Monday, May 28, 2012

Memorial Day

The second Holiday in the Americana Animist wheel of the year.


Memorial Day is the official start of Summer to most Americans. Sure, most of the kids have  two or three more weeks of school, but this is the first long weekend of the summer. Parties and barbeques abound.


Strange that a solemn feast should be celebrated that way, but solemnity is tough for us, I think. There will be ceremonies at monuments and cemeteries, laying wreaths and and hearing speeches, but after that beer and hamburgers.


Memorial Day never fails to make me sad.


There is only a part of this country fighting a war. They have been fighting a war for years. We see it on the news, but it hardly touches most of us. 


This photo has been floating around the web for years, and it is true. Most of the people who go into the military, go in because there is very little opportunity for them elsewhere. 


Recruiters are commonly accused of selling the military life to people to whom higher education is nearly impossible due to economic constraints and these are kids who desperately want to improve their circumstances.


They come home with injuries that go deeper than skin and bone. For the second year running, we lost more troops to suicide than to combat. 


We're losing these children to failures of leadership. They go, they do what they're told to do. What the leaders tell them is right to do. And then, they come home to a country that doesn't care about them (Don't even make me start about what a nightmare it is to get treated at the VA), to houses in forclosure, and not a job in sight. Is it any wonder the domestic violence statistics for the military are ridiculously high?


Count the significant others of the military veterans who are victims of this war too, and the human cost is astronomical.


While we're on the subject, sexual assault in the military is endemic. Women in the military now have more chance of being  sexually assaulted than being injured in the course of their duties. 


I'm one of those people who've occasionally bought a serviceman their lunch anonymously. I don't go to memorials or parades. I don't like crowds and the memorials are too sad. I really dislike the rhetoric of "honoring the troops". How about we just stop sending them to wars we don't need to fight and treat the injuries they come home with?


When my family goes to Washington DC, we visit the different monuments. I like the Korean War Monument--life size statues of soldiers, all with thousand yard stares. They remind you


 
 When I worked in the homeless shelter, twenty years ago, we had lots of vets. Its a cliche, isn't it? The veteran who ends up a homeless junkie or a drunk? 


One of the first descriptions of PTSD appears in Norse mythology. It's where we get the term "berserk".


Jonathan Shay, MD, a psychiatrist and researcher in this field, makes a connection between the berserker rage of soldiers and the hyperarousal of post-traumatic stress disorder. In Achilles in Vietnam he writes:



If a soldier survives the berserk state, it imparts emotional deadness and vulnerability to explosive rage to his psychology and permanent hyperarousal to his physiology — hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder in combat veterans. My clinical experience with Vietnam combat veterans prompts me to place the berserk state at the heart of their most severe psychological and psychophysiological injuries.[12]


Another war word from Old English is fæge (pronounced fa-yah), existing in modern English as "fey". It means "doomed to die". More correctly, I suppose it means someone who thinks they are going to die in the next battle. If they don't actually die, they were said to have their soul already halfway to the next world.


How many of our service people are coming home both fey and berserk?


On this weekend, if you're the type to go to memorials, remember the living as well as the dead.












Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The Witch of November, One Spirit of The Great Lakes

Although it is May, not November, I've had this on my mind to write for a while. I wanted to talk a little about weather phenomena and one of my favorite songs. 


I spent most of my childhood on the Great Lakes.  Mostly in Southeastern Michigan, but we visited all the Lakes at one time or another.


I have always had this idea that the Great Lakes like their human inhabitants. The cities on their shores inspire fierce loyalty in their people. Ask any true Detroiter or Chicagoan about their city, even in these days of urban collapse and decay, and you'll hear stories of beauty and renewal.


If you have never been to the Lakes, you have to remember that they are not really lakes. They are freshwater inland seas. In other words, they are huge. When cousins from the UK used to visit, they were always waiting for the tide to come in or go out. They couldn't wrap their heads around a lake that one couldn't see the other side of.


Years ago, there was an effort by Vermont to include Lake Champlain into the Great Lakes system. Sorry, Vermont. I love you, and Lake Champlain is a pretty darn good lake, but the Great Lakes are things unto themselves.


The Great Lakes are big enough to form their own weather systems. The most common one is "lake effect snow", familiar to anyone who lives to the east of one of the Lakes.


The other common weather phenomenon is both more sinister and more romantic sounding; The November Witch, as made famous by the song "The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot.


If you don't remember the Gordon Lightfoot song, here is an awesome cover that includes the radio chatter from that night. Here is the transcription of the radio transmissions that can be heard in the recording.


I find radio recordings, such as these, especially moving tributes. They seem to open the doors between the worlds, like nothing else does. This particular cover makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.


The Witch is not something Lightfoot made up, but the name of a particular type of November gale. She's been known to be deadly since we've had records of sailing on the Lakes.


