Religion does not really bring us to God, does it? And a religion really isn't the same thing as spirituality. Or better to say possessing spirit. Religious people can be the deadest souls in the world. We would do better to look for honesty than religious justification, to live sincerely in love than to worry about what any church says. But the way is narrow, and how many people have the courage to live in truth and love and say to hell with the rest of it. This is a very un-Catholic paragraph, but perfectly Quaker, perfectly Anglican, perfectly British. And I take a little pride in that.

In the last year old friendships have been growing stronger, stale ones have been dropping away like scabs. There are some people I don't see or hear from anymore, feel less and less of a connection to. For the first time I realize this is okay, and maybe even appropriate. And as a lot of old ties to people and religion fall away new and surprising one grow. It's a graceful time I guess you might say. It is probably the most ALIVE time of my life. All I can do is shake my head and go on in something I think religious people call faith. I will not fool myself, I do not think I am a religious person. If I ever was. And I don't think I have much use for most religious people. If I ever want to see how far conventional religion ever got anyone I have only to remember the last three years of my life. I have only to go to Mass on Sunday and listen to the cantor drone like a dying mule and the priest at Sacred Heart mutter something completely irrelevant.

Three days of drivers ed class left before we begin our individual driving appointments. I actually enjoy class, I enjoy my classmates and this week, now that three classes aren't squeezed together it's a hell of a lot better. But really, we're cramming a month long course into ten days so all of this shit is intense and, when you mixed that with the early to rise and the cross town bus business it can get a little exhausting. Even though I'll miss my classmates, I'll be glad when I can sleep again. I'm just so glad, recently, that I'll be staying around here. And the longer I live in this city the deeper my roots grow in it. I love this place, really. It's the first place I've ever had a root too. I guess I came of age in South Bend.

I keep on wondering why I am in driver's ed. Sounds silly, doesn't it? The obvious reason would be to learn to drive. It's just there are some places I find myself in where I'm sure there is a reason REASON a sort of divine purpose. I feel steered by God into some places and I feel like, out of all the driving schools, all of the classes, all of the times, this is the one I am in and the one where connections are made and I just wonder what I'm supposed to do. A quiet bvoice says just move along with eyes and heart wide open and you'll learn your purpose.

Midsummer Day iii

I stayed up until 2:30 finishing Black Haired Girl. It's written, at least the rough draft. All that, a new life, Foot in the Door, and driver's ed. Um...

Midsummer Day ii

A lot of people my age feel sort of placeless, don't know what to do, are disconnected. During the change this week I feel myself changing and I think what it is boils down to the truth that, in many ways we are who we are in response to the people around us, to the responsibility we owe them. Suddenly I am catapulted into a new and strange group of kids and I change because they have changed me. I have a responsibility toward them, and it was one I didn't have toward anyone last week. And yet I don't feel put upon. I feel glad to take it. I feel like it's always been there waiting for me. Though I can't define it.

Midsummer Day

Today, after driver's ed, Robert is lurking around the Walgreens looking clueless. Well, no, that's not true, looking as if he's waiting to do something only it's some sort of secret something, and he looks awkward and gangly like a fifteen year old boy. Which is what he is. Since I have come to this class the adult me is not so much on hiatus as gone. I have an odd feeling that with all the stuff I've let go of, the stuff I thought of as "me" another layer is gone. That grown up me. I'm sure it will come back, but also sure it will come back in a different way. And there is this new me, who is learning to drive a car and feels at ease with fiteen year olds, feels as if my world is starting all over again. It's as if the last decade counts for nothing and the lessons I learned of as final things are actually more like, well, conditional things, truths for a time. I get a new lease, a chance to start again.

I don't know if I'd want this chance except that it seems more like a command. Look at these people. On monday I wondered what in heaven I would do with all of these teens, now on Thursday I wonder what I can do for them because they are doing so much for me. Three hours a day and my world is changed. I am up earlier, more and more tired, removed from the life I was pleased to have, but pleased to have these people around me, all of us in much to close quarters, smelling each others breath and inappropriately launders clothing, and yet Sahne announces, "We're all one family now.... Even Adam on the end.. And he never talks."

