slipped in a brand new journal. It was the Autumnal Equinox, which felt portentous given that the older Book of Art had begun on the Autumnal Equinox five years prior. However, I closed the new Book of Art and secured the leather tie of the cover without intonations, bells, candles, or frankincense and myrrh—much to the relief of Mark.

When I added the old, filled book to the stack of older journals, their blank black spines prompted me to finally use a silver gel pen to write date ranges down so I could more easily go back and find a particular era. This was harder than I thought it might be, as back in the early 2000s I tended to not date entries or use the year. It was interesting to see which journals spanned two years and which ones (like this last one) spanned five.

I typically start a new journal off with a front page with an artistic “The Book of Art.” Since this new book started on the Autumnal Equinox, I have a halved circle in a square with alternating dark and light regions as the background. Other times I’ve just written “The Book of Art” in large or fancy letters. One time I attempted an Art Nouveau look with branching trees and an awkward self-portrait.

I’m currently working on a geometric zodiac on the next page, and I want to reproduce a Tree of Life design that I did in the old Book of Art next. And a geometric construction of a pentagon using Euclid’s method afterward, maybe with a comparison against the method involving a circle, dividing its diameter into five parts, and a chord through the second point on the diameter.

I should more regularly go through the retired Book of Art pile. While I would be thrilled if archeologists or graduate students pored through them for detailed analysis supporting literary critique or Insights into the Culture of the Quizzical, North American, Gay, Cisgender, Pagan Man of the Early Twenty-First Century (Quick! Find David Macaulay’s *Motel of the Mysteries*!), the boxes of my dead relatives’ writings gathering dust are an indicator that I’m the person most interested in my own writing. Somehow, I doubt that anyone is going to host a retrospective of my art or read passages from various Books of Art unless it’s my funeral.

Hmm, I suppose I’ll have to rebrand The Book of Art as Hot Sex and Free Parking Spots.

Reading the Tea Leaves

Friday night Mark fell asleep early and I decided that I would do a tarot reading outside under the half-moon. This was partially an excuse to take advantage of the clear night and light eight beeswax candles at the cardinal points and cross-quarter points of the brick circle. Because eight candles burning in a circle looks cool.

I gathered candles, matches, cards, a flashlight, a small folding table, a copper tray, and The Book of Art and headed outside.

There was a slight pause as I had the disappointing realization that one, if not several, outdoor concerts were filling the air with… music. (Last time it was *Earth, Wind, and Fire* performing at the Cuthbert Amphitheater, two miles away.) I decided the music was dim enough that the fountain would mask it and continued with my plan.

As I was setting things up, there was a sudden thump, and something medium-sized, white, with a wedge-shaped front crashed to the ground out of the old-wooden-fort-cum-grape-arbor. I think it was an opossum. “Whoa!” I said. “Hello.”

I clapped my hands a few times to let whatever it was know I was there.

It scampered along the edge of the candle light, along the west end of the yard, and toward the tool shed.

Summoned by my clapping (which typically means SQUIRREL!), Aoife raced out of the house and silently and vigorously patrolled the shadowy foliage in the area between the tool shed and the grapes.

I continued to light candles, and began a formal invocation of the ritual circle, and invitation to the Powers of the Four Watchtowers. Aoife continued to guard the perimeter—at one point she did add to the concert music floating through the air by whacking the tin sides of the shed with her tail (this is usually a sign that she’s scented wildlife cowering under the shed’s foundation).

I chose to do a general bellwether, five card spread. 1. Situation/environment: Death. Change and transformation. 2. Crossing Obstacle / side-quest: Four of Swords, reversed. Emerging from rest. This would be like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis. 3. Temperance, reversed. Churning resources; spinning one’s wheels. 4. Strength. Animal drives and reason working together. 5. Knight of Swords. Air expressed as Air; mental agility; reminder to stay focused and sustain efforts. In this particular reading the three cards don’t represent a past-present-future progression so much as showing a way the Strength is a balance point between inward churning and outward charging.

I did a count: two swords; three major arcana. Two reversed cards; three upright cards. The interpretation of the five-card spread I did boiled down to: you’re moving forward by leaving old things behind; take a moment to ground; don’t confuse stability or balance and stagnation; don’t confuse the opposite of stagnation for undirected frenzy.

I wrote the cards down in the Book of Art, bade “hail and farewell” to the Four Quarters, dismissed the ritual circle, and brought all of the equipment inside. A little light reading before I fell asleep reminded me that Death, Temperance, and The Devil are connected with “The Dark Night of the Soul” and related paths to Tiphareth on the Tree of Life.

I suppose that this reading might have something to do with my job, my retirement, Mark’s much sooner upcoming retirement, and how long I’m going to have to continue to work until my pension benefits and social security benefits will provide sufficient retirement income (Don’t Lose The Day Jobbe just yet).

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The next morning, Mark stopped on the threshold between the kitchen nook and the living room. “There’s something on the floor here.” He stepped back and forth. “What is this? Did you spill sugar or salt on the floor?”

“No,” I said.

He reached for the hand vacuum. “Huh, it’s kind of black. Were you doing Secret Pagan Rituals while I was asleep?”

“Well… actually—“

“Hah! You were Agitating the (Astral) Cooties, weren’t you?” He vacuumed the floor. For someone who claims to be a religious non-participant, Mark has an intricate theology of the Cycles and Habits of the Common Astral Cootie, which boils down to: “Leave The Cooties Alone.”

This is what I get for reading 1980’s Starhawk aura cleansing techniques to him.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I just did a tarot reading outside.”

He turned off the vacuum. “What did you do?”

“I just put eight candles on the brick circle and did a tarot reading.”

