headache

I intended to do something tonight, but sat in front of the tube watching 'kids' and Bio-Scott Baio instead. Didn't even want ice cream.

I have been on edge all day. Managed to eat breakfast and go to Walgreen's for chocolate and hard candy (as the student supervisor, at least for now, I have taken it upon myself to provide chocolate and hard candy for the library...my students work hard and they deserve treats. Then I almost missed the bus, didn't have my ID, had two meetings (one in the morning and one in the afternoon), was bitchy enough to the AUL for services that I apologized. Cheron and I rode the bus home and went to Za's for dinner...we got home and TC and Marcey arrived at the same time. They had another huge fight and she ditched him before dinner, so I took him to Za's for dinner...it sucks.

Want to do something interesting or useful. Things to think about:

http://www.wildhunt.org/2008/05/rooted-in-experience.html

Let me make a pitch for one of my favorite Pagan causes: being rooted in experience.

We like to say that Paganism is not about following a creed or obedience to commandments written in an ancient book. It's about lived experiences: direct encounters with our gods and our communities, with nature and with spirit.

So why is nearly everything we write in the form of a recipe book? Why so little in the way of lived experience? For a religion of direct, personal gnosis, we have remarkably little writing about what happens when we set out to practice rather than preach.

I propose we change that. Here is my challenge to you:

Don't tell me how your tradition draws down the moon or performs a proper blot. Instead, tell me about the first time you led a public ritual: about how your knees were wobbly, and you began to sweat; about how you were afraid that nothing would happen. And then it did. And something in the sound of the drums took hold of you, and you felt different, and the world changed.

I don't know Cat Chapin-Bishop (although I do know Jason P-W) and I am not a Quaker (although I suppose I am a lapsed Pagan).

The guy who writes Slow Reads quoted T.S. Eliot's East Coker from Four Quartets. Why did I not study Eliot when I was young?

Now they are talking about the death of Jim Morrison on tv. I'm going to bed with a book.



http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/