autumn twilight
… where the water meets the sea, between the worlds, within the void …autumn twilight
… where the water meets the sea, between the worlds, within the void …Festival of Lights
I’ve got a lot brewing in my mind tonight. More than I have adequate words to summarize. I’ll not hurt myself trying.
I think what I want to say is that I’m sorry. I’m sorry that the world isn’t what I believe it could be. I’m sorry that there is so much suffering in the world. I’m sorry that I have only the limited resources I do, that I can’t simply wave my hand, or enter into fervent prayer, and wash away all that is wrong with the world.
Everyone sees Imbolc as this joyous festival. The time when we get to really start looking forward to all the great things that are coming. We have a chance to start many things anew. To plant new crops. To create new relationships. To get away from the cold that has kept us cooped up. Imbolc is the festival of hope for the future.
But it is also a time to say we’re sorry. To reflect upon our actions. To cleanse ourselves in the snow. To purify our intent. The light is returning, and there is much cause for hope, but the future is not all sunshine and roses. When the spring comes there will still be starving children all around the world. There will still be injustice. And suffering. There will still be people taking advantage of anyone they can.
I believe, deeply, that we are better than these things. I believe no child should suffer enough at the hands of his peers that he takes his own life. I believe that humanity has within it greatness that we hardly ever see. And I believe that we turn away from that greatness because it is different from what we know.
There are more reasons for this than I can hope to illuminate in a compendium, let alone this humble post. I’m sure I can’t truly begin to grasp the magnitude of our aversion to it, but I can see the aversion at work all the time. We don’t allow ourselves our greatnesses. To use Coyle’s words, we don’t allow ourselves to be big enough.
When you see the light returning, don’t see it only giving life to the crops. Let the light show you the shadowy places too. Your own and those around you. Let the returning light reveal our greatness, that we have the power to change, to choose.
New apartment
For the first time in about 5 years I’m getting ready to live alone. There are a number of factors that prompted this, but in the end I’m in a place in my life where I need to learn who I am on my own. One of the great things about living with other people is that you find your place in a series of relationships that are consistent. That’s a great thing, but it also means that you wind up stuck in the roles that those relationships engender. Alternately, living alone gives you the opportunity to find your place in relation to yourself. Both are valuable lessons. I’ve changed a lot in the last few years. I’ve done a lot of growing up (although I’m still pretty young inside my head).
This year I have a lot of personal goals and so does George. I think it’s the right decision for both of us to explore our own space and work on our own projects. Fortunately our new apartments are only a couple blocks apart in uptown. Also fortunately, I’m moving into the building where my teachers Amatheon and Coriander live, as well as another of my brothers Jeremy. Commonly referred to as pagan palace, or the Brotherhood Monastery.
I’ll have pictures of the new place in it’s base state soon, and I have some ideas about taking pictures as I paint, decorate, and make the place my own. I have a killer idea for a glass dry-erase board that I’ll talk about at another time.
Right now my mind is racing with all the things that still need to be done to finish the move. I have a 3 month overlap in my lease, the first of which is already gone. I’m planning on getting mostly moved by late February. This seems entirely doable. I’ve got lots of things that I want to buy, and I should have tax money coming back soon to help me buy them all.
I’m thinking a lot about the mood and energy that I want to infuse my new home with. The temple room/study/library/lounge room is my biggest challenge and requires a lot of thought. I want to create a single space with multiple uses and a mood that suits all those uses. It needs to feel sacred, rarefied, and peaceful, but it also needs to be comfortable, conducive to focus, warm, welcoming. Above all it needs to feel like home to me. It’s a tall order but one that I know I can pull off. I’m looking at paint colors and exploring my furniture options.
But I’m always open to ideas. :D
The state of theo, Elemental Diets (partial)
the theme of my life right now is change.
Believe it or not, it has been a very productive six months since I’ve made regular posts. It doesn’t always feel that way. Not to me anyway. I have a bad habit of getting mired in the details of life, and forgetting to look at things from the big picture.
One of the challenges that those details bring is a difficulty in prioritization. Details all seem fairly equivalent. When it comes to little tasks it’s hard to remember that in a list of a hundred things, only a few of them need to be done now, and only a few of them have any meaning or impact beyond the immediate.
One thing I’m learning is that a busy person can’t afford not to make hard decisions about what will and will not get done. If I want to make real progress in some things, other things will have to be let go of. Nobody, not even as awesome as I think I am, can do everything that they’d like to do.
(On that note, if you can do everything you want to do I challenge you to think bigger.)
What that means for me right now, is that I have to make a lot of choices about where my energy and time are focused. One of those choices, that’s staring me right in the face, has to do with my intellectual diet. The things I read, listen to, and watch. Other people call this an information diet, or a media diet. I think of it primarily as the diet of Air.
The diet of Air is what feeds your mind. What do you spend time thinking about, absorbing through media, digesting in journaling or conversation. We all need a healthy diet, and as with any diet there should be balance. I think, in the west at least, our Air diet is extremely heavy on junk-food that is primarily nourishing only to emotional centers. Much like twinkies are. They make us *feel* full and happy and nourished, but the feeling is immediate and in the long run they don’t add a lot of benefit.
I know that I am probably less prone to subsisting on a media diet of junk-food than many people seeing as I don’t own a TV. That said, I do have the internet, and I have no problem spending a day watching old episodes of Bones or Buffy or Roswell, or any one of a hundred terrible movies that I adore.
My saving grace in this is that I am pretty much unable to sit still long enough to just watch television shows. I always have to have something to do while I’m watching. Sometimes this is a casual flash game. No benefit there. But as often as not it’s something that is at least mildly productive and mentally stimulating.
Still, I believe there is a lot of room for improvement in my Air diet, and I plan on working on that.
