You may have seen something of a debate going on over at Pagan Square and elsewhere in Pagan Blogistan between what are sometimes called “hard” vs. “soft” polytheists. One blog says that:

Soft polytheism encompasses views of the gods as figurative to some extent, whether that means they are metaphors for aspects of nature, or metaphors for some greater transcendent divine power (which may or may not go beyond what a naturalist usually considers “nature”) that is difficult to grasp except through human-created imagery. To that extent, different deities may be seen as aspects of one another.

In contrast, hard polytheism asserts [that] deities are distinct entities, usually as causal agents with their own independent wills and personalities.

I’ve avoided jumping in because, Sun in Pisces and Geminii rising, I’ve got the both signs in the Zodiac specifically designed to see both sides of every situation. It makes me a good lawyer, but a leaves me disinclined to proclaim the one, true, truth. My answer to these either/or questions is almost always an unqualified “Yes.”

Also, the whole “Someone is WRONG on the internet” thing just gets old after a while. If one person finds fulfillment in worshiping Isis as Isis, a real and true entity, that’s fine with me, and if someone else finds fulfillment in worshiping Isis as a thought-form related to all mother Goddesses, related to Gaia, related to Nature, that’s fine, too, as far as I can tell. I’m willing to bet you’d find similarly diverse notions about the specific nature of divinity in the membership of any Catholic church, Buddhist temple, or Jewish synagogue. And part of the appeal of Paganism, from my perspective, is the willingness to accept that your Goddesses and Gods can be yours without that requiring me to do or accept anything.

Christopher Penzack has a post up about this debate that says, and says well, some important things.

I would say I’m not a person of faith or belief. My religious experience is of a mystery tradition, of a more mystical nature than sheer belief. I believe in experience, and feel there are many ways to define the experience, but the experience in consciousness is what really attracts me to this path. I find the different ways of describing it interesting, but become concerned when those in Magickal, Pagan, Wiccan, Witchcraft, Heathen, Theosophical, and related paths adpot terminology and attitudes that remind me of my previous Christian experiences.

* * *

I tend to focus on technique, rather than decide theology and then seek experiences to support it. I’d rather have experiences, and see what ideas fit those profound moments. I think that is what most people do, at least initially on our path, regardless of where they fall in this debate. We simply have different experiences, and find different ideas to fit them.

While I whole heartedly believe the gods are as real and individual as you and I, I also don’t believe that we are all that real or individual. Much like the simple summations of quantum physics, there are times when it behaves as a particle, and time when it behaves as a wave. I think that philosophy applies not only to the subatomic world, but to gods and spirits, as well as people and all of nature.

Penzack’s point about not being a person of faith or belief, but rather a person who has experienced the mysteries, is one of the reasons why I’m always begging Pagans not to say “faith” when they mean “religion,” not to say “faith community” when they mean “religious community,” not to say “interfaith work” when they mean “inter-religious work.” Using “faith” when you mean “religion” adopts monotheism’s framing and encourages the notion that the only real religions are ones that are faith-based. Even the hard polytheists that I know have had mystery experiences of their Goddess and Gods; they don’t believe that they should have “faith” in Brigid or Apollo and that faith alone will “save” them.

Sometimes, the Goddesses with whom I work are very real, discrete, individual entities and sometimes they are so gigantic and overwhelming that it seems to me that for me to pretend to understand who and what they are would be like the mitochondria in my cells assuming they know all about who I am. I don’t need, or want, it to be any different — for me.

Picture found here

What did you start at Samhein that’s now near to harvest?

Wild Datura

* What Joe Gerstandt is saying about the workplace is also true of many Pagan organizations, covens, circles, groves, etc.

* I’d like to go foraging with Ms. Lawless

* Sylvia is, once again, talking good sense:

[O]ne thing I can say for certain is that our souls certainly need wild relation to vast as well as to brambly weedy places where foxes and blue bellied lizards and thrushes live, in order to maintain our own sanity. They need to be fed by wide open spaces, by views of the place the sun goes down and the curve of the earth and the sense that we will always be small and full of wonder at the fact that a STAR, (a bloody star, people!) touches us with its beneficent light every day. And equally (more literally, once), we are fed by thickets of berries which thrill the body to eat and to savor, even if we don’t rely on them for our entire sustenance, patches of nettle for tea, and glimpses of young bucks, brush rabbits and hawks, to remind us of our bigger family.

* In The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler writes:

To move beyond the world oil production peak means that never again will all the nations of the earth combined extract as much oil from the ground as we did at peak, no matter what happens on the demand side. This has extraordinary implications for oil-based industrial civilization, which is predicated on constant and regular expansion of everything — population, gross domestic product, sales, revenue, housing starts, you name it.