Weather is a mindless force and the analytic part of our brain understands it that way. On another level, however, our intuition forces us to deal with these mindless forces as if they had intelligence. Apparently, it must work well for our species, because we have been able to live in every climate on the planet--never mind that we are a tropical species.


So, we feel the weather as a living thing. It's not even spiritual, but visceral. Otherwise, why would we give hurricanes names? Why do we call a November gale "The Witch"?


As I said, I have always felt that the Lakes are quite content to have people living on their shores. They have always been very generous. So much of this country's wealth in the 20th Century was concentrated right there. I know that now, it's considered "flyover country", but consider that, from about 1950 to about 1975 that was where our wealth was. Those same Lakes supply water to millions of people, and continue to be a major waterway for trade.


There's this idea that sailors are superstitious. The ones I have known were not. Mostly they were just very knowledgable about their craft. In the absence NOAA and radar (and even with them) sailors have to read the weather and water. Their lives depend on the water. They love it and they fear it.


Love and fear are perhaps the best description the Animist's attitude for approaching the natural world. Not panic or phobic fear, but that sharp little spike of adrenaline that keeps you awake and alert. The fear that prevents a bad case of stupid. 













Friday, May 11, 2012

The Imposition of Meaning


Although I have not been a Catholic for many years, the Catholic church does have one custom that I like. When one is suffering, one "offers up" one's suffering to God as a type of sacrifice or holy work. The sad, the suffering, and the afflicted then are to be seen as holy warriors rather than as victims. Or worse, as people whom God was angry with.

When my mother first developed Rhuematoid Arthritis, in her 40's, she used to say "I better offer up this pain to the Blessed Virgin."

I was never sure what she was offering the pain up for, until after my daughter was born. She said she always offered up her pain to the Blessed Virgin, that her children should be protected. She said it must have been accepted, because I and my sister-in-law had given her three granddaughters (and later a grandson) without complications.My mother saw her disease as a holy work. A long, intricate spell that was woven through her life.

She never believed that God sent her the pain, mind you. Pain and suffering were just things that happened. A big part of her religion was always to impose meaning on her own suffering.

If there is to be meaning to suffering, it must be imposed by the person suffering. Somehow, for her, "offering up" her pain somehow made it more bearable.

When people have a close call, such as surviving a plane crash or a car wreck, they say, "God was with me."

Really? What about the other 80 people on your flight. What about the people in the other car?

Does being a cripple or dead mean that God doesn't like you?

Megadoom, over at his blog, Dust In The Wind, has an excellent essay on this subject.

Gravity works for everyone. If your car spins out on a bit of black ice, the physical forces of velocity, inertia, mass, etc. are all in play. If you don't have your seat belt on, you're a marble in a box. No matter how devout or good a person you are. Conversely, when bad stuff happens, it is never some kind of punishment. 

You can't overrule the laws of physics.

I've heard of miracle cures, but they're always the merely improbable, never the truly impossible. I've also had my share of close calls.

How does this coincide with Animism?

The Animist does not see the world as a celestial ATM, nor yet is it a place of punishment. It is a complex system that is interlocking, interdependent and dynamic. Even the chaos the Anthropocene has wreaked upon the planet is part of the whole. Even if we were to cause a mass extinction event, life on this planet would continue to trip merrily on.

Since we are (as far as we know) the only fully self aware animal on the planet, it is only ourselves who try to find meaning. 

The New Age and the popularity of positive thinking takes this so far as to say that one calls one's misfortunes to oneself. That one "chooses" these "lessons",  or that karma is coming to get you, or that you had too many negative thoughts.

A really lovely discussion and debunking of this appears in Barbara Erenreich's Brightsided.

Suffering can be reduced by finding meaning in suffering.In 21st Century, North America there is a presumptuous, and sometimes cruel, urge to try to impose meaning on other people's suffering. I'm sure that this comes partly from our Calvinist leanings. That idea that misfortune happens because God doesn't like you.

Truly, bad things happen because bad things happen. At this place and time, many people feel they should be exceptions, because for years we have been told that we *are* exceptional.

No, on the macrocosmic scale, we are just one small piece. If there is meaning, one must impose one's own within the microcosm of one's own life.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Spirits of Weather and Land


When I was growing up, I was told never to approach an animal that was behaving strangely. A night animal in the day light, a day animal at night. My dad grew up on a farm. One of the few useful things he taught me was that animals acting strange meant they were sick. They'd probably bite you.

This extended to the weather. If the weather started acting strange and you had a bad feeling, get inside. That greenish hue to the sky? Yeah, get inside, that's a tornado. That bad feeling you get from the wind? That's a blizzard.

When Europeans came to the Americas, the "savages" would try to tell the white people what this omen or that omen meant.  They laughed at the Indian's "superstitions" until a few too many of them starved.

The French Trappers caught on pretty quickly, but everyone knew the trappers were half savage to start with. They went native sometimes and learned to read the weather spirits, in the days before the Weather Channel.

