On this page the following entries were made in the “January, 2010” time-frame.
Archive for “January, 2010”
Imbolc
Snowdrops break the seal of Spring
As light laps at the gloaming
Ffraid – or Bride – your blessings come
Bright candles bid you welcome.
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Animism and Bad Rooms
Animism isn’t all sweetness and light. We know houses and rooms in houses can be haunted.
But the form of those hauntings can be so intense that it is as if the room itself has its own form of life. And not a pleasant form either. Here I am not talking about spooky feelings in a room, or seeing a shadow or apparition. Here I am talking about when the room itself comes alive.
The following is excerpted from borky’s comment at Loren Coleman’s Twilight Language blog. I was reading about a 9-year old kid named Montana Lance (!!??!!) killing himself… Read more »
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Helping Others Grok Bioregional Animism
You don’t really need to “do” anything. It’s the Land that does it. Through talk, through good feelings, even through terror.
Ask questions when you are walking around with them in the outdoors away from “people stuff.”
Ask, you talk to your dog right? Your dog is alive. How about a cat? Did you ever talk to a bird? What happened?
Did you ever see any faces in clouds? In rocks? In the leaves of trees?
Do you hear music… Read more »
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Granite Dells
One of the last things I did before leaving Prescott, Arizona, was climb over rocks in Granite Dells near sunset.
Fantastic mounds of rock look like toes or fingers or mushrooms or just about anything else you can imagine.
The neighborhood sits right next to a Rails-to-Trails throughway where you can hike for miles. We scampered up and up to catch the last rays of the sun. On the way we played with our shadows to make living rock art. That’s Joan on the left, me on the right, and Marna offstage taking the photo:
The trees cast their own shadows as the rays… Read more »
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“The Celestial Omnibus,” by E. M. Forster
The boy who resided at Agathox Lodge, 28, Buckingham Park Road, Surbiton, had often been puzzled by the old signpost that stood almost opposite. He asked his mother about it, and she replied that it was a joke, and not a very nice one, which had been made many years back by some naughty young men, and that the police ought to remove it. For there were two strange things about this signpost: firstly, it pointed up a blank alley, and, secondly, it had painted on it, in faded characters, the words, “To Heaven.”
“What kind of young men were they?”… Read more »
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Faeries, Devas, Nature Spirits
I don’t have any particular attachment or problem with the terms “fairies” or “devas” even though both have cultural baggage, at least not since when I was a kid reading some of the Findhorn materials. But then some people have baggage for terms like “spirit” and “soul”. Let’s face it, most terms have baggage to one person or another. But when language gets in the way, it stops achieving its purpose of communication.
I don’t know what these “Others” are. I don’t like to put boxes on beings I don’t know about. My native american background doesn’t even use the term… Read more »
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Of Saints, Angels and Wolves
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February, month of the quickening,
month of Brigid the Threefold,
muse healer, goddess of fire.
Ruth Bidgood
As Imbolc approaches I’m revisiting a collection of poems by Ruth Bidgood (*) which includes a ‘radio ode’ commissioned by the BBC. I published the ode some time after it was broadcast in a magazine I was editing at the time but it did not appear in book form until much later. The ode is called ‘Hymn to Sant Ffraid’ and is written for three voices. How could the Welsh Ffraid be cognate with the Irish Brigid if the latter was an actual person living in Kildare?…
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“A brief additional note about Hallowell’s phrase “other than human persons”
From Graham Harveys Web Page on Animism
“A brief additional note about Hallowell’s phrase “other than human persons”
I’m not alone in finding Hallowell’s phrase – rooted in his learning from the Ojibwa of Beren’s River – powerful, evocative and invaluable. However, although it is clearly a vast improvement over phrases like ‘non-human’ or ’superhuman’, it might not be entirely accurate. Hallowell’s phrase might intervene detrimentally between the members of Ojibwe clans (totems), which are interspecies kin groups (i.e. given associations of human and other-than-human persons such as beavers or bears). It might suggest that all humans are alike in a way… Read more »
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Words of Power, Part I
Words dissemble
words be quick
words resemble
walking sticksplant them
they will grow
watch them waver soJim Morrison, American Prayer
It has been suggested in a forum I contribute too that words only have the power that we give them. This is an idea that I would like to explore on several levels. I’m not proposing a certitude either way, I’m just very cautious of coming down to such a binary conclusion.
Words are strange things. I recall a Reith Lecture in which the neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran demonstrated a synaesthetic relationship between word sounds and visual and kinesthetic senses. By showing people two pictures, one of… Read more »
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