And Adam just smiles and nods because... Well, he never talks.

Solstice

I began driver’s ed on Solstice. It is the longest day of the year and I felt like I was in the longest CLASS of the year. It went on FOREVER, but I didn’t really mind. I gotta tell you, I love these kids. Now that we’re in the middle of publishing a novel about teens, for the most part, and going into is sequel, I must say I was worried that I had lost the feel for teenagers. We divide off from each other quickly and it’s the fault of adults, especially in my generation, not to take teenagers seriously. As soon as people hit eighteen they will themselves into a pretended adulthood and loose all understanding of the kids we are so close to in age.
I didn’t tell anyone how old I was. I wanted to see if we could connect, if I could fit into this wonderful world I hadn’t been part of for so long. I love these kids. So much of what they say reminds me of how innocent and childish they still are. They think having a car And a job at the grocery store will make them independent. They’re on restriction, they’re not allowed to date or secretly dating. And yet all of these kids are philosophers, full of dreams, ambitions and definite ideas. They are more fully drawn than the eighteen years olds they may become, more alive than the college students and young adults who put away that whole part of themselves. They have a lot to teach me, and maybe I have a little too teach them. It is school after all.

And maybe we might even learn to drive while we’re at it.


The longest day of the year, the Solstice. A friend asked me what I was doing for Solstice, and said going to driver’s ed. The modern world cramps everything into one or two days. Modern Christians, even the Catholics, cram a period of feasting into one day. These days Americans don’t remember how to celebrate. A celebration is a time to put away all the things that are supposedly pressing and give yourself up to the joy of the days-—and it's never just one day. Somewhere in the midst of this joy, this singing, this relaxation, these games, the suspension of normal life we wake to touching something deeper. But it seems that in this part of the world we’ve forgotten that so much that no one even remembers Solstice by it’s new and official title: the first day of summer. Ignoring the time we move on with our often all too small lives, not remembering how to celebrate or how to live.
So now I enter into a joyous time, Solstice, then Midsummer Eve and Midsummer Day, also called Saint John. And the days in between until Old Midsummer Eve—July 4th! And old Midsummer Day. Each day is a time to celebrate and in the celebrations touch upon life and memory and feel the energy of Saint John and beyond that the breath of the Wild One, who had many names, but is always green, and always springing up from the depths and carrying us into something new and fiery if we let him. When we forget the ancient ways and spirits we forget a part of ourselves, we unlearn that which is an instinctual gift. We can walk in mystery. Or we can stumble around aimless. The ancient holy days give us a chance to decide which we will choose

FOOT IN THE DOOR PRESS

We'll call it Foot in the Door Press. When Publish America (tell me that's not a lame title for a publishing house!) had my book a professor said, "This is like your foot in the door..." to beigger and better things. To the major publishing houses.

Well, fuck the major publishing houses. Fiction writing in America is shitty and so are the houses that publish it. We're going to do something new here. Remember Kerouac and Hemingway? Remember Plath and Woolf. Remember when writers had the LIFE and they were personalities. Rememember when authors were concerned with telling stories and not with being called serious writers? Well, we're bringing all that shit back. I swear. We're going to say, fuck New York City and all that Simon and Schuster bullshit and start a new thing. Young people will be excited and write in their full passionate voices. The old will see hope for tomorrow. We will be Alanis Morissette meets Liz Phair meets Quentin Tarantino with a Dostoyevsky sensilibity.

Foot in the Door Press is, so far:

David Mc.Nelis: executive editor and photographer
Shawn Delahanty: layout manager
Breain Ma'Ayteh: assistant editor
Helen Hawarth: assistant editor
Christopher L. Gibson: producer and managing editor

and we will be glad to take a certain London Kennedy's work very shortly.

vermin

Once again, blogspot has done something weird. I'm typing this in a rectangular box the width of my finger. I am so computer unsavvy. like, I think i left a comment at London'd site, but I am not sure. I went bac kto check and couldn't find it. At any rate, I have just finished cleaning the remains of the dead flies I squished last night from my computer screen. It's Saturday, so I think I'll clean this place up a little. It's getting to be a mess. Found a mouse in the kitchen last Saturday. I can still remember the little bastard. The dining room smells, quite frankly, mousy. But maybe that's my imagination. What is not my imagination is the nasty thing I heard scratching around in the attic around six o'clock this morning.

