Aquila ka Hecate

Waiting For The End Of The World

2012-01-22T15:24:00.002+02:00

Above the white noise of the fan you can hear the rumble ofthunder approaching.

The greens and purples, reds and whites of the garden takeon a richer hue – all overlaid with a dark gravity which says more powerfullythan sound that the storm is coming, is coming, is close.

I savour the taste and juiciness of a piece of charcoaledsteak in my mouth; chewing slowly, the ultimate act of one animal envelopinganother. My soul treasures the textures and seems to know that these days, too,will pass. Even as I add the lightly-boiled flesh of a plant person to myingestion, I am overwhelmed with joy at the brevity of days, and theimpermanence of this plane.

The air outside is gravid, now: the storm is nigh upon us.First a raindrop, then another, spatters the terracotta tiles on the patio ofmy temporary empire. Here, here is the meat of other and self, ever evolvinginto One Thing. Here, too, is the terrible Sign and the Portent. Here where Isit, chewing, waiting for the End of the World.

Parsimony

2012-01-11T17:55:00.002+02:00

I was listening to Terence McKennatalking on ethnobotany this morning (courtesy of the Psychedelic Salon), where he mentions Ayahuasca.

Apart from the fascinating entheogenicproperties of this psychotropic brew, the discovery of it isfascinating in itself.

We don't know who the first human wasto put psychotria viridis leavestogether with smashed stems of banisteriopsis caapi asa tea, but the awesome fact is that, amongst tens of thousands ofplant species in the Amazon jungle, these two in combination – andonly in combination – producean intense DMT trip. This trip which, somewhat distastefully to me,is available to casual tourists in the Amazon basin today.

Theone plant, psychotria viridis,produces DMT in its leaves, but this DMT is unavailable to humansuntil a monoamine oxidase inhibitor is added: and banisteriopsiscaapi is the vine whose bark contains exactly that. It could havebeen a process of trial and error which led humans to the correctcombination of plants.

But,you know, there's this tool much-used in the bag of tricks whichmetaphysical materialists carry with them wherever they go. It'scalled Occam's Razor, andit basically says that, when faced with a choice of explanations fora phenomenon, choose the simplest. I like this principle of parsimonyvery much, not being given to understanding the Cosmos as aterminally complicated place governed by a jealous god who goes outof his way to make things non-understandable to people.

Turningback to the topic of plants again, I remember when, a couple of yearsago, I dreamed of a small yellow plant with odd-shaped leaves. And inthe dream, I heard the name Coltsfoot uttered.When I woke up, I wrote it all down. Now, I had never suffered frombronchitis before in my life- despite being a fairly heavy smoker –and, even though it was Winter, I wasn't aware of anyone around me athome or at work who had bronchitis. Therefore it was a stunningrevelation to me when, about 10 days after dreaming of Coltsfoot, Icame down with bronchitis for the first (and so far only) time. Whystunning? Well, one of the major properties of Coltsfoot is itsability to dry up phlegm. It was a remedy much used in the past incases of bronchitis.

Now, Isuppose I could explain this somewhat in the following manner:

Isomehow knew, ten days ahead of time, that I would contractbronchitis (even though my body had never hosted this particularpneumococcal bug before). Plus, I somehow knew that the plantColtsfoot was sovereign against this disease – it's not impossible,to have subconscious knowledge which comes out in a dream. But todredge up this particular piece of arcane lore just before I camedown with the illness it is strongly indicated for is, really,pushing it. Although I guess it could all have been coincidence.There's at least 3 fuzzy suppositions in there.

Themuch more parsimonious explanation – and the one I prefer – isthat the mechanism at work here is simply that of a living beingcommunicating with another living being. And we know that's acommon,if not universal, modality.

Whatgives depth and strength to this preferred explanation – that theplant spoke up and warned me – are the numerous occasions of plant communication in dreams which followed. To this day, I continue tospeak with the plant kingdom, and although their timing may not behuman (as with the Pin Oak who produced a gorgeous green-leaf-bearingshoot at exactly eye-height for me on an otherwise artificiallystripped trunk), and their reasons sometimes obscure, it remains arich and rewarding field of experience which draws me ever closer toa knowledge that the entire damned universe is alive, and, if you areinclined to listen carefully, speaking.

Pic: Banisteriopsis Caapi, the Vine of Souls

Not A Pretty Picture

2012-01-10T08:23:00.001+02:00

Around eight o'clock at night and the quiet is veritably rent by a bellowing, ranting, screaming human voice. The man across the street is communicating with his female partner. The epithets are not very pleasant, either - if I had children in the house, I really wouldn't want them to hear most of the invective which flows from his mouth like pus from a wound.

The yelling is really at full volume too; the entire street of maybe twenty households are treated to this son-sans-lumiere maybe twice a week- more likely three or four times in the summer. And this has been a feature of our lives for over eight years, ever since I bought this little house in the quiet suburb .Goodness knows how long it has been a part of the lives of the family across the street, who are unfortunate enough to include this childish man among their members.

Yes, I said childish. This is a fully-grown adult male, probably in his late '40s, who cannot communicate with his wife, his children or his dogs without frequently descending into a rage more suitable to a two-year-old with teething problems.

Sure, we all yell sometimes. We all feel, and express, rage, outrage, hatred and loathing - unless we're some kind of saint or bodhisattva. But to keep this up as a mode of communication for over eight years speaks of an ego in full command of the body and soul; an ego denied its perceived status and needs, a petulant, pouting, rancorous sphere of me,me,me: hear me, or I bellow. Give me due deference, or I will call you a whore.

And this appears to me, more and more, to be the level and the capacity at which much of Western, modern-day people have settled - that of the screaming child deprived of what it wants. And every time it opens its eyes it sees more that it wants. The covetousness and selfish greed of humanity given full expression in a hate-filled, ear-shattering temper tantrum which the individual never seems to move to correct in himself (and yes, I use the word himself advisedly). This is humanity at its peak, in full flower and at the pinnacle of its radiant beauty.

Not a pretty picture, is it?

Terrapin Station

2012-01-06T15:24:00.001+02:00

As I've said many times, I am a slowlearner.

Oh, not in all things: ask me to solvea fourth-degree differential equation and I'm there, with pencil.

Calculate the apparent orbit of anewly-spotted comet? I'm your girl – or I was, alongside JackBennet and Johannes Wolterbeek-Muller, back in the day.

But understand a relatively simple taleof incarnation and re-incarnation turned into a wonderful piece ofmusic by the Grateful Dead? I'm afraid not.

At least, not for 35-odd years.

Terrapin Station is the only Dead musicwhich really got to me. Probably because I bought it first in 1977,when I was just 17. The soaring orchestration of the eponymous trackdid indeed dig fairly deep grooves in my psyche – the astronomicalallusions are gorgeous for a start.

But, in my mind, until now, I'vesituated it as a slightly stoned campfire tale. The imagery of thestoryteller and his audience in the firelight, while visions ofsoldiers, sailors, and ladies with fans come and go is a powerful oneon its own.

Let my inspiration flow in token lines suggesting rhythm that will not forsake me till my tale is told and done.

But what is this Terrapin Stationplace, anyway?

Yesterday the song started replayingitself in my mind, seemingly out of nowhere.

The Terrapin, or alternatively theTortoise, is an ancient symbol of the earthly plane.

Some rise, some fall, some climb..toget to Terrapin.

When we are out of the world, we are inquite another space altogether.

While you were gone...this space wasfilled with darkness. The obvious was hidden. Nothing to believe in,the compass always points to Terrapin.

We are in that circle offirelight,keeping the darkness at bay – or trying to ignore italtogether – and telling each other stories which conjure upphantasms from the void. Stories which give us insight in how weshould be living this life, what our soul's true path is.

For many of us, our soul's true path isto be the story teller. The light-shedder. Not necessarily the voiceof reason or the voice of the thunder – although both these modesmay have their places. Not to dominate, but to illuminate. Thatis the path I am – hesitantly, at first – setting my foot upon.

I am a Witch and a Priestess of Hecate.I am also a Shaman – and I'm making no apologies for using thatdescriptor, given my family heritage.

A Witch's job is to turn the Wheelsays Sister Hecate, and ofcourse she's right. A Shaman's job is to help heal her line, and ofcourse that's right, too. But all of us have an added obligation totell our story – to describe what satori feels like, and lightingcandles in the dead of Winter, and dancing the Maypole in the Summer,and surrendering to the Universe when it's time to do that, andmaking and creating and shaping this Terrapin Station in all the waysthat we can.

While the fire lights are low,strange shadows from the flames do grow – till things we've neverseen seem familiar.

For many are the souls waiting justbeyond that circle of earthly light. Waiting for a chance to slip inonce again, to return to Terrapin, in all its wonder and glory andpain. And many are the already incarnate souls gathered around thatcomforting fire, turned to the flame, their ears pricked for thestory's message – some hint, perhaps, on how best to navigate thisround of Earth. We can help light their paths for them.

Story teller makes no choice –soon you will not hear his voice. His job is to shed light, and notto master.

Savoir Faire

2012-01-04T04:41:00.000+02:00

A filling station and a pile of bones –legacy of a scam and an unsolved murder.

A black woman driving an old blackMercedes – not driving it competently I must add; a threat.

A nuclear power plant and a PR womanpatiently, laboriously explaining stuff to me – and me impatientlycutting her short, in the arrogance of my assumed knowledge.

Those were the features of last night'sdreams, which I'm setting down here as a sort of neon sign for mymemory. I do keep a dream journal, but paging back through itsscrawled entries can be a bind sometimes. So I write it here. Forlast night my dreams took on the aura of wide connection: they werenot at all about me, although some readings of them could make themappear self-addressed, I suppose. You'll just have to trust me onthis- there was a feeling of tapping into the Web about last night.

On the home front, we spent a veryquiet New Year. Very quiet, what with the television packing up onNew Year's Eve. It's in the shop for repairs under guarantee rightnow and I do not miss it one little bit.

After sunset on New Year's Eve, thearea was lashed by a thunderstorm, which somewhat dampened thefirecracker-throwing activities of the local yobbos...err...children.The dogs were sedated as a precaution that night, but were entirelyundrugged on the next two nights, when the local youth resumed theirbombing. Scylla and Taranis were completely cool with it all, however– they lay around on the tiled floor looking not at all impressed,and I was proud of them.

The birds in the area however, were sostartled at every firecracker that I feared for their safety –especially as we have a new Olive Thrush hatchling trying his wingsin the garden right now.

The need for young humans to blow offsteam I can almost empathise with – but not when it is at theexpense of other living creatures. Don't get me wrong – I eat meat.As a Shaman I know moreover that the plant kingdom is possessed of aconsciousness at least the equal of the animals', and I eat them,too. But this making of very loud noises – louder by far thangunfire – for very little reason had me wishing, vindictively, thatthe perpetrators' hands would get blown off in the act of lobbing acracker. Nasty of me, yes.

Meanwhile my canine companions - asalways, as always - are giving me a lesson in savoir faire. There isnothing I can do about the noise, so flop on the floor and ignore it,why don't you?

Pic: That's our sweet, intelligent girlie Scylla

Other Than Alone

2011-12-25T17:29:00.000+02:00

The quiet of this Christmas period is really quite encouraging: the streets have been all but silent in this area – so far – and the nights particularly hushed. I appreciate this and moreover have a glimmering of hope that the materialism of this season is finally on its last legs – not in the minds of marketers and product-pushers, but the ordinary person seems to be slowly waking out of the desire to spend themselves into a coma at the end of the year. Could this really be happening?

Being possessed of a hermit-like nature, I don't, as a rule, socialise much at any time of year. And that goes double for Christmas. Having a good book to immerse my mind into beats crowds – or even small family gatherings – of people all congregated in a determinism to have a good time at any cost.

This Solstice I engaged once more with Ghost Hunters, a tale by Deborah Blum on some of the more prominent psychic researchers of the nineteenth century. It's a good read, but I found myself, just a few minutes ago, taking issue with one of the luminaries of this field, Edmund Gurney. Bless his soul. In his two-volume opus Phantasms of the Living, which he co-authored with the tragic Fred Myers, he muses on crisis apparitions, attempting to explain why we quite frequently receive visions of loved ones at the moment of their death-and,more importantly to him, why these apparitions appear to be clothed, of all things! His tentative postulate was that the person receiving the crisis apparition would translate that sudden burst of energy transmitted by a dying connection into something we expected to see: the vision would be wearing a favourite coat, or be dressed as one usually remembered them. The idea being that the apparition receiver translates the incoming signal to their own expectations.

It was at this point that I put down the book, muttering “Hang on a minute..” as I remembered my own moment of reception of such an apparition: my father, dying more than 10 years ago. The vision I had seen looked nothing at all like I would have expected. He looked about 25 years old, for a start. I don't think that my own expectations were at play here. Which lead me to wonder: is it the transmitter whose biases clothe a crisis apparition rather than the receiver? Or, more tantalisingly, is it something more of a blend of the two - transmitter and receiver - which forms the details of the vision sent with such energy at such a peak moment?

Maybe I can think of it like this: if we are all, as I have no reason to doubt, aspects of the One Thing, could the disturbance of a death at some point in the Field not open a channel which is normally not perceived to be viable, and the rush of contact between two parts of the whole create the apparition in agreement with both parties?

Something for me to think about, anyway. That, and the fact that I'm more critical of my reading matter these days. You know, reading used to be a full-mind immersion for me. I'd inhabit the author's world to a degree that contradiction with the proponent's viewpoint was very difficult. And then I started to grow up, and realised I had my own faculties after all, and started to disagree with some things even my most favoured writers committed to paper. What grand heresy!

And so, from the sleepy suburb of Bloubosrand, wherein I lead an almost solipsist life at times – heaving concepts of Great Evil out of the front gate in my dreams, clearing the long grass from around the roses and, my all-time favourite, picking up dog pooh – I salute you all, fellow concentrations in the Field of Life, as we deal variously with our hemispheric Solstices, and the diminishing naked greed of Christmas, and our own struggles to feel we are something other than Alone in this Cosmos.

Ave Atque Vale

2011-12-22T05:47:00.000+02:00

Ave, Sol Invictus!

And the red-gold sun lifts over the horizon, outlining dark and smoke-spewing towers of a power station on the horizon.

Vale, Quercus Rex.

The Oak King has met the Lady and died in Her arms.

Ave, Ilex Rex.

The God's other face now turns to face us, down here in the southern hemisphere.

Merry Summer Solstice!

What Happened?

2011-12-21T15:57:00.000+02:00

Have you had a stroll through the Science Fiction section of your local bookshop lately?
What happened to all those 'hard' scifi stories we used to gobble up? Authors like Heinlein and Asimov; tales of adventure in shiny new futures fully equipped with magical technology?
It's becoming quite difficult to find SF works by modern authors where the action is dependant on the fruits of our science, isn't it? More common by far are the archaic revival stories: wizards, dragons, wights, mystical lands which all seem modelled on the Sword In The Stone or, worse, on a Tolkien novel.
Sometimes I fail to distinguish between one of these modern authors and another.

What happened?

Having just finished a really good book by an author who is (perhaps surprisingly) new to me - Embassytown by China Mieville - I was wondering what happened to all our dreams of the future, and why we are chasing that rabbit back down the hole in the wall which leads to the land of wonder.

By "we" I mean, mostly, folks of my generation and the one before. The seemingly endless upward curve of humanity's technical ingenuity was the theme-setter for those halcyon days of hard science fiction and children who watched Moon landings. We looked forward to a future in which we had the fundamentals of human health under our control, where clever and universally available gadgetry would make the Earth a paradise. For humans, sure. Today, one of the commonest droll sayings from a Baby Boomer seems to be "..and where is my Flying Car, I'd like to know?"

Where, indeed?

These predictions, made in 1949 by Robert Heinlein, give a snapshot of some of the things we thought were waiting for us, up around the bend in time.
I think he got precisely one right out of 19. The phones, he nailed. All the rest...well, it sounds like another world - the kind we all expected to live to see being born.

Sometime around 1974 or 1975, I bought myself a book by Reginald Bosanquet, a BBC host and newsreader, on our projected advances into space in the next century.

We were supposed to have had a fully operational colony on Mars by now, you know.

So, for the third time: What Happened?

Did we come to our senses, grow up a little, and tailor our expectations more closely to reality?

Did we indeed start our slow descent into Marching-Moron-hood, letting our tech get away from us more and more?

Or did the real world - Nature Herself, and all of Us who are Her, too - clip us around the ear, just a little?

Here, Higgsy, Higgsy..

2011-12-15T04:18:00.000+02:00

It's almost the end of the civic year, and although the Fraud Department should never relax its vigilance – perhaps especially now, when people tend to throw their money around a bit – I found myself on Tuesday with an hour or two to spare at work.

And so I tuned in to the streaming public conference from CERN where – so we were promised – we would finally hear news on the existence or otherwise of that damned elusive god particle, the Higgs Boson. I don't suppose there are many people around the internet by now who haven't heard that this is one Very Important Particle, able, it is said, to bestow the property of Mass – which, when you think about it, is practically the same as Existence in our material world – upon all other particles. Quite a big deal for a boson, and it arises from the odd fact that the electromagnetic boson, or photon, is not only massless but is very much in evidence, whereas the intermediary vessels of energy transfer for the Strong and Weak nuclear forces, the Z and W Bosons, appear to have mass and moreover cannot account quite for the mechanisms of those Strong and Weak nuclear forces.( Err. These are the forces which, respectively, keep the nucleus of an atom together and keep the electrons bound to the nucleus.)

Well, anyway, this conference promised to be a truly historic moment, so I thought I'd like to catch it. I obtained the stream quite easily, but, having no sound card in my computer at work (why would the Fraud programmer need to hear anything, after all?) I could only watch the action, and try to follow along with the Twitter feed from Everybody Else. It was quite entertaining, in silence. Professor Higgs himself was there, seated in the front row with a bunch of other elderly White Dudes, and the auditorium was quite full,although nowhere near as hectically overstuffed as pre-conference tweets had led us all to believe. I mean, have these Physics People actually been to Edgars at Red Hanger Sale Day? Or any concert by a marginally popular band in Joburg? But there they were, elder statesmen in the front, younger scientists up in back,each with a laptop or notebook open and smoking, waiting for the words which would shape or break our view of the Universe as we know it.

