Resilience - Survive, interconnect, thrive, repeat

Resilience is primal law.

There is something very deep in us that considers survival not just a right, but a duty. We pity people who give up, either in spirit or by suicide. But we also judge them.

Maybe that is why I included resilience in my list of ethical principles. I didn’t mean for any of them to be judgy. But by their very nature, ethical principles are something we strive to live by.

And yet, resilience is often discussed as something a person either has or doesn’t have, and we still judge people who lack it. And to be honest, I think the jury is still out on how much of resilience we have personal control over.

Resilience is partly explained by the comic with the frog being eaten by a bird that reaches out and grabs the bird’s skinny neck in a fist while most of its body is already inside the bird’s bill. In a nutshell, that’s it. A living being has got to struggle to survive and to thrive. It isn’t just the frog that embodies resilience. It’s the bird too. That bird’s got to eat to live.

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Resilience is what I put in place of the rules about self-sufficiency and industry that crop up in some other systems. I don’t think self-sufficiency is really possible in an interconnected world. Putting it forward as an ethical goal is like saying one should try to be at the top of the food chain at all times.

Well, yes, that does seem preferable to the alternative.

It is also a warning against sloth, but most people who have touted “self-sufficiency,” “industry” and “individualism” as values were privileged and they got much of what they thought was their own “honest gains” through systems that oppressed and stole from other humans or damaged the natural environment beyond its ability to regenerate in that person’s lifetime.

Concern over self-sufficiency mostly ignores the fact that so much of our ability to provide for ourselves is dependent on the local natural environment and/or the manmade circumstances we’re in.

Sure, I get irritated with laziness, but I have never encountered laziness that wasn’t based on being in a privileged position. I have never actually met a lazy, poor person and I’ve met a lot of poor people.

I have met people sick with a disease we call addiction that looked lazy. I don’t know their fight, thank the gods. But I don’t think that is “laziness.” I’ve met people sick with despair too, but those were generally people still working their asses off.

I have met people who were lazy and complained about not having money, but invariably they lived in wealthy areas and were actually being kept in relative comfort by someone else, often their parents, an inheritance or a privileged job that didn’t require much of them.

I have traveled in some of the most desperately poor parts of the world, like Bangladesh or the back roads of Zimbabwe and Ecuador and I never met a lazy person in those places. I don’t see laziness among poor people in wealthy countries either.

Among people who struggle for the next meal or for next month’s rent, I see resilience. It isn’t self-sufficiency. People in these hard situations are always in a community, supporting one another, getting by and sending what they can to those who need it even more. It certainly isn’t individualism and sometimes health precludes outward “industry.”

This resilience is a tenacious will to survive and thrive, but it isn’t just greed and self-service. There is more too it because resilience also implies a long view and it’s requirements often extend beyond the self..

Resilience has several interlocking components:

1. One prerequisite for resilience is the understanding that failure and struggle are normal and inevitable parts of life. It isn’t that one has to be a morose pessimist in order to be resilient. Resilience walks a delicate balance between optimism and knowing that mostly life is pretty hard.

2. An old adage says, “God only gives us what we can handle,” but that is really only true for those who have been born into relative comfort. It’s a comforting thought but a false friend, which can lead to crippling despair when luck deserts us. Resilience says, “It is our purpose to keep on, even when the way is broken and there is no light anywhere.”

3. Part of resilience is the ability to get up and try again when circumstance throws you in the dirt. We love to say it to others, “Try, try and try again.” It isn’t much fun in practice, as I was reminded when I finished this post and a website glitch deleted it permanently as I was finalizing the formatting. If you’re reading this, I managed to finish it again. It’s not the most popular part of resilience, but it’s there.

4. Another part, often neglected, is the ability to pace one’s self and engage in self-care within overall focus on the goal. When my web software deleted my post, I was very unhappy. I’d spent all of my free time for several days on it and now it was gone. I started rewriting but only got a few paragraphs in when my ten-year-old finished his online schoolwork. Despite the looming deadline, I fulfilled my promise to make gingerbread cookies with him and then sat down to enjoy some with a cup of tea. This too has to be done if resilience is to be maintained.

5. Another aspect that sets resilience apart from sheer desperation is that strong community, reciprocity with the earth and a healthy local environment all enhance resilience. It is possible to be somewhat resilient even in the worst place and circumstances, but insofar as resilience is the ability to survive and to thrive even amid adversity, external conditions matter, particularly the most local conditions. Getting to a better location or improving the situation where you find yourself build your capacity for resilience.

6. But there’s a catch, if those good local conditions are manufactured through exploitation and exclusion of others, resilience is weakened instead of strengthened. The wealthy might pay for their place in a gated community or a climate-change-proof bubble, but all they gain is a tenuous advantage. The structures that keep desperation at bay through exploitation will eventually crumble, leaving those who opted out of developing strong community and a healthy environment even more vulnerable.

7. Finally, resilience isn’t just about the survival of the individual. It is about building resilience for life through the generations. A resilient plant, when threatened by extreme heat or drought will put every bit of its remaining strength into throwing out seeds. This is part of it, the urge to help one’s own kind continue. But the same urge drives us to do creative work or aid other species. Life promotes life. Resilience.

These interconnected aspects of resilience give a better understanding of why resilience is an ethical principle, rather than mere survival. Resilience calls us to survive and thrive over the long haul, not just as individuals but as a community and an ecosystem in a way that ultimately benefits the individual as well.

I’ve finished the post for the second time and I’ll take better care in saving a backup. It has been a hard year and the last couple of days have epitomized that with close friends and family angry and not speaking over online accusations and politically sensitive resentments among those who usually share the same politics. And yet it is Thanksgiving.

A lot of Americans are having a quiet long-distance holiday. It is always possible to think of something to say we are thankful for, even if we don’t feel very thankful, even if the day is bitter. I am reminded that all of these values are interconnected. Gratitude is another and it too is part of resilience. We know things are hard and that makes gratitude even for small things blossom.

They say it will be a hard winter because of the virus and the economy and isolation and climate change and political division. Our hope is for resilience. Breath. Humility. Gratitude. Interconnection. Hope.

Patience: Riding the great wheel

If there ever was a time to write about patience, it would be now.

But I haven’t seen a lot of posts on patience during COVID-19. There are a lot of posts on anger and rage. There are posts on grief and how to get through isolation and depression too. There are practical posts and posts that try to foster empathy and solidarity. But not a lot about patience.

Maybe that is because we have no idea if and when this slow-mo crisis will ever end. Whether an effective vaccine ever comes or whether we simply figure out how to live with this new threat to our health, we need patience more than ever—patience with ourselves, patience with those people we do meet, patience with our families and patience with technology.

But I’m not actually writing about patience specifically because of COVID-19, though it is clearly relevant to the times. Patience is the next principle for practical ethics in my backwards take on the code of ethics I presented on this blog a few weeks ago.

While often unmentioned, it is a classic Pagan virtue. Patience is at its most basic about recognizing inevitable cycles, both within us and in the world around us. A farmer who pulls on the shoots will not hasten a good harvest to put it in Wheel-of-the-Year terms.

Last time, I wrote about joy as a principle of ethical living and that might have been confusing to some. But we are used to thinking of patience as a virtue and some may wonder what more there is to say about it.

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We should be more patient. We all know that. Yawn.

But before you dismiss patience from consideration, I would ask you to look at some aspects that slip through most interpretations. And to consider the great harm done by insisting that oppressed people need to be more patient. That gets us a bit closer to the ethical principle of patience.

First, we are all pretty familiar with the concept of being patient with children, students, customers, employees or people in the service industry. We are told that we should bite our tongues and stifle our frustration when people don’t live up to our expectations or do what they are supposed to do quickly enough.

Those of us who are very busy and living in hyper capitalist societies have a particularly hard time with this part of it. We are not fond of time wasters, be they human or inanimate. We take yoga and meditation classes to cope, and we still struggle for patience.

If you’ve taken enough self-help classes or have a therapist, you have likely also heard about the concept of being patient with one’s self. It’s the same as patience with others, except patience with yourself is about not churning out hateful, toxic self-talk as soon as you make the slightest mistake. Not everyone suffers from this problem overtly, but those who do likely know what I’m talking about. Here too, patience is widely regarded as a virtue.

But whether we’re talking about patience toward one’s self or toward others, does biting our tongues and suppressing frustration really do any good? Doesn’t it build up tension and resentment that will eventually do its damage anyway, even if less directly? Is patience really primarily about suppression?

It is for a lot of people today, and that’s part of our problem.

What if instead of suppression, we thought of patience as a long-view attitude. That’s what we need with COVID-19 after all. We aren’t telling people developing vaccines and medicines to “be patient” and suppress their feeling of urgency. We are asking them to pace themselves, do the careful double and triple checking and go through the proper science to keep people safe.

A lot of life under COVID feels like suppressing frustration, granted. We have to swallow frustration with our internet providers, our devices, our kids, their teachers, store clerks, our customers, our colleagues and so on. Everyone is on edge. We also have to swallow frustration and stifle twinges of panic at the sensation of partial suffocation in order to put on a mask again and again.

But what if instead of suppression we look at these actions actively? Instead of suppressing frustration we extend empathy to each of those people we are frustrated with. If instead of fighting frustration every time we put on a mask, we consider it an act of strength, steadfastly protecting those in need of protection.

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Then discomfort and frustration changes. It is still there but instead of frustration bottled up, it becomes another challenge overcome, another example of inner strength. This is a different kind of patience. It is closer to endurance, but still reminds us to be patient with ourselves as well.

Oppressed people have been told to be patient and to endure too much. Why would I consider patience a primary ethical value then?

If you don’t see patience as a matter of suppressing your feelings, but rather a matter of steadfast persistence and an attitude with a long view, then this question is less troubling.

There are issues and situations that need anger, even rage. There are times when suppression of such rage is wrong. We’ve seen some of those moments this year as well in the United States and elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need enduring patience at the same time.

