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To think, last summer, before I started my Monster Powers journey, I thought I had nothing left to say on this blog. lol. For those just joining this series now, it begins last fall when I first started my Gila Lizard Powers medicine (GLP-1) and became obsessed with perfume.

I resumed working on the Gila Monster tapestry after my housemate's family's visit. I put all my weaving stuff back in the front room that gets good morning light.

I'll be signing my book Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path at Las Vegas Pagan Pride Day, November 11, 2023, at Paradise Park. I'm really excited! This is the first time my local PPD has been back since the pandemic started. It's an outdoor event so it's among the safer choices for pandemic safety, but because it's outdoors Las Vegas holds our PPD in November rather than September like most other cities do. I've been wanting to sign my book at my local PPD since my book came out, but since my book came out in 2020 I didn't get a chance to do that before now. I'll also be making a short presentation about Asatru and answering questions as part of my booksigning. 

My new book is a longer, updated version of my out-of-print book Asatru For Beginners. Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path is available in print, ebook, audiobook, and audio CD.

I'm delighted to share with you that the newly revised and expanded second edition of Ariadne's Thread is now available!

The first edition, published 10 years ago (wow, has it really been that long?) was the inspiration for the creation of the Facebook group that evolved into the beautiful community that is Ariadne's Tribe.

A friend of mine asked ChatGPT who I am, and got a pretty cool response. It's posted below. ChatGPT is called an "AI" but it's actually a machine learning program, not a true artificial intelligence. A friend asked it what it knew about me.

The Machine's Response

What a magical thing a book is. Someone spends years slowly composing their thoughts, writing and rewriting every word over and over until it's their best work. Someone else polishes it, and someone else makes art to sandwich all the words together, and finally you open it and behold! There are markings, and they speak into your mind, and the words flow to you and you hear the thoughts of the author. Over time, over space, sometimes translated into new languages, or even beyond death, you hear another's thoughts and words.

To write, to read, to even just pick up a book and look at it is to honor the god of writing, Odin. Odin, who won the Runes on the Tree, in his act of shamanic self-sacrifice. Odin, who spoke his own words to human writers and poets to be written in the Havamal, the Sayings of the High One: "I know that I hung on the windy tree, nine long nights, without food or drink, I looked down, I took up the runes, screaming I took them, I fell back from there."

The Poetic Edda is one of the basic texts of The Lore, the collectively decided cannon of Asatru and related Heathen sects. Thorstein Mayfield has made a new translation, with extensive footnotes. It was sent to Witches and Pagans Magazine for review.

This new translation of the Poetic Edda is subtitled A Heathen Study Edition: Mythological Poems. Author Thorstein Mayfield holds a Master’s in Literature from the University of Houston at Clear Lake. He is a founding member of Woden’s Folk Kindred in Texas, the organization that owns the publishing company which published this book.

In a week, I'll be giving a talk about Asatru at my local UU, which I've done a few times before. But this time I won't be behind the podium, but sitting at my desk at home. It's only an hour's drive away and yet I'm teleconferencing, because the UU has locked back down again. Even after a year and a half of pandemic related restrictions it still feels odd to be planning this. We left it to this week to decide if we were doing in-person or Zoom since there was no way to predict in advance whether the church would be open on a particular date. That's another thing that still feels odd to me even after all this time.

It's been a little over a year since the new version of my new launched, and I had hoped that by now I'd be planning a post-pandemic belated book tour, but it looks like I might have to wait a little longer for that. Or I might never be able-- or allowed-- to travel at all, ever again, since my health issues prevent me from getting the booster. What a strange world it is now. On the other hand, after solving the technological issues associated with videoconferencing, there is no reason I could not give similar talks like this all over the world, not just in my local area. Instead of a wall this might be a bridge; I might be able to virtually go all kinds of places to which I could not physically go. I'm available for talks at virtual conferences, festivals, book clubs, and of course earth spirituality groups like the one at the Unitarian Universalist Church I'll be addressing next week.