The lady spokesperson, Fabiola Gianotti, was apparently a treat to listen to. Although of course I couldn't hear her. But when the slideshow started (Powerpoint! Microsoft!) the internet erupted in mirth as we realised we were looking at this Very Important Announcement in Comic Sans font. It was probably an astute move, for, after the team-congratulations and a sketchy outline of how the LHC works, we were all left with the impression that she said nothing very much, although indeed she had said it well.

(Her colleague who took over from her, and spent some time looking for the bloody keyboard was another point of hilarity. Way to go, high-tech dudes – can run a billion-dollar particle collider but can't locate a keyboard. Confidence inspiring).

Bottom line on the Higgs: we still don't know if it has any existence, or not. The data did not include a high degree of statistical confidence-over 2 sigma but less than five, for those of you who find that sort of thing meaningful – and there was an admission, given rather sotto voce to my eyes (remember, this was all in Golden Silence), that the data could be interpreted just as easily as evidence of the Higgs' non existence.

So there we are – no real news, but a fairly loud circus to announce it in. Perhaps, after all, we're just looking to retain our funding? I didn't say that – no, I didn't.

Solar Plexus Of Your Soul

2011-12-04T14:44:00.001+02:00

Sunday : Tons of Rain read the 7-day forecast when I looked at it earlier this week.
I see they've changed it to read A few showers. Afternoon clouds. Mild. Which shows us how chaotic the art of weather prediction really is, I suppose.

Now, crossing the garden picking up dog poop for the week, I look up into a brilliant blue sky crossed by those picture-perfect sailing ships of bright white cotton cumulo-nimbus clouds, the horizon constrained from my view by tall Cycads, a Coral Tree in full bloom, two enormous Monkey-Thorns and the neighbors' renegade Jacaranda. Looking down, I see grass grown long enough to be cushiony, patches of Motherwort - who knows how that got in here? - and rose petals fallen all along the garden. Lemons from the home tree I pick , take inside and make delicious lemonade : lemon pulp and juice with ice water and a dash of mint, nothing better right now. Oh, add some ice maybe.

It's hard to remember that we're actually slap in the middle of a Mercury retrograde period - and one, moreover, taking place right across my second house, home of my own natal Mercury and my Jupiter. I'd have thought this one would be quite traumatic, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
For a start, I began earnest work with my Ancestors on a family disfunction near the beginning of this retrograde period, and the work continues well and steadily. I have also noticed an increase in my inner serenity and grounded-ness, about coincident with this period; in fact, yesterday I was incredibly at home during the whole of a trek to the mall to get Warren a new cellphone ; a trek which didn't work out, as it happens - several little Mercury-type obstacles rose up before us. Got to laugh. We also have had absolutely no luck in locating a hardware part for Warren's laptop. These sort of setbacks I can surely live with - and they're nothing to the full-on Mercury retrograde Anne's been having, this time around.

As I pour myself another glass of lemonade - with ice this time - I gather that these retrograde periods perhaps give us each precisely what we need for learning and for growth. That seems a bit rough, when your car is blowing up and your every utterance turns into a miscommunication - but there are compensations. Next time, you learn to take precautions, perhaps. Or you use the retrograde period as a chance to connect at a different level with your antecedents. And you dig your roots in just a little bit deeper to the land on both the physical and the spiritual planes, so that when those breezes blow, they blow with you, not against you. And you have that sense of joy that comes from being incarnate, here and now, with all its little and large disruptions. And you laugh, long and loud and from the solar plexus of your soul.

Image found over here

The Core Of The Healing Of It

2011-11-29T18:38:00.001+02:00

I'm heating Myrrh and Geranium in the burner as I sit down at the altar and stretch my soul out to connect with my Ancestors.

The combination is strange: the rich depth of Myrrh contrasting oddly with the sharp, sour invigoration of the Geranium. Spiritual depth and courage in this combination of scents - just what I really, really need right now.

I feel Pied Crow settle into my God-Soul while Black Panther rises from the Earth, insinuating himself along the sushumna. And I reach out my hands, and find them taken, on both sides, by female antecedents. Mom and Granny Banning, welcome. The space behind the oil burner is gradually being filled in now by the shape of a man - hair oiled and swept back off a slightly receding forehead, he's all shades of iron-grey. My Grandfather Banning is not someone I have any conscious memories of - only that indelible memory of my mother, sitting crying by the phone one day in New Jersey. That memory which has never left me, like the recall of a head-on blow to the Spirit. Her father had died, and I, being too young to really understand,nevertheless gathered that here was something noteworthy, something of subtle and gross meaning, of undertones and grief-laden overtones. My Mom, who was the solid foundation of our emotional lives, was battered by sorrow and guilt and many other emotions which flew straight over my 5-year-old head at the time.

I have him take the Spirit-hands of my Mom and Granny - his daughter and his wife - and we sit like that, in circle together, for some time, me breathing slowly and deeply, directing the energy around my bodies, and grounding - oh, so desperately grounding - as I open my Self a tiny bit for these three graces.

The disease of alcoholism has run strongly through my family - and in particular, through my Maternal family, to the point where it has become the unhidden secret, hardly talked about but felt to the core of every member. Where does it come from? From which well of fears and misalignment rose this terrifying spectre, which still haunts my dreams every so often with visions of glass bottles half-full of clear, stinking liquid, and a heaviness of dread when I awake?

I'm making a little progress in trying to fathom my distaff kin. For, unlike my paternal family, who appeared in this land as members of the conquering race, these people of my Mother had no land to call their own for three, four,maybe five or more generations.
Foundering on an island to which no member of the population was native, they put on the culture and appearance of the gentry, which may have been a deception right from the start. They moved then to this land, where they once again faced a lack of rootedness - a lack of the presence of their own Ancestral Spirits all around them, which seems to be important to humans. For rare - although increasing in frequency - is the person whose mind can accept and encompass that the entire Earth is our home and mother - and beyond that, that we are truly at home in the Universe, and it is Us as We Are It. In my great-grandparent's generation,that state of mind was uncommon and unacknowledged.

I'm looking at an entire side of a Family Tree whose branches do not apparently connect directly to any roots; whose leaves are fluttering unanchored in the breeze of Culture. This sickness, I think, has its origins right here - in a lack of origin.
This is just a start,mind you. I'm putting my feet upon that path which should, if I am mindful and careful enough, and if I have a depth of empathy and understanding which will overcome ancient fears and hatreds, lead me to the wellspring of the illness itself - and thence, without a doubt, to the core of the healing of it.

Pic: Francis Plain, St Helena. Doris Francis George, do you remember this?

Let It Be Me

2011-11-27T20:09:00.000+02:00

Remembering our breath is very important.

It's a part of the work which can be easily neglected - in our rushing days interacting with the world, one of the first things to get forgotten can be correct breathing.

I know, for I've been correcting a lifetime of bad breathing - chest breathing, breathing too fast and too shallowly - over the past few years,and it's still something I can let slip when my mind's too engaged with the minutiae of this civilised life I Iead. Or don't lead, depending on the sign of the moon.

This weekend I monitored my breathing most of the day, when I wasn't off in the land of the undead - which this weekend meant monthly shopping - paying attention to all the sparkly bits that clamored for my attention, trying to decide which pack of toilet rolls was actually the better value for money,or how much VGA cable we really needed to connect Warren's laptop to the telly. It wasn't easy, but I found that attending to my breath - making sure that it was coming from the expansion and contraction of the diaphragm and that the energy was flowing steadily - produced a much less harassed-around-the-gills sort of shopping experience. It was even quite pleasant in parts,plus we got more done than we normally would, when both of us are just sprinting to get it over with and get out of the damned mall.

So: breath, yes,is important in the most menial of events in life. Another thing which needs my attention, and right now, is the question of unresolved ancestral issues.

Christina has a lot of wisdom to share on this topic.
I'd recommend listening to her podcasts.
I'd recommend to myself that listening to her podcasts is one of the brighter things I can do.

Ancestors can be, and frequently are, invaluable helping spirits, especially for anyone on anything even approximating a Shamanic path. They have the wisdom of both life and death to impart, and, being concerned with our well being, they are willing to help us to help ourselves.

In my family, one unresolved issue has shown up as alcoholism. It beset my maternal grandfather to his death, has shown its face among cousinly branches of the family, and of course it has had a major effect in me. The last twelve years I have been moving farther and farther away from the terror of alcoholism, and perhaps now is a good time to start to look at the reason it has raised its ugly head down the generations and across a swathe of family, destroying all in its path and much on its periphery.

Issues like familial problems with alcohol, drugs or dependent behaviour are old, unhealed wounds to the psyche which manifest in many members of the family constellation. If not addressed and healing started, they will continue their devastating course until a descendant finally does get the message,and begins to do something about it.

I have felt my Mom tugging at my inner ear for days now, pointing this out to me. She has been hovering so near that at times I can smell her, feel her touch upon my arm, see her clear hazel eyes in the face of a stranger passing by. And what she's telling me is that some one - some descendant - must step up to the plate and take on these ancestral issues which manifest mostly as alcoholism in my family.

I am that person in this generation who is closest to having an understanding of a Shamanic worldview.

Therefore, let that descendant be me.

Pic: Many years ago, Mom first let herself be known as an ancestral helping spirit by appearing to me as a hippo.

Strange Birds

2011-11-23T07:13:00.002+02:00

In the last day* of Sun in Scorpio for this year, with the moon also in this sign, I stand on the wet and drizzly balcony and wonder: if I took a test for Borderline Disorder right this moment, and answered from my deepest sense of truth, would I be diagnosed as mentally ill?

No, I've never had this diagnosis made upon me - not even close. But it seems more and more as if I've come to the crossroads now where I clearly see the way forward which aligns with what I know about existence - that's life and death together in equal amounts, carrying equal weight of force - will eventually divorce me from human culture.

So many things we acknowledge as good and true and right in this human incarnation rely on the drawing of boundaries. Between this and that. Between good and bad. Between personal integrity and violation of it.
But I'm growing to understand the ephemeral qualities of these boundaries. The liminal places themselves are disappearing as states of being merge one into another, without seam, without edge.

Insane? Probably, from a human cultural point of view. But I remember that culture is not your friend and I am somewhat comforted by it - especially since the words friend, your and is are slowly losing their meaning in the place where I truly live.

One day your eggs are going to hatch and some very strange birds are going to emerge.

* seems the Sun is already out of Scorpio, technically. Also, here comes another Mercury Retrograde. Hold onto your hats.

Relief

2011-11-22T07:00:00.000+02:00

It's called Guerilla Hop

Well, thank goodness for that.

Because I can't, you know, stand Hip Hop.

Here We Go?

2011-11-18T06:39:00.000+02:00

The new knowledge is piling on thick and fast.
For a start, something we've mostly thought of as a statistical tool to help us understand the world - the probability wave function - turns out to very possibly be real. Whatever that means.
Mathematical abstraction moves real world

Also, despite our best efforts to explain it away, the neutrinos are still moving faster than light

Although I don't take everything - or even anything - that Terence McKenna said terribly seriously, he's still worth cocking an ear at.

Pic: Terence Mckenna's natal chart.

Ex Tenebris

2011-11-17T07:14:00.001+02:00

It's not an ego trip, it's an ego rip.
As the personal ego dissolves, it spreads out through the physical body, then the etheric body. It leaks a little into the auric body, and by the time it has risen up the sushumna to the god soul, all that's left is a weak pulsing, which flows out the top of the skull and showers gently golden sparks into the earth around me.

I am the creation and the creator.
I am the never-born who is continually in the throes of death.
I am the centre and I am every point of the circumference.
I am the zero which causes the one.
I am the point-charge and I am the field.
I am you and yet I have never been anyone but truly myself.

I am holy and I stand always upon sacred ground

Bede's Bird

2011-11-15T13:00:00.000+02:00

It took me about twenty minutes of Googling today to find the allusion which was bugging me - and what that teaches me about the Internet is that it's getting dumber along with the rest of us.
(Somebody else was looking for the same thing a couple of months ago.)

The Venerable Bede:

"You are sitting feasting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter time; the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging; and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly flies out the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again."

Monday morning and the sultry night has become a stuffy early morning - the air dead and unmoving. We open the front door as well as the back door. And a Dove rushes in. And rushes out.

Later that morning I'm having my first smoke of the working day. On the balcony is a long, pale grey feather. So I pick it up and take it back to my workplace, where it sticks up from between the F8 and F7 keys, a gift.

I know someone else has made that metaphor, before: that Life is like a bird traversing a room, coming from the great outdoors to fly across the inner spaces and back out into the great outdoors again. But it seems to me that this Dove provided a more accurate analogy than the Bede's Sparrow.

Our Dove came in from the Space Beyond which was full of light and warmth and heat; flew a little while across a darker, shadowed Inner Plane, and departed again to the Great Light Beyond.

He could always see the Great Light before him as he flew across the living room and then the kitchen - it was always in front of him, beckoning him on and guiding him out. if he was looking, that is.

To see the Light from which he'd come, he'd have had to crane his neck around, but he could surely feel, if he tried, the heat and maybe - if there had been a breath of air outside - the wind would have ruffled his feathers. Wind from the Source.

Even, if his birdy beak was up to it, could he smell and taste the air of All Around, as it passed with him through the Little Within?

Pic: Carrie Wild, "Bede's Sparrow"

Oh Come...

2011-11-10T18:34:00.000+02:00

It's Christmas time in Joburg.

According to the braying-ass of a company which manages Melrose Arch (forgive me, Donkey-kin everywhere, but you know what I mean), it has in fact been Christmas since midway through October.

The same people who seem to believe that other living beings exist for the sole convenience of humanity have deemed that not only will we start celebrating Christmas in October - we will celebrate it with a heap of cognitive dissonance to boot.

The poor captive Pin Oaks along Melrose Boulevard have plexiglass and metal electronic icicles wired into their limbs. White snowflakes adorn the thoroughfares and shops.
I don't know if you're quite aware of this, AmDec, but it's high summer in Joburg and the temperature was over 33 C today. At the risk of seeming facile, I must ask: are you completely mad?
Considering the types of people who shop and hang out in Melrose Arch (by choice, not through the stricture of happening to work there),perhaps they don't consider themselves all that mad.
Perhaps they see what they are doing as gilding the glittering illusion through which most of the voluntary shoppers there walk: a mirage where joy is for sale, where she with the latest fashion draped across her body is obviously the most worthy, where he who drives the most expensive car is without a doubt the most noble.
Excuse me while I use the sick bucket.

Elsewhere in sunny Joburg, the big supermarkets have crowded the newspapers with what they hope are irresistible magnets to consumers to Come!All Ye Faithful! And Spend, Spend, Spend! For quite possibly, tomorrow you die.
This gaudy and tacky meme is propagated across the city, doubtless causing those without the ready cash to look around for whatever they can steal. The incidence of slightly-more-than-petty theft has already risen alarmingly at my partner's work. The cash-in-transit heists have started. The armed store robberies have jumped up the graph. For if we are not given the money to buy all this proof of goodness, why should we not just go out and take it? Everyone else is doing it after all.

It is not just as a Pagan that I growl deep in my fifth chakra at this nonsensical display of naked greed: as a human who sees cars as despoilers of the Earth's bounty and every shiny new electronic toy as somebody's soul destroying slave-labour,I sometimes feel like just putting my head down in my hands and weeping.

The story of the Sun King, the Christos, has been cheapened and the impulse of good people everywhere to share their gifts with all has been made into a thing of awesome ugliness, flashing lights in the star-bereft night sky and toxic-tinsel-draped apparitions of abundance withdrawing swiftly before us,leading us ever forward, over the edge...

Pic: from Johannesburg Daily Photos

Cake For Breakfast

2011-11-08T09:34:00.000+02:00

Thirteen times four years I have had this body, now - analogous to the thirteen moons in a solar year, or 52 weeks. I was born with a moon in Aquarius, so that this last 4-year period of my life also corresponds to an Aquarius moon.

It is sometimes a great fault in me that I like things tidy, orderly and mathematically explicable, when I know damned well that life is just not like that. Look at the way I insist upon celebrating the cross-quarter Sabbats on the astronomically exact midpoint between Solstice and Equinox for example. So I have been giving a little thought to these four-year periods and what they have meant to me, so far.

This last one was fairly traumatic: three of my four canine family members were murdered by RSS Security Services, and I was emotionally betrayed by one I had thought my heart was safe with. Just goes to show that indeed, all of us who dare to love are brave. On the other hand, it was also the period when I regained my son, to a degree, after having lost him for ten years. It has been a time of learning, laden with chakra-opening lessons.

The moon before this one (hah! Capricorn!), 2003-2007, was when I acquired land for the first time: land which has permitted me to live on it-sometimes in it-and which has given me in return the surprising gift of knowledge of the consciousness of the land itself. An inestimable gift. It was in this period that I also learned to communicate with and value the lives of those non-human souls we share the Earth with. A process which continues to this day - and which precludes me from becoming a vegetarian or vegan - encompassing as it does the awareness of and communication with the plant kingdom.

If I push this moon analogy further, it means I am entering a period of Piscean moon effects, which leaves me somewhat tentatively poking the future with a long stick, almost as if I were afraid of it.

But this morning I ate Beltane Chocolate Cake for breakfast, continued the dead heading of the roses so suddenly halted by a Sister's injection of wisdom on Saturday, loved my dogs' shiny black and white coats and their ready grins, admired the dappling patterns of green upon the garden, picked up squashed lemons, inhaled the fragrance of freshly laundered curtains in the house, and took a brief early morning nap. Yes, you read that right - I can, and frequently do, nap at the drop of a hat: whenever, wherever.

Should I be afraid to say that life is good? Or that the palpable air of Love I walk in constantly is sweetness itself? Or that, when I've finished with this incarnation, I am willing and eager to put on the body once more, if only to feel the air after a thunderstorm against my skin or bow before the mystery of the Moon as She rises, in silver-blue and pearl stamped, above the trees?

