The Magical Battle for America 5/27/17

Now’s probably a good time to remind everyone to check/refresh the wards on your home or wherever you do this work.  Be sure that you’re rested, grounded, and in a comfortable position.

Breathe.

Anchor yourself firmly to your landbase.  Notice a small detail that will call you back when this working is finished.

Ground and center.  Cast a circle.

Breathe.

As you move astrally to our American plain on the astral plane, you can see again the safe hillock where you do your work.  You can see the five giant banners, shining in the sky:  Walden Pond, the Underground Railroad, the Cowboy, the Salmon, and Lady Liberty.  Do they seem more defined since we began our work?  Do they have anything special to tell you this week?

Can you feel your connection to the American landbase?  Run your roots down deep, deep with the grass roots that hold the prairie together.  The land itself wants to work with you and you can draw power and strength from the land.  Look toward the North and see the shining banner with Lady Liberty.  As the banner becomes bigger and brighter, you sense how truly huge Lady Liberty is, both physically, as she towers over New York harbor, and as an archetype of America.   The title of the statue is:  La Liberté éclairant le monde, or Liberty enlightening the world.  In one hand she holds the torch that shines its light on the world and in her other hand she holds a tablet that represents the Declaration of Independence.  A broken chain lies at her feet; she will not be shackled.

Walk into the banner, slip through, and stand before Lady Liberty.  Is there something you would like to offer to her?

Dark and shadowy forces conspired to steal this election from American voters and are continuing, in hidden and nefarious ways, to destroy America and the role that America plays as a proponent of liberty throughout the world.*  Over the past few weeks, some of that nefarious behavior has begun to come to light — despite the Trump administration’s best efforts to conceal and obfuscate.  There is still much, however, that remains hidden. Sunlight, as Justice Brandeis once said, is the best disinfectant.  We need to bring more light to bear on this situation; we can’t begin to fix what’s wrong until we can see what is lurking in dark and dirty corners.

Ask Lady Liberty to raise her torch even higher.  Watch as it glows brighter and brighter.  See her golden light spread across the country and across the globe.  As her light touches everyone and everything, all is revealed.  The roaches and rats may try to run and hide in a dark corner or under a dank rock, but Lady Liberty’s light picks them out and shows exactly who they are, what they did, what they are still doing, how that violated our laws and our norms.  Gradually, the bright light causes them to shrivel up and turn into dust.

See the light of Liberty’s torch shining into each home, office, and shop in the country.  See it helping Americans to see what went wrong and how to fix it.  As you stand before her statue, sense that Lady Liberty grows larger and larger, holding her light higher and higher.  It now reaches across our shores and to other parts of the world — into Moscow, into internet bot farms in Eastern Europe, wherever people work to undermine freedom.

Liberty’s light does something else, as well.  That clear, lucid light shows us how to defeat this administration and its cabal of international thugs.  It shines into Congress, the Senate, our courts.  It shines into newspaper office and tv stations.  It shines into town halls and voting booths.  It shines courage into the hearts and minds of all who love America.

Spend some time knowing that this IS happening and that it CAN continue to happen.  Place your hand on the broken chain at Lady Liberty’s foot.  Draw a pentagram or a binding sigil upon it so that the chain can never become whole.  Liberty can never be shackled.

Ask Lady Liberty if she has an specific advice for you.  What role can you best play in the Magical Battle for America?

Thank Lady Liberty and begin to walk back towards the American plain.  Walk out of the banner and return to your own magical hillock.  Sense again your connection to the land.    Look around you; do things seem brighter and more clear than they did before?

Breathe.

Return to your own body, your own landbase.  Open your eyes.  Rub your face, move your arms and legs.  Notice the detail you selected to call you back from the astral.  Open your circle.  Drink something, maybe some iced coffee or a fruit smoothie.  If you like, have something to eat, maybe an oat muffin or a handful of cherries.

During the course of this week, you may want to visit the bannered prairie several times in order to strengthen its presence on the astral.  You may want to repeat this working several times.  You may want to place an image of Lady Liberty on your altar.  You may want to journal about it.  Are you inspired to make any art?  Can you sit beside a warm fire, or light incense, or stare into a candle?   What actions are you inspired to take for the Resistance?  If you’re willing, please share in comments what happened and how this working went.