DEAN !

Dean, I don't have to tell you how proud I am of you or how much I respect you. I've already told you and you already know. You're full of courage and growing more and more everyday. Serious as an old bust of a Roman senator and light as a clown, all at once. There is so much work for you to do, and life is not going to be easy for you. You deserve better than you get, and I believe you will get what you deserve. If you were a tree you'd be a young maple sapling,lanky-thin, tall and merry, but sober at the same time. Even when you throw a party you're five miles from everyone else there, in your own world with your own thoughts. The moment someone is in need you come right out of them to do whatever you can. Your heart is full. Whenever you need me, however you need me, I'll be there to support you.

The birds are singing... it is the hour of Math son of Mathonwy. It is the beginning of the two hour dawn that begins in darkness and ends in silver yellow light. To me there is no more magical time. Here the world is transformed and the day reborn. If there was ever to be healing and magic, it would be during the dawn.

The human body is not a machine. It is a living soul just as the earth is. If you don't think your body is a soul as much as your spirit or your conscience, then please tell me where you would be without your hands, your feet, your senses of touch and taste, the comforts and discomforts of flesh, your sexuality, your incidentals. No, the body is living and rich and knows what to do and what not to do.

It's amazing really. I wake twice. From old monastic habit I wake to do my writing and early praying in the middle of the night, right before midnight. Then I wake up a second time, for good, at around six. I only use an alarm clock for the second waking, and it almost never gets to sound off because my body wakes me up between 5:48 and 5:54. I can count on that. For first rising my body wakes me up between 11:20 and 12:20 depending upon what I need him to do. My body tells time. I don't wear watches. My body knows who is good and who is bad, who to approach and who to avoid. For a long time I ignored him and didn't trust his senses, but he's usually never wrong.

My body seems to know that tonight with it being the beginning of Friday, the weekend, with it being the end of a dark moon I don't need to be awake, and so I stir at about two a.m. It's three and I'll be going to bed now. I won't be working on the novel that's nearly done. That would be like going to a dry stream bed to draw water. Right now what I need isn't there. The flesh and the spirit will supply it later in the day. This is how it is on Fridays. But how it is all the time is an act of mystical trust, that the flesh and spirit supplies what I need if I am faithful to both.

“You see.. people think we have no native tradition, that it’s long dead… But our own native tradition is still alive—just. Don’t look for it in witchcraft or any of the dafter sorts of paganism. You’re more like to find it at May time in a little village church when the old ladies have hung the place with blossoms….
--from Becoming the Enchanter, Lyn Webster Wilde


Today my heart sings, not a loud, crazy song, but a gentle, contented hymn. Firstly I took my driver’s exam and I’ve never been so ill prepared for something and so surprised to learn I passed it. As soonas I got my permit I nearly ran out of the DMV thinking, “Let’s go before they realize they’ve made a mistake and take this thing back.

Dark moons are always like little Lents, times of surrender, shedding, penance and self examination. And after the long meditations and the arduous soul searching comes the relatively laid back morning of the new moon, and the day when everything is new and we take up a new cycle of doing. On days like this I can place my bare toes on the ground and feel them go into the soil like roots, take up the power and life there in. I feel like a plant taking in all the life in the air, in the earth.

If you listen there are lessons all around. We had every kind of weather in one day that you could think of-- except for snow. By eleven the sky clouded, At eleven thirty we had a terrible storm that knocked the limbs off of trees and threatened to turn off power lines. By half past twelve the sky was full of sun.

Walking back home the sycamore speak an important lesson. Or maybe they just live it. Here there are the tallest, mightiest trees, and in every storm they lose the most limbs. They always drop leaves. And they are always powerful and strong despite their losses, never fighting the way nature leads. Around the lake the sycamores grow at a slant, even the ones thirty feet from the water do not grow up, but rather sideways in the direction of water, knowing that eventually they will reach the source if it takes a century. And it will take a century and more. To trees it does not matter.