. . .

At peak, the human race will have generated a population that cannot survive on less than the amount of oil generated at peak — after the peak, the supply of oil will decline remorselessly. As that occurs, complex social and market systems will be stressed to the breaking point, obviating the possibility of a smooth ride down from the peak phenomenon.

What does that mean for Pagans, for people who revere the Earth? If it’s going to be a bumpy ride, who plays the role of seat belts?

* A recent trip to the Virginia State Arboretum reminded me, oddly, of how few meadows there are left in my area. In addition to a lovely herb garden and a world-class collection of boxwoods, the park has acres of lovely meadows, which were in wild bloom here just before Litha. Pollinators and birds were everywhere — so much life going on. It did my soul — and my body — good. The picture of wild datura above is from one of the meadows.

Photo by the blogger; if you copy, please link back.

Now, you — you gentle breezes on a warm day, you — you would probably recognize what the water nymph did next. Madeline L’Engle would have recognized it. And that odd Mr. C.L. Dodgson, had he looked up from his numbers, he, too, would likely have understood what was going on. Ray Bradbury would have guessed, but would have considered it far too low-tech. And Nikola Tesla, for whom tech was just one method, among many others, for accessing the deep mystery, Tesla would have gone to work deciphering how the electrons worked. But to the old man and little boy who were sitting on the bank of the run and looking for turtles — to them it just looked odd. “Maybe that woman was swatting away a bug,” the old man said. He and the boy turned their attention back to the water, peering for turtles.

What really happened, as you will have guessed by now, was that the water nymph took out her Swiss army knife and, using it as an athame, opened a door in space just as a Witch opens a door in the ritual circle. She held out her other hand and Gemmy grabbed it. Gemmy felt a rush of air and, for just a moment, thought that she understood the dance steps in the Space-Time quadrille, although Gemmy had never, in her life, danced a quadrille.

A moment later, the water nymph reached behind and closed the door. Gemmy looked around and couldn’t help it: she’d been waiting all her life for a softball like this. “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas, anymore,” she said to the water nymph, with as straight a face as she could manage.

“Don’t quit your day job,” the nymph deadpanned back. “No, Dorothy, this isn’t Kansas. Can you guess where it is?”

Gemmy looked around. She and the nymph were standing alone in an area of complete devastation. Gemmy was tempted to guess that they stood on a battlefield, but even bombs and bullets couldn’t create this kind of destruction.

And our story, dear ones, our story is not, as you know, about wars. Our story is about a place that needed a Witch. And so, because, as we all know, there’s no such thing as Witches, or water nymphs, or places that need them, I will tell you where Gemmy was. We all know that giants don’t exist either, don’t we? Well, if a giant had existed, and if that Giant had reached out and scooped the top third off a mountain and stuffed it down his throat, and then lumbered off, leaving the opened mountain to die, it would have looked just like the place to which the water nymph, if she existed, would have brought Gemmy, had Gemmy been a Witch.

“Mountain top mining,” Gemmy said, turning around widdershins to take it all in. “I’ve heard of it and seen pictures, but I had no idea.”

“You won’t banish it that easily, more’s the pity,” answered the nymph.

“Welcome to Hobet Mountain, West Virginia, early Spring, 2013,” the water nymph said. “Not a single thing left alive: no trees, no weeds, no snakes, no birds, no bees, no people. Worse, no earthworms and no mycelium. What the coal company didn’t want, they dumped into a hollerfill down there and killed the stream and all the plants and animals that lived in it. The people who live around here have incredibly high rates of cancer and birth defects. You can see the scars on GoogleEarth.“

The silence was deafening, not the comforting silence of a forest, but the ominous silence of a nightmare.

“But what does it have to do with chestnut trees?” Gemmy asked. “You said you’d show me what it would be like if we bring back the American chestnut.”

“Hold on tight,” said the water nymph, “and don’t be surprised if this makes you feel a bit queasy. Your kind travels through space a lot more easily than through time. As every cosmetic surgeon knows.” She grabbed Gemmy’s hand again and cut another door.

Gemmy heard a soft rustling and then sensed a slow tug on her muscles. It wasn’t painful at first, but it felt somehow wrong, and Gemmy’s first reaction was to pull away. “NO! Hold on!” the nymph yelled over the now much louder rustling. “If you get lost, I’ll never find you.”

Gemmy squeezed the nymph’s hand. She blinked and saw that they were still standing on Hobet Mountain. Something was different, though. Instead of hard rock, they now stood on a patch of soil about an acre wide. Scrub weeds covered the soil. Dotted across the flattened mountain were several other acres of soil. People dressed in jeans and green t-shirts were doing something on the farthest acre of soil.