Picture found here.

*It probably goes without saying that America’s role as a proponent of liberty throughout the world has been, at times, more aspirational than actual.  We are working here, however, with archetypes, and it is the idea of America as a proponent of liberty that Putin, Trump, and others are most interested in subverting.

 

We’re All Sluts

And we deserve whatever happens to us.

By now, you may have already read about Maddi Runkles, the Maryland high school senior whose christian school is not letting her walk for graduation as punishment for getting pregnant.

Well, of course they’re not.

A story: in my tiny, substandard christian school, in my senior year, fully half of my female classmates had pregnancy scares. But it turned out that none of them were pregnant, and none got caught. In our sophomore year, S wasn’t so lucky. She was dating J, the class bad boy, and the rumor was going around that they had gone “all the way.” Had they? Honestly, I don’t know. I *do* know that S and J got called into the principal’s office, and their parents got called in, too – and that only S got expelled.

Another story: a dear college friend, an accountant with a “big four firm” background and nearing 30, announced that she was “finally” (her words) getting married. None of us were all that fond of her finance – he was controlling and religiously doctrinaire – but she was happy, so we were happy for her. Several months later, she shamefacedly announced that she was pregnant. Remember, this is a well-employed, financially-independent, already-engaged woman with a college degree in her late 20s.

The day of the wedding, the minister spent the majority of the ceremony haranguing the visibly pregnant bride (and the groom) about their “sin.” Of course the reception was a dry one, so the appalled college crew repaired to our car in the parking lot, where we’d set up a full bar in the trunk, to plot if there was any way to salvage the JOY OF THE DAY AND OF THE IMPENDING BIRTH from this catastrophe. While taking turns swigging from a bottle of vodka, we came up with the idea that, after we’d all eaten and the reception was as swingin’ as a dry event was likely to get, we’d commandeer the mic and announce that, to celebrate the doubly happy occasion of their marriage and their SOON TO BE BORN, BLESSING FROM GOD BABY, we’d be collecting one potential boy’s name and one potential girl’s name from each table, at which point we’d draw one of each, and the selection would be binding, so maximum creativity was encouraged. Several tables, stone-faced, refused to participate, but most got into the spirit of things and it lightened the mood, at least somewhat, from Imminent Stoning of Hester Prynne to Wedding Reception, No Booze Edition. (Later, when the baby died shortly after birth, several wedding guests were known to comment that it was God’s punishment, and no, I am not making a sick joke.)

For evangelicals, all women are forever tainted with Eve’s “original sin,” so any and everything bad that ever happens to us is 100% our fault.

Husband raped you? That’s actually not possible, since any time he wants sex, it’s your wifely duty to submit to him, no exceptions.

Husband beating you? Also your fault, for being insufficiently submissive (that is actual, verbatim “pastoral counsel” given to women in the church I was raised in).

Acquaintance or stranger raped you? You must’ve done something to tempt your attacker, and he couldn’t control himself because of your short skirt or your smile or the fact that you talked to him or you didn’t talk to him or rode the bus or walked down the street or were In Public (on In Private) While Female.

Does that sound oddly like the way women are viewed and treated in repressive Islamic regimes? It should – it comes from an identical mindset.

Maddi is apparently suing to be allowed to participate in her graduation ceremony. That’s a good first step in standing up for herself, but I hope it *is* only the first step out the door of a worldview that is based on hatred of women and has absolutely nothing to offer us.

Image found here.

When You’re Left to Yourself, How Do You Hold the Conversation of Life?

Words for Wednesday

The Hard Structure of the World

~ Richard Eberhart

Is made up of reservoirs,

Birds flying South, mailmen

Snow falling or rain falling,

Railmen, Howard Johnson and airmen

Birds of Paradise

Silk lined caskets

Prize poems and guitars,

Beatitudes and bestiaries,

Children taught contemporary manners,

Time taking time away

With a haymaker or a sleigh,

Hope always belaboring despair.