The time of the dark moon is here. It would be nice to think that I have it all together, and you know what, I imagined compared to a lot of folks I do but comparisons don't count for much. One little word, one spectre of misfortune can set me to worrying. I worry over matters like people paly with sore teeth.

The dark moon is like a sabbath, only more so. On a good old fashioned Sabbath one might do work, but it would turn out okay. Nowadays everyone works regardless of what day it is and no one thinks about Sabbaths or holy days so it doesn't seem to matter. Or maybe it does. Maybe it's because people violate holy times now, that so little of what we do turns out whole. I don't know.

But back to the matter of dark moons. Among hedgewitches or shamans or lots of people with good sense there are only certain times of the year when certain things may be undertaken, and only certain times of the month even when things may be done. After the moon has fulled it is time to let go, and during the days of the dark moon it is an intense sort of sabbath when no new thing should be started. Nothing good has ever come for me from trying to violate this. And so for these days I am stil and contemplative. I meditate and pray more and... worry more... about what I can't change, the things that I cannot force. Tonight, when I close my eyes and go to the place of peace I hear all around me voices that ask a simple question: "Why can't you let go. Let go. Why don't you let go?"

My hands clench so tightly on everything even as I smile and sigh with supposed relaxation. There is so much of which I should let go. And I am so often unwilling.

All things have a spirit. Tonight with one of the dogs I sit in the yard waiting for the sun to set. Bees buzz past me. Firelfies light up in the crabapple. the new honey locust plant burshes my knees. Thoughtfully, the dog begins to lick the cracks of my toes. Ants cross the concrete of the deck. There is so much life. The sunset, the slight breeze, they have a life. The elm tree on the neighbor's property that leans over into our yard (because it likes us better) has a life. Out here I am part of it. Sink into this knowledge and all the weariness passes. Anything that is not important in this deep knowledge, of how all things are held together in God's Hoop, how the universe cares for her own-- is not important at all.

There was a time in life when life was so bad that I had to go to bed at seven every night. Not simply because the monastery had trained me to go to bed early, but because my head hurt and the backs of my eyes were full with tears. It was just too much to stay up too long. I turned on the jazz station and no angels sang to me, but Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Miles Davis healed me. I would sink into that music, and it was my medicine.

Went to give give my deposit to Frick's driving school and schedule my class for a week from Monday. I ought to be excited, but after twenty-seven years of not having an automobile I'm more ticked off about having to sit through a two week crash (no pun intended) course. I ought to be excited and I would be excited if this didn't mean two weeks straight of hopping public transit early in the morning and yawning through the number 7 and the number 15 A Route.

My mother says something stupid to poison my whole day. I love her like a best friend, but when she says stupid things I want to scream and usually her breath is bad when she says them. For a week now whenever she opens her mouth I'll think, "You stupid (insert expletive here)" And she knows when she's about to say something that will just piss me off, but there she goes again.

That's in my head too. At night, when you're tired every bad thing is in your head. Every good thing seems like an imposition. There remains, no matter how much you've done, a list of impossilbe tasks that follow.

And then comes sleep. Sleep and night work a marvelous change. That which could not be understood becomes clear, the obstacle you could not find a way through, suddenly unblocks, the fusty air in the room is cooled by the breeze in the window. You awake and the world seems to awake too. New with you. I will close my eyes and wait for that miracle.

Annie had a new man. They're just getting close and tragedy strikes. It seems there is little guard against tragedy. The man's best friend-- that friend's daughter is abducted and killed and left in the woods. This week they are going through the first phrases of mourning.

She is holding up now, but we are working together on healing rituals, such as the right baths to take, candles to burn, meditations to make, how much grief it is safe to personally take on. A great deal of my life is consumed with ritual making these days. Blessings. Sometimes someone may ask for a curse, but I usually don't have to say to much to dissuade them from this. what hey need is a blessing too, maybe a healing ritual. I don't mind this a bit. It is part of being a hedgewalker.