“Were you burning myrrh?”

“I thought about it, but I just lit beeswax candles.”

“And why did you light the candles?”

“Well, they’re cool. And they were on the circle, so they formed a barrier.”

“Ah ha! You raised energy and Summoned the Cooties, and you’re handsome and the Cooties wanted to get to you but they couldn’t.”

“It was just a ritual circle and tarot cards. Oh—something large, white, and wedge-shaped dropped out of the arbor. I think it was an opossum... Aoife came out and chased it and then was on silent patrol.”

“What?! There’s no such thing as albino opossums in Oregon!” He reached for his smartphone. “(AI’s love me.) What does seeing a white possum during ritual mean?” He then read out two answers, which boiled down to protective spirit animal or deceiving demons. “Ooh. The poor AI; one source is an Instagram feed, the other is a goofy Facebook page…. I’m going to go with the protective animal.”

“It was running away from the grapes.”

“Oh, these men. That just proves my point; it was running away from The Cooties that you stirred up.”

“Oh, you know, I wonder if the black stuff was the remains of a match; I brought in the folding table when I was through.”

“So you brought stuff into the house! And The Cooties followed you in!”

“I’d dismissed the circle after the tarot reading….”

“You put a barrier around yourself, but you didn’t put a barrier around the house, did you!?”

“Well, the ritual circle keeps—”

“It’s the old ‘Where Did You Send The Cooties?’ question all over again.”

I was not awake enough to point out that my raising a ritual circle for a candlelight backyard tarot reading was different from a ritual cleaning and banishment performed by one of Mark’s Pagan housemates back in the late 1990’s.

Mark claims his irritation with myrrh is proof of an affinity with The Astral Cooties. “I’m surprised I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t have any odd dreams…. Although, I did wake up at 1 AM with a headache.”

By this time I needed to get to the Y to clink weights, so the conversation ended. I suppose that I’m going to have to ritually sweep the floors in front of him and bid The Cooties a formal farewell and adieu.

But, by the time I got back from the Y, Mark decided that the black substance on the floor was not the result of Cooties but actually the remains of a teabag that ruptured when he was straghtening up the beverage supplies cart in our kitchen.

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

Indigo Lake and Pika

The other day Mark and I went to Indigo Lake, in the Willamette Forest on the slopes of the Cascade Mountains. It’s about an hour to the turn-off, and then another hour along a windy road to the trail head.

We saw what we thought was a hawk or other raptor flying ahead of us on the road, but after about a quarter of a mile of it flying above the road, when it alighted on a branch we saw that it was a raven. It was a sign, I’m sure.

We also had a deer moment on the road where we were reminded that deer always travel in pairs.

The weather was at turns sunny and overcast. This was fine with me because just as one would start to feel chilly from the wind or a little overheated from the uphill hike in the sun, the weather would change.

Mostly we walked through pine trees. On the steeper areas, the base of the tree trunks curved downhill; this is where the snow, melting downhill, has repeatedly bent the trees over successive Winters and Springs.

The trail to the lake ran along a stream; we were able to cross over without getting wet because the stream bed was dry. Further on, we did see sluggish water held back by rocky formations, and even further the stream widened into a marshy, open meadow.

Indigo Lake was not indigo when we visited it. It was green, to Mark’s disappointment. When we first encountered the lake, at its northern end, the wind blowing on it gave it a voice of a thousand lapping tongues. The only competing sound was the swelling rush of the wind through the pines, which sounded like something produced by Wendy Carlos in a mid-seventies recording studio. (“Psithurism” is the name of my next Mediaeval Synth Band). Overhead, clouds raced by Sawtooth Mountain.

We followed the lake’s shore to the mountain’s talus. I located a Chrysler-sized rock slab (one of many) for us to lounge upon and Mark broke out the blue cheese, almonds, walnuts, and crackers. I broke out the Ceylon OP.

And we listened. And waited. For pika.

They came. We heard their cheeping first.

One came close enough for me to be able to get a photo of Mark peering at it through a small monocular.

Mark was enchanted by its small, round, black ears and its whiskers. Unfortunately, there was no gift shop near, as the closest Ranger Station was about thirty miles away; so I could not purchase a plush pika for Mark to be a companion to the plush baby orca I purchased for him a couple weeks ago at Port Townsend.

I broke out some pens and pencils and sketched the rubble pile the pika was hiding behind.

Even though it was a secret, unspoken desire that I was silently talking myself out of, Mark had a psychic moment and forbade me from hiking through the talus to see if I could locate a surfboard-sized one to slide down the slope on.

Then it was time to head back home and Rescue the Dog from Ennui.

We managed to miss the rain while we were in the mountains, only encountering it on the drive back to Eugene.

Adventures in Dancing

Well, so much for regular blog posting over the summer. I am thinking that a combination of irregular writing practice, The Day Jobbe, doom-scrolling on Instagram, family duties, and a desire to have a blog post that is a polished, 2000 word essay has kept the posting down. So, yay, Autumnal goals!

My latest activity is Dragon Dancing. When I was researching dance poi, I stumbled across a Seattle-based influencer waving around a long, sinuous, LED-laden, zero-porosity, dragon banner in gyring arcs. And I thought, “Wow! That thing glows in the dark!” After a month of wishy-washy deliberations, I ordered one.

My dragon is blue, with white LEDs running along his fabric sides. He has a purple-highlighted Chinese dragon head, so he’s got glowing antlers, glowing white eyes, and he’s got a glowing red ball in his mouth. His rope leash clips into the ball. I whirl him around in circles and his fabric body traces spirals. I have to make sure to keep my back to any shifty wind or else the dragon’s body will sideswipe me, tangle around my feet, or the tail will whapp me in the face.

