I feel asleep early. It's past three thirty in the morning, and I've lit a half stick of incense and a candle, preparing to sit and breathe a little before going to bed. Or sit and commune. That's what I do. The word "meditation" is so dry. My blood and my practice is either Celtic or African. It's not clean and sterile with new agey socially acceptable words.

It is the time before dawn when the birds begin to chirp to each other. They belong to Math, and any druid, witch, or one who had read the Mabinogion will vaguely know who that old spirit is. He sits at the door of beginnings and endings. The gate of enchantment.

There was a song out a few years ago. (A Christian contemporary one) called "Time to Believe". But I am thinking of what Ly de Angeles, an Australian witch, has said about belief. Belief implies doubt. This is true. you have only to hear most Christians, especially the stridents ones, talk abotu thier beliefs before you realize that a great deal of modern, Orthodox Christianity hinges not on actual faith or experience of the divine, but on a set of "beliefs" about what someone else has said. Many Christians are full of doubt and void of the actual experience of anything divine. I'm sure I'll talk more about this later.

And God help you if, in some well appointed church before the well dressed establishment you begin to talk about the ACTUAL experience of something, SOMEONE real. For some reason Christians, especially the orthodox ones seemed to be more troubled by the prospect of an actual Jesus than anyone else.

It is not time to believe. No. It is time to KNOW. It is time to stop being afraid and encounter. The truth is Western culture inside and outside of the houses of worship is becoming atheistic. A true atheist says can say there is no God because he has no recognizable contact with the divine. Nowadays neither do religious people. The sympathetic religious say that atheists are well reasoned people entitled to their opinion. The conservatives, afraid that this out loud and outspoken atheism will remind them all too much of what they already fear deep in their hearts, beneath all the rhetoric, react loudly and vociferously.

Both reactions are wrong.

To be atheist, to deny the wholeness and the soundness and holiness of the universe is not a “reasoned opinion” nor is it something to rage against. To deny spirit is senseless in the truest sense of the word. It is the ultimate symptom of the main sickness in Western society: our divorce from our universe.

HIEROGLYPHS

Right now I am reading Jean Houston's The Passion of Isis and Osiris. Each chapter has an excersise for channeling the spirituality of ancient Egypt, and the current chapter is about hieroglyphic thinking as opposed to alphabetic. To look at a hieroglyph is to look at a symbol composed of many symbols meaning many things. In English the letter A means you make a certain sound and AND produce a sound that means "as well as" or "not to mention".

Coming to the chapter I thought that what Houston was saying is we have no sense of symbol in the Western World-- especially America-- but now what I see is that we think symbolically all the time. Only our symbols are shortsighted and misguided. I am FINALLY going to a proper driving school and getting licensed. This sounds amazing the many Americans who cannot imagine life without a car. I've noted among friends who have even the crappiest cars what these gas guzzling metal shells mean. To me a car is a great convenience for getting me to places a bus or my feet will not do. To most people I know a car is adulthood, independence, freedom, power.... I have all four, and I can count on one hand the times I've driven a car.

Having your own house or your own place away from your family is pretty much the same symbol as having a car. It says you are grown, you are free. You are your own person and no one elses.

To me having a home means having a roof over your head.

I use America, but to some extent this nation is just a caricature of all the Western world. It is fine and well for people to think whatever they wish to and to associate power with what they like. But when it produces a nation of half asleep, dreamed out twenty-somethings old before their time striving for jobs not worth having and sitting behind desks for several hours told out on a time clock... then we should look at some new symbols.

DISMISSED

Successful and rich
Humble and wise
Lovely beautiful,
Hypnotizing
All of these
Materializing
At once
You want

And this is not allowed
And this is not allowed

Innovation
Without renovation
Originality
Without oblation
New things to say to me
Without honesty
A life that’s deep
Without the sacrifice

And this is not allowed
And this is not allowed

This is not allowed
This is not allowed

Joy in the morning
When you have never wept
Singing
Bringing in your sheaves
When you did not plant with tears
All the years
You spent doing what was easy
Grin hard, say one quick work
Smile for us nice and cheesy
Where is the cross that you always wore
The one that you never bore?

