Inherently, I don't like meditation because I feel like it's one long exercise of someone else telling me what to do.  If you've been reading me for any length of time, you know how well I respond to being told what to do except in very specific consensual contexts.  The second you tell me to close my eyes and make that mandatory and not optional, you've lost me.

Needless to say, this has been problematic in my budding yoga practice.  It is one of many problems with my budding yoga practice.  Almost everyone in my classes looks like a sexy yoga toned sex kitten who effortlessly flows from one movement to another.  I spend a lot of time in class wondering why non-waifs don't do yoga.  I also spend a lot of time in class wondering if I will ever be able to do half the movements being done as my boobs impede my entire life.  Every time I say this, it's like a revelation so I'll say it again.  If you are above a DD cup, everything is not awesome.  Everything is not awesome at all.  First, try spending less than $80 a bra if you are not in the Lane Bryant spectrum.  I get three bras at a time and I have to replace them every six months.  Yeah.  For reals.   Second, buying a bathing suit is like the fourth ring of hell.  Third, sexy nightgowns?  You are the hilar.  They don't exist for us.  My boobs never fit in the designated boob area.  Fourth, athletics are super difficult to do because you have two quart sized baggies of peanut butter hanging from your chest.  Fifth, good posture is a pipe dream.

In today's Airy Monday, we look to the realms of archaeology and anthropology, to see what wisdom the past has for today. A Jewish divine pair?; notable real-life Vikings; ancestor worship meets anthropology; Vikings and the Islamic world; Sheela-na-Gigs.

Did "God" (YHWH) have a wife? A new find in Israel lends weight to the concept.

Fans of the History Channel show "Vikings" might want to check out this short-list of notable Viking leaders.

A modern anthropologist meets ancestor worship in the modern world -- respectfully.

We're getting our dawns back.

At the latitude at which I live—44.9798º N—we lose our dawns during the winter. The Sun goes down; it's dark. The Sun comes up; it's light. But the rich, varied colors of Dawn—the roses, the ambers, the saffrons, the teals—go down into the Dark of the Year and are gone.

But now they're returning. In the colorless world of winter, color comes flooding back.

The Dawn of the Seasons, the Dawn of the Year, approaches. For 6000 years and more, spring has been the special season of Dawn, ever-young goddess, and the many and varied dawn goddesses of the Indo-European-speaking world are known wherever those languages are spoken. In English we call her Easter.

Some have postulated a myth in which, through the dark winter, Dawn is held captive in the Underworld. And now she's coming back to us again, free at last.

There is no set date, no temperature, nor is there a light level at which nature in the Northern hemisphere agrees on spring having arrived. It doesn’t help that freak storms and late frosts are always an option. Do you start early and hope to get ahead or hang on a bit longer in the hopes your precious eggs and shoots aren’t frosted to death?

Tree by tree, bird by bird, each individual makes their own choice about when to push forward into this new cycle of living. The choice to live is the risk of death and failure. At this time of year, there is nothing else. Living is a risky business, but wait too long and the opportunity passes, it is summer already and you have nothing to hatch.

March

The Spring Equinox

Today is a big day.  It marks one of the oldest, most celebrated and sacred events in the ancient Roman world: the date on which the Vestal priestesses renewed Vesta’s sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta in the heart of Rome.  

This event marked the first day of the Roman new year.  Renewing Vesta’s fire was a major civic and religious event, and a beloved tradition that spanned from the earliest days of the Temple in the  8th or 7^th century BCE (when it was still a wooden structure, the first in the Forum) to the 4^th century CE when the Temple was forcibly closed during a brutal policy of Christianization. 

More than 50 ancient hieroglyphs depict birds: ibis, quail chick, hawk, vulture, duck, plover, goose, swallow, sparrow, cormorant, egret, ostrich, heron, flamingo, lapwing, hoopoe, guinea hen and falcon, plus variations on each of these.  It’s a veritable feast for modern bird lovers; tomb paintings like Nebamun hunting are still more delightful, showing the teeming color of life in the Nile marshes. 

Egyptian cosmology is closely tied to birds, too.  During Sep Tepi (sacred time), a bird of light flies out of the dark waters of Nun and lands on the primordial mound called the benben. This bird was thought to be an early form of Ra, and Herodotus thought the bennu was the phoenix of later Greek myth, the firebird which rises reborn from its own ashes.