I found a dirty brass case with glyphic/Latinate inscriptions on it that was being used as a door stop & determined it contained a daemon of some sort. Considered opening it or keeping it but ultimately just wedged it back under the door.
Somehow ended up sorting through recipe books with a cool witch & her friend. We decided to watch a movie & after I sprawled on the floor the cool witch did the same. I bashfully awakened from this one with alacrity.
In both of these cases, my apologies if I blundered into someone else’s dream.
I’ve been ruminating on place and space and time. It’s been 15 years since I last wrote about not feeling like I have a heritage to claim. Often, as a cis-het white guy, it feels like my heritage is constitutive solely of colonialism and patriarchy. After centuries of that amalgamation, I find little wonder in the difficulty of an authentic (as seen by others) practice. I have no idea exactly what kind of mutt I am.
I’m certainly more aware of and try to be more delicate when I might be engaging in an appropriative or co-optive activity, but at the same time, trying to gain knowledge or practice based upon my cultural or ethnic background seems arbitrary. I’ve been connected to the beech-maple forest of the Ohio and Cuyahoga watersheds my whole life. If the land still remembers, I feel like I should engage with it in the languages it recognizes. For me, practicing Celtic shamanism, Nordic paganism, Wicca, witchcraft, feels like only a marginally less colonial practice than Christianity.
At the same time, living a secular life without ritual, or with empty ritual, is unsatisfactory. The celebration of Thanksgiving suffers from dumb colonial mythos, but that doesn’t mean we should take it behind the shed and put a bullet into it. Forget the myth, but retain the giving of thanks. Gratitude and gentleness. The way is a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I wrote in a poem a long time ago, I’m still “learning to ask the ground/with each fresh step/how best to walk upon it.”