This is not allowed
This is not allowed

You’re dismissed.

HOLY ROLLER
Last time I saw you I knew I never saw you
And all of our days together
You were sewing from fig leaves and leather
A cloak of invisibility
Of who you wanted to be
And you wanted me to feel the same way too
All the things that I do are just too much
And you think that I’m never sorry enough
Stick out my chest
And roll on the floor
Cry out to God and whine some more

And be a holy roller
You holy roller!
You’re such a pretty soldier
With your rosary wrapped around your wrist

Holy roller
Sons and daughters
Of dust and ashes
Sashes of gold will surely be handed out in heaven

Odds are seven to none
That this will be the day that you run
To me with open arms
And please don’t say, “God bless you!”
--I’m feeling blessed enough.

Everytime it’s you and me
We talk about the trinity
And all the things you wish that you loved
And you talk of God
It think it’s odd that while you love
The man of Galilee
I can tell you have no love for me


But you’re such a holy roller
You holy roller!
You’re such a pretty soldier
With your crucifix hanging from your neck

Holy roller
Sons and daughters
Of dust and ashes
Chances are just cause you call it “God” doesn’t mean you’re not really talking to yourself

Do you know--?
I bet you do
Once I wanted to be just like you….

Now I’d rather be myself
Why don’t you try being yourself

And she says-- i don’t think i’ll be coming back here again
laughingly
she says to her friends
the nights roll on
the tears roll on
and a girl with a gun is the only one whose willing
to exorcise these demons
and she demands
why are you still here?
oh,
why are still here?

this is not autobiography
this is not a place i wanna be
no! she says!
this is not a place i will be coming back to again
my friends--
Romans
all my country men and all unworthy you won’t see me
here...
why are you still here!
oh, why are you still here?

IN RELATION TO ANDREW BARNETT'S LAST ARTICLE

(Andrew's link in the sidebar)

I just want to say this: I'm glad someone finally said that the issue isn't that there are no jobs to be found. After I got by degree in English Lit ( a field that makes you totally useless for what most people call the real world) what I found among most liberal arts majors was not so much the inability to have a job, but the unwillingness to put up with jobs that just are worth having! I say balls and horseshit to the mentality that would separate men from their children and their passions, throw a tie around their neck like a noose and sentence them to a goddamn cubicle.

This: in short, is my philosophy for writing, though I feel it is the general prophetic philosophy. I did not write it, but I recognized my self while reading it.

Some books are incitements to action, none of them good books, for the principal function of writing is to stimulate thought, to stimulate creative thought in particular. That means producing confusion in the place of certainty, melting concepts so that they may reform and coagulate in new relationships. The way of doing this may be quite violent, for settled certainties resist corrosion, and demand vitriol. They are shrunken and crusty and need roasting or scalding to make them germinate new forms.

You may think, dear reader, that I have overstated my case. The attack upon my own culture is, indeed, extreme, but the weight of custom is heavy as life and it’s hide is thick. The hearts of my readers may be made of more penetrable stuff than I think, and so my challenge overshoots its target and falls harmlessly beyond, or leaves an exit wound that hardens into scar tissue….

--From the Warning preface to Sex and Destiny by Germaine Greer

Well, it's another mid spring morning in Indiana. The sky is blueing and the clouds are white. There's a heavy wind. True to form it's cold as anything after a Sunday when even at ten o'clock at night, the fan needed to blow on me to keep sweat from coming. A woman at my church told me, "I love Indiana because if you don't like the weather, it's bound to turn change tomorrow." What Alice left out is that the weather is usually likely to change to something equally dislikable as what you have now. When a perfect spring days blows by everyone is grateful. And everyone is surprised.

