Saying No and Saying Yes

Catherynne Valente went back to Fairyland in the wake of the election.

Birthdays, Anniversaries, and TDOR

I love birthdays, especially mine. Not because of doing anything special for them, although that's nice, but because it means I survived another year, which is a big deal to me as someone who has been suicidal. It's also a personal New Year's, a time for me to take stock. And in the same week, we have the ( Read more... )

Aftermath

Sorry, folks, expect posts to be a bit thin on the ground for a while. I'm heartsick, terrified, and depressed, hurting too bad to write much ( Read more... )

Field of Dreams, the movie

So, after that message at Samhain -- a message that wasn't even for me -- I decided maybe I should watch this old movie, give it another chance ( Read more... )

Field of Dreams and Mirrors

Halloween night, I did my regular ritual, including a brief check-in with my Dead via oracle deck. (I used to do a whole thing for the Dead on Samhain, but the farther into Hellenism I get, the less interested I am in that.) And then I put down a few more cards to see what happened, and what happened was a message for a ( Read more... )

The Purpose of Wailing

A nigh-universal feature of Greek funerals was the wailing of women, as they beat their breasts and tore at their hair. This was originally the province of women of the household of the deceased, but they were eventually joined by professional mourners.

Labyrinths

Many of us have daydreams of having a piece of land, often out away from the city, where we can have rituals, shrines, maybe even a temple. My personal version of this is the Earth Labyrinth dream.

Memento Mori Mistakes

So I finally got around to printing a lino block I carved weeks ago. Turned out I made a few mistakes...

Ritual Framework for the Litany

Galina Krasskova, after using the Litany for the Many Dead in a group ritual, wrote to me to suggest that it needed a ritual framework. Not everyone who might use it has experience working with the Dead, she pointed out, and working with them can be difficult and even dangerous. The Litany is an invocation of a ( Read more... )

Inky Quills

I've said for many years that I don't do "flat art" -- I don't draw, paint, etc. I don't do things on a flat surface. I like dimensionality too much, and making flat look dimensional always seemed too hard to me.