Pic found at the site of the Yoga Teachers Fellowship of Southern Africa. I didn't know there was one.

Beltane Tide 2011

2011-11-07T15:38:00.000+02:00

Welcome to the Beltane-tide. We have it all here - deep red metallic candles, rose-sandalwood-frankincense-woodruff incense, a magnificent declamation from the Stag of Seven Tines and a priestess hobbling around the borders of her land because of a bee sting.

It's only the second time in my life that a Sister has actually had the effrontery to sting me: the first time I was about 10 years old, in England, running barefoot in the garden at Wokingham. The poor Bumble Bee who my enormous foot came down upon had her revenge. On Saturday evening I was dead heading the Thug Rose Number 2 and, although shod in slops, a bee found my foot once more. The pain was, well, excruciating.

Warren applied a thick paste of mustard and a professional crepe bandage after my howling had died down, which drew most of the venom out of the wound. But today it's still red and a bit sore. So I suppose I'll be limping around the Boundaries at twilight, swinging the censer and brandishing the Athame. I only hope all the Sisters have cleared the area beforehand.
In the meantime, the Belfire has been extinguished and relit, the Guardians called to renew their protection of home and family, and yes, the God who Sets the Head Afire with Smoke has proclaimed His presence here.

We continue to tumble into the Summer with all its promise of heat waves, wind-downed trees and blowing up of tolling gantries. And then there's the Beltane Chocolate Cake...

Photo: Bee from the Beltane Ranch. Copyright Joseph Readdy

Theoretically...

2011-11-02T15:35:00.000+02:00

"Theoretically, this is impossible, but observationally we can see it happening."

In today's issue of the journal Nature, astronomers report that organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the Universe. The results suggest that complex organic compounds are not the sole domain of life but can be made naturally by stars.

I've italicised the bit that grabbed my attention.

Somebody appears to believe that stars are not within the 'domain of life'.
This belief seems to be fairly widespread.
This, in my rather rabid opinion, is a good example of what the fuck is wrong with humans at this point in history.
And don't get me started on the whole it's-impossible-even-as-we-stare-it-in-the-face.
I swear, scientists...

Birdy Fight Blogging

2011-11-01T12:05:00.000+02:00

Bird fights are sometimes interesting.

Sparrows, for example, seem most inclined to squabble with others of their own species: maybe under the principle that whoever is competing with you for the exact same resources is your biggest threat. The Sparrows seem to believe that, anyway.

On the other hand, I've seen evidence recently of intense animosity between two bird species who do not, on the face of it, inhabit exactly the same ecological niche.

This morning I left a bit of bread and cheese out for the Osiris birds.
First to arrive were a few Indian Mynahs, including my friend who ruffs up his head feathers and sings at me whenever he sees me:

When they had had a fair crack at the treats, I shooed them away to allow the Sparrows some food.
All of a sudden, out of a silent sky, here comes a Wagtail; tiny, delicate bird with a huge voice. Two of them are nesting in the courtyard this year, but they seem to be almost exclusively insectivorous and not interested in breadcrumbs. This little warrior dove straight at a retreating Mynah, knocking him sideways. Her partner showed up and hovered in midair near the balcony, flapping the Mynahs away from the food.

What could I do but applaud such audacious bravado?
And then fall over laughing, of course.

Beltane's Coming...

2011-10-28T15:02:00.000+02:00

RiboNucleic Acid

DeoxyRiboNucleic Acid

Maypole

DNA Maypole

Sculpture by Barry Woods Johnstone

Light Without Limit

2011-10-26T15:28:00.000+02:00

"Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us, can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building to the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it's really all about." - Terence McKenna

Ain.

Ain Soph.

Ain Soph Aur.

This Is What Fascism Looks Like

2011-10-25T04:45:00.000+02:00

Hat Tip to fellow mystic and scientist Katrina Messenger over on Google+

Icarus Weighs In

2011-10-21T07:20:00.000+02:00

The ICARUS project, located like the OPERA project in Gran Sasso, near L'Aquila, has added a negative piece of info to the riddle of the faster than light neutrinos.

Basically, we already know that subatomic particles can appear to outstrip the speed of light when travelling in a non-vacuum medium, such as water.That's because the speed of light itself is lower than in vacuo.
When this occurs, the particles carry a momentum which is anomalous for their real speed, and so on re entering vacuum they lose this momentum as extra energy in the form of radiation - the so called Cerenkov Radiation.

The neutrinos apparently caught exceeding the universal speed limit last month did not exhibit this tell tale radiation, although so far nobody has actually negated the experimental results.

So what are we to make of this? It seems that the supraluminal behaviour of the little neutral ones was not occasioned by a change of travelling medium.

Theories are abounding, from extra-dimensional motion to instrumental error, but so far no one explanation has been seen to hold the day.

We'll have to wait this one out some more, I think.

Above A Liminal Moon

2011-10-18T14:23:00.001+02:00

Quickly now, then - waking or dreaming? Which is it?

Neither. Or maybe both. More likely some of each. A bleeding one into the other.

Because consciousness is not, in my experience, anywhere near as simple as on/off. It's non dual to the max, as far as I can ascertain.

I remember when I was about 18 months old - it must have been sometime before I was 2 years old, anyway, given the location - I was walking down a road with my Mum, holding a balloon by its string. Passing under a bridge. Then nothing. Then I was in my grandparents' flat - jungle of knees and stuffed chair armrests - and then in my Grandpa's car, riding past a Zulu on the side of the road. Then nothing.

It's a bit like the computer was flickering on..then going offline again, then spluttering to life, then dying once more. But it's not as clear-cut as that, is it?

At night, I'm travelling along a spectrum of consciousness as I compose myself for sleep. The ritual banishments and invocations of deity, then the calling of the egregorious guardians of my home, followed by a period in which I may see faces very clearly, or find myself briefly in sharp, realistic situations completely outside of my bed and little house. Then sleep, dreams...and waking once more in the middle of the night, sometimes with a start. Sometimes - once at least - a state of alertness in which I cannot physically move, while a malevolent entity, felt but never seen, tries to pull the duvet off me. Sleep paralysis is an interesting form of consciousness in itself.

Then, this morning, standing outside the North door as I did yesterday at about the same time. Noting that the moon - now brightly visible - had moved a little to the right. Seeing a wisp of cloud appear like a soul rising from the lunar surface, and then a huge, undulating white mass against the black morning sky: the beetle appearing, the Scarab rolling itself and its eggs in dung across the heavens, just missing the moon, careening off to the South and West as its shape dissipated.

Waking or Dreaming? No, it's not so simple. It's an infinitely long continuum. And who is to say that there is not a stage we reach where all of this - dreams, invocations, divinations, imaging, computer programming, mathematical equation wielding - is just as dreamy and fuzzy in comparison to our regular consciousness as the sparking and sputterings of a not-yet-two-year-old mind appears to us now?

And Hecate, standing guardian before the triple dividing of the ways, She knows. It's all One road, really.

Under A Liminal Moon

2011-10-17T18:16:00.000+02:00

All day the sky, when it was not heavily veiled, has been glaucous.

This morning I stood under a nearly-last-quarter moon which resembled nothing so much as this pale moon right here on the background to the blog. There were no wild geese flying under it, however.

Yes – tomorrow we are expecting some rain. And a great big blessing that will be, should it come to pass – for I'm weary of trying to round up the dust of ages every two hours or so from where it has settled on my living room floor.

This morning, just before I found myself standing facing North (the direction of Fire for us Southerners) looking at the moon, I had awoken from a dream of great clarity. It didn't seem to portend much or mean anything in particular; but it was a dream so lucid that for quite a while I was not sure whether I had just woken up or just fallen asleep.

I do not practice the art of lucid dreaming, having far too much dream content to keep tabs on as it is, without willing myself to enter into a control relationship with the damned things. But I found myself still wondering: am I awake now or am I dreaming?

And it has stayed with me all day, this question. Dreaming now, or awake?

Not that I went through the day muddled and confused – although I'm willing to bet that I sound like a terminal case to anyone reading this – rather, I traversed the 'day' in a state of mild euphoria, as if it didn't truly matter which was the Waking and which the Dreaming. I think I've come closer today to a soul level understanding of the proposition that this is all just Lila.

Now, swiftly, ask yourself the question: Dreaming or Waking – which one?

Beautiful

2011-10-17T08:23:00.000+02:00

This is what it looks like.

Deep Green Resistance

Common Thread

2011-10-13T18:21:00.002+02:00

There I was, after quite a tough day at work, furiously sweeping the dust and leaves from the stoep, my muscles all in a rage.
The reason? 16 year old Louise de Waal was abducted at gunpoint, probably raped, and her body burned beyond recognition in a fire at a farm in Muldersdrift yesterday. I was sweeping for her. Also for 8 year old Zikhona Qhayi who was likewise raped and murdered in Khayelitsha yesterday.
The first case was headline news for two days; the second barely cracked a page mention, since Louise was White and Zikhona was not.
The tendency of this particular sub-culture to fetishise the victims when they belong to the White race is pretty overwhelming - a pointer that South Africa has not come all that far, really, in the last few years.

We seem to be living within a torrent of violent acts of the utmost depravity. Acts which both boggle the mind and turn the stomach, even as we avidly devour the details, and the press take pictures of the grieving and traumatised families. What is driving this escalation of crimes of total brutality? Could Derrick Jensen be correct when he holds that this civilisation is in fact insane? I think he is right on the money, and also that it's getting worse.
But our conversation revolves, in Joburg, around childish finger-pointing on the subject of the perpetrators' race-some of the comments in News 24 are particularly puerile - or braying demands for the return of the death penalty.

As much as I long to see such men dead, I have grave misgivings about the death penalty - not the least of them being would you really want to hand this inept government the power to kill its citizens?

We are not addressing the causes, and this will ensure that nothing is done to stem the flow of childrens' blood. Rather than asking what is causing these men to crack, we bay for their blood, in turn. Humans; I really don't understand you at all sometimes.

But among all the noise about White perpetrators and Black perpetrators, among all the accusations of barbarity and lack of civilisation (really?), most of us are totally ignoring the one rock-solid factor which ties both these young women's death together , and that is that both the deranged offenders are male.

Horrible pic: Louise de Waal's mother and grandmother, snapped by the press

Fermentation

2011-10-11T07:35:00.000+02:00

I first took this Alchemical quiz about four years ago.

The result, according to that quiz, was that I was then at the stage of Conjunction.
It was, I thought,a fairly accurate representation of the place I stood in at that time.

Rediscovering the Alchemy Lab last week, I re-took the test, and obtained the result of Fermentation, which is the next step in the Alchemical process.

According to the Emerald Tablet, during Fermentation, we raise consciousness from the darkness of the animal body through personal meditation and planetary evolution. "Separate the Earth from Fire," it tells us, "the subtle from the gross, gently and with great Ingenuity."

I find this to be a very accurate representation of my situation in Time and Space right now - for the last couple of months, in fact.

The four or five years preceding this have been characterised by a growing rapport with Death, to the point where I was wholly comfortable with my own passing; so much so, that I twice (once about 18 months ago, and once just last week) was aware of an imminent arrival of Death Herself (the Ultimate Woman) for the collection of...me, myself.

The intimation of my own death was so strong last week that I felt sure I was ready to go. But that was not how it fell out. Instead, it was a transition from the Dark Night that I was feeling, up ahead.

Held fast in the Earth for the last couple of years, slumbering lightly yet tossing and turning in the nightmare of the fight against the Wetiko culture, the product of my Conjunction was laid in the soil, thrashing out and raking it in fury every so often.
When the Death transition came, it was not a mortal passing, but a spiritual one - possibly because I have already experienced the Shamanic Dismemberment - and the start of the enlightenment of the Fermentation process has begun.

It's still just a glimmer, but it ties into my feelings of having travelled backwards to a place of greater simplicity, of cleaner joy.

It is the re-admission of the Above into the putrefied vessel of the Below which produces the golden seepage from the corpse.

It is a wonderous scent from heaven and a flaming of many colours and varied visions. It is a re-establishment of healthier sleeping patterns (which had gone badly awry the last few years) and a re-awakening of appreciation of beauty above as well as below.

It is the Change which I felt coming and which I misinterpreted as my own personal End.
It is a re-imagining of the aspects of Soul.
It is a re-appreciation of the human, here among the animals of the Earth.

It is, in short, the bubbling, fizzing Fermentation of my Self.
Gently.

Hieroglyphic Monad

2011-10-07T15:13:00.000+02:00

Monkey Science

2011-10-05T15:27:00.000+02:00

CERN theorist John Ellis has opened his mouth to produce the most quotable quote I've seen from the scientific community in a long while.

Reacting to the plethora of ideas being put forward to explain the apparently faster-than-light neutrinos clocked at Gran Sasso last month around the time of the equinox, he seems quite happy with the babble so far.

"At present, it would be foolhardy to say one [theory] looks better than the other And they're probably all wrong, because the result will probably evaporate." he says. Then:

"Scientific conviction comes primarily from experimental results, but it's also the job of us theorists to, if you like, bash out all the possibilities, like monkeys on a typewriter."

Right. On.

Pic: It's a Howler Monkey

Special

2011-10-04T06:52:00.002+02:00

Well, that was special.

Yesterday, the car having been fixed of its oil leak by Warren - which necessitated the timing belt being taken off and put back on, never an easy job - wouldn't start. Warren called in our friend Hennie, who's very good with machines, and between them they had the problem sorted within a few hours.
Apart from the oil leak, which had reappeared during the fixing.
Off to the spares shop we go, in Hennie's car, to purchase a new oil meter. Installed, sorted. Waved goodbye and thanks to Hennie, who has problems of his own to sort out.
By now it was after midday, and we were just getting started on our usual work days. We took the normal route along Leslie to William Nicol, where the car stalled on an uphill and refused to budge.
We reversed free-wheeling back down Leslie, as we were seriously blocking traffic and really annoying some daft types in very expensive cars, who overtook us with roars of their engines.
We backed eventually into the broad car-entrance to a couple of complexes built side-by-side, and called Hennie.
We'd probably flooded the engine, in his opinion. So we took a walk down the road a way to the Douglasdale Shopping Centre, to buy bread and cigarettes and look for a spark plug spanner, which we had neglected to pack into the car.
Two hours later, the car is still sitting outside the complexes, the spark plugs have all been examined and cleaned, the presumably flooded engine now viable once more. We should have been able to start out again.
Only we couldn't, as by now you'll have guessed. There was spark and we had a quarter tank of fuel, but no running engine.
Back to the shopping centre, where a petrol attendant at one of the garages gave us the number of a mechanic who lived nearby. (No, don't ask me why petrol stations have no mechanics or workshops - that's so yesterday, and unproductive in the Wetiko scheme of things).
When he examined the engine, the local mechanic pronounced our fuel pump inoperative - which explained a lot of things that morning.
By now it was mid afternoon, and a new petrol pump could be purchased at the spares shop - about ten kilometres away. Hennie was involved in his own problems, and we had no recourse but to walk.
The going was rough, particularly considering the recent rains had washed huge amounts of suburban debris onto what we laughingly call our pavements. Actually, pavements don't exist in suburbia more often than not : if you're so lower-class as to be walking, you can bloody well walk in the road much of the time.
The last couple of kilometres of our journey were short-cut by our arrival at a major road, where we opted for a taxi ride, to get to the spares shop before it closed.
Surprisingly, I'd never ridden a 'common' taxi before - most of them are extremely scary, from the outside anyway, and - well - white folks don't often make use of them. Good excuse,huh?
We found a small knot of people standing by the road, ascertained from them that they were also headed in our direction, and caught the appropriate taxi with them. This, if you're not a South African, is more complicated than it sounds. It requires a knowledge that middle-class office workers just don't have, often.
So we arrived at the spares shop before closing, after a really pleasant ride in a clean and quiet taxi, squashed among many other people, who all politely made room for the mlungus aboard their commute.
Petrol pump purchased. And a couple of Cokes, for the walk home.
Arriving home just before seven, the dogs were really glad, although puzzled, to see us arriving on foot. But you know, your non-human animal companions never question how you got there or where you've been - they just make a huge fuss of you when you are there.
Warren calls his manager, who is surprised that he didn't ask one of the mobile supervisors for a tow. Well, I wouldn't have known to ask that, either. So a couple of hours later still, car is towed back home,and we get some sleep.
The walk, though, was an opportunity to see things easily missed as we whizz about in this car culture. A Glossy Starling who sits still long enough for me to enter its birdy mind; several mafioso Sparrows struggling in the dust and refuse; a real, live Quercus Alba where one would least expect to see one. And the humans of course - this is Africa - full of good cheer and greetings....

...This morning, Warren is installing the new petrol pump. We'll see from here.
It's certainly never boring in this life. Frustrating, painful, horrific even. Never boring.

Pic: Quercus Alba - the White Oak

Twelve Years

2011-10-03T06:56:00.001+02:00

Sitting in the car, cranking the engine for Warren yesterday evening, during a break in the hectic thunderstorms and bucketing rain we've had this weekend, I was looking out at the graceful fall of the trumpet vine curtaining the carport, and feeling myself almost yearning to slip away into a dream.

These liminal spaces have been calling me lately: the rain seems always to do that. Recently - over the last month or so - I've been feeling myself slide gently back into a place I started to occupy years ago. A place of less anger and more simple enjoyment; a place, if you will, which seems to be signified by the Tarot card Ten of Pentacles.

But I wasn't too happy with the underlying urge to run away into the mystic. This, it seems to me, was too similar by far to that state in which I very nearly died, twelve years ago.

Thinking about this urge for flight and the fact that twelve years have passed since I received my Dismemberment in what has got to be the most horrific episode of my life ( and thinking, too, on the significance of the number twelve, a powerful counting which has come down to us in the way we measure time) I was faintly surprised at the swift passage of those years. And I thought- well, what former state am I trying to recapture, albeit almost subconsciously, with my attraction to fugue? For certainly there have been no periods in my past in which I was quite as happy, quite as frequently blissful, or quite as aware of my awakening to my own divinity as this one.
I would not swap a single moment of my past for the gnosis-with all its attendant pain- that has been developing in me these past dozen revolutions of the sun.