Patience doesn’t mean suppressing the rage and grief of people who are yet again traumatized by a system that strips them of their worth and their rights. It means doing what must be done, fighting yet again. It means protesting day in and day out for months if that’s what it takes, like the people of Portland, Oregon have. It means considering the long view in the midst of a crisis and balancing the needs of the moment with strategy.

There are times to exercise patience toward those who don’t comprehend a burning issue the way we do. It is possible to say, “I recognize where you are coming from,” because it is a position we are familiar with. It doesn’t mean I agree, only that I recognize it and I have listened and heard the other. That doesn’t mean I won’t protect myself from someone who refuses to wear a mask or protect the vulnerable from a bigot.

Patience is about recognition of a living being, where they are at right now without assumptions made for their future. Patience doesn’t mean we let ourselves be trodden upon.

The same things apply to patience in our interpersonal relationships and with one’s self. Instead of suppressing frustration, patience here too should be about taking a long view and recognition of where a person is at.

Rather than suppressing my frustration with myself when I couldn’t work for three days due to illness, I have to recognize that I am sick and remember that if I push it, I will remain sick longer. The delay would, in the end, be longer.

Patience may not be the most welcome ethical principle in our tool kit, but it is certainly necessary. It is akin to the self-discipline mentioned in many codes, but it is self-discipline toward a specific purpose—a long view and a capacity to endure.

Patience, my dear ones. Do not despair.

Joy as a principle of ethical living

I’ll start backward. That seems somehow fitting. I’ll start from the bottom up.

When I wrote my thirteen practical principles for living well, I thought about a lot of things. Thirty years of thought, testing and reevaluation went into that. But in terms of which principle I put first, I wrote them in the order they occurred to me. I didn’t think of one as more important or primary than another.

I find it interesting then that they have a clear order as listed and I have no desire to change it. It isn’t a hierarchy though. I don’t see any of these principles as “number one” and none is dispensable. It’s more about the parts of life they address.

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The first three principles (balance, reciprocity and integrity) address our relationship to the earth and the cosmos, to life itself and to our spirituality. They are the biggest concepts, the ones that came to mind first because after all the years of pondering they were the hardest to nail down.

The second three (empathy, nurture and solidarity) are mostly about our relationship and actions toward other living beings, both of our species and of others. It is personal but also general. These too came quickly to my mind and developed from my years of intercultural experience and from the animals and plants I live with.

While I think society could be much improved with the first three spiritual principles, it could well become a ruthless and hard-edged world if based only on things like reciprocity, integrity and balance. Empathy, nurture and solidarity make for the kind of world I would actually like to live in.

The next three (interconnection, justice and openness) are essentially the political ones. This is about our relationship to society as a whole. Certainly any of these principles could be political but taken together these three outline a socio-political creed—one which emphasizes the needs of the whole, a world without coercion and the inevitability of constant change.

Finally, there are three (resilience, patience and joy) which are about a person’s relationship to themself. There is one final principle, of course, to make thirteen. That is mystery, which stands alone because it is the essential reminder not to be too sure, never to become a cult or adopt the arrogance of believing I have it all figured out—even when the occasional good day makes it feel that way.

So, this is why I say that beginning with joy is starting backwards. Except for mystery, which like the Fool in the Tarot doesn’t really have a place in any order, joy came at the end of my list.

Starting on the path

It has been a decade now, since I made one of the most important decisions in my life. It was not the decision to go to college or leave college or get married or have kids or leave my country or buy a home or quit my day job and start my own business.

All those were important decisions. But this one has done more to change the way I live. Ten years ago, I gave up on social approval. I didn’t give up on manners or small talk or trying to reach out to others. I just gave up on any of it actually working to make me socially accepted.

This was after decades of exclusion. As a kid, I was heavily ostracized because of my thick glasses and extreme nearsightedness. As an adult, I was able to pass for about ten years in my twenties until my vision impairment and other physical disabilities became more pronounced and visible. But even then it was a constant struggle to pass.

As a new mother in my mid-thirties I found myself snubbed in mothers’ groups because of my disability, because I was a foreigner and because my child’s skin didn’t match mine. That isn’t to say that I was universally rejected. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it was when I was a kid. I have wonderful, life-long friends who just don’t live where I do. And locally there were a few other women I connected with.

The giving up wasn’t about not trying. It was just about not hanging onto it and not hinging my happiness on social approval. Up until that time, I had truly believed that a person’s happiness could be measured in the quality—if not necessarily the quantity—of their friendships. I had also believed that goodness. honesty, loyalty and a full heart would win through in the end, that I would find those who would value me if I kept faith.

Those sound like such good things to believe. And yet those beliefs made me miserable because my experience for thirty years was that I was a failure at it, no matter what I tried. My friends and I tend to be people on the margins of society. We love one another, but because of being on the margins, we don’t generally get to congregate close together and the people I live among never fully accepted me. And I realized that they never would.

So, I let it go. And I decided to base my goals in life on something else. I decided to pursue joy.

Beware here. When I say I pursue joy and encourage others to pursue it as well. I do not mean the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure, momentary whims or entertainment. These things are not joy and pretty much always lead to eventual misery if they are over.indulged.

Joy is different. Joy is the deep love and gratitude that you feel in a beautiful moment full of life and passion. Joy is the satisfaction you feel when you lose yourself in work that it is purposeful and true to your own gifts, work you enjoy. Joy is often, but not always, in the connection with people you love, friends and family. Joy is also an open connection to other living things and to natural places.

Joy is both fleeting and lasting. It often lasts only a moment when you notice it. But it also does not destroy its own potential. Unlike the enjoyment of pleasure, which can when taken to extremes lead to addiction, destruction and exploitation, joy feels different and it doesn’t destroy.

Both pleasure and joy are sweet. But pleasure is like salted-caramel ice cream—a treat that leaves me feeling heavy but properly pampered. It costs money—a lot where I live—and I love it, but I also know that if it disappeared forever I could still survive.

Joy is like fresh homemade bread with honey. The sweetness fills my senses. It nourishes and I know that it is attainable directly through my connection to the land with work and focus. There is something in it, the real food of the spirit that I know I can’t live without.

I do use hedonistic pleasure. I eat sweets—specifically salted-caramel ice cream—to celebrate or to get through a tough time. I love to lie back and watch a good film or an old, beloved TV show. And in moderation these things are good. They just aren’t joy. They have more to do with another principle we’ll look at another time, that of nurture. Our bodies and souls need some pampering, but that isn’t what joy is about.

Joy often comes at the expense of that pampering. If you’ve ever worked for twenty-hours straight on an artistic endeavor in a fit of joyful passion, you’ll know that joy isn’t self-care and needs to be tempered by it. The same applies to that joy that comes from stunning natural places, often reached through considerable strain and discomfort.

Joy is the positive side of passion. Maybe that’s the best definition.

Essentially, I found that you can have a pretty good life in all of the ways that are supposed to matter—material comfort, respect, family, friends, purpose—and still feel empty without moments of joy or a joyful passion underlying it.

When I decided to give up on social approval the important part of the decision was that I decided to live my life for joy, even if I was not accepted.

I have continued to put energy into social things, but it is a limited amount of energy. When I reach out to people and I am rejected or dismissed out of hand, it stings but I refuse to let it derail my life again. When I try to build local community and my efforts are rebuffed, I don’t let it take my happiness anymore. I have found a great many joyful things that don’t need anyone else’s approval.

After fifteen years of building it bit by bit, there are many things in my home that give me joy. Last year, I finally had the raised bed that I have dreamed about since I was about six years old built. I feel real joy sitting on it in the afternoon sun, studying the herbs from one of the books I don’t have enough time to read very often. I also get great joy from finally finding the key to successfully making sour cherry jam, which my husband always said was his favorite.

I feel joy every morning as I walk up the hill to feed the chickens, not because I love chickens that much. But because they force me to get out and experience the morning air and light earlier than I would otherwise. I feel so fortunate to be one of those people who lives on a hillside with a view of a misty valley and mornings that are sometimes clear and sometimes rainy with a gritty wind.

The hard thing about joy

What gives you joy will inevitably be different than the things that give me joy. My husband often mentions that the things I take such joy from are drudgery to him. But then he hasn’t found his joy. So many people today don’t know what would give them joy or even believe that anything would.

It isn’t easy. I certainly spent enough years being miserable and I probably would have thought “joy” as a principle of ethical and practical living was a trite and simplistic slogan. But I’ve been living it for ten years now, and it has helped. It hasn’t fixed everything, but it has helped.

The other hard part about joy is that it is so often fleeting. Early this summer my ducks made babies in a nest right outside of my window—the one where I both sleep and read in stolen moments. It was lovely to listen to the tiny ducklings with beautifully speckled backs pecking around through my rock garden. I put food and water near the nest every day to make sure the mother duck would not have to go far.

But still they didn’t survive. I am not sure what got the babies, though I suspect a surly neighborhood tomcat that prowls loose. I could easily see the entire incident as negative, but I know the truth. There was joy. There were moments of joy both for me and the ducks. And sometimes that’s just the whole reason we live—those little moments.

A year ago, I was deeply enmeshed in Extinction Rebellion, an organization founded on good ideals and flawed humans. For a time, the local group gave me more purpose, hope and social acceptance than I had known in well over a decade. Not only do I fully believe in the vision of an equitable future and the struggle to mitigate the devastating effects of climate change, there were moments of pure joy when groups of people worked together creatively and harmoniously.

For months I was respected as a healer, a teacher and an effective organizer. And there was definitely joy in that.

But the same old prejudices crept in and eventually those who felt threatened by me and could not accept me as anything but a symbol of the group’s charitable tolerance toward a disabled person in a corner of the room held sway. I lost it all again.

And it would be easy to be bitter. But the joy that the group created and that I knew during that time was real. Sorrow doesn’t negate joy. They switch places over time or even coexist simultaneously.

A friend who also left the group recently wrote and asked me for comments. I will always tell the truth about the prejudices and exclusion that forced me out of the group and ultimately decimated the local group after I was gone, but that truth goes hand in hand with the real joy that existed for a time.

Joy is often fleeting. It is real for all that. It also lasts.