Well, I've had my birthday and the surprise was how much I thought I would 1.) hate turning twenty-seven and 2.) be paradoxically unchanged by it. Both are untrue. I feel like I've grown into something, and I actually enjoy saying, "I'm twenty-seven." Since college when people have called me sir or kid I've been offended on both scores. Now I'm grateful for both. If this makes any sense I don't feel like I'm old. (Everyone around me is much older.) I feel like I've matured into a proper youth.

I'm so excited about this upcoming summer. I'm listening to the Sheryl Crow CD "Com'on Com'on," the bright sunshiny one that always reminds me of two summers ago. There is a sort of summer in my mind, and I always think of that summer and that record and the novel I was working on in one bright moment. But looking back, that summer and the time afterward was actually a time of thwarted promises and misguided ambitions. A time when I depended on too many people and counted on so many factors that, in the following year were painfully taken from me.

Now it seems like THIS summer, this moment, this time in life, is the ACTUAL moment of happiness I was only sort of dreaming of back then.

It is a little past two in the morning and I am sitting in my bedroom, after the rain storm, sealing and signing envelopes, putting away the last bits of my application for graduate school in the fall, stetching notes in my journal. I have lit the new candle and burnt what remains of the stick of patchouli incense. I want to sit in front of the altar and clear my head before I go back to sleep. I want to get all the muck out so that the good stuff can come in.

Poets and storytellers now have it easier in so many ways than those who went before us but is is also harder now than ever to write mythically with that root to those who came before us and the vital connection to the world as it is now. When Virginia Woolf was young she could turn to Hardy for information and inspiration and her father ran the library begun by Tennyson. The root of writers stretched back and back. A storyteller embellished upon what his grandmother told him and she on hers and hers back to Eve. Stories had the rich dirt of creation upon them.

Today we have distant authors all too often more concerned with their reputation and making money than continuing on in a tradition and passing on that trade. We have authors and not storytellers, writers and not poets and that is not all. We have lost myths and folktales and traded them in for bad religion, mediocre self help books, movies, six o'clock news and television shows. We are drowning in information, but much of it is half information or misinformation. Our ideas are half formed and desires half baked. This age is one full of vague longing and little direction and is a difficult struggle to even approach having an original thought.

posting and comments

For the first time in a REALLY long time... I have posted on Wicked Fairy.

My friend, Frema, surprised me the other day by knowing everything that was going on at Witch's Blood. I was surprised because she didn't leave comments. I was surprised again when another friend told me about my blog because I didn't know she knew it existed. I am reminded again and again that just because the comment box remains blank doesn't mean that no one is reading. But, of course, there really is no other way to know if anyone is actually reading, which is the whole purpose of my writing. Web counters are unreliable and if they do tally actual people, only tally them off as numbers, as "hits". I have scores of clothbound journals which no one ever sees and no one should. If I write in a public forum it is to communicate and there is no communication is no one leaves comments. I don't want to know if the people out there think I'm relevant or wonderful. I just want to know that there are people out there. That's the reason we have comment boxes in the first place.

THE LAST EPISODE:

The last season of Angel was so shitty that it DESERVED to be canceled. The high advertised final six episodes were just as shitty as the ones that went before. The final episode, which aired last night, on my bvery own birthday, ranks as one of the shittiest endings to a television series I have ever seen. I kept wondering: how is Joss Whedon going to make this good. I wondered until the very last fifteen minutes when I realized: "Oh, he isn't."

evolution

first I wrote anything because no one was reading. And then I wrote certain things because people were reading. Now, after nearly two weeks without comments I am back to the place of revelation: of writing ANYTHING THAT COMES TO MIND.

The governor of Indiana, who is running for re-election this year, was going to speak at Saint Joseph's high school's commencement this year. He graduated from the school years ago and they would have been really proud to have him. But it seems the increasingly decrepit Roman Catholic bishop uninvited him upon finding that Governor Kernan made some remarks that could be interpreted as "pro-choice".