I know that some of my steps have been wrong ones, just as others have been correct. I know that I will only get to travel this path through error and correction, always.So, I am about to take to my altar, this morning in a fresh state of openness to the knowledge that Spirit passes through me and through all the living World, there to ask, humbly if I can, in which direction I should set my face for the coming twelve years.

Sigil

2011-09-30T14:07:00.000+02:00

Respect

2011-09-28T06:45:00.000+02:00

The main stream media is, as most of us know, willfully blind, complacent and thus complicit in this murderous over-culture. In addition to this, Radio 702's news arm," Eye Witness News", is something of a joke concerning journalistic standards: their English is frequently appalling and their reporting often carries the air of having been made up on the spot without much thought for cohesion.

It was therefore with great pride that I witnessed my blog-friend and fellow-traveller, Mark Esterhuysen , let loose with a stream of invective against the industrial-capitalist killing machine.(Warning - NSFW language).

As a lowly programmer without many opportunities to strike back at the entity which is holding a loaded gun to all life on this planet, I applaud Mark wildly for using his position as graveyard news anchor to articulate his feelings.

Becoming aware of the inherent insanity of this culture has much in common with becoming an Atheist: once you start to reason things out for yourself, and see how the adults you trusted have been willfully or complacently filling you with crap for years, why, you become very angry indeed.

If I was short-talking this, I'd say he has more balls than I ever had. In reality, his courage, integrity and willingness to put his career on the line for his truth are an amazing testimony to his wholeness and lack of willingness to compromise with what is more and more plainly revealed to be a sick, insane civilisation.

Mark called it as he saw it, and was fired for it.
I couldn't be prouder of him. Respect, my man.

Spring Fever

2011-09-27T10:28:00.000+02:00

It usually happens something like this:
You wake up one morning and the scent of the Winter Jasmine is flooding through the cracked-open window, smelling like rich, otherworldly bubblegum.
Sometime the next week you notice the Yesterday-Today-And-Tomorrow bush is alive with flowers of white and two shades of purple, where just the other day it was bare branches.
One day, when you get home from work, the whole garden greets you with an almost overwhelming wave of gorgeous smell. "Welcome home, look what we've been doing!".
It starts to get too hot in the office by about lunchtime, so you can take off your woolen blazer, your Witch's shawl, your leather Pit-Bull jacket.
There are green blades of grass amongst the brown ones, and the roses are covering themselves with new, dark green and glossy leaves.
Ah yes, Spring has not only come, but has settled in again. Your soul breathes out a breath of relief; a breath that was held all through the long, dry, dusty and cold Winter.
Then, sometime after the Equinox, you come down with such a fever that it's hard to make it through the day without snapping like an aged dragon at your co-workers. Your wrists and ankles pain with the forerunners of that elderly arthritis, just waiting for you, up ahead in the years. You go to bed early with a glass of lemon and honey, thanking the tree and the bees, only to crawl through terrifying vistas of wastelands running behind your house, of broken teeth uselessly grinding,and of panes of glass warped and running through your elevated-temperature brain. The next day it's really difficult to get up, so you sleep another 4, 5 hours, then read your email and type a little nonsense on your blog. But the sweat is pouring through your skin and into your pyjamas, dampening your hair and causing a miasma of unwellness to drift through the house.
You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I'm not a true child of the African heat. So I rejoice with the Swallows when they return, swooping close to the buildings, and with the Sparrows clustering close around the hose with a small leak in it, fluffing feathers and having a regular party - but I know that Spring, despite its almost inevitable 'flu, is one of the best of times indeed in the Wheel of the Year, for me - the other one being Autumn, when we can pull out of the heat and riot of fecundity with a sigh.
So for now, I'm headed back to a somewhat damp bed; there to sleep some more, in the hope that the nightmares of illness have passed this way and have now gone.

"Where The Hope Of America Lies.."

2011-09-26T06:54:00.000+02:00

Chris Hedges on Occupy Wall Street

"They want us to remain passive and to remain frightened. And as long as we remain passive and frightened, entranced with their electronic hallucinations, we are not a threat.”

Ostara 2011

2011-09-23T08:16:00.000+02:00

"Thee we invoke, O Light of Life;
Be thou a bright flame before us,
Be thou a guiding star above us,
Be thou a smooth path beneath us"

A wonderful Equinox to all - Vernal in the South, Autumnal in the North.
Blessed Be the Balance of the Dark and the Light.

Graph: Found here

FTL

2011-09-23T06:05:00.001+02:00

Watching this with interest.

Long scientific story short: a beam of neutrinos received at the underground lab near L'Aquila in Italy (yes, where they had those earthquakes a couple of years ago) from the CERN facility in Switzerland seems to have contained at least one particle which moved above the speed of light.

The fallout from this, if the experimental results are verified, include the necessity of reformulating the Special Theory of Relativity, since some of the equations would blow up if a particle's velocity exceeded the speed of light.

Also on the chopping block and directly related to the SToR equations, is the assumption that the speed of light is a constant and would remain the same for observers in any frame of reference - an assumption upon which a major load of Physics is predicated today.

It's an interesting and exciting finding, but we shall have to wait for corroboration.

Pic: That's actually the San Grosso Lab, not a painting by Alex Grey

No Gods, No Masters

2011-09-22T14:13:00.000+02:00

Now there's a concept which makes me wrinkle my nose in distaste - mastery.

It's very much a part of the Wetiko culture - a core concept, perhaps.
Mastery over the planet, 'nature', women, children, workers, fields of study, animals,instruments, feelings, thoughts, ideas...yourself. Somehow this culture has embedded in it the principle that a true human exhibits, or at the very least aspires to domination over some subject. Which turns everything into objects.

The only real sin may be thought of as just this - treating others as objects. And that's precisely what thousands of years of patriarchally-driven culture has inculcated into us all - the need to master, to control. To subjugate something or someone else to yourself is, I submit, to miss in large part the point of being Here.

For standing in the flow is not to block it. And Being in the Tao is not to oppose it. it all flows, and you with it. Unless you have bought into the Wetiko culture completely, you need to swim with Life rather than try to command the tides. To allow your entire soul to enter into participation with the mystery and ecstasy of the rush of water, the swirl of waves, the swell and fall of gravity.

Even our gods are not our masters. Hecate Herself is not in charge, even when She overshadows me: She merely has access to more dimensions than this human does at present. But She and I are co-Being. Together, making and shaping and creating and destroying...For all Time.

So no, my fellows. No gods, no masters. No gurus, no saints-in-charge, no over-demons and no control. Just Being, now and always, to the very ends of the Cosmos.

Dreaming Death

2011-09-22T08:31:00.000+02:00

Death paid me a visit last night, in my dreams.

And Death was a dualistic Being of male and female; brother and sister.

Promising to heal me, Sister Death held me in a long body hug. Brother Death smiled upon me.

And then they took me away in a car.

Perhaps this is the Equinox impinging itself upon my dark and dreaming mind in terms of light and dark, yin and yang, female and male. I don't actually know.

But, as usual by now, there is no fear, no anxiety.

How would I greet my own personal death, should it find me this season? In the same way I greet the Autumnal Equinox, but reversed: arms outspread and Falling Forwards. Into the White Water.

Nudged Into Matter

2011-09-21T04:46:00.000+02:00

The poor trees which the building managers, Amdec, had moved to install waterproofing on the second floor deck were eventually thrown away yesterday.

You may recall the way in which one of the Cape Ash trees,lollipoped to within an inch of its life, had collaborated with the resident Sparrows to save their nest.

My dearest colleague, The Moffie, called me inter-office shortly after lunch in a distraught state. He had witnessed the disposal of all the trees - which had been left waterless in large pots for weeks - and the Sparrow nest with them. The birds, he said, were flying around with insects in their beaks,looking for their nest, which now could not be found.

My heart suffered major hits. Joining The Moffie on the balcony an hour later, I assured him that whoever was responsible for these life-negative decisions would, sooner or later, also find themselves dying without a home, their children having been thrown out with the trash.
I don't just believe this - I am aware of it as a truth as deep and meaningful as our own god-ness.

For one of the decisions we make when we consent to Fall again into Matter is to allow the ineradicable learning of physical experience to school us. We teach others and we learn from others, just as those semi-conscious building managers are about to be taught by their actions towards some trees and Sparrows. So are we all. It's a major part of why we're here. God teaching God, divinity learning from divinity.

For only incarnate matter can inflict these vicious wounds upon itself.
And, hurting and being hurt, we move toward a state of greater comprehension of Cosmos, and Godhead, and why it is we are here, now.

Pic: How magnetic fields nudge matter into black holes

Op: BankerBlackFax

2011-09-19T10:19:00.002+02:00

Op: BankerBlackFax
Hello Citizens of the world.
AS you may or may not know, many of us are trying to fight corruption
by protesting on Wall St. WE are tired of the corrupt bankers destroying
the world with their unjust policies, we are tired of the Federal Reserves
unconstitutional ways, and we are tired of remaining silent.WE are all fighting
for different reasons, but we are all fighting as one. We all thank you for
your continuing support, and we ask those who can not make it down to Wall St.
to help us with Op: BankerBlackFax.
The Plan:
Starting when the Stock Market opens at 9:30am ET until it closes at 4pm ET
we ask you to send the following images, to the numbers listed below, using the
Fax services also listed below.
Continue doing this as long as Operation Occupy Wall Street goes on.
The Goal:
Disrupt the service of the following banks, untill our voices are heard.
We are Anonymous
We are Legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
We told you to expect us Wall St.
BE SURE TO USE A VPN ALONG WITH THE PROXY SERVICES LISTED BELOW!!!!

IMAGES TO FAX:
http://images.alphacoders.com/811/1280-960-81119.jpg
http://files.myopera.com/Spaceomega/albums/533507/Anonymous.png
FAX TO:
NYSE
New York
Wall Street
Fax:(212) 510 3566
Fax:(212) 656 2126
Federal Reserve
Fax: (212) 720-8707
Fax: (212) 720-5686
Fax: (212) 720-8189
Fax: (212) 720-6331
The Goldman Sachs Group
Fax:(212) 902 9316

NASDAQ
Washington DC
Fax: (202) 912 3199

Free Fax Services:
http://faxzero.com/
http://www.gotfreefax.com/
http://www.myfax.com/free/

http://fax.1888usa.com/
List of Proxies:
http://www.proxysites.net/

MUCH LOVE ANONS!!!
-Wolfgang

Plus..

2011-09-13T12:06:00.000+02:00

And in further hopeful news, Henry Okah will take the Correctional Services Minister to court.

Bloody well right. This man has been detained without trial since February. I thought we were done with that sort of nonsense in this country?

Imagine

2011-09-13T08:49:00.000+02:00

"George Monbiot, in his Guardian article, asks some important questions about living without industrial electricity: “How do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways—not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels?” But he reaches an illogical conclusion: “The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production.” Actually, no. The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment you fall out of love with the whole economy, an economy that is systematically exploitative and destructive, an economy that is killing the planet. "

Derrick Jensen making thoughtful, soul scouring points.

A Silver Bike And Standing In The Observatory

2011-09-12T15:24:00.000+02:00

The weekend's major geomagnetic storm (I've never seen the kp index reach 7 before) may, or then again may not, have had an effect upon my internal vision centres.

On Saturday afternoon, napping on my bed in the strong Spring sunshine, I found myself standing within an ancient courtyard. It was a couple of hours before the dawn, and looking up the height of a dark stone wall, I saw a perfectly circular opening outlining the night sky. I felt the slight chill of the air, heard the hush of the early morning hours, and I knew I was in some kind of observatory. The whole scene bore an aura of wonder and deep, deep beauty.

Sunday night, I dreamt of a motorbike which was about to be mine. It was neither very large nor very small; neither a superbike nor a moped. But it fitted me exquisitely. There was a broad, comfortable seat for the driver, and one slightly different in shape for the passenger. The bum-box was just big enough for all my stuff. The entire bike was bright, reflective silver.

I'm still trying to decide whether increased geomagnetic activity affects my dreams and visions, and these next few years seem likely to provide me with a great deal of data.

Pic: Kokino Observatory, Macedonia. No, I've never heard of it before. But the vision seemed to have been located not too far from here.

The Sight of Starving Children

2011-09-09T17:25:00.000+02:00

I am, among the many labels which can be slapped upon my person, an Anarchist – or at least, a supporter of Anarchism.

This is not as alarming as some people may find it – and not at all surprising to anyone who reads this blog . But the fact is, I find people's understanding of the word Anarchist to be a bit lacking, at times. What Anarchism means, to me, is a critical view – sometimes harshly critical – of the human social systems based upon dominance hierarchies.
Which means, pretty much, all human societal systems at this time, worldwide.
The country I live in is highly patriarchal, and thus subsists on a dominance hierarchy of male-over-female in practice, although our laws are much more enlightened than our people. Perhaps where you live it's the other way around. But all societies in this early 21st century CE on this planet depend in some measure upon control of some parts of the populace by other parts, be it the police controlling the citizenry, the males controlling the females, or, most commonly and in tandem with one or more other hierarchies,the rich controlling the poor.

Here's a very telling piece about just that mindset. When confronted by a picture of a starving child, the woman just feels “blessed”. Whatever she means by that.
I have every sympathy with the writer yelling at the poor victim of our systems, but we have to realise that she probably believes that her answer was spiritually enlightened.
Thank God that you're not oppressed into starvation? What a dangerous way of thinking.

The fact is, we are all enculturated into these systems of control, from the very moment of our birth. We are brought up to believe in a multitude of disguises for the global oppression of humans, animals and plants everywhere.
The religious codes of the Bible, Koran and Torah are pretty masterful pieces of synthetic myth-making which we almost unconsciously integrate into our patterns of thought and hence behaviour, all our lives. Yes, synthetic myths. Or counterfeit, as Joseph Campbell preferred to describe it.
The obviously phony stories of a male creator and the fall of mankind through an act of female disobedience is such a striking attempt to discredit the ancient, and more logical, worship of the female deity that I don't need to say too much more about it. Any one of us could uncover the lies, if we thought about it.
That these counterfeit spiritualities have become mainstream is not to our credit at all. Yet still, even among those bright souls who have examined the major religions of the world and found them wanting, there is still more than a vestige of dominance hierarchy thinking running as a baseplate beneath most of our institutions, be they social, business or governmental.
I only have to remember the attitude of my family of origin – a family which considered people uneducated in the prevailing systems as somehow lacking, or of lesser standing. It could be book learning, or amounts of little green pieces of paper, or ancestry, or something else, but the defining lines are always there. You are this, we are that – and that is better than this, obviously.

It's an attachment to labelling people which is an insidious part of it all as well. I can talk -look at the description of my blog, where I slap at least a couple of defining labels on myself, as if that makes me more real...or more something, anyhow.

Anarchism would have us lose the labels.
It doesn't mean, as many citizens seem to fear, violent looting in the streets as a matter of course. Although that may well happen as people start to wake up to their imprisonment within these toxic, highly oppressive systems.
Anarchy doesn't equate to chaos. It means,rather, an appreciation that we are not the labels we have plastered all over each other, that dominance hierarchies are not the natural order of things, whatever our encultured brains seem to be telling us, and that there are – almost certainly – other ways of Being in this great, beautiful, field of Life which we have put our Souls together to create.

Do you remember? You were certainly there, too.

Pic: Found Here

Read Obligation

2011-09-07T07:30:00.001+02:00

...by Scylla

"Unless you have to. Unless the spirits demand it. Unless you have no other option: Do not walk the Witch-path. You'll come out the other side mad, dead, or a shaman. And them ain't the best odds. "

Well said Scylla. Who is not, I might add, my dog of the same name.

But also:

You could come out all three. Mad, Dead and a Shaman.

Just saying.

Pic: Found somewhat inexplicably here

Taranis Presents His Garden

2011-09-04T17:35:00.000+02:00

Hi.
My name is Taranis - yes, the Celtic God of Thunder stole mine.
I'd like to take you on a quick tour of my garden, now that Spring has finally gotten underway. From the comfort of my rug, of course.

The lemons have been growing all Winter, but I think they look better against the blue of the Spring sky. Not that I like lemons of course.

The Winter Jasmine smells really strong, and sweet. Like the honey I'm not supposed to eat, but which I can coax out of Mum by sitting and drooling at her.

Here's the Clivia - the ones I didn't dig out of the ground have made a great show, don't you think?

Some more of the Jasmine, this lot on the East side, twining among the Parasol Plant.

..and finally,more Jasmine, part of a giangantic Cycad, and the bare boughs of the Monkey Thorn, in which the Weavers are busy making their nests, as they do every year.

Now, we're just waiting for the Lily bulbs which Dad divided and replanted to settle in and start flowering. Otherwise, I'm going to dig up some more of them,and blame it on Scylla.

Mighty Lady of My Heart

2011-09-02T20:51:00.000+02:00

I should really be getting to bed.
But the crescent moon has been calling and I've been making my obeisance, in earnest and with a full heart of Love, to Hecate's bright symbol for the first time in a couple of years.

Today we went to Pretoria, taking two of our witnesses with us, to the High Court.
It was fun.
We have four expert witnesses, three "ordinary" witnesses, and a financier who is not herself a plaintiff, on paper.

The other side is nearly wetting itself. They moved to have an amendment made at the very last minute-they want to change their plea to "self defense", thereby throwing their employee to the wolves and leaving him adrift in the tides of the law. Needless to say, back at the House of Ethics (that's me!) we are taking a very dim and somewhat sneering view of this show of rank cowardice, venality and lack of responsibility.
It all means that we have to take another court date -probably in 6 months to a year - and come back and do it again.
I almost laughed aloud when I heard the change of defense plea. This was one stupid move on their part. And what, you are asking, was their original defense? Hah - they didn't have one.
That's right, they didn't have one.

I can't go into detail, but I can say that this defence is easy enough to knock over with a bloody feather.

So, we're weary, emotionally exhausted, and winding down. I think it may all end much sooner than the return court date, and so do many of the participants. Charybdys, Chippy and Bart - you have indeed won, my beloved friends. And I thank you all - all over the world - for your support, good wishes and messages of encouragement. You really have made a difference.

