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.