I list joy as a principle of ethics because it is a focus that doesn’t betray. If you can separate joy from pleasure, entertainment and seeking quick comfort, living with joy as a goal that provides just the sort of true compass that we need to stay on our path.

That’s what ethics should be about in the end. I don’t subscribe to a religion of angry gods or an ethical framework of “shoulds.” We strive to live ethically, in the end for ourselves. We teach our children to live ethically for their well-being. Religions that make ethical and moral laws based on punishment or even a reward after death are, in my view, fraudulent methods of control and oppression. Real ethics has as its objective, not control, but happiness and genuine peace of mind.

What does the Pagan value of hospitality mean in practice?

I know. I know. There is nothing—absolutely nothing, including respect for the earth—that we are allowed to say actually connects modern Pagans together in terms of a value or belief. BUT many European Pagan traditions do explicitly claim “hospitality” as a virtue, requirement or tenant.

Moreover, I have lived in traditional communities all over the world and have never encountered one where hospitality was not a lived value, a primary requirement of ethics and a point of honor.

In remote villages in Bangladesh, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Nepal, the Ukraine and Zimbabwe, I was told that their people live by “the law of hospitality” usually in so many words in their local languages.

Some of these communities, the villages where I lived for a time in Ecuador and Nepal, for instance, were proudly indigenous in their spiritual beliefs and they pointed to the law of hospitality as an important marker of that and something they believed distinguished them from people in non-traditional, industrial society. The other places had a thin Christian or Muslim venire with clear signs of pre-Abrahamic traditions showing through.

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We may not call these cultures “Pagan” today because that term is generally only applied to cultures that have asked for the label, primarily modern European Pagans who wish to practice either a reclaimed ancestral tradition or an earth-centered path. But even a rudimentary exploration of anthropology will show that these cultures and ancient European Pagan cultures have a lot in common.

In fact, one of the ways Europeans can successfully follow a pre-Christian ancestral path is to observe and learn from indigenous cultures. This doesn’t mean culturally appropriating their technologies, terms and rituals, but rather looking for the context and how indigenous communities relate spirituality to ethics and to daily life. These things don’t tend to change that much between a remote village in Ecuador and a remote village in Nepal, so it is likely that ancient Europeans were also pretty similar in these matters of ethics and practical spirituality.

That’s all to say that I’m going to make the statement here that hospitality is generally a Pagan value, whether the nitpickers like it or not.

Whew! Having established that I am even allowed to discuss hospitality as an ethical requirement, I am interested in what it means in practical terms, from interpersonal interactions to politics.

Stories tell us that among the ancient Scandinavians rules of hospitality were truly observed. A request for hospitality could not be lightly declined and it was considered a spiritual and moral failing if necessity or danger forced one to refuse. It was shameful if one didn’t have food and drink to offer and not offering what one had was unthinkable.

This was also my experience of being a visitor in indigenous communities. I was invariably given more and better food than my hosts, even in situations where they were clearly suffering nutritionally. I was always careful to be quiet and reserved until I learned the requirements for guest behavior, which are so often part of hospitality rules and can vary from place to place. I always brought gifts but rarely offered to directly pay my hosts unless I could be sure this wouldn’t give offense.

In one memorable encounter, I showed up in a small village at the end of a dirt road in Nepal with a letter from my Nepali friend asking his cousin to help me hike to the even more remote village where his wife and children lived. My friend was an immigrant in the West and we had met through a network of immigrants in a country where I was also a foreigner.

We’d been through some intense things together, including an incident when I had to bandage his serious wounds because his immigration status wouldn’t allow him to go to a hospital without ending up in deportation proceedings. We were tied by strong bonds and those bonds then extended to his cousin by the rules of hospitality.

I was dismayed to see a look of shock and even horror cross the face of the cousin when I finally reached him and handed him the letter from my friend. I could tell something was wrong, but he quickly recovered and greeted me with all due respect. At first, I worried that our friendship broke some rule about relationships between women and men in their culture or some such.

But later the cousin pulled me into a private corner and laid out the problem. which put two of his most important spiritual laws in conflict—hospitality and the rules of ritual.

His toddler was sick and this was connected in traditional belief to the fact that the family had neglected rituals to purify and ward their newly constructed house. A local elder and ritual leader had been called in from a distant village to conduct the necessary rituals. The elder was to leave the next day and the rituals could not be put off. Their tradition had a hard and fast rule that anyone who would sleep in the house that night must participate in the ritual.

From the perspective of my friend’s cousin, this presented a terrible dilemma. He had met only a few western foreigners and they were all Christian missionaries who viewed traditional rituals with disgust and disrespect. He felt pretty sure that I would be the same and this had caused him great discomfort because he had to decide whether or not to postpone the ritual or refuse hospitality to me.

Given that the health and safety of his family was at stake, he had finally decided to do the latter.

Thankfully, he addressed the issue with me openly and forthrightly, and so I was able to put his fears to rest and attend a traditional ritual that few foreigners would be privileged to join. It was one of the most intense and mind-opening events of my twenties, but I have written about the ritual itself elsewhere.

One of the most important concepts I gained from that experience wasn’t in the ritual at all though. It was the relationship of hospitality to ethical and spiritual rules in that culture. Clearly hospitality was a high virtue, but not the highest priority to which all others had to give way. My host was clearly distraught by the idea of refusing hospitality but also prepared to do so in order to obey the rules of the ritual leader and protect his family.

I have thought a lot about the laws of hospitality and how they should apply to my own conduct since then.

Eleven years ago, I was on my way an orphanage to meet my three-month-old daughter for the first time and a meth addict accosted me in a parking lot and begged for money. I was carrying the food to make lunches for my husband and me on the road. I could have stopped and handed her some of the food. We could have done with a little less and the law of hospitality tells me that I should have.

But the moment was among the most intense and emotionally fraught of my life and I instinctively recoiled from her face, so ravaged by the poisons of methamphetamines. And I fled. The woman was not threatening me, only begging. She would likely have used any money I gave her for drugs or alcohol rather than for food, so far gone was her addiction. But I had food—that most essential element of hospitality—right in my hands.

It is one of the most potent regrets of my life that I failed to give hospitality in that stressful moment. I have given it at many other times, but it is the time I didn’t that I remember.

Being a harried mother, I have also kept food for my children’s dinner hidden so that I wouldn’t have to make a whole new meal when guests showed up and I served only drinks and snacks. But these were not hungry guests, just people who didn’t have young kids or an understanding of mother’s work and exhaustion. I am not an extreme or perfect follower of the law of hospitality.

Still the law of hospitality extends far beyond this personal level. Countries where hospitality is expressed as a national value take in far more refugees than others. It is a common myth in North America and Western Europe that these wealthy nations take in more refugees than other countries, but it is far from true. Under the current definition, the top ten nations in terms of numbers of refugees accepted all happen to be countries with a majority Muslim population.

A refugee is defined as a person who has been forced to flee their home due to violence or persecution. Under current definitions utter lawlessness and systemic poverty left in the wake of colonial resource stripping doesn’t even count, though the closed attitude of wealthy nations would be even more apparent if it did.

Hospitality is an often cited tenant of Muslim culture and I have seen it in action in Kazakhstan and Bangladesh. As a young traveler without a clue, I showed up unannounced in out of the way places in both countries and was initially greeted with suspicion bordering on hostility.

But as soon as locals determined that I was a lost and nearly penniless kid rather than a threat, I was swept up in the culture of hospitality, treated as an honored guest, given a seat beside the head of household and provided with everything I might need.

It is apparently need that the law of hospitality responds to, not merely the state of being an outsider. The Muslim, refugee-accepting countries are not notoriously welcoming to everyone, just to those in dire straits.

I wonder how our Pagan ancestors might have seen modern politics and how they might view something like a refugee crisis. There is a strong current of isolationism among modern Pagans, even among those who claim to honor the law of hospitality. They tell me that hospitality means we should give food to a person who is right in front of us, that we shouldn’t fight with a guest and other things that are reminiscent of romanticized historical movies.

They say our ancestors never intended it to mean taking in hungry and desperate strangers. But that isn’t actually how the law of hospitality works in places where it is still a living tradition.

Looking at the evidence, I must say that hospitality should be a broad Pagan value. And hospitality means accepting and helping refugees and thus being Pagan should necessitate that we are in favor of policies that help refugees, whether they are fleeing violence, persecution or starvation.

Conversely, it does not mean that we have to be in favor of accepting every immigrant or that we are supposed to play doormat or not defend our homes, tribe or nation from a threat. While indigenous communities I visited seemed to be less suspicious than Muslim communities, this may well have to do with politics more than with the underlying cultures.

Certainly, it is not always easy to determine whether a person is a traveler minding their own business, a desperate refugee or someone bent on exploitation, distraction or even violence. Our Pagan ancestors had the same problem. This did not mean they didn’t consider hospitality to be a requirement of an honorable person. It just meant and still means that we have to use our intuition and consider it to bring dishonor if we guess wrong and refuse hospitality to a friend or to someone in need.

Not all giants are ancient

There is something in Pagan cyberspace that has been niggling at me for awhile like one of those little parasitic worms that got under my kid’s skin a couple of summers ago after she went dipping in a scummy pond.

That is the fad of dissing hippies.

OK, I’m ready to duck already .But this has got to be said. Gerald Gardener may or may not have started a modern witchcraft tradition and a lot of other big names contributed to the nice wave of Pagan-friendly public sentiment and popular trendiness we now enjoy, but without the counterculture movement, the New Age, and yes, the hippies, we would not be experiencing a western world in which Pagan spirituality and culture are both widespread and generally well-accepted.

Image via Pixabay

Without the cultural developments of these movements that are so widely ridiculed among Pagans, Wicca would most likely have remained a tiny fringe interest of a few wealthy eccentrics. Traditional witchcraft would have stayed where it was for centuries, losing ground and scrambling to preserve shreds of knowledge. And non-Hindu, non-indigenous Paganism would have remained in the history books.

Don’t get me wrong. I am as irritated by “fluffy bunny” New Age platitudes as any hard polytheist.. Yes, we intersect with the New Age sometimes and it can cause a bit of friction and some eye-rolling on both sides. But let’s face it. Other movements have impacts on the social environment we live in and even on us.