And now, I feel the Wheel turning so strongly; turning my soul and my Being back to a place it once stood in, not so long ago. For by means only a mystic would not laugh at, my Matron Goddess and strong protector has called me back into Her service. Today, I am once more a Priestess of Hecate.

May Her name call forth Resonance on high and from the depths,mighty Lady of my heart.

Photo: by Wade Clark

It Feels Like Letting Go

2011-08-31T07:26:00.002+02:00

Well, this is interesting.

With just 2 days to go before the Supreme Court case against RSS Security, I have discovered within myself a total loss of trust in anything human.
I'm not particularly angry - just infinitely, quietly, sad.

It appears very clear to me that trustworthiness, honesty and ethics are almost completely absent from most of the human animals around me at any given time.

I'm not sure why I'm surprised - given the nature of the insanity bred into our culture. But self-serving, greedy, grasping people seem to be the norm now. It's grab what you can to advantage yourself.

I've discovered a detachment I didn't know I was capable of: a total letting-go of all investment in outcome. It's curiously liberating, to know that I've done my best out of Love and commitment, and that other people - well, they are under no control of mine, and it has ceased to make me anxious in any way whatsoever. What happens will happen, and it doesn't make any difference either way. On Friday, win or lose, I know I've put what I needed to put into this action.

And, by the way, those sparrows in the last post? Somehow, when the tree was moved, despite being roughly handled and tilted every which way but upside-down, the nest remained firmly in the tree. This is not due to the efforts of the humans involved, apparently. It seems that tree and birds contrived to keep the nest safe.

Here's another curious layer: I feel fairly heavily overshadowed by Hecate at the moment. She seems to not expect too much of human animals, either - which shouldn't be surprising , seeing as She and We created each other. But it's another facet to my odd, rock-bottom despondence which doesn't feel like pain or fear in the tiniest particle.

It feels like letting go and saying: Thy Will and Mine - Our Divine Will - be done, now, Lady. There is nothing further to strive for.

Pic: Found Here

A Strange Feeling of Displacement

2011-08-29T15:43:00.000+02:00

I feel almost unutterably sad right now.

There's a tightness in my stomach and a dizziness in my head. Also a vague nausea.

I find this quite interesting, because maybe as recently as five years back, would not have had quite this reaction to the things I have seen today.

At work, there is a balcony, on which we smoke. This balcony overlooks a second-floor patio, complete with tables, chairs and umbrellas against the sun - and three poor, bedraggled Cape Ash trees planted in a narrow drainage ditch running around one side.

The company who have been leasing the second floor are moving out, and the patio is being re-waterproofed, lest it drizzle upon the heads of the mining-house lawyers downstairs from them.
(I cannot tell you how that prospect fails to fill me with alarm - wet mining-house lawyers deserve most things which reduce their self importance.)

So, the trees are being dug up - cramped root system and all- and planted in big pots, temporarily I think.

Meanwhile, the sparrows who have made their nests for years in these trees -the sparrows who are my constant little friends of a cold morning - are sitting metres up the building, shouting and crying in alarm.

I feel despondent with the knowledge that most people see nothing wrong with any of this - the cramped, lollipop ed planting of great spreading African trees, the subsequent uprooting of them and the displacement of the birds.

But I feel as if I've been sobbing for hours.

For Hecate Phosphorous, Propylaea, Trivia

2011-08-27T14:01:00.000+02:00

Flame within the black, spangled rose.
Thy fire my beacon and guide.

Rise, ether, upon the jasmine's spring perfume,
Infuse every part of my being and then
Infuse the world.

Stand beckoning at the tripartite way - and we, divided for Love's sake
Flow down each lane, until
Swarming into the sea
Are One again.

No Rose art Thou, but the Fire within it
No Jasmine, but the Scent it issues
No Road art Thou, but by Thy Being
Bring Road and Way into our ken.

Heart Girt With A Serpent

2011-08-24T15:45:00.000+02:00

Behold! in my beauty how joyous Thou art,
O Snake that caresses the crown of mine heart!
Behold! we are one, and the tempest of years
Goes down to the dusk, and the Beetle appears.
Pandemonaeon

Imagination

2011-08-18T07:58:00.002+02:00

Pied Crow is circling the million dollar slum known as Melrose Arch in search of food. A crumb from the bakery, perhaps – a morsel of meat from the restaurant. She sees me standing on the balcony and changes direction, swooping low directly towards me. A low caw and she veers off again, showering the blessings of wild intelligence from her wings. She says: I am with you. And that’s enough, as Monica Richards sings, for now.

The gate opens with a rattle of pebbles against metal. We’re home again after a day at the salt mines. The Yucca points its totally non-sha chi towards me, the lemon trees branches bear near to the ground with juicy fruit; the thug-of-a-rose swarms the wooden pagoda in complete, viscious-thorned abandon. Love wells up from the ground and from each and every green living thing. I am enclosed in warm rapture and a sense of being gently, continuously, abided with.

The black and white dogs yawn and stretch, tails thumping or helicopter-rotating as is each animal’s wont. Two muzzly faces are planted on the edge of the mattress, staring at me with adoring eyes. I reach out both hands and rub their furry lovingness.

And yes – I am imagining it all.

But I am also, then, imagining the starry constellations around the Earth.

I am imagining this broad tarmacked highway and every one of these roaring, belching vehicles upon it.

I am imagining the flat-bottomed grey clouds which hang like a presentiment of Armageddon above the Nedbank building, heralding snow, proclaiming wind, generating cold.

I am imagining the smell of roast coffee beans from the bistro downstairs, and the slant of sunlight upon the shopping precinct outside my window. Imaginal, too, are my snuffling, sickly colleagues fairly bravely coming in to work because somebody needs to do it now that we have lost about half our department.

And the twin flat screen monitors I look into as I type these words? Figments of my imagination as well.

Much gratitude to Christina for clarifying the issue so well.

Pic: found here

Shamanic Dismemberment- An Answer

2011-08-17T07:16:00.001+02:00

"What's the difference between a "shamanic dismemberment", and a "more" typical person who is completely destroying and rebuilding their life?" asks my friend David over at SA-Essay.

I'm glad he didn't say 'normal' person, at least.

A Shamanic Dismemberment for a member of a traditional or indigenous society, where Shamanism is still a part of everyday life is of course anticipated by the initiate. In that way we can say that it is a consciously undertaken process.

Most of us in the civilised world however are so messed up that we have disconnected from our roots, and the roots of all Life on the planet. Therefore we do not often consciously seek a Shamanic Initiation, let alone anticipate the Dismemberment which precedes it.

I know I certainly didn't. That is to say, my little-self ego had no idea of what I was going through. That my relationship with alcohol and drugs had become deadly was symbolic of my relationship to life and to the planet which sustains it. I was nearly dead several times during the process - but it is certain that had I not been Dismembered I would not now be here talking to you.

I now know that some part of myself - the larger part which can indeed call itself God - was aware of everything as it happened and also before it happened.

But my Dismemberment was not made with the agreement and knowledge of my ego, my 'present' self. It couldn't have been,as there was no way in hell that the selfish, stupid,civilisation-raddled person who was me at that stage could understand anything which was not to its own immediate survival.

And yet, it allowed itself to be destroyed, for the birth of the authentic self.

I'm saying that only looking back on the process can most of us understand what has happened to us. It may be that we deliberately give meaning to something which otherwise would seem ugly, nightmarish and without a shred of worth to the wider world. We create the Dismemberment in retrospect by the meaning we endow it with - and this by the way we live our lives thereafter and the amount of conscious awakening we strive for.

Not everyone calls this a Shamanic Dismemberment, either. A Conversion, Salvation, Hitting Rock Bottom, The Dark Night of the Soul - these are all good names for it. But in this case, a Shaman arose from the destruction of the outer shell and not, for example, a Born Again Christian or a reformed alcoholic, and so I call it a Shamanic Dismemberment.

One life may not be all important in the grander scheme of things...or is it?

It's more than possible that Life needs every single organism which is capable of transcending the hypnotised state of modern life to do so. This is a time of some urgency, after all, when we decide as a collective whether to carry Life forward or to end it all here. Guess which decision I made?

Pic: Lexie Sundell

Never Let You Go

2011-08-14T21:48:00.001+02:00

Sunday evening and I'm fairly exhausted, despite never having set foot off my land all weekend.

Our legal team - the advocate and the attorney, that is - came around this morning to view the scene of the crime and talk to our witnesses some more. Some very interesting facts have come to light in the past year concerning the murder of our 3 canine companions by an armed reaction officer employed by RSS Security Services back on the last day of 2008. We know we will obtain justice for our friends -it's just been such a long road. However, I would do it all over again in an instant, and even though, as the saying goes, the wheels of the gods grind exceeding slow, they also grind exceeding fine. We go to court in 3 weeks' time.

I don't think it's just this-and the hilarity of trying to recognise our legal people without their Lawyer Suits on- that has me wakeful and strangely emotional way past my normal bedtime, though.

There are other energies afield which I'm picking up and interacting with pretty damned heavily right now. They seem to be connected to Time and Love and the Tragedy of Women in the Patriarchy, and all in all,my second chakra is taking a pounding. There's a tender vortex of what feels like wounded energy sitting right behind my stomach. That part of me which connects to the universe through the archetypal colour orange flared up earlier this evening and burst aflame, so it felt.
Is this the normal place of weeping for women in the wisdom phase of their lives? I feel a little like all the tears that female humans have shed down the eons are echoing within my womb right now. How very odd.

Blood-orange tears or no, I have a week to attend to coming up, and a partner who has had to rush into the centre of Joburg to arrest one of his officers for carrying a firearm at work, so I sit up and doodle-type upon my blog.

The wind rose to a brief roaring gale an hour or so ago, flung the (finally) reddening leaves of the Cape Ash all around the yard and rushed off to bother some other locality. But the genii loci of this place are reaching out tendrils of warmth and affection to myself, Scylla and Taranis, lulling us in their golden-broken-through-with-green arms. Telling us without words that Winter has indeed fallen away at last, and the heart of the land is quickening once more.

Be still, and you can hear what the land is saying. Quiet your several egos and She will shout into your mind. Open your connections and She will never, ever, let you go.

Pic: Nikos Hadjikyriakos Ghikas

Never Mind The Reasons

2011-08-11T06:44:00.001+02:00

Hey, how many of us remember growing crystals in a saucer in school?

You would be given a bunch of copper sulphate, or something, and if you made up a solution of this with a little water - and made the solution up just right - you could stick a piece of string into it and grow crystals all along it. Magic.
The key of course was the solution. It had to be super saturated. And then, anything of large enough dimension which was placed into it would act as a flash-point for all those copper sulphate molecules hanging around.

I guess we have something like that in many, if not most, places in the civilized world today.

Take a population of humans, and divide them so that some - a very small number - are super rich and the rest either dirt poor or just getting by. Increase this division so that the super rich get even richer, and end up controlling most of the resources that the entire human race needs to live. The pool of poor people increases, and those who were just getting by become poor, too.

Subject all humans to the machinations of a marketing and media organism which has as its one objective hypnotising people into believing that owning material goods equals power and worth, while at the same time making sure that the poor do not ever have enough nutritious food to eat - substitute junk food made from real junk, and watch those minds fail to grow and thrive.

Make sure that your media/marketing machine keeps the carrot of aspiration dangling- allow the people to fixate on the possibility of becoming themselves one of the elite.
Add to this mix a class drawn almost exclusively from the non-elite whose function is to protect the power, wealth and property of the elite. They may not think this is what they're doing - after all, they're humans just like us, trying to stay afloat - but that's what it comes down to: the police in every nation are the guard dogs for the property and privilege of the rich. No wonder police men and women everywhere are so stressed and conflicted that they often end up shooting someone. And so provide the catalyst for the crystals.

Watching the world catch fire one city at a time is not fun. My son is living in England, but I feel no fear for him. I'm wondering why he isn't out on the streets himself actually. And moaning about criminals who try to rob my loved ones is not helpful to anyone.

I feel no fear for myself, either. It's happening, as it was bound to happen, and my chief feeling is that yes, it's past time that this Wetiko civilization was put to the flames. It won't stop the destruction of the Earth and much of its biological life, however.

The people rioting in Egypt and Lybia and London and Athens are huge allies to the planet.
Never mind the reasons.

And I - and you, too - are incredibly powerful, with the sort of power never dreamed of in such trash as The Secret and only envisioned by the elite themselves in their darkest nightmares.
Go, humans.

Ugly

2011-08-08T11:22:00.000+02:00

Standing in the 11 O'Clock sun, basking in it, communing with a poor caged tree, I was startled out of reverie by pounding feet on the tarmac as a jogger hurried by.

"There's nothing more ugly than a beautiful woman behind an ugly cigarette" he yelled at me - I quote verbatim.

I threw back my head and laughed at him. No other response was necessary.

For me, tobacco is sacred, and I treat it reverentially.
For me, nothing is uglier than tarmac and monstrous cars rushing by, between concrete and brick buildings housing the cells of gangster capitalism.
For me, nothing is uglier than that poor, caged, symbolic, suffering tree.

Imbolc 2011

2011-08-08T06:24:00.000+02:00

A Sagitarius Moon at just over half-full called me outside after sunset.
I stood in the ritual space looking up through the branches at the moonlight silvering the dark green leaves of the Giant Cycad and it was as if the sentinel trees around this intensely holy space had called me just to show off their beauty.

I'm feeling that it's still a bit chilly at night, so I went inside and loaded my altar with silver candles of many shapes and sizes, a pair of ivory candles looming over all. Their flames flicked across the silver and crystal like the Moon was licking the Cycad outside. I felt the fire in the Mother's belly, and was content.

Yes, it's me late to the feast as usual. Those of us who celebrate the astonomical Cross Quarters are always the last ones to put their shoulders to the Wheel, therefore we have only to nudge it, mostly, to get it to spin really well.

So a very merry Imbolc (or Fire Down Below) to all my Southern friends and readers. And to those in the North, a happy Lughnasadh!

Guide Of Souls

2011-08-04T06:36:00.000+02:00

The Guide of Souls is with us.

He's always with us,of course, but now as his footsteps slow and start coming back to where we wait, we are far more aware of him.

Looking up, I see the Pied Crow swoop to a landing on the cellphone mast. He fixes me with one eye, leans into the wind and caws at me. My own bright and dark messenger of the gods.

Hermes, Toth, Odin, Corvus Albus. He leads off in the sky and guides our soul. Until the day he stops, looks around and sees us paused back there, somewhere behind him.
He walks back to us, slowly at first, gathering speed.

What is it you've forgotten, little one? He asks. What would you like another look at, another chance to do over and do right?

Mercury Retrograde. Inspiration by Robert Wilkinson

EMail Spoofed

2011-08-02T06:47:00.000+02:00

My email at the Hotmail site has been hacked and the address spoofed.
So, good friends and other contacts, please be aware that anything apparently emanating from my address since yesterday is not, in fact, from me.
If you see what I mean..

Heart Decoder

2011-07-30T07:33:00.000+02:00

Working for the fatal downfall of the Patriarchy - which is just another name for Civilisation, in my book - has many,many options open.
One of the ways to get into the guerrilla war against The Machine is to open yourself completely to yourSelf, as much as you can.
Opening your heart chakra (decoder) is one of the most beautiful things a human being can do to this end.

Here's Neil Kramer, from the ARC convention last year, with more to say (and a more succinct way of saying it):

Archaic/Tribal Consciousness

2011-07-26T06:47:00.000+02:00

When Anders Behring Breivik set the bomb in Oslo and when he opened fire upon a group of youths at a camp, what was he thinking?

His statement that he wanted to save Norway from a Muslim invasion has a ring of truth to it - or at least a ring of one truth, perhaps the top layer of truth in his mind.
I've never been good at psychoanalysing people, but by gods I do want to fit myself into their minds from time to time, if only to gain further insight into what this Wetiko culture has become, and is becoming.

That Breivik's 'level' was firmly set at Tribal is a bit of a help. The integrity and purity of the tribe is so important to some humans that they will not hesitate to think along the lines of violence against the Outsiders.

That othering of the great majority of the rest of us is, I admit, pretty offensive. I've run up against this kind of thinking among the White Pride bozos. But what, really, are they thinking? What convinces them that their cause is so righteous that the cold blooded murder of scores of people is justified and heroic?

I fear that the heroic aspect is the key here. This man, like many men and a few women in this careening vessel of deepening sickness, have not evolved beyond the Red level. Their tribe, their people, their volk are the be all and end all. It is a cause to which they can give their passion and their lives. It is a pathetic place to be, but how much hope is there that this level of evolution will die out before the end of the century? Looking around me-and remember, I'm in Africa-I see very little light on the upward turn of the spiral.

This kind of being is partly what gives the Wetikos-in-Chief their tremendous power. Pandering to fear-based reactionism gives them a great and violent support base.
Do we have to just sit back, then, observe it all and sigh for the lack of evolutionary mobility among large parts of the human species? I hate to say this, but maybe, yes.
The bottom end of the spiral is heavily weighted against us in numbers and sheer ferocity of emotion. Can we afford to wait it out until these atavisms are dead or ineffective?

I don't know the answers at this time. I would dearly love someone to shed some light on the questions, though.

Pic: Found on this blog

Listen

2011-07-22T20:26:00.001+02:00

Have a great weekend, wherever you are.

Love your companions - animal,mineral, vegetable and spirit - and love your eternal spirit.

Breathe.Listen - can you hear it?

There Would Go I

2011-07-21T19:32:00.000+02:00

Joburg, Joburg, Joburg. Thou seething cauldron of psychoses. How it strains the human animal to live within you.

This afternoon, in broad daylight, Warren came close to being hijacked. He was coming off work, coming to pick me up, and he was stopped at a traffic light in the city centre, light on red, a bus behind him.

Out of nowhere there came two youngsters, apparently unarmed and begging. One approached his car from the rear, one from the side. Warren kept his eyes on both of them, as you do, in Joburg. Suddenly, the one on the driver's side produced a gun from the back of his jeans and leveled it at Warren. Warren did, in my opinion, precisely the right thing - he put the accelerator pedal down and skipped the traffic light.