“Welcome to Hobet Mountain, West Virginia, early Spring (to the extent that Spring still visits Appalachia) 2093,” the water nymph said to Gemmy. “Turn around deosil this time.”

“Why?” Gemmy asked. “What’s happening? What’s happened? What’s going to happen? I’m not even sure what tense to use.”

“After the mining company declared bankruptcy and moved away,” the nymph said, using past tense to help Gemmy orient herself, “the State reclaimed the mountain. A young scientist working at Bluefield State College discovered how to transport a small amount of soil up the mountain and help it to grow more soil. At first, no one could see the benefit, but she kept filling out grant forms and going around with her powerpoints and, eventually, she got enough money to turn one acre from blasted mountaintop to soil. I’m not saying some West Virginia Witches did magic to help her and I’m not saying that they didn’t. Dirt, you know, needs several colleges of priestesses devoted just to itself and, in time, it will get them.”

“And then she got funding for these other acres?” Gemmy asked.

“Over time. Anyway, seems some Witch in Virginia had been planting almost-pure American chestnuts, whenever she could, and a few of them, at first, survived the blight. Some people say that she spelled them and some people say that she didn’t, but those as held the seeds knew the truth,” the nymph said, beginning to slip, as water will do, into the cadence of the place. “As time went on, the seeds from those trees sprouted and even more of them survived,” she explained.

“Now, a nursery in Virginia has grown several thousand American chestnut trees and, see those folks all the way over there? They’re members of a loosely-knit group of Pagans that gets together a few times a year to plant American chestnuts in Appalachia. A few hundred years from ‘now’ assuming Mamma Gaia can keep the temperature low enough — what with all the carbon — Hobet Mountaintop will be covered with chestnut and other trees. So, there. You asked, and now you know,” the nymph said to the woman holding her hand, standing on the re-grown skin of a scarred mountaintop and staring with tears in her eyes at people acres away, planting trees that she wouldn’t live to see.

“I don’t know why, but I know what you’re going to say if I ask whether I can walk over and plant even just one of them,” Gemmy said.

“Sorry,” the nymph answered. “It’d screw things up for a butterfly in Brazil and, believe me, there’s a new kind of polar cub about to be born 40 years ago . . . .”

“Verb tenses!” Gemmy yelled, confused.

“who really does not want that,” the nymph concluded with a shrug. “You’re a Witch, come on, you always knew that all times are one time.”

“And, anyway, I gotta get you back to Donaldson Run in 2013,” she said, as the text message chime on her iPhone– the chorus from And It Stoned Me by Van Morrison — went off.

“You get reception up here in 2093?” Gemmy asked, as the nymph once again cut open a door and pulled Gemmy through.

“Don’t be silly; no one still uses cells in 2093,” the nymph said as she settled a somewhat disoriented Gemmy back down by the tulip poplar, just off the trail. “Listen, I’ve been out of the water too long and I’m going to have to head back. Can you make your own way home?”

“Sure, Gemmy said, feeling better by the minute. “Here, these are for you. Can you plant them where they’ll be sure to grow?” she added, handing the water nymph all of the American chestnut seeds she’d brought with her.

The nymph took them, bowed, and began to float down towards Donaldson Run. “Nah, but I can do what I always do. Let them float and see what Nature has in store.”

“Good enough,” Gemmy said, standing up, brushing mountain dirt off her shorts, and turning towards home. “I’ve got more where those came from. And Nature and the chestnuts used to be friends.”

“Now they’re leaving, it’ll be quiet enough for the turtles,” the little boy said.

/To be continued.

Picture found here.

Robert Michael Pyle

Next on my booklist: The Tangled Bank by Robert Michael Pyle.

What’s next on yours?

Picture found here.

I am posting this in spite of the misplaced comma. Because I spent all day editing, I’ll just say that: “Good day. Didn’t have to unleash the flying monkeys,” would be more effective.

/hat tip to my funny friend R.

It started at 2:30 this morning when the loudest, deepest, longest, and yet most OK thunder that I’d ever heard broke directly over my little cottage. Since then, we’ve gotten more rain on already-saturated ground than I can remember seeing.

Just now, it’s coming down gangbusters and the low spots of my bit of Earth are as flooded as they’ve ever been.

Of course, since it’s warm, I’ve been out dancing in it. It’s the only planet I have. I’m the only Witch of This Place that it has. We both need to dance together. It’s scary because it’s new. But this bit of Earth and I, we know and intend to dance with each other all the way to the end. Gaia, let me, in Mr. Cohen’s words, see your beauty when the witnesses are gone.

May it be so for you.