Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

( The Good )

( The Surprising )

( The Not So Much With The Good )

( The Exciting (but not in the happy fun way) )

So, how was your weekend?

None of that Glenn-Danzig-Fucking in the journal today (even if it did get more discussion than anything I've posted in months...what does that say about us?). Today's journal is serious business. (Insofar as anything is.)

See, yesterday, we performed a funeral for a young man (he had achieved the ripe old age of 23) who was shot while trying to defend his mother and younger brother from a man who had broken into their home. We didn't know him, or his family, but he was a Wiccan, and Gaia Community was the last religious group he'd had any affiliation with, so they called us. And of course, we thought it was the right thing to do, to go and honor this person who was a fellow-traveler, even if we didn't know him, and talk to his family, who were supportive of his religious leanings, but not really solid on what the whole Wicca thing was about. And so we did.
( Concerning the afterlife... )

Friday night, oreibasia was supposed to come around so that we could talk about Dionysos, but she had some car issues and didn't show. Nobody else showed either, which doesn't bode really well for the enterprise, but whatever. It's still an interesting concept.

Saturday, triadruid and I went over to help capriciouslass sort out her new place. We painted, sealed cracks, peeled up truly foul carpet tape, wired lights and hung ceiling fans. We also got to watch liquidfun light himself up a couple of times while working on the wiring. So that's good times. I enjoy doing home repair that I know how to do, which leads me to believe that I should learn how to do more of it. Maybe in my next life.

Sunday I dropped off kittenpants at Gaia to prep for ritual, and I went down to JoAnn's Fabric, where they were having a massive sale on beads and associated paraphenalia. I spent about $45, and got about $200 worth of stuff, which was nice. I think we now have enough materiel to do this Prayer Beads workshop on the 13th. Then, off to ritual, which was about escaping perfectionism. I worry that we do too much work on letting people forgive themselves for not being perfect/good enough/whatever, and not enough on getting people to strive for improvement. But whatever. The ritual was solid, anyway, and for some people, liberation from the ideal frees them up to actually do something instead of wandering around paralyzed by their inability to be ideal. All good in the end. Came home, made some example sets for the Prayer Beads thing, drank the wine we bought for the Thiasos Lampteros meeting that didn't happen.

Tonight, we're planning a Labyrinth walk ritual for two weeks out. Tomorrow, orcjohn and I are doing finance and tax stuff for Gaia. Then, I have two nights off to finish up the Prayer Beads talk with kittenpants, and then we're going to St. Louis to do the workshop. Organized religion, like a gas, will expand to use up all available space.

I just cut my tongue on a peppermint. It's possibly the stupidest injury I've ever had. It's well beyond ordinary stupid, the sort of stupid you don't admit to. It's gloriously stupid, the sort of thing that you have to go tell other people about because you can't believe you ever did anything so stupid.

But what do you expect on a Monday, especially when the preceeding weekend included so little rest? Friday night was gaming night, and saw the end of a year+ D&D campaign. I'm hoping to transitions my character into some other game -- I enjoy these occasional instances of getting to behave like a tiny 12-year-old sorceror with mild autism and a tendency to turn into an eight-foot-tall, four-armed gorilla monster at the worst possible moments. It's good for the soul.

Saturday was full of ritual prep. I should have gone to fyreseer and akaashben's housewarming party, but had so much ritual prep to do that I couldn't party in good conscience. Stupid conscience. It's probably just as well. I have all the social ability of a mildly autistic four-armed gorilla monster (it's a theme!) and I needed it all for Sunday's ritual.

Sunday was Gaia Community's Yule ritual, which was not an all-singing, all-dancing ritual extravaganza with a cast of thousands, but desperately wanted to be. It felt like a good ritual, and I hope people experienced it that way. The symbolism was awfully simple, and I was hoping it would come off in that way where the simple things are the most profound, instead of the way in which things just feel facile. No way to tell, really. I did make it through all of my speaking parts without swearing, which I thought was a meaningful accomplishment. In my personal practice, it's perfectly fine to address a rude word to a deity or to proclaim dirty poetry to them, provided it's accurate to the deity in question and their qualities, but I understand that's not the usual expectation. I'm working on it.

And now, two days of work, and I'm off for vacation. Life is rough.

Yet another long-arsed weekend full of er... mostly working for us. Friday night, triadruid, kittenpants and I helped brandy22kc move into her new place. This mostly involved clearing out a storage unit, pulling some bizarre and unnecessary stunts, getting lost between Shawnee Mission and Olathe, and generally being cold and tired, but it also involved coffee and some truly funny moments, so all was well. Best wishes to B and family in their new house -- we understand that in 6-9 months, we'll be moving them again, out of program housing to somewhere better (and freer), and that's good too.

Saturday, we had visitors from Texas. The church I think of as The Other Pagan UU Congregation (although it may not be the only other one; there may be one in Florida now too) sent some people up to talk to us about leadership of our congregation and see how we did things in case there was anything they wanted to steal. They stayed through Sunday evening, and left with hopefully a lot of good stuff that will help them. Apparently also, kittenpants and I will be visiting their congregation in May to teach an abbreviated version of Excellence in Ritual, so that will be fun. (Especially since it will be right after we get done teaching the full 8-week version here... yeesh.)

Late last night, in a stunning bout of irresponsibility, triadruid blew off working on Winter Bazaar to go see Casino Royale, which was just stunning. I enjoyed the hell out of the new Bond concept, but I'm thinking that I might not continue to enjoy it as they make more films -- the brutality and hands-on nature of New Bond I am digging, but I can't for the life of me work out why anyone would want to go to bed with New Bond, and that's going to be a problem for me as the franchise continues. Shining moments: a fantastic sequence in the beginning of the film in which Bond chases down a minor bad guy who happens to apparently be proficient in parkour; the most flips ever achieved in a car crash with the help of an air cannon (7) (and by the way, that's the 2007 Aston-Martin DBS); Felix Leiter; M lamenting the end of the Cold War.

Jesus may have walked on ice, or: how we have no effing public dialogue at all about the you know, vague possibility that religion is, you know, myth rather than historical fact. The weather part of this is actually sort of nifty, but the reporting on it is rather crap.

Also, special bonus funtime poll: At the moment I happened to click on it, the poll attached to this story indicated that 35% of its respondents believed that every word of the Bible was literally true. Now, I understand that this sort of poll is much like a livejournal poll, which is to say, designed for the amusement of some of its readers rather than with the intention of producing any useful information, but still. That tells me that 35% of the people who bothered to click in either a)haven't read the Bible and are just bullshitting, or b)are simultaneously not very good at maths and also crap at critical reading.

Favorite line in the article: "Tabgha is the town where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been found." Why, oh why, am I not in the journalism business? Even setting aside the fact that well, as far as I know anyway, there aren't any archeological findings related to Jesus that haven't been later determined to be frauds, um, well, it's thing with the findings being found.

The foundation of my personal irrational faith is that once upon a time, in a time now lost to history, there were copyeditors. I can't prove this, but hey. As the curator of Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Archaeology, Israel Museum says in another story in the news today (which gives the implication that authentic finds from Jesus' life are being shown in museums while burying the little note that none of the items shown have any relation to Jesus way down in the last paragraph of the story), "But there is still a lot of archaeology going on, and new discoveries are being made all the time".