Holding the leash near the clip results in very tight circles, which have to be combined with a lunge or a full body turn so that the dragon takes a corkscrew path. Holding the leash at the handle end results in wide, slow arcs that can reach about fourteen feet in height; with the dragon’s body unfurled in this way it’s easier for it to act like a windsock. Adjusting the distance from the leash’s clip to my hand changes the period of the dragon’s swing, allowing for me to sync up with the beat of whatever music I’m listening to; I’ve made a Dragon Dancing playlist to help me keep track of session length.

It turns out that this is a dance and movement form that older people in China do. So, yay, I’ve landed on an age-appropriate behavior? There’s a lot of arm waving and lunging to get the dragon ribbon going, and my fitness tracker frequently thinks I’m swimming when I do it. I’ve decided that it’s good cardio, and I’ve been aiming for 45 minute sessions. Mark calls it “fast Ti-chi.”

I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to get hot pecs or bulging biceps Dragon Dancing, though, as I’m currently doing a lot of jumprope type motions with my shoulders, elbows, and wrists—however, I do notice that my posture is improving, that I feel more limber afterwards, and that the repetitive motion results in a toned look. And 45 minutes gets me sweaty, which is a plus because Mark appreciates it and “sweat is fat crying.”

After about a month, my repertoire consists of a figure-eight figure, a four leaf clover figure, circles of varying sizes, and a corkscrew. Continuously. For forty-five minutes. I recently saw a YouTube video where a performer whirled her dragon ribbon around her, overhead like a lasso, which I can do if the wind isn’t blowing too fiercely. I have a feeling I look like a western dance sequence from Xanadu. I suppose I need to pick up a few more moves; I think there’s one where you can make a large, Doctor-Strange-portal motion with the dragon-ribbon and then hop through it. I also need to curate my dance playlist to fine-tune it; when the right Dead Can Dance tune comes on it’s easier for me to put footwork and full-body motion into the routine, which helps to make the dancing feel less mechanical. And probably makes me look like a dance-flow hippie.

Yes; I sometimes dance with the Moon. Sometimes I dance with the sun and my shadow. But mostly right now I dance with the wind, because if I don’t I tend to get smacked by a dragon tail.

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In other, Old Gay News: I was going to go dancing the other night, but wound up staying home because I couldn’t find my stupid ear-plugs. I spent about an hour and a half—all dressed up in in a club vest that Mark bought me, black pants, raven earrings, rings, and a glow-in-the-dark bracelet—armed with a mini-maglite to help me actually focus my perception, looking through desks, tables, shelves, medicine cabinets, drawers, bookshelves, counters, room dividers, mantels, car gloveboxes, travel bags, backpacks, jacket pockets, pants pockets, under beds, under shelves, and under baseboard heaters for the stupid black, round, pillbox shaped case that holds my hearing’s salvation. I found my library card, an actual pill box, numerous pens, a pencil sharpener, and an embarrassing quantity of dust and shed animal fur.

Mark was asleep.

It was quite vexing. I tried to put a “this is the Universe saving me from encountering a gunman on an e-bike near Agate and 18th” spin on it, but I was so put out by the failure to find them that I doom scrolled on Instagram and groused about gay community and “doing gay things.”

I am sure my earplugs will turn up as soon as I order replacements.

Dead Architects

This has been a kind of funny morning (7/11). I went to the Y for some cardio on the treadmill (with Lady Gaga and Madonna on my new-ish, noise-cancelling earbuds), came home to get ready for a writing session, and had a bout of the blahs. It’s times like this when I wonder if I don’t have seasonal depression, but rather depression-depression, and is this a function of getting older or is life in hippy Eugene just an extended, long-play version of the first part of the theme song to *Friends*: “when it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.” Or maybe morning tea (with three lumps of White Death) is propping me up more than I realize.

Cue angsty Alanis Morissette music. Insert Capricorn-esque fretting about legacy here. Insert pondering dubious connections to various Eugene communities here. Insert musing about the proto-beach-ball behind my belly button as I reach for another square of chocolate here. Close out with Annie Lennox’s “Money Can’t Buy It.”

I checked out a random book at the library: “Architects of Oregon: a Biographical Dictionary of Architects Deceased - 19th and 20th Centuries.” I will confess that the typeface used for the directory headers was the real reason I wanted to look at it, but once I got the book home I discovered the B, the D, the R, and the S are the only letter designs that are interesting. The book lists Doyle, the architect who designed the original buildings of Reed College (and the Doyle Owl), and the guy who designed Shelton McMurphy House in Eugene, and The First Ever Licensed Woman Architect in Oregon.

This is a book about architects for architects, and not about architecture. One detail that struck me as I was reading was that the architects’ buildings’ descriptions rely on the reader being familiar with the buildings. Since I’m only familiar with the Reed and Eugene buildings, I couldn’t imagine what styles other buildings were using much beyond the generic “bungalow” or “arts and craft” or “inspired by Ruskin.”

Lots of folks were born in the 1800s–so lots of thumbnail photos of handlebar mustaches, sideburns, cravats and ties, formal jackets, and bowler hats. Their parents came from the Midwest States by Ox-Drawn Wagon or The Old Country and there’s quite of few of them who took a non-traditional path to architecture: either by defying their parents and running away to architecture college; or somehow scraping together enough wherewithal to get into an architecture program; or by starting as a teenaged construction worker, becoming a draftsman, and working up the architectural office ranks to fully ranked architect. Lots of folks practiced across both World Wars. And, as the sub-title says, they’re all dead.