The New Age not only sheltered a lot of early Pagan, Wiccan and witchcraft books and tools in bookstores for several decades. It is only in the past twenty years that a meaningful line could be drawn between modern Paganism and the New Age.

I will grant that New Age spirituality has little directly in common with modern Paganism outside of a few visual trappings. But many people came to Paganism through contact with New Age authors, stores, publications and events.

Beyond the New Age movement, the wider counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s had an even deeper impact on society, opening up the possibility of acceptance and widespread information on small and growing spiritual movements of all kinds, including ours.

That brings me to my own background. My parents and most of the adults I grew up around were on the rural, financially poor fringes of both the counterculture and the New Age. They didn’t have the connections, wealth or geographic positioning to be part of early Wicca and other more recognized Neopagan groups. Instead they were what are today (usually disparagingly) called hippies.

Specifically, my father and mother arrived on a rocky piece of land in Northeastern Oregon shortly before I was born with little more than a broken down old truck to their name. There was a weathered one-room school house on the property, which they shared with another family—until it burned to the ground one November night, while they were out, due to a faulty DYI woodstove.

My folks were left in the snow with my two-year-old brother and my mom pregnant with me. My dad built our first house—often referred to as a “shack” by outsiders—around and over the old truck, which no longer ran. That’s where I grew up, learning to grow food, pay attention to natural cycles and call the quarters on important occasions.

We weren’t Pagan in the ways most widely recognized today, but we were in the ways that actually matter. And we were not alone.

As I traveled around the world as a journalist, I met countless adult children of the hippies—some better adjusted than others. Some adopted their parents’ values and some rejected them outright. But they all share a new kind of cultural assumption of fluidity and diversity—whether they like it or not—that has fostered the modern Pagan and witchcraft movements.

Why do I care if Pagans make fun of hippie names or other symbols? Can’t I just take a joke? Lighten up?

It bothers me. Maybe it is because it is part of my own roots. Maybe I’m not pure enough in my rejection of all things New Age. But there is something here Pagans should pay attention to. These too are our ancestors. They are the ones on whose shoulders we stand. Not all giants are ancient or even very tall. They sometimes just muddled through harsher times so that we can have what we have today.

Think on it the next time you laugh at a hippie name or a fluffy bunny chant.

Why do we strive to live morally and ethically?

“Why can’t I have all the presents?” one of my kids shrieks.

The tone isn’t joking the way you might think. She is demanding, furious, her face red and sweaty. For a moment, she is overcome with that primitive urge that seems to defy all ethics. I call it the “me-want-now” urge. We all know it, though we don’t always admit it and some of us bury it deeper than others.

“I want everything! They’re mine, not his!” She kicks toward her brother but I pull her away. He is often ready with sibling comebacks, but this one of those moments when his older sister shocks him into silence.

Some kids seem to be born with a moral compass on the most basic level. They have the urge too. but they also get that other people have it and that we’ve got to meet somewhere in the middle. Fair is fair. They can be persuaded to see the logic of “How would you feel if someone did that to you?”

But this is by no means a universal trait. And unfortunately, my kids aren’t among the budding saints of the world.

Creative Commons image via Pixabay

I not only have kids myself, I also teach preschool and early elementary ESL students. Two sisters ages 5 and 8, who I teach, are always cuddling. The older one looks out for the younger one—making sure she gets the colors of crayon she needs and that she’s dressed warmly to go out—but then insists on winning all the games in recompense. And most kids aren’t even that nice.

Between the current wave of right-wing, anti-compassion politics and my struggles with my own little humans, I have been thinking a lot on ethics lately..

We blithely talk about teaching children to know “right from wrong,” but increasingly it seems like adults in our world don’t know or at least wildly disagree on the subject. OK, most people—at least publicly—get behind the rules of not killing or physically harming people or stealing.

But every week I come across at least one online post declaiming on how wimps who are hurt by verbal bullying should grow a thicker skin—i.e. exclusionist opinions in direct opposition to what I know of as ethics. And clearly, while most of us think it isn’t okay to kill or steal, we go on buying products the production of which requires killing and stealing from the poorest people in the world.

What is it we really believe? And why would we strive to live morally and ethically even if we could agree on what it would entail?

Abrahamic religions have an answer that is so widely disseminated in the world today that I doubt there is a fluent English speaker who isn’t well versed in it, regardless of whether or not you follow one of those faiths. There is the carrot of Heaven and the stick of Hell. And each particular religion or specific sect has its set of commandments or moral rules saying what will be grounds for sentencing you to Hell or rewarding you with Heaven.

For those who believe literally in this Heaven and Hell thing, the ethical life may seem relatively simple. Follow the rules or you will suffer. It’s a fear doctrine with a bit of a possible reward held out—not unlike my methods with my children. “Stop kicking your brother or you will lose your video privileges and be banished to extra chores-ville!” I’m less eternal about it, but only because I—unlike the Abrahamic God—can’t manage to hold grudges and don’t have guards to enforce my Hell while I am otherwise occupied.

Another popular method is the Hindu concept of Karma. Some more sophisticated versions perceive Karma as primarily about providing specific lessons that one needs to learn. But there is always an element of “If you behave unethically, you will suffer as a result, possibly in another life, but eventually you will suffer.”

This may be conceived of as learning a necessary lesson in order to be more enlightened in a future incarnation or as straight-up karmic punishment, depending on who you listen to, but either way, it’s a method of enforcement.

My parenting often has a Karma-like element too. “If you break your toys, you won’t have them. If you use up all your time fighting, you won’t have time to play. If you break someone else’s toy, you’ll have to work it off.”

In parenting circles, we like to call this “natural consequences” rather than punishment. Just like we like to call the Heaven and Hell version, “reward-based discipline.”

Every reward entails the possibility of its denial. And every natural consequence that a parent enforces is only one step removed from punishment.

It may be that immaturity leads many of us to require this kind of external moral compass. As children we almost all need it to some degree. Many adults still appear to need it. Without constraints, most humans don’t act particularly ethically. This is why we have law enforcement after all.

Some people will argue that morality and ethics are nothing but social constructs, and thus somehow suspect and questionable. Many animals don’t appear to have ethics, these ethics deniers argue.

But that is a belief primarily espoused by those humans who spend very little time with animals or in nature. In fact, very few animals kill beyond self-defense, the need for food or competition for procreation, i.e. beyond absolute necessity. Some do but most do not. Many animals respect the territorial rights of others with only exceptional outbreaks of violent struggle. And recent research is showing a remarkable number of animal species that are capable of compassion, loyalty, empathy, revenge, community cooperation, communication and occasionally even heroism.

So it isn’t really possible to say that ethics is a merely human conceit.

A secular, humanist perspective acknowledging this science often simply claims that we want to do “what is right” without any basis for it. And perhaps those young children and animals who act ethically—seemingly without threat or reward—may be proof that this principle has some traction. This reason for ethics is pleasingly uncomplicated, but often there are hidden reasons.

My extraordinarily well-behaved eight-year-old student wants the approval of adults. She is highly motivated for approval and enjoys being praised more than most kids. She also enjoys winning though, which is why she insists on winning every game over her younger sister.

There is a reward being sought and a consequence being avoided. The reward of praise and approval and the consequence of disapproval. The fact that her reward and consequence equation is a bit less tangible and forceful than that required by some kids does not negate the fact that it is still there. She glows under adult praise and so pursues it.

It is still an external reward but perhaps it is easier to transition from such a non-tangible reward to an internal reward and thus to ethical independence. That is why parents often try to motivate children through praise alone, hoping that our children will not always need a carrot or a stick.

As a follower of Pagan gods and a seeker for spiritual insight in ancient traditions, I am often fascinated by the ethical systems of ancient cultures. Many do not appear particularly moral to us today. The concepts of ethics were different and some ancient cultures were quite hierarchical and ruthless. But the deeper you go into tribal, hunter-gatherer traditions, the less hierarchical and the less external reward-consequence thinking you find.

It is not that there is no possible reward for ethical acts but in these ancient cultures there is a heavier reliance on internal rewards, those we give only to ourselves in the form of self-respect and s healthy self image.

This is what I am interested in. Whether we call it enlightenment, awakening or honor, it all comes down to one thing—self-respect.

Within reason, children need consequences and rewards. And in law enforcement, these mechanisms seem necessary as well. But when it comes to most ethics and my own deepest beliefs, I want to live my life ethically based not on a hoped-for reward or a feared consequence from outside, but rather because my self-respect demands it.

Unless I am within a specific tradition that uses a different term to mean the same thing, I use the more universal term ‘self-respect” because that most clearly gets at the meaning. My goal is to live well, ethically and morally in such a way that I can feel unreserved self-respect.

This is one reason I follow an earth-centered spiritual path with ties to ancient cultures. This spiritual approach lends itself to the ethics of self-respect. I strive to teach my children these values as well. It is not easy in a world filled with instant, external gratification from consumerism and passive entertainment. But when they do well, my first response is not a material reward or even my approval, but a comment to notice how they feel inside.

When you call yourself a "gypsy"

Pagans, new agers, beautiful beings or spirit and creativity, all of you, hear this.

I have done some very silly things in my time. When I was a young teen and I desperately wanted to be a beautiful and wise Pagan priestess and herbalist healer from Middle Earth, I mixed up inedible brews of random leaves from around my house. I forced my best friend (a boy) to sit facing me and hold a crystal on his forehead in lengthy tests of our telepathic powers.

I also talked him into training to be a "knight" by whacking a tree endlessly with a wooden sword. This last was not just silly but ultimately destructive and cruel. My friend, trying to win his medieval wannabe lady's favor, knocked all the bark off of the tree in a ring all the way around the trunk. And the tree died. 

My friend went on to learn to use a sword skillfully from martial arts teachers in Japan. I spent the next twenty years learning which plants actually have medicinal properties and which are poisons or will just give you a stomach ache. Fortunately, for me and my friends, I stopped short of being stupid enough to get anyone to drink my early concoctions. 

