Category: Carry Water

Automotive Misadventures, The Fabulous Jonathan, and Spiritual Practice, Oh My!

On By PaxIn Blame Sannion, Carry Water, Chop Wood, everyday, Notes on the Journey, spiritual practice, The Fabulous Jonathan4 Comments

Dear Friends,

So as you may remember I have been working at building my array and regularity of Spiritual Practices in my Pagan journey for a while now…. Meditation, both silent and focused, and Conscious Breathing and Grounding and Centering and work with my Chakra’s and (for those of us on the New Aquarian Frontier who are of the Witchy persuasion) of course Magick…. and loging them all daily along with my daily diet and writing I’ve done that day and any Professional development and physical excercise…

And my practice has been growing and becoming a regular part of my life.  So of course as I grew it eventually became time for a test.

My old car, the Late Great Volvo, had already had 170,000 miles on it when I bought it used for $1,700 a few years ago.  I had already spent more on it in repairs than I bought it for, almost double.  I have been reading and researching replacement vehicles and pulling together money and otherwise talking about getting a newer car.  However my A.D.D. blessed brain kept getting distracted by more immediate things… duties and commitments and exhaustion from a wildly varying schedule and all sorts of other life stuff… or so I told myself.

So when I stopped at a fast food place for some breakfast this last Sunday, and the car didn’t want to start, I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

Turn the key, nothing.  The lights came on but the engine did not turn over.   I figured it was the battery, and after some harsh lessons in the road readiness and charitable nature of many of my fellow human beings…. I called my boyfriend The Fabulous Jonathan.  He made the 45-minute to hour drive to where I was and we tried jumping the battery.  Repeatedly.   No go.   After a while the ugly truth dawned that it wasn’t the battery, it was the transmission.

For those who are even more automotive repair/maintenance challenged than myself (and I hope you live somewhere either blessed with fabulous public transit or which is very pedestrian friendly) that is both ridiculously expensive and the automotive kiss of death.

The Fabulous Jonathan set aside his own duties and chores for the Week-end and helped ferry me around town for a few days and look at cars and figure out how to invest my modest nest egg into a new vehicle.  I am now the proud debtor of a slightly used 2010 Kia Rio!!!

(brief pause whilst Pax does some calming breathing about his very first Car financing experience, which is really different from a Student Loan because you can’t really defer payments…. banks are a LOT less accomodating or flexible on Car Loans than Student Loans as I understand it)

So we exchanged Valentine cards on the 13th, and spent most of the next 3 days together.  He helped me get to work on Monday night, after I switched shifts around to have Tuesday off to go Car hunting.   We talked, a lot and laughed and shared stories from our pasts and he made a scary crazy making experience a lot less painful!  He is wonderful, and smart and cute and funny, although I am admittedly biased on the matter.  It was nice to know that we are capable of weathering storms together.

I am truly blessed to have found you Jonathan!

So sometime on day 2, even though I wasn’t doing my usual Journal / Log-booking of my practices, I noticed I was still breathing consciously, I was grounding and centering, and otherwise trying to engage the practices that help keep me on an even keel; even in the midst of maddening times.  That is why we do them, they help us to grow and be stronger and better people; being stronger and better people we are more aware and engaged in our lives and our relationships with ourselves, our friends and families, our Gods, and our Sweet Sacred Universe.

Jonathan was even patient with me as I got very snarly and with him at the Dealership as I sat with him waiting for some of the paperwork to go through as I wrestled with this tremendous wave of doubt and fear that washed over me.  He kept trying to reassure me and I kept getting mad at him… which I knew was bs and driven by the fearful and hateful parts of my self that have been hurt so often over the years – and sometimes allowed myself to be hurt rather than risk failing at not being a failure or a screw-up-… finally I just told him that this was my fear and I needed to face it.

Although I was more than a little bastardly about it, sorry my dear.

Sometimes you have to face your fears instead of running from them, which is of course one of the big reasons I had waited to buy the car or seriously scope out my financing options.   But I found a good finance rate and payments I can afford and even as I go scared further into the world or being a Real Adult ™, I am blessed by good friends and good fortune and the love of a wonderful guy!

I also find myself contemplating how small and limited I’ve let my life get in the last year or so as I faced the impending death of the Volvo and of how I avoided dealing with the situation.  I have many friends whom I could be sharing my journey with in a more personal face to face manner, and even with the hovering cloud of automotive doom I have been trying to do just that lately… spending time with Tracie the Red this last week-end…. and making it to various 1U events.

I have had a lot of “Once I have a newer car and a better job I can ______ and _____ and ____.”  Conversations/prayers/whatever’s with the Gods and the Universe in general lately….  Projects I could be involved in, events I could attend, activities I could take up…. not a new thing these conversations, but my sense of being actually able to tackle the various projects and promises is newer to me.   Its grown with my dive into Practice and Study in the last couple of years.