It also has a bunch of short entries that end “Nothing else is known about him.” Which implies that somewhere in Oregon there are houses or buildings still standing which are designed by unknown architects; or, probably more likely, demolished or repurposed sites that are the only remaining echo of a century old designer. (Pause to be momentarily overwhelmed by the lyrics of Peter Gabriel’s *Mercy Street* (“…all of the buildings, […] were once just a dream in somebody’s head…”).) This, of course, gives me license to imagine forbidden, gay, or forbidden gay lovers. Or a secret, Free-Mason/Golden Dawn adjacent cabal of mystic architects who have faked their deaths. Or dueling architecture firms with Ninjas/Jedi/Sith/secret agents. Or proscribed architecture because There Are Some Houses Mankind Should Not Build.

I am pretty sure Insane Architecture of Madness and Portals are involved.

Musings on the Scrying Glass

June 10, 2026

The new Moon of June is creeping closer.

In an attempt to not be a tired, depressed, grumpy, and unproductive lump during new moons, for about the last year I have instead been meeting with some Wiccans of the Reclaiming Tradition to scry. The idea was that if the Moon was going to be in a phase that is supposed to be secret and regenerative, one might as well try to work with it and try to connect to the subtle influences for instruction or revelation. Those mystic crystal visions aren’t going to come on their own.

The tradition is that the Moon’s final crescent signifies the endings of processes, either of the previous twenty-eight days or of the year. The moment when the dark Moon is between the Sun and the Earth is a time when unconscious processes become secretly energized and rejuvenated (and not tired and grumpy at all). And the very first sliver of a new Moon is the time to set intentions for the month or for new beginnings. Extra interpretive points if you add in seasonal flavors: a new Moon at October’s end would indicate that the veils between the worlds are extra sheer. We typically cast a ritual circle and then meditate on a dark blue glass sphere before dismissing the circle.

I do find myself sometimes wishing we were dancing in a larger group instead of five or six of us sitting around a collapsible table draped with fabrics decorated with mystic symbols and set up with ritual tools and beeswax candles at the world’s four corners surrounding a blue glass sphere. I do find myself sometimes feeling like this is an exercise in applied pareidolia or daydream interpretation. And in more practical moments I notice that I’m not producing something like Jung’s Red Book (which, now that I think of it, counts as a kind of Book of Shadows), or applying ritual means to political, physical, or personal ends. At least I’m not peering into the future to try to divine winning Lotto numbers.

However, there are enough surprising or startling phenomena to justify the continued practice—like that one time I looked into the sphere and instantly saw a miniature scene of someone with a backpack standing on a corner sidewalk with a rotunda in the distance, next to a kind of bike rack on one side and glowing, illegible letters on the other, and above, a figure in a draped cowl looked down from a portal of lunar fire. It was like seeing a completely new tarot card (which was cool, and I still haven’t figured out what it meant). The monthly practice is improving ritual technique; the discovered formula—“be whirling earth / be wheeling stars / be billowing veils / between the worlds”—works well to invoke the protective ritual circle. And there is an attempt to commune with the natural and spiritual world, to celebrate the moment of the new Moon and Earth cycles, and to transform through subtle wits and senses.

What I’ve learned:

• It can be useful to use tarot cards as an auxiliary meditation focus when the only thing I see in the blue glass orb is my inverted silhouette or reflected candles.

• Having a specific question or situation in mind is helpful; if you aim at nothing, you hit nothing.

• Old Dion Fortune was onto something when she wrote about rising above illusion when mentally traveling to the Sphere of the Moon (social media, I’m looking at you).

• Sometimes you’re just going to feel tired and grumpy instead of rejuvenated and mystic.

June Dancing

We’re a week into June. The end of May and the end of a sexy full-moon-to-full-moon cycle since May first seems like it happened years ago. We’re about to launch into June proper, the month when everything happens: The Child’s Birthday, New Moon Meditation, Father’s Day, Graduation, Juneteenth, Solstice, and Pride. It’s kind of exhausting.

On the drive home from work the other day I caught a few minutes of a David Sedaris interview. I didn’t hear the whole thing, but what he said was something I learned in a memoir class many years ago: someone who you meet in real life is a person; someone who you write as text on a page is a character.

The other thing I took away is that if you’re a bitter, angry person when you are young, chances are good you’ll be a bitter, angry person when you’re old; and that the folks who are not bitter and angry are generous toward others.

On another, previous drive I listened to a pop-psychology book advertisement disguised as an author interview. The subject was “belonging” and the gist was that one could increase one’s happiness by actively increasing one’s sense of belonging… I think by hosting snack hours and book clubs. The interview didn’t explore strategies for when one is sidelined or ghosted, or at least hadn’t by the time I tuned the radio to the local classical station.

Tonight is a dance night. It’s occurring to me that due to the typical collision of events and familial obligations, tonight’s dance will most likely be this year’s sole Gay Pride Dance Night. Since Mark doesn’t care for dancing, this will be a night out with my hair (who will probably get a few date offers). I will have to take a disco nap.

I expect that there will be guys there snapping large, rainbow-hued fans emblazoned with words like “bitch,” “queen,” and “slay.” I will have to remind myself that I’m there to dance, and that I’m dancing in a Eugene bar with a Gothic Faerieworlds Festival vibe and not the New York City Eagle or even Perry’s on Pearl from a Eugene three decades ago (which, actually, means not having to go out dancing only to discover the venue is a drag show disguised as a dance). I will have to remind myself that it’s the Moon’s last quarter, and that the folks at the bar are less likely to be invoking a circle of blue flame, saluting cardinal directions, and drawing down the moon on the dance floor—especially not the go-go guys twerking on the stage area.