But in truth, the last six months or so has been one of the most productive periods in my life (getting back to the point.) I’ve found a new apartment (I’m in the process of moving), I work for a different company (although I do the same job), I helped get the new website for the Brotherhood of the Phoenix up and running, and a ton of other things. There is plenty of change still happening.
This year, I’m looking to try and focus my efforts a bit more narrowly. I’m going to re-approach life-audit work to try and manage the things that I’m doing to tasks that actually further larger goals and not just immediate-feel good goals. This is the work of the Diet of Fire, which is of course the diet of our physical activity, and how and where that activity is applied. As with any other diet, balance is important, and the content of the activity is as important as it’s output. Simply doing enough things may keep one alive, but it doesn’t necessarily nourish us. That is a lesson I’ve had to learn. I was hard-wired by my mother to not be comfortable just sitting around doing nothing. But I’ve found that a lot of busy-work I do is just done to satisfy the feeling of getting something done. Again, this is the Fire-diet equivalent of a Twinkie. It feels good and satisfies the immediate need, but in the long-run it’s not that beneficial.
But I digress, as I often do.
For those of you who’ve noticed some changes to the site’s URL and such, I’ve done some behind-the scenes work to make admin easier on my side and manage multiple sites better.
For those of you who had trouble with the rss feed, it should be fixed now. That said, you should change your bookmarks to point at: http://autumntwilight.theogeer.net/feed/
The site is due for a redesign, but I’m putting that off for the moment. I’m going to try and focus on updating regularly again first.
Stay tuned, hopefully for some more regularly scheduled content, but definitely for more changes and love coming from me to you!
share the gift
Solstice
It’s the winter solstice. Well, the night part of it anyway.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written or rambled for the masses, or however few of you find my words interesting. I’m not writing tonight to make a comeback or a promise. I have my plans, but the world is chaotic, and no plan survives the first engagement.
Tonight though, I feel words need to be written. So here I am.
This is my 62nd Solstice. I’ve lived through 31 summers. The morning brings the beginning of my 31st winter. It seems so long. But I don’t feel as though I’ve been around that long. I feel young. In many ways I feel like a child. There is a part of me that will always want nothing more than to sit on my fathers lap, singing “You are my sunshine.”
The winter brings with it the promise of summer. The long nights begin to give way to the sunlight. Soon there will be light in the evening hours, and the comforting darkness will not arrive until much later. I don’t enjoy the lengthening days, but I honor the beauty and necessity of that cycle.
I am pondering a good many things lately, among them the character of our society. It seems to me that societies can be looked at in a great many ways. One of those ways, which I find important right now, is the character of it’s liberty. Liberty, the recognition that the self is sovereign, is a fundamental of our society. But we are not as careful to protect that liberty as we once were. I’d quote Benjamin Franklin here, but I’ve heard it far too often lately.
The thing that interests me though is how liberty relates to the justice system and legal code. This is the distinction that I think we are in the process of modifying, if we have not done so already. Liberty implies that a person has complete authority over his own person, and the right to act in any way that does not infringe the sovereignty of other people. In essence, if it doesn’t hurt or impede the liberty of others you can not be denied the right to do it.
We have never had perfect liberty, which I will say is a very thelemic concept if looked at in the right light. In fact, I think we were moving further towards liberty for most of the history of the united states. But lately we’ve been moving away from it.
But enough of that. the hour grows later, and I have a job to go to in the morning. The cat wants my attention and my eyes are beginning to droop.
I will sleep deeply and dream of the returning light. Share the gift.
Manifesting the Androgyne – Nerves and Memory Loss
I’ve posted recently that I’m beginning to get better at mediumship and posessory work. At Ecstasis (The Brotherhood of the Phoenix’s holiday in the season of Mabon), I got the opportunity to do something I haven’t done for the Brotherhood since 2005. That is, I got to perform the aspecting/invocation of our god during public ritual.
I received a call from Reverend Coriander about two weeks before Ecstasis. He asked me if I would be interested in manifesting the Divine Androgyne for Ecstasis. I wasn’t entirely surprised that I was his choice, but I also wasn’t really expecting it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to at first. As George said, “You could talk about any of our God faces for 30 minutes without stopping, of course you have something to say.” He’s right, but I wasn’t sure that the Androgyne had anything to say through me, and that’s important to me. There is a big difference between expressing our thoughts on a matter and becoming the voice of the god. I told Coriander that I’d let him know the next day.
That night I did divination and seership work to commune with the Androgyne. Am I the right vessel at this time? Do we have things to share together? I knew that I felt I understood the Androgyne, that I was in good communion, but I wanted to hear the vision of the Androgyne on the matter. Again, I was surprised. The vociferousness and immediacy of the response I got was stunning. Clearly we had things to say together. I texted Coriander the next day that I was a go.
… read the rest
Guilty
I’m feeling guilty tonight. Guilty for a number of reasons. Mostly I feel guilty because it seems like I always let the day to day business of my life get in the way of the larger movements, and by the time I get back to them they’ve either passed me by, or I’m back at square one.
This blog is one of the few things that I’ve ever kept around for more than a year or so. And even here, My life moves me into and out of orbit more frequently than I’d like.
It’s not a very comfortable feeling. And there are times when I feel helpless. There’s a whole list of things that are important to me, that I’d like to accomplish, and it often feels like no matter what I do they simply are not going to get done. I can think of a dozen ways to adjust my life that would make it easier to focus or apply myself in these other areas, but all of them require patience. I am not in the mood for patience. I want my life to get itself in order now.
Labor Day Ramble
Fair warning: I feel a ramble coming on.
It’s labor day and I haven’t left the house today. This was intentional. I needed some time to decompress. The last few months have been too full for my taste and I feel that by and large I’ve done little but survive through them. This annoys me.
… read the rest