We were discussing this at Saint James Episcopal on Friday, during lunch. The Catholic bishop is an old tyrant past his time who has no respect for the people of his diocese but, as we said at Saint James with a sad shrug, "He can do that." In the Catholic Church this is the power of a bishop.

In some ways the Catholic Church grieves and Anglican in an especial way, because the two churches are so very close. But there is a reason we are not the same. There are several reasons, and these are the things that grieve us. Even as we sit there at lunch trying to puzzle out why our sister church of sorts harms itself the way it does, I feel that there is much more than can be done than us shaking our heads. Shaking our heads is not enough.

Till this day I don't know what one has to do with the other, but on graduation day at Notre Dame, Scared Heart, their church, is closed. So yesterday I went to the Unitarian Church. It was one of those "coming home experiences". I never knew I could have so many homes. I was surprised to already know someone in the congregation. She said, "This is the hippy church. It's different." Then, in the first part of the service, where the minister asked if anyone had any announcements to make, Kelly Ray stood up and told us she had a whole bag of pro-choice bumper stickers and buttons, so if we wanted to buy..."

Dena turns to me and says, "See... I told you so."

The people of God are everywhere. If only we would just see each other.

structures ii

It is near the middle of May. Thinking about change I'm thinking about one of the last masses I attended as a devout Roman Catholic. It was full of drums and bells, a youth mass for those who had thought of entering "the vocational life." A bishop came every week to give a sermon and there were camp councilor sorts, university students who once had originality, who years ago had been like this group of young kids. Their elders told them how they were the bright future of the Catholic Church and they would be taught to be leaders. But what happened is they became junior models of the old worn out models until they were all half dead at twenty.

The leaders who arise in this generation will not be made by those of the last. Bill Gates founded a computer school and when someone asked him if the next Bill Gates would come from it he replied that the next Bill Gates wouldn't need it. Of course. The spiritual leaders who arise in the next age will not come out of the churches. They will have walked out of the churches. They will not be sane, well balanced, respectable and likable. They will be driven half mad with disgust for how things are. They may even be a little ugly. They will have a dark path to tread. But in the end, by grace, they will get their acts together. And help us to get out acts together too.

new structures

I went to look over literary agencies last night thinking that an agent would get my book to a better place than I could, and get it there quicker. I come away a little sickened at the world of lit agencies. Failed creative writing majors who have lost the skill of writing and gone into editing only to read manuscripts with the question: will it sell. Hackneed writers with dollar signs in their eyes, the same publishing companies trying to crank out the same thing. The same readers looking at glossy books either meant to entertain for a day, or pasted with portraits of pretentious authors with many titles behind their names. Their work will be forgotten tomorrow too even though today they will have respect.

I come away from the whole experience sick remembering why I apprenticed myself to bard craft and chose to be a bard instead of a writer, why I chose the ancient healing craft of a shaman. If the stories I have are meant to get out they will get out, and they will be full of soul and touch souls. They will not be forgotten in a day.

Those who don't know better say that we have to "play the game:, that one must work from "within the system". I am young, but I'm old enough to know this is a lie. Nothing lasting ever came from working within the existing structure.


So how do I build a new one.
S

Since my friend Annie turned me onto the thirteen month calendar, I have followed it’s system of days. They make more sense to me, and as a practitioner of druidry and hedgecraft, the thirteen lunar moons as opposed to months work a lot better. The only part of that calendar I follow now is how the first day of the week is Friday and not Sunday and certainly not Monday. And Friday always feels like a new beginning.
So… the week is ending for me. There is still a lot that I haven’t completed yet. There’s much I wish I could complete today but the clock and the body says one’s energy is not limitless. I still want to get in a bit of proofreading before the day is done. There’s more I want to do, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.