My partner of 12 years says he wanted to grab the armed youth and drag him across the intersection with him. While I sympathise fully, I'm very glad he didn't, but rather escaped to circle back, fetch the cops,and find out why his guards, who were supposed to be patrolling that corner, were nowhere in sight.

I nearly lost my beloved human companion this afternoon. The guards? They're unarmed, what can they do?
And the laaitjies, who apparently strolled into a nearby shebeen after being cheated of their prey?
Well, I can only take a flying guess at the level of desperation and dislocation from one's own human soul which enables a youngster to amble up to a perfect stranger in a car, in the middle of a busy afternoon, pull a gun on him and demand his valuables. For I can't think that they were after the car. No-one would put out a call for a 12 year old Daewoo. Even for the spare parts. No, it was almost certainly wallet, watch and cellphone they were seeking.

And this is by no means an unusual occurrence in dear Joburg. It happens many times a day. I can hope that, after the guards and police were put on notice, that the pair of robbers went elsewhere. I am entirely conflicted as to whether I hope they made a catch or not. For, appalled as I am that the potential violence of the desperately disenfranchised has struck so close to me, I cannot help but try to understand what depth of dissociation brings forth such acts in human people. It's a grey and black picture, indeed.

And there, but for the grace of something I am only now attempting to understand, these last dozen years, there, but for that luminous, ineffable grace, would most certainly go I.

Ancestral House

2011-07-18T08:18:00.000+02:00

The truce of silence between myself and one side of my ancestral lines has come to an end, and at my request last night they granted me a dream vision which has started to reopen communication between my maternal forebears and me.

The dream was vivid, bearing the unmistakable stamp of an ancestral communication, and this is how it went:

The house is large and multi storied. Odd passages run off here and there; staircases ascend and descend all over the place. No room is a regular shape and most of the stories exist on many split levels themselves. There are rooms I know I haven't visited in years - yet I know they are still within the house, somewhere. There are rooms I know I haven't seen before in this life, and rooms which have been radically renovated.
One of the rooms is actually a deep cave, lit by candles and torches in the walls, those walls also bearing busts and statuettes of goddesses. Before these, I bow.
The people I meet as I roam the old house are each significant.
The house has grounds, as well. One heavily tree-line promenade is overshadowed by a towering church with steeple. I recognise it, and mark the attitude of my maternal line to it.

Much food for thought here - and I will be chewing it over for a while. But meanwhile, as I wake out of this dreamscape, I notice something else: that there is an einsteinian-style time dilation-and-contraction effect at work between the worlds of waking and dreaming. In the land of waking, each dream seems to last about 12 seconds. Yet in the land of dreams, this can be a period of 12 hours or more.
Thus, applying Special Relativity to these two states of consciousness, it seems as if the dreaming state is analogous to the resting frame of reference...and of course it is, as dream states are that much close to the Ground State, the Foundation of all Being, and that is perhaps the ultimate rest-frame-of-reference that we have.

Pic: An ancestor from the other side of my line

Talking To Myself

2011-07-15T04:46:00.000+02:00

Waiting for Warren to pick me up after work yesterday evening - enjoying a smoke in the company of 'my' tree - I was hailed from behind. I turned to see a young man of Indian extraction, willowy and fey, greeting me. Not by name,mind you, yet I still felt as if my name had indeed been uttered. Odd. I felt that flash of instant but fuzzy recognition, and at first thought that this was somebody I'd worked with in the past - somebody whose name I just could not, for the moment, remember.

But no. It rapidly became clear that, on one level, I had never seen this young man before in this life, and at the same time I did know him, had known him all my life.
He wanted taxi fare into Joburg, and without hesitation I searched the last of my coins from my purse. I also offered him a cigarrette, which he took with every sign of gratitude. He sat under the tree and we smoked, and I saw that in his mien which let me know his immediate past history as well as his probable future, in a flash, as if it were all written there in that exquisitely fine boned face.

Without a moment's hesitation I found myself assuring him that he would be alright, as I had been. I relayed a brief outline of my own near death, lying on the streets of Joburg. This is not something I particularly tell to new-met strangers.

His face displayed to me all I needed to know. The death of hope, a desperate addiction, and the promise of a long hard fall from grace were all written there - although his clothes were neat and clean and new.

I promised him that he would come through the future - just as I had - and invited him not to believe my words, but to come tell me in a couple of years.
The tree listened, enrapt. The birds perched and gave ear.

And I realised, in this sudden meeting with this familiar stranger - who was now weeping silently behind his hand - that I had become that Gypsy woman who you meet on the road; the one who tells you your past, present and future. The one who gives you the strength to go on for just a few more miles, to your destiny.

Pic: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

Shadow Work For The Planet

2011-07-14T10:07:00.000+02:00

You sometimes wonder, don’t you, if Mother Gaia can handle the problems humans cause all on her own? And you see stuff like this , where tons and tons of heroic jellyfish shut down nuclear power plants in Scotland and Israel, and stuff like this, where turtles shut down a major airplane runway for whole minutes at a time(and although that was due more to human sensitivity to the turtles’ presence, who’s to say that humans’ sensitivity to non-human life is not also a guerrilla tactic of the mother? ) and think, hmm, AIDS, superbug gonorrhea , multi-drug-resistant TB….is the planet fighting back on Her own after all?

Well, apart from the fact that the Earth is a complex living system made up of so many interlocking cycles, rhythms and states of being that we can’t parse them all let alone see how exactly they all work, she is also a larger Being who is part of Us, the All, and so Her fighting back, or separate human groups and individuals fighting on her behalf, is really only Us fighting with Ourselves after all.

Note that this does not mean that everything is OK. Competition and cooperation go on all the time within the life which is the Cosmos, and we fight or cooperate with different parts of ourselves all the time – it’s what makes it all go tick- tock. But if you see a woman being raped around the corner, you don’t go “Oh that’s alright then, it’s just part of the All”..no indeed, you intervene on the woman’s behalf, even paying with your life if need be.

It’s about the fight within Us, and We need to continue to struggle for the best benefit of All. If that means we kill the polluters, hang the corporates and blow up the dam builders- then that’s what we do. Hanging back in a kind of transcendental bliss is not what Life is about. We fight. With ourselves. And we die, all the time. Because nothing is fore-ordained. It can all still end in tears, you know.

So I draw the parallel of ecosphere struggle with my own recent and ongoing shadow work.

I don’t tolerate all my demons and love them to death, you know. The five year old little girl full of rage at being a girl- her I let live, and love her into integration with my individuated self. But other demons which constitute the multi-voiced entity I do drag kicking and screaming into the light, and stake to death. I’m sorry, but I’m unable to deal gently with some of my shadow selves.After recognising them and dialoguing with them long enough to, hopefully, understand who they are and where they came from - I kill them dead.

And so should we with some of the shadow beings who make up the totality of this Gaian system – or even wider, this cosmic self – tolerance and loving kindness is not, I suggest, the way to deal with them.

Like the compassionate jellyfish, I think we should consider intervening with violence if necessary, in this struggle within Us for everlasting Life or fairly sudden and equally everlasting Death.

Myrrh and Coffee

2011-07-11T08:48:00.000+02:00

My home smells of myrrh and coffee this morning.

The brazier is lit and the percolator is running, dripping heated water through freshly ground beans with a touch of cinnamon and cocoa.

The panel heaters are skimming the chill off this morning - and damned if I don't remember as cold a winter as this one in Joburg - while the dogs curl in front of the bar heater, licking each other's paws and necks in a fine display of canine love.
I am an unusually fortunate person, to have this little house to heat and fill with coffee-and-myrrh aromas, and some might wonder what I ever did to find such apparent favour with the gods.

But all comfort comes at a price, this we know. And lately-well, for the past year or so in truth-I have been able to access my traumas, both suffered and perpetuated, precisely whenever I didn't wish to.

I've mentioned several times what's happening. My ability to shift into a deeply altered state of being has become almost easy. I ground, centre, draw down protection, call my deities, helping spirits and ancestors, settle in before the altar...and I'm in a state which can only be described as blissful. The apparent cause-and-effect here is to drive all my demons to the surface, screaming for attention.

Yes, I was warned. And honestly, I can't say I'd refuse this bargain if offered it a second time. I'm at a stage of the process of waking up, now, where the ego is becoming aware of what's happening, and is calling forth all its bag of tricks to get it to stop.

For the awakening of a true soul is almost always the death-or at least radical dismembering-of all the self the ego identifies with.
We are not our egos - any one of them - and to evolve into what we truly are is an interesting, and sometimes painful, process.

But now I must return my attention to this morning, as I have plumbers calling to see to a burst geyser (how is it these things always burst in the winter. Don't tell me, I think I know), and thus I also have complacent pitbulls to turn out into the frozen garden, huffing and complaining like lap dogs. Because the plumbers will almost certainly see my two friends as vicious man-eaters, and we can't have that now, can we?

Pic: What I'm listening to: The Machine In The Garden

From Stones...To Cacti

2011-07-08T07:35:00.000+02:00

How I wish I'd written this illuminating piece!

Think about how we are outnumbered by the non-dimorphic entities of the world. Think of Gaea not as a loving mother Goddess, but as an all-encompassing Both/And deity who is all things. Allow yourself to see the Divine as including all reproduction of all types, not having a specific form, but being manifest in everything, from stones to amoebas to helium to cacti.

But Lupa wrote it instead, today. I suppose it doesn't really matter which part of Us wrote the thing in the end - it got written.

Thanks, Lupa love.

Dick Head

2011-07-06T12:29:00.000+02:00

Here's Richard Dawkins coming across as a whiney, arrogant, self-important prick.

Pretty standard patriarchy, actually.

Pic: found here

Necessary Pain

2011-07-06T05:10:00.000+02:00

Occasionally, instead of connecting to the Cosmos and letting my mind dissolve into its Oneness for fifteen minutes when I've got home after a long day talking to computers, I allow myself a period of rage.

Sitting padmasama before my meditation altar with myrrh or benzoin heating in a brazier, I will, from time to time, let the images of past horrors arise, in all their gory detail. For I have an exceptionally gory past, and sometimes I let my mind deal with it on its own terms, rather than the world's.

These are not happy sessions. The angst and disturbance that remembering what a truly fucked up human I am capable of being - as we all are, make no mistake - is hardly likely to lend itself to blissful egoless connection with the All.

But it's necessary. The received wisdom is to have compassion for all, including,most emphatically, oneself. But it has never been easy to work through so many godsdamned demons.

Still and all, it's a task which must be accommodated, and I allow the memories and images to just flow, without attempting to stop them in their tracks, until they're done for the moment.

Acknowledging these demons, and their intertwining in my soul, their identity as very much a part of who I am this time around, allows me to move forward- slowly but inexorably -in the life's work of knowing Who This Is that resides in this body and this juncture of space and time.

And though I squirm - and come close to hating myself at times and for brief periods -I know this is good therapy, and required before I can even start to have that essential Love for the immanent deity I call myself. Which is in itself a prerequisite for knowing the Love and compassion which moves the sun and other stars.

Pic: Taranis knows all about it

Butterfly

2011-06-27T07:11:00.000+02:00

As I sit, cocooned in the warmth of my little cottage house with my canine friends, awaiting the arrival on this frosty morning of techies from my Internet Service Provider (and I really hope they can fix the speed which sees an email arriving 2 and a half days after sending it), I'm thinking about a reminder of my own mortality, and a conversation with friends which both took place last week.

The mortal reminder was early last week - Monday I think - when I was being pushed and harried a bit at work, and found myself in great pain from a spreading contraction of my chest. I got up and walked on the balcony for a bit, wondering if my unhealthy past and only somewhat healthier present had finally caught up with me, and I was having a heart attack.

And I realised in that moment that I was not quite prepared to die there, at work with these friendly strangers all around me, that the last sight my dying eyes would see was one of my colleagues, panicked and concerned. One of my Sparrow friends flew down at that moment and, perched upon the steel balcony railing, began to chirrup loudly and insistently almost into my face.
His feathers were fluffed to a degree that he resembled a brown and grey ball of life, with sound at its heart. And I smiled at him, knowing that, as far as last sights went, he would be a most welcome and comforting one indeed.

The other point of reflection for me took form during a casual conversation with friends on Saturday. Warren and I had been invited over as their first guests in their new (and first owned) house in southern Joburg. It's a lovely place, all airy and wooden-floored, built in the middle of the last century, if I don't miss my mark, and they purchased it for, as the saying goes, a song.

Since these friends are middle-aged working folks, with two almost-grown sons - one gay, and the other a super bright intuitively intelligent rugby player - I was happy for them that they had managed to buy their own place at last. It's sometimes not easy for white folks in this country, either.
Anyway, we were chatting about this and that, and I found myself in the middle of an explanation of how, as I see it, we are so unprepared as a culture to encounter our own, or anyone else's, death.

Death has indeed been hurried under the carpet in this society. Unlike birth, it is rarely celebrated with congratulations and joy, although song is a big feature of many black South Africans' funeral rites. Whites seem to know only how to be anguished and devastated.
And I was asking, is it right that we are taught by our parents and peers all about birth, to some degree, but nothing about death?

We don't know how to die.

As a journeyman Shaman, I have been privileged to take the death walk with a few transitioning souls. Right up to the point of exit I have accompanied them, and then turned and made my way back to this plane, joyful in heart and knowing that was one less concentration of energy left alone and lost. But mostly, we don't have a clue on what to do when our own turning point comes - or how to help anyone else over that final/first hurdle. It's just not spoken of, much less is it a subject of teaching, in this culture.

As far as I'm concerned, the plethora of strange objects seen in our skies over the past century, intensifying at the present time, is a sign that we are badly disconnected from our souls, both personal and collective. So disconnected that the only way they can get us to notice them is to appear as great rotating disks of light in the skies above our heads. Or triangles. Or 'space aliens' intent on abducting and interrogating us.

The symbol of freedom, even in this culture, is the butterfly. We need to learn how to acknowledge and handle our own metamorphoses, before those transitions start handling us. Or maybe, it's too late already.

Oh, and that heart attack fright? Very likely a combination of muscle-spasming cold, a cramped sitting position, and a touch of over stress. Now, just excuse me as I make the dash outside to hang up the washing. I'll be mighty grateful when this winter gives way.

I'm You, Too

2011-06-24T08:30:00.000+02:00

Just as I was slowly discovering that I am not who over 40 years of enculturation has taught me to believe I am - just in that smear of time, over a decade as we count it, my Ancestors have hit me with the knowledge that I am not who I thought I was on other, somewhat lesser levels.

This latter knowledge I am not, for the moment, at liberty to discuss - Trade Union negotiations have got nothing on my forebears' ability to hold a PowWow - but I feel free to talk about some of the former assumptions about who we are and how we fit in to this glorious universe.

I grew up and absorbed my training as a scientist at just that time in recent human history when we were starting to revise our world view big time. I grew with a vision of matter as solid, underlying, and separate from energy fields. Matter we could take apart to see what it was made of. A fully Newtonian reading of the cosmos, in fact.

It has taken me many decades and much altering of my souls' alignments to gradually accept a picture much closer to what, when we don't think too much, we know already - that there is no matter, it's all fields.

All one field, to be more precise. What we thought of as solid matter (or Earth-plane) is more like a condensation of energy in various loci. Our bodies - and all so called particles, down to the quarks - are densifications of the Field. Our knotted, contracted energy state.

I totally get that, now. Don't laugh that it has taken me more than 50 years....
For this week I have been dreaming that I was somebody else. Myself, but also another woman, whose history and circumstances were completely different to those I currently live with. I have awoken, twice now, with the knowledge that somehow I was that other woman...and then nearly dissolved into giggles because of course I'm her. I'm you, too.

Pic: found Here

Ave Sol Invictus

2011-06-21T07:06:00.000+02:00

Welcome back.

Pic found here

And Time Is Just Another Dimension

2011-06-20T06:24:00.000+02:00

Every weekday I both read, and do not read, the homily written in black felt tip pen on the glass walls of one of the exco's offices.

I don't read it on my way to the smokers' balcony and I do read it on the way back.

Do or do not - there is no try it says.

Yoda, Yoda, Yoda...tsk tsk tsk. That is not a particularly enlightened thing to say.

But we not only accept these little sound bites, we veritably build our world around them. These words put into the mouth of a supposedly wise fictional movie character are arrant nonsense. Yet we cement them into our world view, thereby giving them a reality and force out of all proportion to their ability to describe reality.
And they become for many people a reality all of their own - or a least a static brick in the wall of illusion we build for ourselves.

I am so tempted, every weekday, to make alterations in the scribed aphorism to bring it into closer alignment with Who We Really Are. Thus:

Do and do not - there is no duality.

Pic: It's a Bustard, isn't it?

..And In The Running..

2011-06-14T12:41:00.000+02:00

...for the stupidest quote by a physicist ever, Fermilab's Dmitri Denisov's memorable opinion on why the 'new particle' spike in the data of one collector was not found in the data of another:

"Protons and antiprotons don't know what detector they're colliding in."

Now, call me a reactionary, out-of-date ex-physicist if you like, but I'd have thought that the first and most obvious explanation would be precisely that - although re-couched as instrumental error.

For of course the particles 'see' a difference between the detectors. The detectors are in different physical locations, no? The experiment were run over different periods of time, not so? Possibly different local temperature, pizo-electrical fields...hell, even different colours of paint could affect the outcome.

But it seems today's particle physicists are so wedded to their ideal conditions of experimentation - conditons in which all possible effects due to temperature, pressure, gravitation, friction and so on are eliminated - that they are failing to live, as it were, in the real world.

I'm sure they've done their best to provide experimental conditons as alike as possible for the two detectors. But who knows whether the spirit, which blows where it listeth, is not the differentiating factor?

Forever, Who You Are

2011-06-14T07:18:00.000+02:00

With the grand restructuring taking place at work right now, I’m getting pretty well acquainted with one of the more common effects of severe stress – loss of language.

It’s not too often that I simply can’t recall the appropriate noun or adjective I need, but in the last two weeks I’ve noticed an alarming frequency in my inability to locate the mot juste.