After pondering why I just don’t go to a more polished dance venue, I’ve concluded that I’m there to dance in enclave with other gay men and to take a moment to celebrate being an older, cis, white, gay, Neopagan man. How essentialist of me; and likely binary, too. At least I can dance without being judged.

After the dance, on the drive home, my hair and I will have to listen to Tom Cardy’s Transcendental Cha Cha Cha: “Slide to the left / witness perfection / slide to the right / nothing means anything. / (Or anything means nothing, I get them mixed up).”

Same Song, Second Verse?

Mark’s mother passed last Thanksgiving, so this is his first Mother’s Day without her. He has several sisters, and he wished them a Happy Mother’s Day, …Aaand he’s been spending the last few weeks preparing for his mother’s June memorial by writing up notes she left behind for the family.

I asked him how he was doing, and he said he was fine.

Probably the hardest thing for Mark is that his mom wanted everyone at the memorial to sing old songs from the 1960’s. I have offered to sing “Puff the Magic Dragon,” in his stead; this is mostly for him, but partially to spare other memorial participants from Mark’s terrible, sarcastic, and raunchy parodies of Puff.

*

This year, Mark prepared a Mother’s Day lunch of moussaka and a salad to take to my folks’ house. He helped me make the strawberry pie my mother requested.

The Child drove us up the Interstate. We survived.

*

Typically on Mother’s Day, Mom recites the following stories of how the process of birthing children went.

Right after I was born, my mother was very hungry. The hospital staff brought her a chicken dinner (in some versions of this story, it’s a steak), but no tableware. So she picked up the carcass with her bare hands and tore the meat off of the bones with her teeth (and probably no napkin).

When my sister was born, my mother wanted to watch the process (I believe there was a mirror involved somehow). She was expecting a long labor, but my sister was the second-born, and arrived much more quickly than I did.

“Wow, that was fast,” my mother said. “I guess I can take out my (thick, 1960’s style) contact lenses.”

“Uhh,” said the obstetrician in shock.

This year Mom said she didn’t remember those stories. We had to tell them to her.

*

Way back in 1975, I had a theatre kid friend (whom my parents had a high opinion of) who taught me a parody of a famous Shirley Temple song. As a sixth grader, I thought it was particularly funny and belted out the opening verse at home:

“On the good ship Geritol / It’s a fun trip to the hospital /
where old folks play / games like trying to remember their names.”

“Oh John!” my dad said, “That’s terrible.”

This was from the man who introduced me to Monty Python, so I don’t know for sure what admixture of being horrified, or amused, or being horrified that he was amused my dad was. But I never sang the song again where he could hear it.

Sometimes, in the early morning, when I catch a particularly weathered version of myself in the bathroom mirror, I will sing the end verse: “happy landings on a laxative bar.”

*

Meanwhile, back in the present, The Child was having a conversation with my dad and led in with a question about Dad’s Air Force days. I think he was hoping to hear the story of the drill sergeant who once bellowed at Dad, “Bryurredge; if you can’t march, then DON’T SING!”

The Child asked Dad if he served in Viet Nam.

“No,” Dad said. “But your dad served in Korea.”

Dad thought he was speaking, not to The Child, who is an undergraduate, but to my elder cousin, who is currently in his seventies. According to Mark, the conversation recalled a few more Korea details before skipping back into the present.

During all of this I was speaking with Mom, so I only caught a bit of their conversation. I couldn’t figure out why they were talking about M*A*S*H reruns.

*

After lunch, my sister and I had done some quick house up-keep tasks and were in a downstairs room looking at some framed pictures. As usual, the discussion turned to what to do with some of the family mathoms when my folks move out or are gone.

“Do you want that picture?” she asked, pointing to a water color of the wreck of the Peter Iredale.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m not quite sure where we’ll hang it, but I like the composition of the ship and the color’s good. And it’s something Grandma Agnes made.”

“I’d like that one,” she said, pointing to a painting of my mother’s mother’s parent’s homestead—a red barn and a yellow house set against fields and a pine forest done by a great-aunt or -uncle. The house in the painting had no electricity nor indoor plumbing. “You don’t want it, do you?”

“No,” I said. “It’s a place we can’t go back to, and I really didn’t know who painted this picture.“

The last time we visited that piece of 1890—with its five mile gravel drive and rain and oil lamps and wind and wood stove and foot pump reed organ and more rain and old Norwegian bibles and hymnals and musty patchwork quilts and a dark, leaky tool shed with a treadle grindstone and rusty tools and bats living in the unsound second floor of the barn and nobody but two elderly Norwegian bachelor great-uncles for miles and miles (except for that one year with the cows) and really no place to play—was 1978.

There used to be some spectacular giant bearded irises growing there. The violet, yellow, and periwinkle blooms had furry insides and a dusky scent. In the 1980’s some were transplanted and grew on the hillside below my folks’ house and blossomed annually before deer, moles, and icy winters thinned them to nothing.

Somewhere in the pine forest behind where the barn used to stand there’s a pioneer cemetery plot. I think my mother’s grandparents are buried there. You need a GPS to find it.

*

The Child drove us along the back-road highway home. We survived—although at one point in town some horrific driver swerved right out of an intersection and I was convinced I was going to have a broken sideview mirror in my lap.

*

Mother’s Day drew to an end, and I was reminded of a fantasy story where the characters visit caves: In one cave are statues of Zeus, Athena, Thor, Isis and other deities; in the cave after that are statues of gods with no names; in the cave beyond are the broken and worn remnants of statues of forgotten gods; the final cave is dark.

