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In Asatru and other heathen traditions, receiving a house key can be part of a marriage ceremony, when a woman is starting her household by moving into a new place with her new family. For that reason, many people see it as a symbol of marriage, but it's really a symbol of property ownership. I've had the real life keys to the home in which I live for a couple of decades now, and my relationship with the landwight here is a strong and good one, but I haven't included a ceremonial key in my ritual garb. My mom was the homeowner.

Many of the adjustments I've made since my mother's death have had both a mundane and a spiritual dimension, and this is one of them. I'm not becoming the exclusive owner of my home-- my brother and I inherit it equally-- but it's close enough for me to feel that receiving the official title paper is the right time to put on the ceremonial key.

I have three strikes against me as a resident of southern Alabama—woman, witch, and feminist. Coping with the Bible Belt and being in politically hostile territory is nothing new, since I’ve been doing it all my life. I’ve leaned on the security of the First Amendment and Jefferson’s exhortations on maintaining a “wall of separation between church and State” when threatened with theocratic notions. I have believed in these foundational cornerstones of our nation, even if so many around me seemed to forget.   

Over the past few years, though, I’ve watched the extreme fundamentalists get bolder in their attempts to marry church and government, and it’s disturbing to say the least. The latest assault on women’s reproductive rights is exposing just how close we are to Gilead, the dystopian world that Margaret Atwood paints so vividly and chillingly in The Handmaid’s Tale. 

Check it out--I'm pregnant with my second daughter! Incidentally, I've been too sick to blog for the past six months. It's worth it in the long run, right?

My first pregnancy was pretty textbook, but this one's been rough. The nausea and fatigue of the first trimester lasted until week 20 or so, at which point my uterus sprouted a new fibroid that sent me to the ER with pain and preterm labor symptoms. Since then, I've been working from home a couple days a week and taking it easy, but my body seems to have skipped over the high-energy period of the second trimester and gone straight to the constant exhaustion of the third trimester.

         I was receiving acupuncture to address some ongoing health issues.  At one point in the treatment I had a deep visceral experience of a vortex or portal opening up around my belly and the words “Release the pain, keep the wisdom” came into my head.  Those words continued to run the next day as I had a long session with a powerful practitioner of magic who does her healing through deep body work and massage.

I really enjoyed watching a movie called Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons ... until its end. It's a fun, comedic takeoff on finding enlightenment and has a good message ... until its end. There it was: the gender oppression. 

The plot: two demon hunters are in love with each other, but the male refuses the woman's love because he's trying to find enlightenment and believes that there is great love and small love. When she dies, his remorse brings him to enlightenment, and he realize that there is no "great and small love."

I am sick of plots in which a woman dies in order for a man to become enlightened. Or plots in which her death gives him the apparently requisite rage to finally conquer his enemy—who, of course, killed her.

Women's lives are not props for a man's story or his victory. A woman's death should mean more than its relationship to a man. Think for a moment about the results of a woman's death constantly portrayed in films as having no importance beyond its impact on a man.

This is a small part of my story, a small part of my experience of being female.  This small piece of my story is a minuscule piece of all the different stories of billions of transgender and cisgender humans who self identify as women, or gender fluid folk who have their own rich and diverse experiences and stories around flowing through and holding woman as part of their identity, or some gender neutral folk (or trans men) who deal with being mis-identified and treated as girls and women despite their self identity. No, this part of my story is most certainly not the whole story, and in fact is even a small part of my story, and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to why I’m sharing it now.

"Some decks may be stacked against us...but this deck is ours. Our Tarot."

Just came across this fabulous feminist Tarot deck on Kickstarter, highlighting 78 powerful women from history. 

Emily Dickinson as The Hermit, Hildegard of Bingen as The High Priestess, Josephine Baker as the Queen of Wands, Joan of Arc as The Fool, Harriet Tubman as The Chariot, Abigail Williams (one of the primary initial accusers at the Salem Witch Trials) as The Devil--doesn't Our Tarot sound delicious?