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Two bathhouses for more than a thousand sweaty pagans? You've got to be kidding me.

The campground where the big pagan festival was being held that summer usually catered to music festivals. Maybe at heart the wholly inadequate shower facilities was largely a matter of demographics.

Even so. After waiting in line for more than an hour one morning for my 60 seconds under the showerhead, I go up to the office to protest and lobby for some sort of temporary accommodation. Propane showers, maybe?

The campground manager does her best to be mollifying. I'm clearly not the first to bring the issue to her doorstep. Equally clear is the fact that they're not going to be doing anything to rectify the problem any time soon. Thank Goddess for Turtle Creek.

As I turn to leave, she shakes her head.

“You pagans sure are a cleanly lot,” she says, sounding a little surprised.

Gods, it's like watching a rape that I'm powerless to stop. I can't bring myself to look away, but the very act of looking seems in itself unclean, an act of complicity.

I feel like a war voyeur.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine has become a hideous kind of live entertainment as we watch it play out in real-time. Somehow my obsessive interest in what's happening seems to me prurient, ghoulish even. Something Nascar-ish is happening here: you don't really want wrecks, but the potential smell of blood has its own allure. In candor, the wrecks are the draw.

Well, war is interesting: a terrible truth, but a truth nonetheless. I think of the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the Táin, those culturally-foundational war epics. War is reality of the most extreme sort.

From the safety of somewhere else, I watch the suffering of others with fascinated horror. Try as I might, I feel myself in a state of perpetual uncleanness. How do I dare make offerings, do the sacred and necessary work, in such a state of mental impurity?

Yet the sacred work must still be done: without it, the world would fail. Better an imperfect offering than no offering at all. I turn off the radio, take a deep breath, wash my hands, and do my best to clear my mind as I enter the temple to make the morning offering.