I was reminded of a science fiction story where the characters listen to a record of the Beatles song, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and find each other in the heartbeat thud of the record player’s needle circling in the record’s final groove.

I was reminded of the Labyrinth Stone sitting in the Station of the North of our backyard’s circle of pavers: there’s a finger labyrinth replica of the Cretan Labyrinth on it.

When I run my index finger along the curving stone course, spiraling to the pattern’s center, it brings me to here and now.

It Could Lead to Dancing

Tra-la, it’s May. I’ve been preparing for May First—which is a calendrical cross-quarter day, a Friday, and also the Full Moon—by taking the day off and dropping hints to Mark that the weekend could be extra amorous. Western traditions for this time of year include driving cattle and kine between two bonfires for purification prior to driving them to the summer grazing lands; prancing around a Maypole, boys with red ribbons going clockwise and girls with white ribbons going widdershins; and outdoor sex in the woods. Add the Full Moon for extra magical energy; I wasn’t following the moon’s position astrologically, but it was a Scorpio Full Moon, so it would be secretive, regenerative, energy of a sexual nature.

A few days prior to May First, I posted a photo of a bundle of dried grape vines in a small copper cauldron to Instagram with the caption, “I will not light giant bonfires in my backyard on the Beltane Full Moon so that I can be ‘rescued’ by hot firemen.” I followed it up with the comment, “It could lead to dancing.”

One wrinkle in my domestic Pagan praxis is that Mark’s always described himself as a “religious non-participant.” Ahead of schedule, the oak, cottonwood, and willow trees filled the air with mucus-inducing pollen. And Mark’s never been a fan of flames larger than the ones on candles, indoors or out. So hot, throbbing, man-on-man sex between two bonfires in our backyard was definitely off the table. Probably to the relief of the neighbors. And the fire brigade.

Thursday night I watched a very close to full moon. The moon was lower and more southerly than I expected, and it skimmed over the tree tops east of our southern neighbor’s house. If I held my head in just the right position, I could frame the Rabbit of the Moon within an equilateral triangle of tree branches. I wanted to just look at the moon inscribed by branches and at the same time run over to a silver working bench and design a triangular bolo tie of silver with a jade disk displaying a rabbit. Since I don’t have a jewelry studio, I remained looking at the moon before heading inside to hide from pollen with Mark.

Fireman fantasies aside, one of the intentions for this seasonal station was to be more balanced with eros, agape, and amore, which means listening more closely to Mark. I may or may not have visualized cosmic erotic energy flowing through my second chakra during (ahem) certain parts of the night.

The plan for Friday was to hike up Spencer Butte and watch the sunrise. This was tricky because the parking lot for the park doesn’t officially open until 6 am and sunrise was 6:04, and also the low, overcast clouds enveloped the peak. So no rising sun in the east and no sinking moon in the west; only wildflowers, trillium, poison oak, cedar, iris, sword ferns with their sea-horse heads, and an ambiguous homo-social group of men (and their two small dogs) with sage (Mark thought it was marijuana) at the peak (I am uncertain if they were having a ritual of some sort or if we came across the aftermath of a group hug).

My favorite place to stand on Spencer’s Butte is a triangular slab of concrete where an observation station used to be. Mark noticed there were a lot of peanut and pistachio hulls littered everywhere, so I made an informal, impromptu ritual of gathering up the hulls while humming “Bring from the center of the sun…” under my breath. I may or may not have taken off my shirt at Mark’s request.

Back at home, Mark had to work, so I left the house and visited friends at the Cascades Raptor Center. Nike the Gyrfalcon had her back to me, which showed off the circular geometry of her feather pattern and wing arcs, so I took some photos to use as a design study. An elementary school group was also visiting, and I found myself explaining that one of the turkey vultures’ names, Lethe, was the name of the underworld river of forgetfulness from ancient Greek myth. As one does. The symbolism of teaching children about mythic forgetfulness in a bird sanctuary is left as an exercise for the reader.

Afterward, I had an early lunch at The Community Cup. I pulled out my Book of Art and wrote down some highlights of the day, and also did a kind practice-pull-no-specific-question of Tarot cards. I’m thinking the cards didn’t want to practice, because all five cards were reversed: the Ten of Cups, The Knight of Cups, the Seven of Swords, Strength, the Three of Pentacles. I suppose one interpretation is “pretending not to ask a question may hedge you from answers you don’t like, but it’s a bad way to practice discernment and divination.” I guess next time I’ll just pull cards from the top and review meanings flash-card style.

I got back home just before solar noon. By this time the clouds had lifted and most of the haze had burnt off, and the sun cast shadows through the branches of our backyard cherry tree.

There are four metal shepherds’ crooks staked around the circle of paver stones in our backyard. One, with wind chimes, is for the Moon’s South Ascending Node; another, opposite the circle, with a bird suet cage, is for the North Descending Node; a third, holding a sun-dangler-and-wind-chime, I moved to the southwest portion of the circle; and the fourth, with its crescent moon decoration, I moved to the northeast position. I put the Labyrinth Stone onto the north paver stone. I went to the south paver stone in the circle, placed the cauldron and grapevine bundle there, and tried to light a fire with the large magnifying lens.

After lots of white smoke, charcoaled burn marks on the vines, and some dark spots in my vision, I concluded the grapevines were too green to catch. I swapped out the grapevine for a beeswax candle and after a few moments had Cross-quarter Day Fire dancing on the wick. I pulled out two new candles and lit these; for an Instagram Moment I had three flames burning against the greeny grass. Eventually, I moved the newer candles into a glass lantern, but I kept the old candle in the cauldron in the station of the south, burning, burning all through the afternoon and into the early hours of moonlight.