This place to me is full of life and rich with gods and spirits, character, love and inspiration. The whole world is a place of wonder if we have eyes for it.

Things go well over here, but there is so much going on. My transition into the modern world ie. driving school and graduate school. The papers are all signed and sent in, but I'm still obsessed with both. And this all happens as we launch into an idea I thought past it's time: when one friend suggests it, it's a decent idea. When it is suggested again one must think, especially if one wants it. And this one wants it. So with the help of friends much more talented than myself, while still looking for a paper publisher (and I think I may have found one) we are publishing Jamnia as an e-book. What I've seen looks nice enough, but there is still more to do before it is ready. It will be the first book Seanachai Press does, but not the last. There is another author, and we will be producing her work.

The dedication looks just the way I wanted. When it was time to write one I had to make it a real one and not a long lists of thank yous to people that I may love and cherish but who, flatly, had nothing to do with the book or, in some cases, were even hindrances. So in the end the dedication is to the people the book actually belongs to. I couldn't make it to just one person. It's never just one person whose blood is mixed into anything good. And you've got to get a little blood mixed into the work.

The weather is better now in South Bend. Yesterday it was so damned hot. It rained and rained and I was soaked and then the rain ceased, the sun came out and it was tiwce as hot as it had been before. A woman walking across the street with a cigarette in one hand shouted to me, as I sat under the tree on the post office lawn, "Ain't no breeze to be found NOWHERE !" And she was so right. When I got home, took a breath and let out the dogs, I ran from the sun immediately wondering how in the world I could have stood it in the first place.

unsent letters ii

remember that first sunday when i learned you were here again. again that whole kaleidoscope of feelins. not a one of them happy? how can it be that the sight of someone i love causes me no pleasure at all? and i admit it, i do love you. the odd things is that i know you love me. how can two people love each other and never talk, not be friends, not get on, always be an upset one to another. that first sunday, you standing there with that lame line, "it's good to see you, Chris." and me? you asshole, you had been so bad to me for so long... you didn't expect me to smile back, did you? and i didn't. i wasn't ready to forgive you then? it's not that easy. you were supposed to be gone. gone forever after the pain you caused and now there you were and here you are and you're not going away. you know and you have known how i feel. i see it everytime you see me. you don't have the strength or maybe even the words to say i'm sorry. but, no, you could never except an apology in the first place. what if that sunday i had not been filled with horror and confusion and gone straight to you. that was a magic time. we might have embraced and things might have been alright. but that assumes i am responsible for everything. this i know: it ain't all my fault. i've only got so much control.

unsent letters

I saw you again today. i'm seeing so much of you lately. This is the letter I would write to you if you could bear to read true things. And if you were a writer. In some other world some other Chris is writing this to you and it will make all things better. You are eloquent and you are writing back and all the injuries are healed.

i never know just how if feel when i see you. this welter of feelings, and never the same set twice. there were just not enough i'm sorries or i forgive yous. i never sat up and sat i blamed you.

i remember you, it was only a few years ago, when your eyes used to shine and you were gangly and goofy, a little silly. was it only two summers ago? and i beleived in so much i don't believe in now. and knew so much less. and now look at you. i used to call you little brother and now you've grown into a strong, handsome man. you have everything but the smile. do you remember when you used to look up to me, when you used to run to me, when you used to throw your arms around me? when your eyes would light up? and now this. you've grown so dignified and we've grown so distant, and i can't even say how proud i am of what you've become. i can't say much in the way of letting you know i understand that you're doing what you think you have to do, keeping hte stiff upper lip. i can't say i miss you the old way. i can't say that though we may never be friends again i love you still.