This damnable affliction does not yield to intense concentration or the usual tricks of linguistic recall. The word one is searching for remains well hidden however much one tries to retrieve it. Until, at a moment when you are thinking of something completely different – or not thinking at all – out it pops, and you heave a sigh of recognition and relief.

It is just so – as I have experienced and as many, many teachers have conveyed – that our recall of our essential natures remains on the tip of our brains, unreachable by our common consciousness, however much one sits down to discover it. Thinking about Who We Are won’t hack it. Years of meditation won’t hack it either – although the discipline of allowing the mind to stop thinking helps enormously.

It’s just that one day, when you’re concentrating on your breath, or aligning your energy bodies, or souls…just then will you remember, in a flash, who you were and who you are and who you will be unto eternity.

It is the sure knowledge which comes forward when you least expect it. The vision of the face you wore before your great-great-great grandparent were born and upon which your gaze now falls, unexpectedly, amazingly, gnostically. You look upon this face and instantly recognize yourself.

It is a knowledge which comes unsought of itself, in the same way that the elusive word comes when we are not looking for it. And it imparts a knowing you will never forget, never question, and which you will carry with you into countless incarnations. Forever, Who You Are.

Sistrum of Isis Is Heard

2011-06-09T17:54:00.000+02:00

So, just as I was enjoying the clean, slightly windswept, grass-crunchy Winter in Joburg -and being just two weeks from Mid Winter's day, hearing already the sistrum rattles of Isis calling Osiris back to the world- we got hit by a very unusual thunder storm.

The wind started getting up around 9:30-ish in the evening, as the Moon crossed into Virgo. The loud rattling of the bedroom windows and the metallic thumping back and forth of the 6 ft high steel gate which divides the garden woke me up several times. And then the dogs were in the bedroom, wanting to go out to relieve themselves. As I tried to get back to sleep, the room was lit brightly by the first flash of lightning, followed of course by the roll of the first clap of thunder. Not much sleep was had, in the end, and the dreams were as bizarre as this completely out-of-time bit of weather.

A couple of months ago, I heard Christina talk about the lack of initiation for adults in today's world, and how this could help explain the broken society we live in. For broken it is – beyond the ability of simple meditation techniques to fix, I'm afraid, and beyond all the green-toilet-paper-buying, electricity-saving, recycling actions of the good folk to remedy.

The good folk themselves, meanwhile, are more and more closely resembling children: spoiled, selfish, ego-driven children whose first thought is not of the beautiful world in which we live, or the beautiful souls of various species who share it with us, but of themselves, their wants and needs and desires and bugger the consequences. Just as long as the ego is sated and satisfied, never mind the deeper, more poignant connections with All of Life.

And the reason may very well be something as apparently simple as lack of initiation into adulthood.

I don't mean that everyone should undergo a full Shamanic Dismemberment as I have had, of course: the world would soon be awash in pain and tears if we all had to travel that path. But there is indeed meat for some and milk for others – and most of us are being fed neither, spiritually speaking.

Pic: my west altar

Etheric Disturbance

2011-06-07T06:35:00.002+02:00

I've always had difficulty with casinos. When the company I work for (which handles back end services for many online casinos) held their year-end function at a land based casino in Joburg, my partner and I had dinner, wandered around the casino for half an hour - then cashed in our untouched chips and left.

I find it almost impossible to sit - or stand for that matter - at a roulette table or slots machine without a strong feeling of wrongness sliding through me.

Not sinfulness - wrongness.As in: there's something really wrong with all these people, in their best evening wear and artful makeup, staring involved at the spin of the wheel or the turn of the card, for hours on end. And never interacting with any one of the hundreds of other people around them Sure, they might order a drink or yell at a win, but their eyes never meet anothers', their presence is at once essentially isolated and nudging elbows...it's a form of insanity, I guess, which even sends off its own smell. Rank, disturbing and repellent, to me.

So finding myself reacting in a very similar way yesterday evening when we were some 10 km from the nearest casino (you're never far from a casino in Joburg, bless 'em), I looked around with both the eyes of my body and the eyes of my spirit to try and find the cause.
We were looking for another cellphone for Warren and in a very large department store in a very large shopping mall which had been built on what was once (and ever is, in many hearts) a wetland environment.

As I felt the tingling disturbance in my aura I automatically started to ground -three stories up in this toxic setting -and felt my etheric body begin to fuzz and bleed in both directions, into my earth body and into my shining one. It's not a nice feeling at all. I took a walk away from the cellphone stand, leaving Warren and the salesman discussing the merits of different platform browsers, and found myself wrestling intently with the alignment of my souls among the shrink-wrapped bed linens and voile curtains. The gut-deep sense of wrongness was strong, and I wondered if it had, in fact, a physical cause - the presence of many active cellphones in one small area could conceivably have caused a disturbance in all the energy bodies I call my souls.

Well, I'll think on it a while - these are just some preliminary thoughts on how living and manufactured bodies interact upon this plane, and upon the two planes upward of this one. If you have any random thoughts, ideas or teachings to share with me, I beg you to do so.

Murderous Culture

2011-06-05T08:32:00.001+02:00

So, four environmental activists are murdered in the space of four days. That's Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria,the leader of the Corumbiara Farmer’s Movement in Rondonia, Adelino Ramos, and another farmer who was allied with Ze Claudio and his wife, Eremilton Pereira.

The T.E.D blog asks what actions can we take now ? and suggests that you stop buying illegal timber.

Do that if you like - stop buying illegal timber - because we truly need every action, peaceful and not-so-peaceful. But I would suggest that, if the hit-style murders of over 1,500 logging activists in the Amazon since 1988 doesn't convince you that this culture is a culture of murder in a very real sense, then probably nothing will, and you should go on neglecting to buy illegal timber products, for the warm fuzzies it gives you.

And, if you still believe, along with a number of deaf-dumb-and-blind citizens of South Africa, that the police are here to protect and serve you, the perhaps you should ask yourself some hard questions about the sudden detention of Molefi Nonyane, never mind the fate of Henry Okah, who remains detained at the state thugs' pleasure on suspicion of being the leader of MEND.

Or, gimme a break. If you don't notice the insanity of industrial civilization and the gangster capitalism which finances it unto the death of all living things, then perhaps you never will.

To The Strains Of Bach

2011-06-03T04:46:00.000+02:00

For about twelve years, now, I've woken up (at some godsawful predawn hour, according to many) to the sounds of Talk Radio 702. I've fallen asleep to it, too, and had it on in the background as I cleaned the house on the weekend. I've long felt that the human voice is superior to any amount of nursery-rhyme, misogynistic, life-negative popular music.

But a couple of weeks ago I turned off the 702, and switched to Classic FM. The reason? Well, 702 seems to have gradually succumbed to the rampant know-nothingness of the mass media everywhere.
Not only do screaming adverts interrupt their talk shows with ever-increasing frequency at a volume at least double the regular show level; not only do the topics of discussion verge more and more frequently on the inane and viciously personal, but the show hosts themselves have been displaying a disappointing level of stupidity, vapidity and lack of general knowledge of the world around them and any news outside of the culturally-approved sound bites. Even then, they frequently get their facts wrong. And don't talk to me about their vaunted Eye Witness News – the spelling and grammar on that site has gone the way of all popular media: down the drain.

So I've been enjoying a feast of classical music, old and new, along with some well-informed and well-spoken presenters on Classic FM. Which is the station my Dad favoured. Oh gods, I'm becoming my father.

In other post-Gemini-eclipse news, I've received word of some excellent developments from our legal team regarding our case against RSS Security Services. I can't divulge it here, but suffice it to say that, if I were RSS Security Services, I'd be offering to settle right now. There will be justice for my boys. Hecate will not allow Her favoured animals to go unavenged.

So now, among the increasingly clean and windswept winter on the highveld – which I really enjoy, truth be told, despite the sometimes sub-zero temperatures in the morning – I have a measure of contentment, well earned. I'm not looking for it to last, for spirit moves ever on, and change is the marker of progress. But for the moment, I'm bloody well enjoying it. To the strains of Bach.

Pic: found on some news site a couple of days ago. It looks like it should be titled "Deep Green Resistance" , doesn't it?

She Needs Us All

2011-06-01T10:43:00.000+02:00

I thought I'd just overlook it as childish resentment, but this is, I'm afraid, bullshit.

(Who the hel is Kevin Tucker anyway? I'm asking myself. Oh yes - the dude who controls the Black and Green Press. Some good stuff published there.)

Anyway, the main point of this screed appears to be an accusation (levelled particularly at Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith) of authoritarianism.

I admit I had to scratch my head a bit at that.

You simply can not have a critique of civilization that overlook the prevalence and central role that power and the conditions which make power possible hold over any society, indigenous or modernized.

OK, agreed.But then Tucker continues:

That is something Derrick has spoken about, but it’s clear that he’s just playing lip-service. He has literally said that he has no problem with authority, and as he and Lierre have shown, they’re rather fond of calling the cops

Personally, I wouldn't dismiss the critique of centralised power as something Derrick has merely spoken about; I'd say it's one of his central themes. Take a look at some of the premises for Endgame:

Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

This is not just lip service. This is serious critique.
And this has absolutely nothing to do with an individual's willingness, or otherwise, to call the police when personally attacked. For I believe that this is Tucker's main gripe- that Derrick Jensen has indeed called in the local police when his home was repeatedly burgled, and that Lierre Keith reported to the police when a bunch of masked people hit her in the face with a cayenne pepper-laced pie at a bookfair.

I abhor the police, but I, too, will force them out of their skulking behind the seats of power to do the jobs they are ostensibly supposed to do if I am in the position of victim. I see no problem with that.

The master's tools may, indeed, be used to dismantle the master's house, and probably more effectively to boot. Some of us work from within the system, and one of Jensen's oft-repeated refrains has been We need it all.

Yes, we do. And we certainly don't need this carping, petty-veneered hostility from some bloke who has a personal distaste for Jensen. Look beyond your ego's crowding demands: the Earth has need of us - All.

We Will Be Perfected?

2011-05-30T19:01:00.000+02:00

A Vervet monkey was burned alive last week apparently after a mob of 'people' thought it was associated with Witchcraft, or was itself a Witch.

Please remember, there are 'people' in this land who burn and hack women, men and children to death for falling under a similar suspicion.

And here I was, yesterday evening,enjoying hearing Terence McKenna liken the human being to a shadow cast by a 4-dimensional solid state Ground of All Being and thinking yes, it's very much like that, the way we are extruded into the world..and wondering at the light source which would cast so complex a shadow as All of Us.

For a moment, I was in the ghastly position of wanting to disavow any relationship between myself and the monkey-burners, the child-rapists, the mob witch-hunters. They could not be of the same godhead that I am not separate from.

But if the Annelida which turn the earth is God, then so, willy-nilly, are these 'people'. I have no choice but to recognise them as God Herself, too.

Sometimes, the only system of life and death which makes any sense at all is reincarnation.

I found the image here

I Was Here Last Night..

2011-05-25T15:00:00.003+02:00

What is it that time means to us?
Is it the fourth dimension, another measurement to be plugged into the equations alongside length and depth and breadth?
Is it unknowable, a mirage, an illusion caused by being incarnate?
Is it one -dimensional, or two, or more?
Is it, as some hold, another country?

Perhaps all of these, and none of them, and more than these.

For me, time is inextricably attached to location: time is a part of the landscape, and the environment is composed of both location and time, entwined together.

Last night I was, as I have often been before, in Wokingham. It was 1972, quite clearly – for here was my Mum, bending to inspect the front lawn in Arthur Road, as if there were something precious buried beneath the grass. I wonder what it was? And here, on down the road a bit, was myself walking towards me, in bright orange dungarees and a lime green shirt. Alison Cole walking beside me. I did not see my 39-year-older self at all.

Singing in close harmony with my brother Grant, we hiked to Meadow Road – past the Sproul's house and the home of Keith Saynor, up on the rise, and down the other side to the meadow itself, where we stopped, and gathered all – all from 1972 and all from 2011, aware and unaware of each other, the living and the dead, the dreaming and the unconscious.

In the past, these dreams of my former home have produced an acute bout of homesickness, longing and nostalgia in me. But today, there is only a sweetness. A knowledge that this country, composed of both location and time, can never leave me. It is here as much today as it was then. In the breasting of time we find some questions, but more gnosis – a knowing that past is not the same as gone, and yesterday is not equivalent to lost from experience. We can travel there whenever we have leave from our souls.

Pic: Meadow Road, Wokingham, from today's Google Streetview.

Centre Points..Home.

2011-05-25T07:44:00.001+02:00

Re-reading The Mists of Avalon (first one to snigger gets summarily beheaded) and I'm struck, as always, by Marion Zimmer Bradley's apparent handle on agoraphobia.

In this book,she paints Gwenhwyfar as an agoraphobe, just as I was for many, many years, before it all disappeared in the crisis of my shamanic (ie human) initiation.

I understand by now that agoraphobia can be produced in an individual by a radical lack of a personal centre. For a long time, when grounding and centering was called for, I would send a shoot of my awareness deep into the Earth, and leave it at that - no real centering took place at all.

When eventually I learned to find my personal centre - that place in the earth body between the first two chakras and somewhat behind them - I wept with a recognition of Home. This was the place I was really supposed to live in when incarnate and not, as had usually been the case, in my head.

Almost paradoxically, the finding and recognition of a carnal centre point sheds light and understanding upon the fact that we are all, not just connected, but radically One Thing, each a part of a truly all-pervading Life which is called by some God, by others the Awen...and yes, By Many Other Names as well.

Sister Hecate has said she thinks of it like the sea, and we all as droplets of the water in it. Indra's Net is another attempt to articulate this reality. But I've recently come to envision it as a metal mesh, through which the amorphous and unformed mass which is Life is squeezing, appearing now in the world as discrete blobs of..people, and grass, and pitbulls, and quarks. Perhaps the metal mesh vision arises from my deep immersion in this machine culture, I don't know, but it works for me.The metal strands and wires apparently delineating each individual is composed of pain, and greed, and limiting self interest - and it makes us appear as separate islands, indeed. That is, until we see the mesh, and glimpse the stuff of Life beyond it, now bulging forth as each of us. Discrete, but conjoined from a place I have come to think of as the centre point of the All.

And as I tossed painfully on my bed in the throes of a devastating bout of 'flu (conceived through the tumbling of my immune system following a great crisis of Ancestors), I could feel this centre point of the All, flowing into and also from my own centre, in a dark river of tranquility, and patience, and fulfillment so deep that it swept all anxieties and pain before it, and I knew both my individual self and my True self more deeply, more thoroughly, more joyfully.

May the river sweep in like manner through you all.

Image: found here

Fukushima's Fallout on My Soul

2011-05-23T10:09:00.000+02:00

...an essay by GreenRevolutionary

For two months now massive plumes of radiative particles have been spewing into the atmosphere from the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima. These particles have been carried through the jetstream across the northern Pacific ocean, to the west coast of north america, to the east coast and then finally across the Atlantic to Europe and eventually, if it hasn't already, the atmosphere of the entire global north will be contaminated by the radioactive particles produced by the multiple reactor meltdowns in Fukushima.

The Japanese government and the company responsible for managing the plant; Tepco, have been pouring massive amounts of water onto the nuclear reactors but have been unable to raise the water level at all within the reactors; which are designed to be full of water at all times. The coolant systems which have now failed were supposed to supply 1 million gallons of water per minute to each of Fukushima's six reactors [according to Dr. Helen Caldicott http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ITrXVJMKeQ&feature=player_embedded]; apparently they had no backup plan in case they were unable to permanently supply this preposterous amount of water to the reactors.

There has been no real progress made in Fukushima since the beginning of the accident; in fact things have only gotten much worse. Tepco and the government's attempts to raise the water levels in reactors 1 and 2 have totally failed either because there is massive leaking of radioactive water into the ground and surrounding environment, or because they are unable to provide water at the rate necessary to cool the reactors enough for water to exist in their vicinity. Either way, the reactors are still exposed to the air, still releasing massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere, and still at risk of hydrogen explosions.

Additionally, we know that Tepco and the government have been intentionally dumping massive amounts of radioactive water directly into the ocean; because they simply have nowhere else to store it all. This radioactive water will travel the major ocean currents of the Pacific and eventually will flow down the west coast of North America. In the center will be the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre being bathed in radioactive rain. All ocean systems are ultimately connected and it is possible that the dumping of so much nuclear waste into the ocean could contaminate the seas worldwide.

And the radiation won't stop coming out of the reactors for an estimated 6 to 9 months according to Tepco and the government; a timetable which many scientists seem to think is extremely optimistic. So radiation will continue to pour out of the plant until then.

But wait a minute, I'm not sick yet. What does exposure to radiation actually do to the human body?

Well, radiation exposure can effect one in a few different ways depending on the type and amount of exposure. Let's explore what the future holds for our species.

First, there is Acute Radiation Syndrome. This occurs when a person is exposed to a source of ionizing radiation, and refers to health effects which appear quickly [within several months of exposure] rather than over the long term [years or decades after exposure]. This is when someone is exposed to an external source of radiation, rather than ingesting a radioactive particle into one's body through the lungs or digestive tract. In other words, this is what people in Japan and nearby the plant have to worry about. The speed of the onset of symptoms usually indicates the severity of the dose.

Acute radiation sickness normally indicates a large dose. The average dose of radiation administered to a person by a medical x-ray device is something like 0.1 Gy, and people begin to get acute radiation sickness at doses of 1-2 Gy. Though there have been exposures of more than 30Gy, 8 Gy is more than sufficient to kill 100% of those exposed, whether they receive medical care or not.

An exposure of 6-8 Gy kills between 95-100% of those who do not receive care, an between 50-100% of those who do. Exposures of 2-6 Gy kill between 5-50% of those who receive care and between 5-100% of those who do not.

Now the fun part; the symptoms!

1. Nausea, vomiting, lack of appetite

2. Bleeding from Orifices

3. Massive infections

4. Anemia

5. Loss of white blood cells (Leukopenia)

6. Hair loss

7. Central Nervous Systems ranging from cognitive impairment to seizures, tremor and ataxia (severe lack of coordination of muscle movements)

8. Etc.

Furthermore, if you are lucky enough to have a small enough exposure to survive the Acute Radiation Syndrome, you also have to deal with the long-term cancer risks associated with accumulated radiation exposure. Every particle of radioactive dust or fallout you breath in or ingest adds to your risk of getting cancer and will irradiate you from the inside out until it is removed, expelled or decays. This causes cancer. Exposures are cumulative; so every dose one gets adds to one's chance of getting cancer.