Proud to say I finished a book today. I read scores of books in a month, but I haven’t read a novel in well over a year. Oh, I’ve listened to them on tape. I like being read to, but I was getting worried that I’d never be able to physically read a story again. The whole time I was reading it I would pull back in amazement that these black marks of ink could be transformed into pictures and a real story. And then the moment I thought about that of course, they were squiggles of black ink again.

I’m yawning now. I’ve been up sense last night. When I look back on some of the more virulent posts I write (and they're not going to get any gentler. I spent years apologizing for having strong opinions and I’m not going to apologize now) I sound like a grumpy old bear. It sounds almost as if I hate my generation. Maybe it sounds that way, I don’t know. But the truth is that I have always taken very seriously the duty to give something to this generation, to the age I was born into. I want to give something, to the people growing up with me. And I want to leave something behind for those who follow. This is the motivation for the things I do. I know that now.

The years ahead will not be peaceful and uneventful.
Those who place too much value on comfort and security
are probably in for a rough time.
Those who are unencumbered and flexible
will more likely survive.

In spite of the “weight of the sad time,”
I bring you a message of hope.
For I believe our young people can yet save the world.
The revolution that is needed now is already taking place
in the minds and lives of some of them.
They have a dream of a somehow strangely better world
than the one they have inherited,
and they are living as if it were already visible, already here.
They step to a different drummer.

Elizabeth Watson

There have been many times when the “weight of the sad time” is upon me. Being young myself I am used to seeing young people sell out everyday and make themselves old before their time. It seems I lose my best friends this way. I cannot respect what they respect. There is so much more to life than striving to be white and middle class or passing for something close to being white and middle class with middle class feelings and middle class sympathies, liked by white, middle class, normal people. This is the failing of Christianity, one of the reasons many people do not want it, and many Christians, though they will not admit it, do not want it. All too frequently the churches not only allow for a banal life, but they seem to encourage it. There is nothing more to aspire to than this lack of aspiration. Day by day people once brilliant with life give into this lack of life… a thing that can’t even rightly be called death. This belief in a God who is at once peering into one’s bedroom, taking names and notes and making condemnations and at the same time distant and removed from everything is a hell. The faith that the world is full of sin and hostile, that heaven begins when you die, and that one day God will come and save us so that we don’t have to, is also a hell. Christians who call themselves sinners, with relief, because being a sinner means being sick and being sick means you don’t have to bother too much with getting better… this is just your condition you see, is a hell. In fact, one of the greatest hells is the word “sin” which must have meant something at one point in time, but now only breeds in Christians a since of ennui. The myth of Original Sin, not even in the Bible, has been taken by it’s logical conclusion: the world is conceived in evil. I am conceived in evil. We cannot help but be bad. How many Christians have I heard not only go on about their sin, but then start to speak of mine—which they knew nothing of—and of the whole world’s. By which they meant, “I do wrong. But everyone does wrong. So the wrong is right. Or, if not ‘right’ then ‘all right,’ which—in a world where we judge by comparing ourselves to others—ends up meaning ‘right’. This too is a hell. And the truth is hell is not nearly so interesting as a pitchfork and fire, demons dancing about and banging on drums. This might, to some, be a good time. Hell is a sad place of stagnancy, misery and quiet desperation.

And yet, at times like these, it is good to remember “the revolution… taking place in the minds of SOME of them.” Some is enough. Some is always more than enough. Just a few who are not willing to settle, just a few whose hearts on fire, just a few who would rather go mad then go into mediocrity…. That may be all we get for now.

But for now it’s all we need.
FROM SILLY RABBIT, THE BLOG OF HELEN HAWARTH

Hi again.

I have request. It's a little out there, but if you don't ask, you don't get, right?