The fact remains though that we do silly things when we are inexperienced and uniformed. Some of those things are not just silly but stupid. And some of the stupid things end up hurting someone. 

Creative Commons image by James Saunders

There is one silly thing going around in Pagan and other spirituality circles that I want to warn you off of. I say it as a fellow silly person. I don't come from a high preachy perch, but rather from the earth-bound, true-hearted path of one who did not always know better.  

Please don't call yourself a "gypsy" unless you really are Romani. Please don't even name your pets, children, homes or objects with "gypsy" as either a noun or an adjective.

I get it. The word sounds fun. So many people use it and they mean no harm. At worst, it is silly to you in the places where you live. 

I, however, live in a place where the word "gypsy" Is as harsh and dangerous a racial slur as the N-word is in the United States. In Central Europe where I live, eighty percent of Roma live in poverty, often the absolute poverty rarely seen outside of the developing world. Thirty percent of Roma in the wealthy European Union live in households with no running water.

It was only in 2008, that the schools in the European country where I live began to desegregate and Romani children started attending real schools. We are otherwise a wealthy and highly educated country, but discrimination against the Roma is still pervasive and hate crimes, both violent attacks and threats, are widespread. 

Earlier this summer, a gang of ten men armed with knives attacked a Romani community in Western Ukraine, a few hundred miles from where I live. They killed one person and injured four others, including a child. When the Romani residents fled the area, journalists found bloodstained clothing scattered amid children's toys and other household items.

Where I live in the Czech Republic, 65 percent of Roma report discrimination when seeking housing and 55 percent of the non-Romani population openly say they wouldn't want a Romani neighbor, which shows that the Romani reports are probably not exaggerated. In addition, more than 50 percent of Romani children reported racist harassment and bullying in school in a European Union survey published earlier this year.

I know that people who call themselves "gypsies" in fun or even in a belief that they are thus "honoring" the free spirit and beauty of the Romani people don't mean the term the way those who attack Romani people using that word do. But it is still a mistake. It is one of those silly things that actually hurts people by accident. 

Just as Native American indians do not appreciate people dressing up with feathers on their heads and waving their hand in front of their mouth to "be like Indians" even when this is meant positively, Romani people are hurt by the stereotype of the "free-spirited, sensual and cleverly tricky gypsies." They are harmed in spirit and in heart, but also eventually harmed in body as well because these stereotypes contribute to international silence and indifference when gangs of thugs attack the Roma and bureaucrats block the doors of schools and apartment buildings. 

I knew much of this when I first came to live in the Czech Republic. Fortunately, I did not fall victim to this particular silly thing as a young person. I spent my twenties writing for international newspapers and magazines, often about the Roma, racism and ethnic violence in Central and Eastern Europe.

Creative Commons image by Pablo Segade 

But of course, a journalist doesn't experience these events the way those targeted do. After I had lived in the Czech Republic for ten years and was married, I adopted a child. My husband and I couldn't have biological children and we were open to adoption. As it often happens in this country, the child the orphanage placed in my arms was a tiny Romani girl. 

The first weeks with my daughter were some of the happiest of my life. I remember the spring rain and sunshine of that April with misty-eyed joy.  

Then a month later, Neo-nazis threw three Molotov cocktails through the windows of a Romani home and one landed in the bed of a two-year-old girl. The beautiful little girl, who looked very much like my daughter, suffered terrible burns over 80 percent of her body and lost three fingers but survived after months in an induced comma and fourteen major surgeries.

The violence, discrimination and structural racism that the Roma suffer cost my daughter her first family and ended that month of naive bliss for me as well. Two years later we adopted a little boy, also of Romani background, who had already suffered racism from caregivers at an orphanage, where they told me "nobody really liked him." He was ten months old and already deeply traumatized.

Today my children are seven and nine years old. They are largely sheltered from the harsh realities of racism. My daughter once panicked when kids at school called her "black" because she thought they knew something she didn't and that she was going to turn the color black. She has a light olive complexion which is here sometimes called "black." She does love to wear flamboyant dresses and flowers in her hair, but so do many non-Romani little girls playing princess. 

My son's friend from school recently told me that some boys teased my son and called him "gypsy." My son reluctantly confirmed that it was true. He looked terrified as he waited for my reaction. 

My children don't really understand the many uses of the word "gypsy" yet. But like many other Roma, the first place they hear it is in the schoolyard as a racial slur. I will try to explain to them when we visit our family in America and hear people use it in a much more silly way that thee people do not mean to be hurtful. Maybe they will understand but maybe they will just learn to be quiet and keep their hurt inside.

Regardless, the silliness that accompanies the western use of the word "gypsy" spreads unhelpful stereotypes about the Roma, who are called Gypsies because historically some people believed they originated in Egypt. (They actually originated in India.) 

Pagan friends, I ask you not to do this silly thing. Don't misuse the word "gypsy" with a small "g" and don't use "Gypsy" with a big "G" as an insult either (obviously). The former may seem like a minor issue to many but it would help as a show of support for the Romani people who remain one of the world's most persecuted minorities.

Thank you for understanding. 

Of Lughnasadh and solidarity

Over a plastic table at the university grill I laid out my case to two prominent members of the student government counsel about why we should show solidarity with low-income students as drastic cuts in federal financial aid were proposed. 

"That's exactly the problem!" one of the young men glaring at me across the table snapped. "That word."

What word? I combed back through my carefully prepared argument, trying to figure out what faux pas I might have committed in word choice. 

The other young man must have believed my expression of blank confusion. "Solidarity," he said. "That word makes you sound like a communist."

That was more than twenty years ago and it was the first time I heard that "solidarity" is considered a bad word. Unfortunately, that has not changed over the decades. 
 
Even today as progressives are making the word “socialism” halfway respectable, I still don’t hear this more personal term.
 
Solidarity isn’t charity and it isn’t socialism. It is much closer to the Pagan concept of hospitality. It means aid and comfort offered to the cold, the hungry, the wounded, the outcast and those whose harvest was poor last year or for many years, not out of pity but out of a deep understanding of our interconnection.
 
We are always saying that earth-centered spirituality is a big tent and we have very little if any common ground to base any solidarity on. And yet we all recognize "Paganism" when we see it, so there must be something that binds us.
 
Is it our acknowledgement of multiple gods of many different names and conceived of in as many different ways but still with suspiciously similar attributes across the world? Is it our yearning for something authentic, ancestral and rooted? Is it our understanding that the earth, not some man on a cloud, is the true giver of our daily bread?
 
Many of us with European roots wish to be acknowledged as a tradition en par with Native American, African or Hindu traditions that share these bits of common ground with us. But at the same time so many Pagans insist that politics and with it all social justice concerns have no place in our faith.
 
How so? What of that hospitality you speak so highly of? What of gratitude for your metaphorical harvest? What of your desire for native peoples around the world to acknowledge you as honorably seeking out your own ancestral connection?
 
What could the values of Lammas and Lughnasadh, the gratitude and the hospitality toward others possibly mean in today’s world that has been divorced from the land and agriculture, if not solidarity with those who have had hard luck, whether that meant being born in a war-torn and impoverished country or having less opportunity to obtain a secure living in our own country? What could it mean if not sharing what we have to ensure that the earth survives for another cycle of time?
 
You can claim with truth that we Pagans all believe different things. We do. We are vastly different. The words, the traditions and even our core beliefs diverge.

But if you hold some tradition of Lughnasadh or Lammas or even one comparable under some other name, then it is time to match your deeds to  your prayers and libations. Paganism is either real beyond your ritual circle or it is merely the teenage game some have accused us of.

I offer a poem for Lughnasadh and Lammas on the subject of solidarity:

Not to bow to sloth and greed
Nor to build walls of hate
Did Lugh ensure the seed
Or the Norns weave our fate.
You who claim the gods of old,
Who were silenced by crime,
Can least afford to turn cold
To those outcast in our time.
Honor you call for the great,
The ancestors of your blood,
And yet will you rise too late
To stand for right and good?
Odin wandered as it's told
In the guise of hard luck.
And Brigid of flame and gold
Always for justice struck.
Maybe tales are just that,
No more firm than mist.
Old warriors grow fat
And children are mere grist.
But if you call them sacred
And mean your oaths sworn,
It is time to battle hatred
And face the coming storm.
Hospitality for those in need.
Solidarity for those who fight.
The call of the heart’s creed
Is ringing in the night.

What I learned from Christians and Muslims about sharing one's identity with assholes

A few years ago, I attended the concert of a local Pagan band which was heralded as the Pagan event of the season in our area. The music was OK, but then half-way through the concert, the band started making the Nazi salute and yelling "Hail!" 

I grew up in one of those earth-centered families where we didn't call ourselves Pagan, but we read the stories of Norse, Greek and Native American gods, called the elements to start rituals, did Tarot and read the Runes... you know, all that good wholesome Pagan stuff. When I discovered the modern Pagan movement as an adult, I was delighted. There was suddenly so much more information and a whole world of potential community. 

Creative commons image courtesy of Novak Hunsky

The days of avoiding the pesky "What's your religion?" question in public were forever behind me.

Or so I thought.

I moved to Central Europe twenty years ago, following my journalism career. And there are many positive things in my new country, but racism isn't one of them. To say that I was upset to find neo-fascism spreading its slimy tentacles through the local Pagan community is an understatement. I was devastated. My experience with the band was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident and I struggled to find Pagan friends.

I set out for an international Pagans and Witches conference with high hopes of finding a more open-minded atmosphere in an international group. My children were little more than toddlers at the time and I wanted them to grow up the same as me, except better. I wanted them to have all the comfort and wonder of earth-centered spirituality AND a vibrant and friendly community where that spirituality is wholeheartedly accepted. 

I enjoyed being part of a large group ritual and found many of the discussions at the conference interesting. But several prominent persons at the conference made neo-nazi references and while some people seemed uncomfortable, no one said anything. As the only person there who didn't personally know anyone, I was hesitant to speak up, and when I did, I was harshly rebuffed and told to keep to my own business by one of the organizers.

I left the conference early. My mission had failed, since my children aren't white and I could see that even at an international gathering, they wouldn't always be truly welcome.