Seated on blankets and pillows in the center of the circle, I harped a while, running through the regular store of Child Ballads and Filk, cobbled together Monteverdi, a mishmash of contemporary and improvised tunes, and tried to catch the wind in the harp strings, which is very cool when I’m able to manage it. The chimes tinkled and the fountain’s water babbled over its basalt column. I may or may not have woken up the three arbor vitae trees east of the circle.

Clouds rolled in. Mark and I laid down on the deck’s couch and spent the evening looking for the moon to rise (I swear!). The candle in the south twinkled in the grass, and the candles in the lamp melted down. Sometimes I thought I saw Arcturus, other times, maybe Spica; but all times there were clouds and no time was the moon visible. We rested. The south candle went out. The lamp candles went out. By city light reflected from clouds’ undersides, I gathered up the cauldron and lamp and harp and pillows and blankets, and shrouded the deck furniture with its covers.

Controlling the Vertical and the Horizontal

Whew. After days and days and days of unpacking, cleaning, and reshelving the books, the newly repainted North Bedroom is finally presentable. The shelving is not perfect, and I imagine that I will be making slight alterations in how the sections are working.

On one physical level, the only way to get (most) all of the books onto the main shelves was to switch from vertical shelving to horizontal stacking. I’m not sure how functional horizontal stacks will be for a semi-regularly referenced library. It works best when there are many books by a particular author or in a subject matter. It also means that the larger books, which may or may not be the books I’m more likely to consult, form the base of the stacks—consulting them will be like that magic trick where one pulls a tablecloth out from underneath a set of dishes. Hey Presto!

The fiction paperbacks have, alas, been double-shelved on some separate modular shelves. I am going to see if I can purchase some additional planks and brackets and increase the linear shelf space.

There’s no rest for the wicked, however. Now that the books (and the banker’s boxes they were stored in) have been put away, I have to move onto restoring the bedroom closets, which will involve finding brackets for the very long closet rod and installing them before I can transport the costume and prop department lurking in the North Bedroom and Main Hall closet into the new bedroom closet.

It also means figuring out where some other objects are going to live. There were a number of tchotchkes interspersed throughout the books and I’m resisting the urge to return them to the shelves. The chief of these is my Writers of the Future award from 2006, which inspires the joke about the person who goes to a costume party as a Gifted Child, and when asked “What are you supposed to be?”, replies, “Oh, I was supposed to be so many things.” Mark has already moved the trophy, which is a sharp prism of about seven pounds of acrylic, from one end of the modular fiction shelves to another end, where it will be less likely to kill me when The Big One hits and the trophy does a Sword of Damocles impression.

Unfortunately, I can’t make the closet in our new bedroom behave like a TARDIS, and there simply isn’t room for the Old Burridge Chest of Drawers and Portable Stonehenge and my clothes. And my Doctor Who Scarf. And the giant, wool, double-breasted Pegasus Ranger army greatcoat. And my necklaces, talismans, and amulets. And the crowns (plural). Or the file cabinet of critiqued manuscripts.

Or the banner with a full length Cicely Mary Barker Cornflower Fairy on it. I like it because it reminds me of my Anglophile Aunt Margot, and because I like cornflowers; and the over-the-top pose of the young male fairy with his hands to his cheeks and one leg bent up screams, “OMG! You want to go to the fancy dress ball with me?!” Whether it’s Too Much Old Lady or Too Much Twee I can’t say—but it’s so “Too Much” that it’s funny. I’m not sure why Mark hates it and calls it scary. Okay, we did hang it up behind the door of the bedroom just before The Child's temporary return between college academic terms in a decor move that Mark calls "weaponized;" so there may be a residual Grandma-Jumpscare element involved.

Mark also does not care for the large, sixty-year old, touristy temple rubbing of a bunch of bright blue Hindu women playing instruments. I’m sure my parents purchased it on their travels overseas when they were sophisticated almost-thirty-year-old Americans in 1962. It used to be a central image in the downtown house I lived in before I was seven—I thought the figures were pointy-eared extraterrestrial ?women? wearing space (or diving) helmets, with alien devices; avatars of celestial mystery casting a spell; or possibly space sea-monkeys having a party. What I took for either a lap-sized crystal ball or else some sort of space communication device in one woman’s lap in real life is actually a tambour, seen drum-head on. The air-tubes connecting their helmets to the geometric space suits that I saw as a kindergartener are actually chunky necklaces draped strategically over bare, spherical breasts. Perhaps it is Kama-Sutra-adjacent. I suppose I find it compelling and oddly comforting in a “the party’s still going” kind of way; Mark thinks it’s poorly executed.

Finally, there’s the small bronze unicorn bust on a pink marble plinth. I bought it when I first moved to Eugene to live with Mark. It’s fine art that doesn’t look like a bunch of scrap metal and gears glued together, nor does it look like a twee citizen of the Glass Menagerie. Nor is it Eugene Hemp Macrame with Driftwood and Beads. I’ve always thought it might be fun to make the piece a gnomon for a sundial board, but mostly it’s lived here and there in the house in the shelves or by the Portable Stonehenge or on the mantle or the dining room table. Apparently Mark doesn’t like it (and never has)… not because it’s nauseatingly cute, but, I think because a gay man owning a cast bronze unicorn bust is fence-sitting in the way a gay man owning a scaled-down replica of Michelangelo’s David or a reproduction of a sexy, Pre-Raphaelite Saint Sebastian isn’t. Also, being just the head and neck, the unicorn is slightly reminiscent of “The Godfather.” (“Nice bookshelves. Shame if something happened to them.”)