My Mum is running the "Race for Life" for Cancer Research UK on the 11th of July, and I'm basically asking if anyone out there would be kind enough to sponsor her? I have a paypal account, so if you're out across the waves, then no worries (and I would make up the amount that paypal charges to transfer the money...). My email to paypal is super_psych@hotmail.com. Also, I'll be there on the day and make sure that I get photos to prove she did it!! It was just a thought to reach out the dozens of people who read my site :) If you can sponsor her, then please email me with your full name and amount, and I will add you to the form.

Please don't feel pressured - it's just a sideline request!

Anyway, catch you later!!

freedom and choice

My friend David wrote and said, “I think your career path is bad ass,” which is really the best thing I could hear.
I want to talk about choice and happiness, especially in the case of writers, poets and other artists.
I am twenty-six now and this is the age when I look around and many of the friends I had in college have settled down a wife or a husband, a starter home or an apartment, the Jeep Cherokee or the Landrover and would eventually like to get a dog though the landlord won’t allow for it. People’s lives are beginning to settle into some form of security, the first baby is on the way and this is the life that I am told is said to breed happiness. And it does. I do not critique the life, or if I do critique it, to critique is not to condemn. Only when the young artists is surrounded by such lives she or he has to ask questions, is forced to reshape everything we were taught to value.
The most that most people can hope for is a happy family and a steady job, enough money. Security. Insofar as people gain this they are happy. If my interests are safe, secure and well kept then I am happy. Now again there comes a shadow across my mind that may suggest otherwise, but such shadows are easily banished by flicking a light on or turning the T.V’s volume up.
But to a very real extent such happiness is not possible for an artists regardless is she forsakes marriage and a secure job or if he possesses both. In the end to the poet all things are his interests, his family, poetry is his job. And all is not well, there is no security, in writing there is no instant gratification and no assurance of pay. Even a gas station attendant knows that he’s doing his job and earning his bread. If you work in a clothing store, when you ring up the sales price and pass the bag over the counter you know you’ve done your job. If you write it may be thirty years before someone writes a letter and lets you know you have changed their life. And then you must wonder if it has all been worth it. There is really no set price on what the writing life should pay. And I don’t mean monetarily. How many lives should you touch? How often? How do you know when you’ve done what you were supposed to? To a very real extent accepting the writing life is jumping into the dark, and the contentment your friends and family may seem to find so easily you know you will have to look for in other places. Or maybe you will have to forsake contentment and happiness altogether in search of something better?
Surely there is something better than pleasure. Surely security is a fickle god, and there are other gods worthier of our services?

more notes on freedom

I read what blows the top of my head off. If it’s not going to blow the top of my head off, I don’t have time for it. I finally got my hands on Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Therein is the famous line that begins the chapter called “Loathing.”: Most women have no idea how much men hate them.” And it begins a frightening chapter of a frightening section. Frightening because every last word of what Greer has written is true. More frightening because, when I talk to my female friends I realize most of them have one, never heard of Frieden, Greer, or Mary Daly, let alone read them and TWO: if they began to read them, would close the book in either disgust, confusion or disbelief. This is the condition Greer is addressing by the very title of her book: that women are, in this society, lesser versions of men with pretty hair and desirable tits They are valuable because they are valuable to men. And, what is more, all to willing to accept this second class role. To me this is like a white man reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and a history of black slavery, and then telling an African American about it and one of us laughing it off. But there was a point when Blacks did laugh off such things content to take only what we could get. And what we got was nothing. We remained slaves long after 1865.

That is really the condition of many women today.

To be content for the scraps the master throws from the table for you to gobble up is a dog’s lot, and if a human does it, then she is not free.

A woman may think that it is enough to hate men, that this is the message, that MEN did this. No, a man, some man, did this long ago and there was enough hate in the doing of it: men hating women and women hating themselves, to last a life time. It is not enough to be bitter. We have to be willing. Willing to make changes.