As a result, I was aware of the insidious creep of white supremacist groups encroaching on Pagan circles long before it became big news in the United States. Now with prominent white supremacist leaders claiming to be Pagan and alt-right demonstrators carrying Pagan symbols it is no longer so easy to admit to being Pagan in public. 

I have written about this scourge before and urged fellow Pagans to stand up to the abuse of Pagan symbols and groups by supremacist ideology. But for a long time, I struggled to make peace with the issue within myself. Should I abandon the term "Pagan?" I grew up without it after all. I could live again with a nameless identity or find a different term that might fit better.

Should I try to promote understanding of the Runes and other symbols as Pagan spiritual symbols, risking being painted as a racist bigot myself, or cede them to the Neo-nazis, allowing them to become public symbols of hate without a fight? There are certainly enough internet discussions on these issues and I've heard passionate and thoughtful arguments on both sides of that dilemma.

I have heard Pagans of Jewish and Native American background say that we are obligated to stop using the Runes and other symbols stolen by racists. I have also heard people from the same backgrounds argue that white Pagans have no right to just gift these symbols to white supremacists and hide from the problem, that we are obligated to publicly denounce the racist use of these symbols and advocate for their true meanings.

It seems that whichever we choose, we can't just blackout the assholes and go on with our merry lives in peace. At first, this seemed terribly unjust, and in fact, free fodder for the alt right--you know, white people being denied the right to their own cultural symbols because they "offend" someone.

Creative commons image courtesy of Shadowgate of flickr.com

But then I got some perspective from a surprising source.

"Now you know how we feel," one Christian friend mentioned while I was in the middle of this lament. 

I stopped. "What?"

But of course, progressive Christians have to deal with being associated with conservative Christians and fudnamentalists all the time. They've had a racist, sexist, homophobic, hard-right side of Christianity dominating their image in the United States for decades. They have cults, politicians, sexual predators and profiteers all leaching off their identity.

Many Pagans like the idea that because we have no central authority, we are fundamentally different from other identities. Paganism isn't even a religion, the say. We are just spiritual and we aren't going to say it in polite society but we believe we're more enlightened than Christians. 

As it turns out, we aren't all that different. Our beliefs may differ and our relationship with the gods may be radically different, but in some ways it really is the same old story.

By the time my Muslim Palestinian friend chimed in, I got it. Yes, I can imagine how irritating it would be to have your identity associated with the likes of "the Islamic State." 

As much as I would love to have an identity term that encapsulates only open-minded, diversity-loving, tree-hugging polytheists, I don't. All kinds of people on the Internet will tell you that they are Pagan and then drive a jacked-up truck with a bumper sticker that reads "F--- Mother Earth" without seeing any hypocrisy in that. There are Facebook-feed-loads of self-described Pagans who think one of the best things about their ancestral past was its mythical--and much overestimated--racial purity. 

So I got a little more humble and decided to look at how other spiritual groups have handled this kind of honor bruising. Certainly, there are plenty of authoritarian religions who have taken to declaring who is out of their religion for various transgressions. But this didn't seem like an attractive option.

I took to reading blogs by progressive Christians protesting the hateful and harmful practices of fundamentalist Christians. I found some very passionate denunciations, tough questions and calls to reexamine both the scholarship and basic values behind bigoted words and actions by other Christians. But after about two months of research, I was surprised by one thing I did not find in the posts of progressive Christians. 

I did not find any disowning, excommunicating or banning statements--no cries of "Those are not Christians!" 

Not one of the dozens of articles I read, as critical as they were, tried to say that fundamentalist hate-mongers aren't Christians. It isn't so much that I want to follow their example, but that I am surprised to see it. Some fundamentalist Christian denominations do claim that they are the only true Christians and refer to anyone else, including all Catholics, as non-Christians in Sunday School materials. I would expect that eventually progressive Christians would reciprocate. But for some reason they don't.

And the other thing they don't do is bequeath their symbols and terminology to hate-mongers. These progressive Christians don't turn belly-up and cede public views of Christianity to fundamentalists. Similarly my Muslim friends and several well-known Muslim authors, despite being slandered and attacked worldwide, continue to calmly repeat that Islamic fundamentalists don't represent them. 

I may not take my cues from other religions, but I am smart enough to learn from history. This is apparently the price of having that wide and inclusive community, full of new information and potential support which I was so delighted to discover. Soon enough someone hateful is going to claim that identity and abuse it for aims that appear to desecrate everything it stands for. 

That does not mean that we are implicated automatically or that we cannot use our own symbols. It does mean, however, that we have to stand up and face this. We may not have caused it, but at the same time we have a responsibility to speak out against those uses of our identity which are abhorrent.

I, for one, believe we should still use the Runes, but we must also acknowledge that when we take them up, we take up the burden of fighting racism and xenophobia as well. We don't get to just have our identity and remain silent believing that the injustices perpetrated in the name of that identity don't reflect on us.

Like everyone else, this is part of our story.

An earth-centered spiritual perspective: Why is there undeserved suffering?

When I was twenty-three, I traveled around Bangladesh and walked alone into a slum where a million people lived in cardboard and tin shacks on a plane of mud. There I met a woman who was little older than me but looked like she was 80. She was born there and lived her whole life in extreme poverty. She broke bricks with her bare hands for a living. I met this woman because her eight-year-old daughter rescued me from an angry mob. 

Creative Commons image from the Department of Foreign Affairs of Australia

I found my new friends to be incredibly hard working, compassionate and all-around good people. And I was forced to consider the question of why they lived such terribly hard lives, amid constant misery and sorrow, while I lived relatively easily and had many things handed to me, even though I was born in a shack without an indoor bathroom myself. 

In Bangladesh, they had an explanation. Bad karma. Supposedly the little girl who rescued me--a complete stranger--from a crowd of men demanding to know why I had come into their slum, even though I had tried to dress modestly according to local custom, had been naughty in a past life.

Though her eyes shown at me with kindness and innocence, that is one accepted explanation. There was very little chance she would ever be able to go to school or eat a decent meal and if she lived to be 30, she would be haggard, old and fortunate to still be alive.

And something in my spirit rebelled. This idea of karma was no better to me than the talk of hell fire, I heard from Christians back home in America. I was brought up with an alternative spirituality, but I had not been given an alternative explanation of suffering. 

Even in much less extreme situations, good fortune appears to be random. I grew up among relatively poor people in rural, remote Eastern Oregon but I managed to travel to five continents and forge a good life for myself, partly because my parents, though poor, were fairly well educated and did not harbor the hopelessness of generational poverty. My experience, moving between many different social classes has shown that there is little correlation between hard work and financial success. The poor are every bit as likely to work hard as the rich, if not more so. Laziness, apathy, depression and addiction happen among the rich and the poor. 

Today, as the political battles over things like food stamps, universal health care and free education heat up in the United States, I constantly run across arguments, in which one side claims that poor people aren't committed enough to earning a good living and they just need to work harder or smarter. And the other side claims that the economy is rigged against them or that health, family or other circumstances made a higher income unreachable. Rarely does anyone in the verbal sparring stop to acknowledge that hardship is mostly random and the only real question to argue about is why that is and what, if anything, we wish to do about it.

Spirituality arose among the first humans for two reasons: first, to discuss what happens after we die and whether or not we are just meat with neurons; and second, to answer this question: why do bad things happen at random even to good, hard-working people? 

Modern earth-centered and Pagan paths have various but fairly standard interpretations of the first question. As for the second question, it is worth some thought.

If you are the kind of person who believes in gods, whether a primal earth mother, a vague universal spirit or a whole pantheon of gods, then you have to confront the question of whether those gods have any power to affect our lives. Many people today believe that gods are beings that only act through our connection to them or our enlightenment, whether they just all "in our heads" or not. Others believe that spirit or the gods pervade the natural world and are part of us and everything else in the world. Some believe in gods or spirits who are specific beings with relationships to specific humans and that they can give aid, withhold it or even cause harm as they choose.

Either way, it seems like spiritual beings should have some justice to them. What would be the point otherwise? Modern Pagans mostly don't beg their gods for favors in prayers. But we do--well many of us do--ask for help sometimes. And even if you believe that it is only in reflecting in prayer or magical work that you help yourself, you either believe that is beneficial or you're just fooling around with candles and pretty rocks.

And if you're a pantheistic sort of spiritualist, who does not believe in gods per se, but believes that divine energy infuses everything, that nature is filled with sacred energy, then you also must believe there is some reason to acknowledge that creative force. You may not believe that the universe is either benevolent or malevolent. But you still must wonder if there is any point to the randomness of misfortune in our world.

There are also humanists, who do not believe in gods or divine powers or believe that if they do exist they have no power or desire to intervene in our affairs. Humanists may subscribe to the traditions of a spiritual path whether Pagan, Christian or otherwise, but they believe that humans have to deal with our own troubles on our own. While these humanists may not have to deal with the question of why gods let good people suffer, they must in the end discuss the randomness of hardship as well.

It has taken me many years of study to arrive at my own answer to this question, but when I found it, it turned out to be incredibly simple.

Suffering and hardship are random, whether the gods willed it to be that way or not, in order to give us compassion.

I do not believe in karma in the sense that you are punished for some sin in one life by being born to hardship in another. Nor do I believe in divine punishment either in this life or in an afterlife. Certainly we can make our own hardship at times, but the greatest suffering that humans endure is usually acquired at birth and is non-negotiable. 

And here's the crucial point. If we truly believed that everyone deserved what they got, either by karma, sin or sloth, and that the world gives everyone an equal, fair shot, then you would have no compassion. And you would be justified in that. It would be correct to have no compassion. It would be foolish and enabling of wrongness to have compassion.

The only reason for compassion is the understanding that much of the pain, hardship, loss and suffering of others is not a result of their cruel, stupid or lazy actions or inactions.

It just is. 

No god, goddess, spirit or karma put them there and none will rescue them without our energy and intention. Prayer matters. Physicists can demonstrate it. My personal polytheistic belief is that our gods do care about suffering and may in fact give solace or aid when our intention is strong and positive, but it is not in their nature to banish all suffering. And I am not sure that they would if they could.  