When I get a little overwhelmed, I go into the North Bedroom and look at the main, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves: vertical shelving tidily interspersed with horizontal stacks. Dusted. Clean. Accessible and not double-stacked. The hardback novels; the Arthuriana next to the Dion Fortune next to the Ronald Hutton; the gay history running into the gay spirituality; the divination section just beneath the poetry section; the astronomy section and the folklore section and the gardening and herbal section—and along the entire length of the main shelf is the art and the history and the art-history running from the Paleolithic to the Egyptian to the Greek, Roman, and Islamic; to the European Mediaeval and Renaissance; spanning to the Pre-Raphaelites, Escher, Mucha, and the Impressionists; ending with Barbie and Art Deco and New York Gargoyles.

I suppose the books spanning time and space are as close to the TARDIS as I’m going to get.

The Holy City of What ?

The latest idea I’ve been pursuing is an exploration of sacred place.

When I attended my cousin Anne’s memorial a few weeks ago, there was a reference to the Heavenly Jerusalem. The words “Heavenly Jerusalem” almost always conjures William Blake in my mind, and the vision the Heavenly Jerusalem revealed gives me a Close-Encounters-of-the-Third-Kind-esque image of a great mothership descending over Devil’s Tower. Beyond that, my understanding is that it’s a kind of holy city, or polis as an axis mundi.

The notion of a holy city struck me, both as a city dweller and a 21C contemporary Pagan.

I’m not sure exactly what happens in a holy city; my sense is that holy people go about the holy business of the city, living holy lives there as they do holy work and holy play in holy homes among the holy streets. Perhaps there’s a holy library, and holy parks, and a holy discotheque. And holy sewers, and holy infrastructure. I think the idea is to be in communion. With something. Since the Heavenly Jerusalem is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition with a transcendent deity, I’m not sure how it would map into an immanent deity spiritual structure. And then William Blake’s voice rings out, “…bring me my arrows of desire!”

In contrast to Heavenly Jerusalem is Babylon. I want to say that the Jerusalem / Babylon dichotomy is an indicator of the spirit / body dichotomy.

Thinking a little bit more, it seemed that there would be more types of city or polis and I added additional sites from history, myth, and legend. I started with Camelot, because it was a shining city on a hill, a beacon of civility, chivalry, lawfulness, and magic.

Then I realized I needed to add The Fabled Library of Alexandria (the extra cool one reimagined in Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”, not the underfunded, dingy one that collapsed through lack of funding and papyrus rot); how could a bibliophile not include a shrine to learning illuminated by the light of reason? (Plus it’s in Egypt, and Ancient Egyptian things are cool!)

And if I was going to add The Cool Version of Alexandria’s Library, it was a pagan hop-skip-and-a-jump to Atlantis, even if it had been coopted by 19C, colonial, Western European occultists (hey, at least it’s the basis for Tolkien’s land of Númenor, so it can’t be all bad). If I had Atlantis, then I might counter-balance it with real places like Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor (oops, that’s Avalon, isn’t it…).

If I was going to have Stonehenge, then I needed Göbekli Tepe and the Chauvet Cave in France as examples of archeological spiritual places. When I started to add the Hanging Garden of Babylon, I realized I was running the risk of building a catalog of UNESCO world heritage sites. So I stopped.

Aside from being constructed sites, I’m still trying to find the common thread running through these sites: “wonder” is one; “sanctuary” may be another; not all are temples or sacred spaces, nor are they all cities. I think they are all places where an acme, whether in knowledge, governance, communion, art, or some other field was reached. I’m aware of the Wile E. Coyote sense of the word “acme” as I use it.

Moving out of the polis suggests Eden, the primal garden and the birthplace of names. This sets up another dichotomy, the urban / rural dichotomy, with Arcadia and the Elysian Fields at one end and archetypical poleis at the other. Of course, thinking of nouns and Eden reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, “She Unnames Them,” which is an exploration of how names can separate one communion with other participatory creatures. So sacred space is somehow an intersection of logos, gnosis, and communion.

Sitting between Eden and the Heavenly Jerusalem is the portable Tabernacle, a negotiated meeting space between Yahweh and the Hebrew people. The Tabernacle is a tent shrine for deity to appear (epiphany!) instead of the top of a mountain, volcano, or burning bush; it’s a purified tent that can travel with pre-agrarian, nomadic herders, used to commune with deity. I think the concept of Tabernacle would be akin to the Pagan pre-ritual of casting a protective circle and inviting the four cardinal powers to participate in the creation of sacred space and sacred time. (Obligatory distraction as I try to spell “Yahweh” with a J and auto-correct suggests “Jawas” and suddenly I’m re-envisioning the Tabernacle as a Star Wars sandcrawler cruising along the sands of Tatooine… which, I think, would make R2-D2 a kind of Ark of the Covenant.)

Placing all of these different sites onto a map is where I currently am. I’m wanting to apply this map to 21C Contemporary Pagan praxis: if I’m an Information Technology worker who lives in a city, and not a farmer in an agrarian society, how much sense does an eight-fold Wheel of the Year make? Is there really such a thing as an “Urban Shaman,” or is that a category error? Looking at place, it feels like there’s the permanent / temporary axis, the urban / rural axis, the natural / constructed axis, a spiritual / physical axis, and a Good / Evil axis.

I’m still puzzling over all of the pieces. Whenever a bunch of dichotomies band together like this, my instinct is to step away from either/or and try both/and. Maybe the sacredness of place is not so much about specific places, but that spiritual place is more about one’s frame of mind. At the risk of being too reductive, maybe spiritual place is about the building of it, or the journey to it.

“…Bring me my Chariot of fire!”

…Wait, where’s the map?