Precious Bodily Fluids

Good news. Leechblock is working, and as a result, I've submitted a story to a market today (instead of endlessly checking my e-mail and Facebook).


Speaking of e-mail, the other day I saw a forwarded message attributed to Vicki Nobel, the creator of the Motherpeace Tarot (a round tarot deck). In it, she revealed that two of her students had come to her on separate occasions with visions of using their menstrual blood in ritual to lessen the ecological damage of the BP oil spill. The ritual did not involve traveling to the Gulf of Mexico to provide food for bird washers or help run an oil skimmer, but instead using meditation and visualization techniques to lessen the ecological damage.

Whenever I read missives like this, my first response is to imagine the public and Neo-Pagan reactions if seminal fluids were used instead of menstrual ones. (Pause to consider a circle of gay men: "Brothers, tonight we will summon our precious bodily fluids to clean up the streets of Eugene... "[cue disco music]) Then I am filled with astonishment that Neo-Pagan women still do these kinds of rituals; didn't this gyne-chauvinism go out of vogue in the mid 1990's? (At least it appears that ritual provisions for non-menstruating women and men were appended to the original call to ritual.) Finally, I always wonder why prayers and visualizations for disasters seldom are accompanied by positive, practical actions one can take. (And, yes; sometimes the only thing one can do in certain situations is pray...)

So. Here are some suggestions (what boundaries to push with bodily fluids is left as an exercise for the reader).

Short term suggestions for action break down into A) physically providing support or aid in the gulf states, OR B) sending money to various ecological organizations. I suppose that C) supporting local nature preserves funded by national ecological organizations might free up more funds to go to the gulf, but that's a supposition on my part.

http://www.serve.gov/oilspill.asp

https://give.liveunited.org/page/contribute/gulf

http://www.nwf.org/Oil-Spill.aspx

http://www.nature.org/multimedia/features/art31637.html

http://www.whitehouse.gov/deepwater-bp-oil-spill/


Various long term suggestions break down into A) driving less specifically and using less energy generally, B) switching to "green" energy, and C) working with government to enact ecological policies.


And for Eugenians, here's a local nature preserve:
http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/oregon/preserves/art6812.html


Ready? Let the ritual begin.

Turning Away from the Internet

2010-06-23 Wednesday

What I've learned from my recent vacation is how much time I spend on-line. What's worrisome is how much of my time it eats up for low-signal things. Don't get me wrong, I love that I can find out what is going on with my friends and family, and knowing the status (over and over again) of a story at a particular market.

I want to make an effort to have something worth saying ("I can haz corn flakes now") instead of posting something because I can, and cut down on the constantly checking thing (LeechBlock, I think you're about to become my Best Friend again).

Also, while on vacation I noticed a kind of temporal disconnect. Before vacation, I time-delayed a few Twitter Updates so they would occur a week or two later. I also time-delayed " ≟Love" a piece of Twitterature, so that it would be a serial.

The time-delay underscored the virtual part of virtual networking -- yes, my Tweets are real, and the responses are real, except that I'm emotionally and temporally divorced from my original message; so the responses don't seem quite connected. And yes, again, I prefer having a wide virtual community over having a very narrow real one (okay, actually, I want both). I imagine that the responses to my "time travel" Tweets feel similar to time-dilation responses between space travelers and earth. Perhaps this time-delay with message and emotional content happens with folks who send messages via post, and I've simply re-discovered the electronic version.

I will give myself this: I've gotten better at not "fatigue surfing" the web late at night. Yes; there's room for improvement.

So. Off to reconfigure LeechBlock!