When I come closest to my matron goddess at moments of despair, I feel great compassion and caring from that source. But I also have heard a signular message. No one with the power to stop all undeserved suffering in the world would use it. Suffering is terrible, but it is not as terrible as a world of entitled, compassionless light without any understanding of darkness would be.

The Hawaiian goddesses of the Egg Moon: International Moon Circle 10

The energy of spring is a welcome boost to activism and social justice movements. We need the joy of dance and flowers, the breaking free and the energy of fire. 

Creative Commons image by  Steve Corey

Though ancient Hawaiian culture was quite formal, it gave us some of the most inspiring goddesses for social justice. It is to these women of joy, freedom and fire that I devote the month of April, the Egg Moon. 

It takes a while for spring to make it all the way up through Central Europe to our Bohemian valley. February is long and frigid. March is usually gray, muddy and lashed with chilly rain. When spring does come it often brings sudden, wild color and light to our area. The shift usually happens in early April and I have chosen to focus on the colorful and sensuous goddesses of Hawaii for this moon. The Maiden is Laka, the Mother is Hina and the Dark Goddess is Pele--goddess of fire, destruction and anger.

The Waxing Moon

Laka is the Hawaiian Maiden Goddess of the wild wood, dance and gifts. Her energy is that of pure joy and the colors of the natural world. She embodies joyful wildness, the innocence of young things full of promise and delightful movement. (Andersen 2011) This is what happens in April when flowers burst forth and the first green is brilliant. Laka's symbols are flowers, dance and the color yellow.

Creative Commons image by Crishna Simmons

The energy of Laka is a glorious gift. She reminds us to bring play into our lives, to dance, to make fun gifts for no particular reason. This type of connection to a childlike joy is also a way to honor her. This is a great time to make a dandelion or buttercup crown or bouquet and to dance with no one watching.

The Full Moon

Hina is the female generative force of Hawaii, the ancient creatrix. She leads other goddesses and breaks free of male domination. She takes on many different identities, including that of trickster. But she is always tied to moonlight. She represents the rainbow array of women’s experience and the mother beyond stereotypes.

The stories of Hina are full of action, adventure, dragons, flamboyant tricks and colorful mist. One important myth of Hina is about how she made the decision to leave her husband and find a new home. She has the power to create and the strength to call an end when needed. (Monagham 2014) Her symbols are dragons, rainbows, tricks (such as April Fools day pranks) and dance. Reading stories of her adventures would be a good way to honor her as well as making dragon and rainbow decorations.

The Waning or Dark Moon

Creative Commons image by Ron Cogswell

While Pele is the goddess of volcanoes and anger, she is treated rather nicely by the popular media. There was even a club founded in 1922 for people who had looked into her volcano in a Hawaiian national park and made offerings to her. (Nimmo 2011)

Images of her often emphasize her joyful side, which does exist. But she also truly represents the intensity and quick temper that often make strong women intimidating and gain us the labels of “hysterical” or “raging.” Half the time this intensity doesn’t even come from Pele’s anger. Like many emotionally intense and expressive women, she just is that way. She may be expressing joy but it comes with fire and spitting lava.

A way to connect with Pele is to release your inner intensity, express emotions vehemently, even if only in private. Fire is her primary symbol, though dragons may also be appropriate.

Bibliography

• Andersen, J. (2011). Myths and Legends of the Polynesians. New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.
• Auset, B. (2009). The Goddess Guide: Exploring the Attributes and Correspondences of the Divine Feminine. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications.
• Hunt, L. (2001). An Illustrated Meditation Guide: Celestial Goddesses. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications.
• Jordan, M. (2004). Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses. New York, NY: Facts On File, Inc.
• Leeming, D. and Page, J. (1994). Goddess: Myths of the Female Divine. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Littleton, C. S. Ed, (2005). Gods, Goddesses and Mythology, Volume 4. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish Corporation.
• Loar, J. (2008). Goddesses for Every Day. Navato, CA: New World Library.
• Lurker, M. (1987). A Dictionary of Gods, Goddesses, Devils and Demons. New York, NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
• Monagham, P. (1997). The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications.
• Monagham, P. (1999). The Goddess Companion. Woodbury, MN. Llewellyn Publications.
• Monagham, P. (2014). Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines. Novato, CA: New World Library.
• Nimmo, H. A. (2011). Pele, Volcano Goddess of Hawai’i: A History. Jefferson, NC. McFarland & Company, Inc.
• Motz, L. (1997). The Faces of the Goddess. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Reid-Bowen, P. (2007). Goddess As Nature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.
• Skye, M. (2007). Goddess Alive! Woodbury, MN, Llewellyn Publications.
• Sykes, E. (2002). Who’s Who in Non-Classical Mythology. New York, NY: Routledge.

Of Beltane and earth warriors

Pagans and earth-centered people, even if you consider only those who celebrate Beltane, are wildly diverse in worldview, beliefs and lifestyle. We don't all teach our children the same things. It has often been said that there can be no Pagan politics, because we never agree on anything.

Be that as it may, it is not difficult to see connections between earth-centered spirituality and the movement for social and environmental justice. If you have a strong spiritual path and you also feel strongly about protecting the earth, there is no doubt that these two parts of you will be intertwined. Likewise, spirituality and social/ethical values are interconnected for most people, whatever their spiritual path.

Creative Commons image by Francesca Ubliani 

We follow an earth-centered path because we resonate with a way of being that is concerned with interconnection, natural cycles and a sense of the divine in many parts of life. We are concerned about the environment for the same reasons - interconnection, natural cycles and a sense of sacredness in the natural world.

Many also translate this into social justice. We are interconnected. Injustice anywhere is my business, because I'm part of the weaving. Natural cycles and the freedom to be close to nature is crucial. All beings have a part in the divine. Wildly diverse Pagans--just as people of other faiths--are going to translate these abstractions into concrete reality in all sorts of ways.

But in the end, the point is that we cannot actually separate spirituality from social and environmental concerns.

Beltane is a time when that connection is even more apparent. As the veil between the worlds thins, so does the separation between the spiritual and the social, the personal and the political.

Beltane is most often associated with sexual energy and passion. It represents the vibrant maturing of the youth phase in most cycles, that stage in which energy is moving upward and outward.

But it is difficult to ignore the other side of this coin of passion. There is love and sexual passion, yes. There is also the passion of the warrior. The Lovers card in the Tarot is followed immediately by The Chariot. And there's a reason for that.

Beltane is the celebration of passionate union. It is also the celebration of unity in struggle. It is no coincidence that movements for social solidarity adopted May 1 early on as May Day. Like everything sacred throughout history, that connection has, of course, been used and abused by those seeking control and power. But that doesn't negate the foundation--the energetic connection. Earth day is also close by on April 22.

When the body and spirit feel oppression within our human and non-human family or destruction of our home (the earth) happening all around us, warrior energy rises within us and demands a greater channel. 

This is a season when our warrior energy is demanding a release. In times of peace and tranquility that energy can be channeled into dance, love and other energetic, expressive pursuits. But when the body and spirit feel oppression within our human and non-human family or destruction of our home (the earth) happening all around us, warrior energy rises within us and demands a greater channel. In such dangerous times, the denial of warrior energy leads to predictable results: anger, fury, conflict and further destruction.

Anyone who has been in close contact with teenagers (the human stage closest to the energy of Beltane) knows that sexual energy is powerful. Suppression and silence only lead to unhealthy results. That is why we give it expression in healthy ways, learning how to channel it.

Creative Commons image by sammydavisdog of flickr.com

Warrior energy is the other side of that coin, the shadow in the spring sunshine. And its suppression is no more possible. 

The Warrior

Human society relied on literal warriors and hunters for the vast majority of our genetic history. In recent centuries, we have shifted our social organization from tribes to nations and tried to relegate warrior energy to defensive armies and law enforcement.

I'm for peace as much as anyone, and I have huge respect for professional police officers and soldiers. Their channeling of warrior energy for the protection of all is part of what is needed.

However, the warrior energy does not simply dry up in the rest of us--the civilians. Modern society attempts to suppress it for the sake of the status quo, but when we see and feel injustice, it erupts. If not given a legitimate outlet, that eruption is often self-destructive or harmful to others.

This should not actually be nearly as much of a problem as it has become in our modern world. We try to force warrior energy to conform to sports competitions or try to drug it into submission with video games. But neither of these truly satisfies the need at a deep level.

The most basic reason for this lack of release is that injustice and the destruction of our earth is all around us. And as long as there is such a threat, our warrior energy will not rest.

Yet there is something constructive and positive that can satisfy it. Instead of suppression, professional armies, sports or video games, we need to recognize that the incarnation of the warrior today is the activist.

Creative Commons image by Greenpeace Polska

As such, Beltane is the natural celebration of activism and resistance to tyranny. In this year when much of our environmental and social fabric is threatened, the celebration holds particular meaning.

The Activist

You may not like the word "activist" because it has been  used as a pejorative in recent years--to mean someone with a selfish agenda. But a person who is pursuing an agenda for profit is most often simply a business person. A person pursuing a profitable agenda for some other entity is just an employee. These are not activists, but rather people working at a job, whether you like their agenda or not.

Calling anyone with an agenda an "activist" Is a trick of those seeking power to suppress the warrior energy of those they want to control. 

Activists, on the other hand, are in the most clear definition of the word not paid and not working for any specific personal gain. Instead their motivation is that of the warrior--protection of home and family, protection of the tribe, defense of the interconnected reality that allows the self to live and thrive.

This is the other energy of Beltane, the shadow side.

The opposite pole in the dance with the lover is not the hater. It is the warrior. Union is the natural partner of protection.

In the past year, the brave people of Standing Rock helped other people all over the world realize the fundamental link between the ancient warrior and the modern activist. While there are activists of many types, fighting in defense of home, family and tribe in a myriad of ways, the activist most easily connected to the warrior tradition is the environmental activist.

From Standing Rock campers to alternative energy innovators, from animal advocates to investors in rain forest reserves, earth warriors share the energy of Beltane. That is why for me this is a celebration of environmental activism and interconnection around the world as much as anything else.