Notes on Freedom

With books I do not think that if is not subversive and daring, dangerous and provocative, that if it does not poke a hole in the fabric of my universe I want to read it. With movements, If one placates oppressors and is pleased with superficial gestures, then I am not sure that I want it. Being a Christian means desiring to set the world ablaze, the blaze Jesus said he wished were already kindled. I am not satisfied with the world as it is.

A woman who plays the game, acts like a virgin or plays the tart is not free.
A homosexual who plays it straight or plays his part and attempts to fit in even in the role of clown and misfit is not free.
A man who tries to be a man through domination, laughing in scorn at what he does not understand because the laughter holds off the terror is not free.
Blacks who have chips on their shoulder and play up the chips, who excuse themselves from the larger world calling it “white” and pretending they want no part in it are playing a dangerous game. As are Blacks who gain place by ignoring the color of their skin, and acting as if the chains the fathers of the fathers of our fathers wore were never forged. And neither is free.

As long as we content ourselves with role playing we are not ourselves.
And we are not free.

Control, manipulation, guilt, shame, oppression, sarcasm, bitterness, derision and scorn: these are the tools of the powerless, their force lies in hatred and to resort to them is to possess only momentarily a false authority at the cost of true freedom.

It is to surrender to despair.

Beltane iii

I woke from a dream: I was sitting in my house only it had no walls, just the frame, and a man came up to me, opened a back and held a muffin in one hand and a Crossanwich in the other. "You take one, I'll take the other." The odd thing was that I knew him. Two years ago at Holy Thursday Mass he stood next to me.

Out of all the people I have ever met.... Odd.

It has been steadily raining. The street is thick and grey. The sky is a heavy pewter. Last night, Witch's Night, there was white lightening and the pitter patter of rain. The day that had been warm turned gold before eight.

Like every Beltane morning I woke up early to gather flowers for the altar and walk around in the green world before everyone else is awake. I discovered on Notre Dame's campus a copper birch. The first time I saw it I wondered if it could possibly be real ,the bark shone so much, the leaves were so green. I had to take a wand from it. But on that campus you never know what you can touch and what you can't touch, and it's all pretty much ornamental. As I was testing the branches to see which would come off quickest, a police car drove up the quad. Apparently that early in the morning the police cars even drive on the broad sidewalks of a walking campus. It went past me. I was just one of that secret club of early risers who wants to commune with nature.

On the way home the sky was getting greyer and greyer, I prayed, "Don't rain, please don't rain until I get home."

Beltane ii

London said something about the fear of buckling down and being a poet. When I say poet I mean what most people mean by writer, but I mean a writer with a sacred trust, one who inherits the keys the prophets and enchanters, the bards of old, have passed to us. This is the fear that comes to all who choose art. We have heard of those frustrated people who talk about their day jobs and taking time to be night musicians, making their true calls their hobbies, writing, singing, composing in their spare time. We've heard the lie from more practical people who say, "Yes, we know your art is important to you." You can do it after work. You can do it after you have given us your time doing what is logical to us, exhausting yourself in the work we give you to do.

Ah, but work that is given second place is work that is second rate, third rate. We have to take it seriously even if no one else will. We who are writers must do what we can to insure that nothing gets in the way of the gift we have been given.

I was talking to the woman who drove the bus I was on yesterday, about education and the are we live in and the subject of my schooling and of writing came up. She said, "Now that's a gift, to be able to communicate..." Well, it is easy to forget that is a gift. But it is, and a true gift is a true responsibility. If we have been given a gift it is our job to use it, not to turn away from it. It is our responsibility to give it back to everyone around us.

Beltane

Goddamn! Goddamn! Goddamnit!
A whole week's worth of Buffy untaped, unrecorded. The VCR fucked me over! Godamnit! And it's the end of the fourth season, the beginning of the fifth. Dawn just came in, I don't know how the hell she got there. Settle down for a few episodes of one of my favorites shows and the goddamn thing isn't there! Damnit all! Damnit all! Damnit all!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!