Form is a jostle, a throstle,

Life a slice of sleight,

Indians are looking out from the

Cheekbones of Connecticut Yankees,

Poltergeists deploy northward

To tinderboxes in cupboards in Maine,

The last chock knocked, the vessel

Would not go down the Damariscotta

Until the sick captain’s four-poster,

Moved to the window by four oldsters

Gave him a sight of her, and

He gave her a beautiful sign,

And there was the witch of Nobleboro

Who confounded the native farmers

Who, having lost the plow-bolt

Right at their feet, found it

Concealed in her apron: she laughed,

And made the earth fecund again.

The hard structure of the world,

The world structure of illusion.

From seeing too much of the world

We do not understand it.

There is something unknown in knowing.

Unfaith is what keeps faith going.

Picture found here.

Fuck Mike Pence.

So, let me say this about Mike Pence, current Vice President of the United States.

He’s a complete dirtbag.

He is woman-hating, closet-case gay persecutor who’s behind the State Department denying visas to gay men fleeing murder in Chechnya, a misery-encourager, a shit-sack of a Xian.  (Do NOT “no-true-Scotsman” me or I will fuck you up.  I have a law degree and I know how to  use it.)  He

“>lies

as easily as you or I blink our eyes, and he — this is pretty creepy — won’t have a meal alone with a woman and he calls his own wife “Mother,” (and I’m not a woman normally given to judging anyone else’s kinks, but, eweeewww.)  At exactly the point where

“>The Handmaid’s Tale

begins and City of Refuge takes off, that’s where Mike Pence orgasms.  And Mike Pence is in so deep into the Trump administration’s lies about Russia and their Russian coverup that you can’t see the top of his short-cut white hair.

Recently, a lovely young Witch of my acquaintance put up a post on FB that said, essentially, “Don’t get too happy about Trump going down; Pence is pretty bad, too.”  And, she’s not wrong, but here’s why she’s wrong:

Our brilliant founders set up a clear line of succession.  Right now, that line goes like this:  It’s turtles, all the way down.  Seriously, short of Trump hanging on for two years, and the Dems (who have the world’s greatest gift for pulling defeat from the jaws of victory) winning the House, thereby making Nancy Pelosi Speaker in 2018, it’s just turtles as far down as you can see.  From Pence, we go (as we have never gone before) to Paul Ryan, Orin Hatch, Exxon’s own Rex Tillerson, etc., etc., etc.  There’s nothing pretty there, no matter how carefully you turn over the rocks.

Does that mean that we should stop working to remove Trump (via impeachment, Amendment 25, or other means) from office?

No.  No it does not.  We need to get Donald Trump the fuck out of the White House, as soon as we possibly can.

But, but, but, that will put Mike Pence in the WH!  Or, even if we #impeachPencefirst, it will put another equally odious member of the Patriarchy in charge!

Yes.  Yes it will.  It’s a shame that liberals can’t bother to vote in midterm elections, but, yes, getting rid of Trump is not anything like our end game.

But (and here I go, I’m starting a hashtag) #evenPence isn’t as in love with nuclear war as is Trump.  #evenPence won’t bring all his relatives into the WH to sell visas to the Chinese and to hawk online pink-beige sleeveless dresses made by slave-labor in China.  And not having America turned completely into a marketing scheme for grifters is a good thing.  #evenPence won’t whip up rallies of white supremacists to go out and burn crosses, firebomb schools, beat up protestors.  He’ll be more subtle, and in some ways more dangerous, but he won’t be as much “chaotic evil” as is Trump.

As Ms. Whatsit9 reminds me, Hillary Clinton kept suggesting that, whatever we face, what we need to do is to:  “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”  That translates into another of Ms.Whatsit9’s sayings:  Just do the next right thing.

Yes, Pence is bad.  But that is not an argument for leaving Tump in place.  Unseating Trump is a good thing and it will send a good message to future (Goddess guard us) Trumps.  Once Trump is gone, then, yes, we’ll have to deal with Pence, or Ryan, or Hatch, or Tillerson, or whichever monster is next in line.  We’ll persist.  We’ll slay the next dragon, and the one after that, and the next one, too.

Because that is who we are and that is what we do.

But don’t throw a moron like Mike Pence up as a shield to protect Donald Trump.

Monday at the Movies

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