traveling abroad ii

and if texas collided into england and was surrounded by water
it would be australia
down south there are
only kangaroos
and ulurus
well, no, just one uluru
but it's so big it could be two
two luru?
no luru
uga chooga choogaru
and everyone there is a cowboy
except there are no cows outside of sidney
so they all ride on crocodiles
and the crocodiles don't care
no one wears underwear
because in australia they're all just britons,
only freer

traveling abroad

in england everyone listens to dido
and they all watched are you being served
mr humphreys is always free
in england every call box is a space ship
that can travel through space and time
and every wardrobe has exactly one witch and a couple
of lions
everyone smokes marijuana and has fabulous sex
and jk rowling is your best friend because
she's your next door neighbor
because england is a little island
on my map just the size of a postage stamp
and they all ride double decker buses to stonehenge
everyone knows that this is way it is
and england's just like australia except no kangaroos
and the aussies of course of blood in their brains
from walking upside down
and being in england's just like indiana except for the chips and cabbage. At least that's how i've always imagined it

and you are twice the man you think you are
no one thought you had it in you and even you never knew the strength you
drew from deep inside
real courage is doing what you've got to do
even if it means pretending to be braver than you are
when you need me i'll stand by your side

kick my ass one last time
even the sight of you can do this
variable invariant just your existence
is insistance that i deal and that i change
never want to hurt you, never quite forgive you

sun proves
sun moves
slides across the summer sky
sun heals
sun burns
all the blood that they try
to squeeze from you
it will all heal you
they couldn't feel you like
i can
or like the sun proves
sun moves
somewhere in this nonsense
you will find a line
to cleanse you
sun moves
sun proves

About this time yesterday I had a premonition that something would happen. An experience of brokenheartedness. I didn't really understand the premonition. Even after the experience. I crossed paths with someone I can hardly abide even for a minute. Once we were friends. He said a whole lot. I thought we were on the same path, had the same ambitions. But he more or less wanted smoke blown up his bony ass. I wasn't feeling in the smoke blowing mood. I had goals and ambitions and ideas and in the end, we parted ways, him insulting me and refusing to make amends, me looking for the right path which, in the end, cut me off from the life I had known.

And I had more or less gotten past that. He was the first person I ever hated. I remember being filled with blinding and sudden rages, terrible furies at just the thought of him. And I don't think I'll ever feel that fury again. I thank God for that. But yesterday evening, sitting before the little altar with the onyx chalice in my hands I realized quite clearly, "I don't want him to be happy. I haven't seen him happy in a year and until yesterday when he was almost happy, I never knew how pleasant the thought of his misery made me." I wasn't ashamed of this. I think I have every right to the feeling. But to thrive on it will kill what is good in me and affect all I do. Tonight, I sit and breathe and ask everyone out there, every kind spirit that inhabits all the earth, "Can I release the bitterness that has sat so long and secret inside me?"

the three days of the full moon esbat are over and I am recovering. Yes, they are restorative and necessary, but the round of ceremonial bathing, meditation and trance is... well, intense. This has got to be the most transformative esbat I've been through. for a seanachai storyteller in a particular Celtic tradition, the usual method of reading and discounting a fariy tale or myth is not employed. Nor is it sufficient to simply study the myth and tear the dear thing to pieces. The legends are sacred, like any Bible story, and must be lived in, experienced breathed over again and again.

Oprah interviewed and author once and asked her if the characters in her stories just come to her and start talking. The author looked rather awkward at this question. Some, who I do not read, when asked this question say, smugly, "Of course not. My characters are my pawns in my hands." That is not being a seanachai, that is telling a story that's dead before it's born, and those tales won't last. When Tolkien confessed than one day, while grading papers, he looked down to see he'd scribbled the word "hobbit" and then a whole story grew up from that scribbling, that was being a seanachai. When JK Rowling said that one day while sitting on a train, Harry Potter just walked up to her, that was being a seanachai. That is why their works are powerful and touch people to the heart. When I confess to the so called craziness that makes me carry on full conversations and sometimes even take on the personas of my people, that is the art of bardry, and a druidic craft.

New Links

Now I have new links in the sidebar to the British and Celtic traditions which have sustained Western society for years. It is my hope that this section of links expands in time. Among Christians it is becoming fashionable to mention Buddhism and set up Zen links, or even to be facinated with Native American spirituality. But the West has a spirituality of it's own over thirty-thousand years old still extant in various forms of shamanism, druidry and witch craft though these forms are usually vilified or mocked. Little is known of them, and so some sites are offered. Wicca and New Age being neither traditional or, for the most part, Western are not included in these links.