Children and warrior energy

Now that I have children, this topic has become critical for me. I see them pulled--by peers, media and society--toward frittering their life force away with video games or allowing it to be suppressed. I realize the need to awaken that warrior energy for appropriate modern activism. 

I have been an earth warrior from an early age. I spoke up in defense of Greenpeace activists when a teacher at my conservative middle school denounced them. I wrote letters to the local newspaper when I was fourteen to protest clear-cut logging practices. I marched in anti-nuclear protests when I was much younger than that and protested the 1990 war in Iraq, at a time when few others did.

The book Shanna and the Water Fairy is children's fiction but its writing was informed by these experiences. I know from my own childhood that children often feel the pull of warrior energy. And if given access to information about the issues, they are often passionate earth warriors. This book is first and foremost a gripping story that kids love to read or hear read a loud, but it also has the capacity to give hope to the spirits of young earth warriors, who may be beginning to feel that the struggles are too big for them.

The spirit of Ostara: the cycles of the earth as a guide to good living

Sometimes I am asked why I celebrate the Pagan Wheel of the Year with my family, even when there isn't a fun community event to attend.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

Why do you need special words for season celebrations? Why do you need to complicate the dates of school holidays for your kids? There isn't definitive proof of the ancient origins of celebrating eight solar holidays, so isn't it partly made up?

As with most things connected to spirituality, there are several levels to my answer.. On the surface, the answer is simply that these celebrations ring true to me deep inside. And second, I want honesty in practice, I suppose.

Growing up in an earth-centered family that didn't use the Wheel of the Year, calling our celebration "Christmas," while  acknowledging that we were really celebrating the Winter Solstice, I always felt a disconnect. If we're "really" celebrating the winter solstice and we know historically that Jesus Christ probably wasn't born on December 25 and he isn't our main focus anyway, then why don't we just celebrate the Winter Solstice and cut out the middle man? 

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

I felt like kids in real Christian families had it better because they had a tradition, something meaningful in their celebration. And ours felt truncated, damaged... even, yes, stolen. This was not an intellectual thing. I was too young at the time to know the history but that was how I felt.

And I wanted a sense of authenticity for my kids.

That was essentially my motivation in the beginning for celebrating the Wheel of the Year. But lets's face it, it's a hard thing to keep up year after year--a holiday every six weeks or so, that begs for specific preparation, attention and connection. If it were only a matter of principle, I might not have lasted thirteen years and counting. Many people don't.

What keeps me strong and passionate about celebrating the Wheel of the Year is it's practical usefulness. 

Yes, practical, real benefits. Let me explain.

We all tend to get stuck at some point in our lives, either in depression or being a workaholic, being young and isolated form what isn't in our generation or being old and feeling like our life is over. There are many places to get stuck and those stuck places can last years.

And that is a large cause of misery. 

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

The Wheel of the Year essentially ensures that I don't get stuck. The celebrations in are in alignment with nature and thus objectively "true" or "real." Even deep depression eventually has to at least acknowledge the fact that spring came again. 

And better yet, the Wheel of the Year is a spiritual teaching in a nutshell. Within it there is pretty much all you need to meditate on spiritually. Each celebration calls up specific important values and themes and taken all together they are a code of spiritual being. 

People sometimes ask how I teach my children about Pagan beliefs and rituals. The primary answer is that I celebrate the Wheel of the Year with them. There are other things, like learning herbcraft, grounding meditation, prayers of gratitude for food and a little simple candle magic, but mostly it's about the Wheel of the Year for my kids. The earth is our textbook and the Wheel of the Year is our lesson plan.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

It isn't just as simple as learning the cycles of the seasons though. Okay, sure, everything dies in the fall and is reborn in the spring here, but in some climates that isn't entirely true. That isn't really the point anyway. Each celebration has particular themes that feel connected to the earth and sun at that time and therefore are easily understood at that point in our journey around the sun.

At Imbolc we go within and delve into dreams and intuition. It is the time in the belly, before the birth of new plans, activities and projects. At Litha (the summer solstice) we are full of life, bounty, energy, pride and expression. We are often hard at work and celebration comes amid many other activities. At Samhain, we are drawn back to the earth, there is a feeling of old sorrow, of things coming to necessary ends and a tendency toward memory. It is the natural time to be reminded to honor our ancestors. 

If you celebrate Imbolc, you will not go a whole year without remembering to focus on your inner world. If you celebrate Litha, you will not go a whole year without expressing yourself with energy and pride. If you celebrate Samhain, you will not go a whole year without honoring ancestors.

And each celebration has a similarly crucial point. I will be writing more posts about the spirit of each celebration, but the celebration at hand is Ostara, so I'll start with that.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

Ostara

Ostara is the European Pagan term for the spring equinox and it is celebrated much like Easter. The appropriate symbols are eggs, sprouting plants, rabbits, hares and babies of all kinds. The obvious themes are renewal, rebirth, the beginning of life and expression, new beginnings in general and children. 

As a mother, it is very important to me that my children have a lovely time at Ostara. It is a time to honor and delight in them. They are the future, our new beginning as a species. Their joy in the springtime is a blessed and righteous thing. So, more than any other time they get to eat a lot of candy. They fully enjoy scouring the yard and back woods for treats and eggs. We make pretty colorful crafts, many of them egg-related. 

But when I started to contemplate exactly how to convey the concept of rebirth and new beginnings to young children, I realized that the spirit of Ostara goes much deeper than that. If this is a celebration that also honors children, that necessarily implies the protection and valuing of that which is vulnerable. New life is inherently vulnerable and we can see that protection of vulnerability in all of the ancient symbols of this celebration--particularly the egg.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

We know that in our modern world the worst abuses of human rights are suffered by children. Children are more likely than adults to live in poverty or to be in need of basic necessities like food, water and shelter. Children are often the first to suffer when societal racism or other prejudices rear their ugly heads. There are obvious reasons why the protection of children is connected to human rights in general. 

The protection of new life extends, of course to the protection of the vulnerable among other species. The concept of both biological and cultural diversity is implied in the rainbow colors of Ostara. This is not only a celebration of one rebirth but of all the colors and miraculous diversity of life--human and otherwise. 

This realization has deepened my experience of Ostara. This celebration of renewal can be a great help in overcoming a stuck place in myself. If there is some lingering depression, hurt, resentment or stagnation, the return of light to our northern latitude does wonders for it. The necessity of getting outside and tending vigorously to the spring needs of our urban homestead is invaluable in getting past blocks. 

But more than that, the celebration of rebirth, color, diversity and the protection of the vulnerable is what the heart needs at such times. It is a shot of clear-eyed idealism., regardless of how bleak things may seem in the outside world.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

This year, many of us are exhausted from a long winter that did not seem to be as restful as it should have been. We have been struggling to retain the way of life we and our ancestors fought for--the rights and freedoms that often came at great cost. We are also contemplating that now when we should be working primarily for a sustainable future, environmental concerns have taken a back seat to the immediate needs of vulnerable people in our society.

Plenty of us are already experiencing outrage fatigue. And it is just early days yet.

And here is Ostara, the celebration of renewal, a time to warm your heart and think of fluffy and bright colored things. It may be hard to grasp when things are hard, but this is what we actually need right now. 

Stop a moment, ground yourself in the earth. Remember that the earth's rhythm does matter. Let the energy of renewal and new life flow into you. Focus your energies on protecting those most vulnerable, both human and non-human. Celebrate the rainbow of diversity in languages, cultures, colors and species.

Illustration from Shanna and the Raven: An Ostara story

Break free.

 In my quest to teach my children these values of eternally resilient life and hope, I wrote the Ostara story Shanna and the Pentacle. This is a story for all earth-centered, goddess-oriented and vaguely Pagan families. It isn't a "teachy" book, but rather a story that grabs kids' attention, especially if they are growing up as a religious minority.

In this story about new beginnings, eleven-year-old Shanna and her eight-year-old brother Rye move to a new school. At first, that seems like challenge enough. New beginnings are exciting but not always easy. Amid budding flowers and preparations for their Ostara celebration, Shanna runs into a real problem. Her teacher and some of the kids at her new school object to a pentacle necklace that her best friend gave her.

When her family moved Shanna had to leave her best friend behind and that is part of the difficulty of this new beginning. When her teacher demands that Shanna stop wearing her pentacle to school and the principal confiscates it as a suspected "gang symbol," the young girl feels the sting of prejudice. 

Shanna is at the same time learning to accept others who are different from her. One of the new things about her new school is the greater cultural and racial diversity of this urban school over her previous one. Shanna soon discovers that friends come in many varieties and it is through a surprising friendship that Shanna gains the courage to stand up for her own identity as a Pagan girl. 

This story not only embodies the crucial messages of Ostara, but it is also filled with beautiful paintings by Julie Freel that evoke the season and the story. This is a story for Ostara, though one that will show that new beginnings aren't always easy. It emphasizes the importance of standing up for one's own identity, the great advantages of diversity and the need to protect the young and vulnerable. With this story, these values are not forced on children but delivered in a way that makes them as natural as the fact that the sun rises earlier every day in the spring. 

I hope you'll enjoy this story and share its fun and themes with children in your life. Many people have asked when there will be more stories in the Children's Wheel of the Year series and I am delighted to tell you that the Beltane book is very nearly ready to be printed and will be out well ahead of the holiday.

I hope you will support our endeavor--which is still non-profit due to the costs of the illustrations, materials and books--and share these stories with others. If you are eager for more stories about the natural themes and values of the Wheel of the Year, spreading the word about these stories is a significant help in our efforts to keep them coming. 

Happy reading and blessed Ostara to all!

Dedication to Brigid

This Imbolc, after thirteen years of searching and a year and a day of study and devotion to Brigid, I have chosen my specific path and made my dedication. This has come at a time of great injustice in the world. Brigid is in her warrior guise and rides to protect outsiders, refugees and children. Healers are needed. Poets and writers are needed. Warriors for justice are needed. I do not know all the twists and turns of the path ahead but I have faith in her guidance.