Fallout comes down in the rain. It has been raining where I live for six days, and at first I was mostly avoiding it and staying inside. I looked on in sadness as the radioactive rain fell down on the plants and animals and the soil outside. I have no Gieger counter, but I have a basic understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. I know the jetstream is bringing radioactive fallout down in the rain where I live. I know this will be happening for a very long time. They won't have the situation even remotely under control until next year at the earliest.

Sitting in the garden the day before yesterday I came to this realization; there are over 440 nuclear reactors in the world. There are over 100 in my own country; the majority of which seem to be concentrated in the Northeast, where I live. There will be more accidents. Eventually, as the grid comes down, there will be no one left with the ability to entomb reactors and there will be massive radiation leakage, almost certainly, whatever we do.

I sat down on the wet grass under a small peach tree and surrounded by flowers and plants yet to bloom. The pair of cardinals who've built their nest in an evergreen next to the house used the time in between rain showers to gather food. The robins who are moving in to an adjacent shrub shuttled in and out of their new home, each time returning to the nest with a beakful of small twigs. Pollinators swarm the flowers during the lull in the rain.

And then, the rain began to fall again. Lightly at first, and I did not move. Why should I. What is the point? I'm virtually guaranteed cancer at this point anyway, even before this accident. All this does is help me let go of the denial. If I live long enough, I will get cancer. I guess in my heart I've always sort of known we'd reach that point in my lifetime; the point at which the environment is so contaminated with carcinogens that virtually 100% of humans will get cancer in their lifetimes.

As it began to pour harder I looked at all of the living things around me. The living world in the place where I live and love enduring baptism by nuclear fallout. Large heavy drops fall on my head, my shoulders, my back, my arms, my legs. My shoulders and back are soon wet through my now moist shirt. The robins continue shuttling. The male cardinal hops from branch to branch low to the ground in the woods, hunting. I do not see the female. I lift my face to the sky and open my mouth, and tears escape from the corners of my eyes to run down my cheeks and mix with the radioactive rain on their way down to the ground.

And there was peace. There was calm. This is where I live. This is my landbase. This is my rain. Our fates are fused. If there is fallout in the rain, and there may not be today but there certainly will be plenty of times before they get this disaster under control, then there will be fallout in my body. So be it. That makes it all the easier to fight for this place while there is still some fight left in me. The years go on; entire ecosystems die - last year the Gulf of Mexico. The year before the discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre. This year the entire north Pacific Ocean.

A personal future in this world becomes easier and easier to sacrifice. A personal future filled with low white blood cell counts, dying of massive infections in a similar manner to aids patients. Or a personal future with low platelet counts; which are responsible for the clotting of blood and without which the body may bleed profusely and unexpectedly from the nose, rectum or the simplest of skin abrasions. Or dying of bone cancer - or perhaps bone necrosis; where the bone inside a part of one's body dies; and the dead tissue decomposes and causes surrounding tissue to die. Tissue necrosis often leads to gangrene. A personal future watching everything I love die. That's what waiting leads to. That's what the kind of denial that would have me go hide inside from the rain leads to.

I'd rather a personal future spent fighting fiercely for that which is left of what I love; fighting fiercely for life. I don't want to witness the death of the world. I don't want to witness the total and complete unraveling of the web of life. I won't be one of those left at the end who can only leave the house in protective gear for ten minutes at a time to look at the last remaining tree in town before it too dies of radiation poisoning.

No, instead I'll fight for what's left of the web of life, while anything at all still remains of it. I will put everything I am into this fight while I still can. I will fight because there's no better future I'd rather hold out for. I will fight for the right of future generations not just of human beings but of all species to exist on this planet, our home, if we can defend it from those who would participate in omnicide in exchange for a little cash in their pocket. It's time to wake up to reality, time to wake up to responsibility and time to kick the rabid, psychopathic leaders of government and industry off of the fucking planet once and for all.

Jacob Zuma and the Ancestors

2011-05-17T08:45:00.000+02:00

Most South Africans have had their breath taken away by President Jacob Zuma recently when, campaigning for the ruling African National Congress, he stated that the Ancestors would turn against you if you left the ANC.

This statement was met with hoots of derision, mostly, here in Joburg, from all cultures - except for the mainstream media, who carried it as straight news.
Not concerned with the diminuition of his standing in the eyes of most voters, the man who would be king - and who is planning on taking a fifth (or sixth) wife this year - went on flapping his mouth parts in the Eastern Cape, telling people that the Ancestors would be very upset should the ANC lose Nelson Mandela Bay, a traditional stronghold of the party.

But this is not the first time he's threatened the folk with our forebears. This time last year, he was telling us we would get sick if we should dare to abandon the ruling party.

Now, as most of you know, I also claim to talk with the Ancestors. In fact I'd go so far as to say that while Zuma has claimed such conversation, I really do find myself passing timeless time outside of time in give-and-take with the once incarnated souls who are the Ancestors - of you, and me, and every human now materialised within the dream. For Zuma's ancestors are naturally my own, as they are yours. The web goes back millions of years and turns and folds upon itself in more than three dimensions.

And so I say to you - and to the ANC, and to the rest of the people of South Africa - that President Zuma is lying. Whoever he claims to be talking to, they are not our Ancestors. For the Ancestors are never concerned with political factions, but only with the continuance of life and understanding upon this plane. They will greet you, surely, when you cross that threshold between our space and theirs; they will enfold you and welcome you and take you home to rest awhile. But they will not do so waving ANC, DA or IFP flags. They will not urge you to vote back into power someone who has demonstrated his utter disdain for the welfare of all of us, so that it comes secondary to his own material comfort. And they will not become angry or upset or make you ill should you decide not to back a party so corrupted by earthly power that their president is drunk upon it.

Make up your own minds, people - and, if you wish, consult with our Ancestors yourself. The truth will become evident - that Jacob Zuma is now, and probably has been for some time, lying through his teeth.

Pic: Gallo Images

"We Have The Universe On Our Side"

2011-05-15T09:37:00.000+02:00

Gods bless you, Charlie Veitch.

Loyal Friends and Readers...

2011-05-05T11:35:00.000+02:00

The Ancestors and I are in the middle of some pretty serious bargaining councils right now, and I've pretty much withdrawn my online presence until we've resolved some issues.

I didn't mean to be rude by locking the blog down for a while and I hope to be back to regular posting sometime in the foreseeable future.

Thanks for your long-suffering patience.

Love,
Terri in Joburg

Very Large Numbers

2011-04-09T17:44:00.001+02:00

Robert Mcluhan reports having been a guest on a Radio 4 program discussing crisis apparitions.
One of the other guests was Richard Wiseman, a high-profile member of Team New Atheist.
Crisis apparitions occur when a dying or dead person appears to a living one. I've had a crisis apparition myself, seeing a strange vision of my father on the day that he died.

Well, anyway, Wiseman, when asked for his opinion on these surprisingly common occurances, replied that it was all down to the law of very large numbers. You know - something happens often, but only when it coincides with a meaningful event in our lives do we remember it. This theory seeks to explain why quite a large number of people report sightings of dead relatives or friends coincidental with the time of their passing. It happens often, you see, but we only mark it as spectacular when the person we've had the vision of turns out to have died, around that time.

Oh but hang on - that would only work if we all went around having apparitions often enough to apply the theory of very large numbers, wouldn't it?
I don't know about you, but I'm not particularly given to having an apparition a day. Or even a week, or a month. If I have one in a year it's noteworthy.Very.

And so once again we are treated to the spectacle of a New Atheist team member making an absolute jackass of himself. I can't say I have much sympathy - even though, or maybe because, I was once wearing those atheist-materialist threads myself. There's a huge pressure going on in those ranks - I've felt it myself - to come up with a rational explanation for everything we can't explain scientifically. Somewhat like the "need to believe" soi-disant skeptics are always accusing the rest of the population of feeling. Funny, isn't it?

Birds Over Water

2011-04-05T17:59:00.000+02:00

The human race, seriously now, has a need to grow up.
No, I haven't just come to that conclusion, but I'm betting that thousands upon thousands of people are waking up to that inescapable statement.
Amid the clamour and horrors of the BP mass ecocide, followed shortly by the horrors of the Fukushima meltdown, there is one glaring point coming to light: to whit, not one of the people who were nominally in charge of these runaway pieces of technology had the slightest idea of how they really worked, and, when they got away from us - as technology has a tiresome history of doing - not one of the controlling human powers really knew what to do about it.
I'm a little bit more au fait with nuclear physics than with deep sea geology, so my reaction to the unfolding, and largely hidden, catastrophe at Fukushima cut a little deeper and faster than when the Deepwater rig exploded-what, just last year?

The moment that first hydrogen explosion took place all my danger senses were fully alert, and my dreams deeply troubled. But, if you can believe this guy, we don't know the half of it. I'm inclined to give credence to much of what he says there-and a careful reading of New Scientist and Nature online will back that conclusion up.

Like children with toys that no-one thought would harm them, mankind has let his technology run amok. Might we dare hope, for the last time?
I don't know. I accept the heartbreak, depression and tears of all humans ( some of whom have proven themselves heroes by their actions - valiantly striving to contain the nuclear meltdown by deliberately sacrificing themselves, may the gods give them room at the banqueting table) who are in the least connected to this real earth, this real landbase, this real environment which sustains us. As for some of the others- chairmans-of-the-board and fat-walletted shareholders who should have been thrown headfirst into the ravine beneath reactor number 2-well, may they return again, to try again, until they start to get it right.

I sometimes think that it's a pity that humanity doesn't have something like the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood to ride herd on us until we mature sufficiently to handle the products of our wild technological imaginings. But maybe we do. All the living world can be our allies, teaching us,if we open our senses to it, how to live upon and within the matrix of life, the great field of Love which sustains every cricket, every blade of grass, every mountain range, every star. But we have to be receptive to seeing and accepting such allies for this to work. Meanwhile, they go on, trying to get us to learn these lessons anyway.

For myself, I envision my Being as the reflection of a flock of birds in an endlessly placid lake: still moving, not sticking, flowing through, over and around this vale of horror. Birds over water. Bearing witness.

Lessons of Fire

2011-03-31T18:34:00.000+02:00

Last night we started into another Mercury Retrograde.Unlike the long string of retrogrades preceding it, this one is not taking place in an Earth sign. That's little comfort to me, however, as the Fire sign of Aries which is accommodating this backward motion is a bit of an unknown factor in my natal chart.

Aries seems to represent the ego at its beginning. The point-like emergence of I Am from the sea of consciousness. The war-mongering, power-grabbing, dionysian-celebrating result of the first stages of individuation. And as such, it can be dangerous.

In fact, if we think about the function of a Mercury retrograde - to review the past 3 weeks or so, and revisit that ground again - I should really be crouching in a corner, whimpering. I mean -the last 3 weeks? For gods' sakes. Car bursting into flames on the highway, spending thousands on towing fees and then thousands on repair and then spending a week without a car at all; intense and vicious little 'flu virus which hit me for a good ten days, which is 8 days too long;failure of serenity and failure of communication and failure of humility. You want me to revisit the last three weeks?

But I'm not taking it as badly as all that. In fact, I'm rather looking forward to what this period can teach me. My natal Mercury does reside in a Fire sign, after all - albeit the more refined fire of Sagittarius - and the Guide of Souls who is Mercury/Hermes/Odin/Enki has not been known, by me anyway, to make too many great big mistakes.
It's feeling like being in a classroom again, and the teacher is saying "Now, class, this is an important bit. I want you to learn it very thoroughly. So, let's just go back over this piece again, hmm?"

I intuit that my personal lessons will involve flash-or-trigger-points, keeping a clear mind, and opening myself to some less savoury aspects of Who I Am. With, hopefully, a hefty dose of gentle humility thrown into the mix. Let's wait and see then, shall we?

Pic: Fire Dragon by Vlad Gerasimov

Adrift in an Insane Culture

2011-03-26T18:08:00.000+02:00

Warning - what follows is not going to sound good.

I feel I must say it, however, if only as a record for the future, perhaps helping to explain when and how I finally started to lose it with the civilised people around me.
I've never been particularly good at fitting in to the society I found myself born into, but that was mostly explained to me by the adults in charge of my education and conditioning as an unavoidable by-product of being so highly intelligent.

At a measured IQ of over 150 - later in my young adulthood it hit 170-175 quite regularly - I've normally had a problem understanding why something which was quite obvious to me wasn't even on the radar of most folks around me.

For a while I pandered to this sense of superiority by studying Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy - the 'hardest' sciences I could find, which seemed to give me some kind of pleasure and even more of an explanation for being different. Eventually, however, as I became sensitised to the actual, real world in which I found myself - the world of Life everywhere, and much of it nonhuman - and as I finally began to grow up a bit, I noticed that this feeling of not fitting in had not gone away. It was more pronounced than ever.

And so I find myself resident in a country with an average IQ of just 70, surrounded front and back and on all sides with humans who seem to me the epitome of insanity - if insanity can be imagined as that quality of not giving a shit about the future, the matrix which sustains you, and the nonhuman intelligences all around one.

I'm having a pity party right now, yes. I'll snap out of it in due time, I know. But right now I feel my strangeness very keenly, and the only explanation I can put upon it is that I'm still diverging widely from the culture of my birth.
The Wetiko culture, the culture of the dangerously insane, the culture of the zombie.

This Place Likes To Have Fun

2011-03-23T10:02:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I made up a tea of crushed Juniper berries and Buchu leaves - a first time for me.
It tasted delicious, so I assume my body was craving something in the mixture. But more importantly, it started to work almost immediately. I've had one sore kidney since Sunday night's 'flu onset, and while not debilitating it was a bit annoying.
Juniper and Buchu are both great diuretics. Juniper helps blood flow to the kidneys - I'm thinking this is what caused the practically instant effect - and both have antiseptic properties when processed through the urinary tract. After three cups of this brew (just boiling water added to a tablespoon of berries and leaves) I'm feeling a real improvement. Buchu has other properties which were well known to this country's indigenous people; I think a digestive aid is one of them. But Juniper grows in my garden, in the shape of two sentinel bushes and a tall bouncer tree, and I feel absolutely at home with its fruits.

I've also been having run-ins with beaks over the last couple of days. First it was a Green WoodHoopoe, a little rain-bedraggled, perching just outside my window and cackling at me.

Next I found myself scolding three Scimitar Bills who were quarreling loudly in my neighbour's Kaasboom yesterday.

Right after I'd got them to quiet down, a bonded pair of African Hoopoes walked under the front gate and started drilling up the soil.

All of this Hoopoe-ing activity is quite apart from the odd behaviour of a pair of Hadeda Ibises which, for the past week, have seemed intent upon annoying and teasing Taranis and Scylla by landing heavily on the grass right in front of the dogs and yelling loudly from the Douglas Fir. All day.

Don't ask me, I'm just the Witch of this place - and sometimes, this place likes to have fun.

Illness and Illumination

2011-03-22T11:29:00.000+02:00

The last 12 days have been challenging and interesting indeed.
Starting on 10th March, when our car burst into flames on the highway and carrying on through our inability to get the car started again, a battle to find a rental car service which didn't require a small ransom of a hold on our credit cards- not to mention the little matters of Libya and Japan -I'm hardly surprised that I haven't actually performed the ritual of Rushing Dark Water yet.

Well, actually it was more down to a sudden and vicious bout of 'flu which grabbed me, shaking and shivering , on Sunday night and saw me delirious and in pain until this morning.
I have made up the incense, put aside golden candles and marked the ritual passage in my Book of Shadows, so I suspect that I'll be out in the circle tomorrow night at the latest.

In the meantime, I have gathered a sense of what life is going to be like when none of us can afford petrol anymore. Walking to the garage for milk and bread through our delightfully life-rich suburb with children playing in the streets, families walking back from church and belligerent dogs left to roam outside their owners' properties is a worthwhile education in itself, and taking the hour-long hike to the nearest small supermarket -through the bush and across the river on stepping stones- opens your eyes to some details of other peoples' lives indeed. The metres of electric cable covering abandoned on the bush path near our substation in particular provided insight into lives far more desperate from our own, and the constant cheery greetings from fellow bush-whackers underlines perhaps the more humanising effect of not always going everywhere in a damned car.

Then again there was the precious illumination granted so often to us when we are severely ill: an effect noted by many others over the years. There I was, on Sunday night, using psychic techniques to dull the pain in my kidneys and muscles, shivering and sweating and unable to fall asleep, staring up at the join in the ceiling boards in the dark. The line blurred and fuzzed, and I felt my consciousness as a field extending quite some way from my physical body. The top of my head seemed to open wide, and I knew again that I was an experience module in a larger field, outside of which there is Nothing and within which is Everything.

This experience of remembering who we are comes from time to time - not often, but frequently enough to remind me, that I should not forget in this lifetime. I treasure the remembering, for it is perhaps the only thing of which I am really sure. That we are, as Hecate puts it :Goddess pouring Goddess into Goddess, and that's All it is, and that's more than enough.

Now that I'm on the mend and we have the use of a rental car for the week I'm going to find time to say something about combining Juniper and Buchu as a sovereign remedy for aching kidneys. Maybe tomorrow.

Pic: Jessica . I'm waiting for the source from Jacurutu, and I will then attribute it.

Mabon - Rushing Dark Water - 2011

2011-03-21T08:55:00.000+02:00

Farewell, O Sun, ever-returning light, The hidden God, who ever yet remains. He now departs to the Land of Youth through the gates of death to dwell enthroned, the judge of Gods and men, The horned leader of the hosts of air. Yet, as he stands unseen without the Circle, So dwelleth he within the secret seed – the seed of the new-reaped grain, the seed of flesh; hidden in earth, the marvelous seed of the stars. In him is Life, and his Life is the Light of man, That which was never born, and never dies. Therefore the Wise Ones weep not, but rejoice.