I’ve been spending a lot of alone time lately since my work has decided to send me to training an hour and a half away from home.I’m staying there through the week to save on the travel time and gas money.Lacking the responsibility of housework and kids, I felt myself starting to bounce off the walls a bit.The small apartment that I am staying in doesn’t have a TV, nor a radio.Sure, I can listen to Pandora on my phone, as well as search YouTube for songs and videos.Then there is my laptop.I can stream and search using the wifi that is connected to my work’s system.But, I needed to be careful as they review sites that people go on.That limits my searching and researching ability.
Family is one of the most difficult aspects of my life. My husband and I are both the youngest in our families. He’s the youngest of seven and I’m the youngest of six. There are a lot of personalities and opinions in large families.
Recently, my family had an emergency with my mother (who’s 83). She spent the holiday weekend in the hospital. She suffered a very mild stroke. She was lucky in that she has little residual after affects from the stroke.
In Wisconsin, we’ve turned cold, had a snow storm (or several) and had our first real slow down for the winter.I’ve heard nothing but complaints about how we haven’t had cold weather like this since the 1800s.I work with several people who are from the south and they are questioning why they moved to Wisconsin.
It is easy to get wrapped up in the complaining and the whining about how bad it is.With arthritis in every joint in my body, the cold is hard to deal with as it makes me ache.The slippery sidewalks and roads can be treacherous.It isn’t fun to drive down the road following someone who can’t drive in the snow or worse to skid around the road rather than driving down it.
The full moon is celebrated and cursed.Those who work in the police, hospital, and so on will tell you that behavior is odder during this time of the month.
The full moon is about completion.It is like a pregnant woman about to give birth.The energy is high and in some cases giddy.
This time of year is always a bit mad for me. My sleep patterns are light-affected, so as we race towards midsummer, I stay awake later into the evening, and surface earlier. That might not sound too insane, but I have the kind of mind that hallucinates once it gets sufficiently sleep deprived, so if around midsummer I’m exceedingly wakeful for a few days – as if often the case – my whole experience of reality gets rather interesting.
Knowing that I tend to do this, I approach the lightest days of the year with a degree of caution. Madness is really a measure of dysfunction. If you can take what you’ve got and turn it into something productive, you aren’t deranged. You’re probably an artist, an author or the like. Going out to the edges of human experience and bringing back useful and beautiful things is part of what many creative folk do.
Many of us have the opportunity to honor lost loved ones on this holiday. I myself lost my beloved grandmother on Memorial Day weekend in 2010. It was always striking to me that she chose then to go, considering that she was a proud DAR sister who would always enjoy the parade. One year she helped scatter flowers from the bridge to float down the Fox River, in remembrance of veterans lost. I recall attending some of the parades when I was very small and we would go to visit. We would line up in folding lawn chairs along the sidewalk in from of her house, as that was where the parade would march past. I remember getting very riled up when I would hear the first booming of the bass drums and the rat-a-tat-tat of the crisp snares as they approached. I would be hopping from foot to anxious foot, waiting for them to get right up in front of us so that I could be enveloped in the wall of sound and lost in the rhythm of percussive thunder.
If you are one of the fortunate ones who do not have to work on this particular weekend and can get away with friends or family, a tribal drum circle can be a fun and empowering way to bond and raise some major energy. I have employed this at some Memorial Day family gatherings in the past and it proved quite effective. First, make sure that you let everyone attending know in advance to bring noisemakers, hand drums, shakers, maracas, what have you. Bring extras of your own if you sense that guests are in short supply. You can fashion a homemade shaker out of an empty plastic bottle filled with popcorn seeds in a pinch. Ideally, this is an activity best performed after a good feast and everyone's tummies are well-sated. Make sure that everyone has beverages to stay hydrated. Sometimes drum circles can take awhile before they are ready to settle down! If you are able to drum near a lake or other body of water, it can prove very inspiring. My favorite time to start is right at dusk, when the sun is turning the sky to magic time and the moon is on her rise. One year because of various planetary phenomena, the moon was a brilliant shade of pink that I don't believe that I have seen since.
I'm taking a break from my Jungian Pagan practice series to talk a little about Jungian terminology. Jung is one of the most used andabused thinkers in Pagan discourse. His concepts are frequently misunderstood, both by those who love him and those who hate him. Part of the confusion surrounding Jung is due to his choice of terminology. At times Jung could be very specific about what certain terms did and did not mean, and at other times he seemed to use terms in precisely the way that he said they should not be used. To make matters worse, Jung chose terms that -- at least when translated into English -- are commonly used to mean something very different than what he intended. I want to discuss five Jungian terms which are easily and commonly misunderstood: psychic, energy, self, individuation, symbol, and archetype. In this post, I will address the first two terms: "psychic" and "energy".
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...