When Hurricane Irene was doing her thing in the Caribbean last August, I was in Virginia. I kept looking at Irene's storm track. I just kept having this overwhelming feeling that I had to get home to Vermont.

I have a pretty good relationship with the land I live on. I couldn't help but think that the land was bracing for a big storm, and calling us back.

My husband and I packed up and came home five days before we were supposed to. Good thing too, otherwise we wouldn't have made it back for three weeks.

When I lived in the South, I could never feel comfortable. The land just didn't like me. I always felt like I was intruding. That whole area had always had problems, way back to when whites started settling there. In fact the Caddo Indians never actually live in the particular place where we lived.

Hmmm, wonder if there was a reason for that? If yellow fever, malaria and typhus weren't enough to drive people off, you'd think a perpetually depressed economy would.

There are places that like people better than others. There are places that like particular people more than others. Where I live, it takes about a winter before the place either decides it likes you or not. If not, you can't get out fast enough.

I've never really felt settled for good, in one place, but, where I am now is the closest I've ever felt to it. The land likes me and vice versa. It liked me well enough to call me home for Irene.

It's too easy to think of ourselves as separate from the spirits of places. Urban dwellers especially, however, no one can deny that cities have spirits. Reams and reams of poetry are written about it. It's difficult to tell where the metaphorical begins and the literal ends.

For me, going back to Detroit is like visiting one of my parents when they were ill. Visiting the UK is like visiting a biological relative that I've never lived with. Where I live now is like my chosen family.

This is not metaphorical. This is how I feel. After Irene I was sick, not just from the human cost (which was huge) but the land itself mourned.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Animism In Every Day Life

So, what, exactly, is this blog about?

This is coming out of about three years of long discussions with many friends, both Pagan and not, regarding spirituality and how it is expressed in North America (I'm including Canada here) in the early 21st Century.

I want to talk about things I have been dissatisfied with in my own spiritual practice, and things I have liked.

I have tended to be Solitary because my practices have been so out of step with other Pagans. Oddly, I have been drifting towards my blue collar roots more and more in recent years, although I can't deny that I am a member of the white collar class.

My parents were Welsh. My father came from a long line of farmers, miners and steelworkers from Ebbw Vale (Pretend the "w" is an "oo" sound and it's easy to pronounce). My mother's family was somewhere between working class and middle class from Cardiff. This is important, because it effects my spirituality in profound ways, much more so than I had ever thought, when I first became a Pagan some twenty odd years ago.

I have noticed that the more one works with their hands, the more Animist one is. Never mind if one goes to a church or temple on another day of the week, if your livelyhood comes from the land, the water, the mill, or the mine, those things become alive to you. They feed you and your family. They must be treated with respect because, although they do feed you and your family, they can turn on you.

Heather, over at Adventures in Animism calls these the "Moreworld People"; the non-human intelligences that we coexist with. I like that, because I'm not sure what else to call it.

The spirits are always around us. Some are our friends or allies. Some aren't friendly at all. Some don't care.

So, I intend this blog to be a discussion of that. But also, I want to talk about what is unique to our time and place. I keep running into this thing of Pagans wanting to claim a "tradition".  I don't have a tradition...I'm just making it up as I go along. I have to, because there's too many things happening that my ancestors never had to deal with.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

May Day: Workers Rights Day

I used to try to celebrate Beltane, but it just felt sort of strange to me. When we lived in the Midwest, or the South, I was so completely in the wrong latitude that it was just...wrong. Now, living close to 45 degrees latitude, and being a hobby farmer, it makes much more sense. However, I don't have any animals that are due to give birth, at the moment, and my first planting was a week ago.

I thought I'd share with any readers the first spoke in my own idiosyncratic holiday wheel.

Happy Workers Rights Day!

The Occupy people have a bunch of things planned for today. I wish them much luck in their endeavors. I won't be going to any of their rallies this year, maybe another time.  At the moment I'm much more interested in celebrating the ancestors of the movement.

In recent years, Unions have gotten a bad reputation in many places. But, let us remember that they were the people who brought us the weekend.

The WEEKEND! That most sacred of all American institutions. Before the Workers Rights Movement, the workday was much longer. Sunday was for church, if your were lucky.

If you are over 30, you grew up with the idea that Saturday was a day when you got to watch cartoons for half the morning, then spend your time goofing off. If you have a job that makes you work Saturdays, its considered kind of sucky. And, usually you get some kind of brownie points for working a Saturday. Sometimes even get paid extra.

That's all thanks to the International Labor Movement!

Those OSHA signs you see everywhere in the workplace? The ones that tell you about health and safety rules? Those are also thanks to the Labor Movement. Lots of people complain about the "Nanny State" without seeing the results of an unregulated workplace...They're called sweatshops.

Those shiny "Exit" signs? Over fire escapes that actually open? Bathrooms that actually work? Lunch breaks?

Woo Hoo! I am very excited about those things. So, I'll light a candle and listen to a few Union songs.