I can also see, based on that not-quite crushing wave of fear and doubt at the Dealership, that I have more work and Practice to do…

Now it’s back to the daily routine of work at the motel, and on my writing, and on my Practices, and in another couple of days it will be time to Circle again.   Then there are events at Church to volunteer on…   Opportunities to spend times with Tracie the Red, and my gaming buddy and proto-Heathen friend Aarnvast, and others….  More work to do polishing the resume and getting my ducks in a row to try for promotions at work….  More work to do around the apartment getting things in order there…

The adventure continues…

Peace,

Pax

Wow, funny what you find when your looking.

On By PaxIn Blame Sannion, Book Reviews & Recommendations, Bouncing off the Gods, Carry Water, Chop Wood, Cross-roads, Food for Thought, Highest Ideals2 Comments

So I just finished an automatic-writing/ journaling exercise inspired by one of the exercises in Kissing the Limitless by T. Thorn Coyle…(seriously, if you’re mystically inclined go out and buy it!)

I wrote about my relationship with money, my self-destructive patterns of behavior, family issues, how in the end I am the one responsible for my choices and actions so why did I keep (silently, to myself anyway) try to find excuses or some triggering past event; you know, the usual stuff that starts oozing and seeping out once you start squeezing your subconscious on a topic.  A couple of sentences that stood out in  particularly were…

I have this deeply seated feeling of not being worthy.  This sense of if I get crap I somehow deserve it.

Wow!  I am just SUCH a ray of Effin’ sunshine, aren’t I?!?  I can see the insanity of such an idea… I’m just not sure what to do with it.

I’ve been continuing with my prayers and trying to add meditation to my regular/daily list of spiritual practices; along with some other excercises from Thorn’s Book.  (and tweaking them to adjust for my own metaphisical and magical experiences and past)  Breathing in Life energy, placing it into a challice of water and drinking from it.  Deep breathing meditations and staring into a candle flame… breathing new life into my energy bodies and chakra’s.

As I write this I am finding other little bits of toxic thought and feeling flittering to the surface… pettyness, fear, hatefulness, selfishness, lazyness…

These qualities and the thoughts and feelings I personally associate with them are as much a part of me as the beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, and mirth and reverence that I as a Witch have tried to cultivate within myself.

I may not have the money for therapy (which I think most folks should try for at least a little while)… but I have tools and techniques and dear friends and the Gods… I think I am more than ready to start dealing with some of this stuff!

The rather encouraging thing is I think I’m at a point in my life where I am ready to actually remember those tools and allies!

Peace,

Pax

Awakening Aphrodite… a fragment…

On By PaxIn Aphrodite, Carry Water, Chop Wood, Creativity, Imbolc, Imbolc Poetry BloggingLeave a comment

So in addition to working and pre-writing and thinking about a book or piece on the 8 virtues of Witchcraft I have been toying for months with a writing fragment and story idea… here  in the spirit of Imbolc’s creativity and of modern February’s spirit of love is a story fragment…

Awakening Aphrodite

By Geoffrey Stewart (c) 2008

“There were sounds, floating out over the oceans waves. Sounds of songs and laughter and drums and bells and sistrum’s and many other instruments; their joyous noise intermingling with the throbbing surf as the moonlight glittered upon the surface of the waves. Within the ocean the tidal ebb and flow would have seemed to be keeping a rhythm with the music, had anyone been there to see its dance. In the depths of the ocean something stirred, sensuously and slowly. A ripple of seaweed and a curve of wave-borne driftwood, a shimmer of sea-shells, rich sediment and glittering particles of sand, all pulsing in tune with the ebb and flow of the oceans rhythms, and those of the singers on the shore.

Nature’s most powerful forces sometimes take their own time, however, so the full moon was much lower in the Western sky when things really began to happen. No one was there to observe the first miracle, at least none who could fully understand its meaning.

Her footsteps, quickly disappearing in the oceans tides upon the seabed led from the place of Her awakening towards the shore. She strode beautiful and powerful and primal through the waters and as She neared the surface She rose Her lithe arms up and with Her fingertips parted the waves and, catching hold of them, pulled Herself up into the air to stride atop the oceanic waves for the last several yards to the shore. She sighed deeply, deeply drinking in the night air, the scent of the sea, smoke from a smoldering bed of driftwood coals on the shore, and hints of delightful if foreign flowers greeted her. She lifted Her eyes, which had been contemplating the ripples of the water beneath Her feet, and smiled up at the night sky.

The stars redoubled their twinkling in joyous response to Her. Sea birds cried welcome, and swans swam forward to do Her honor. The sea creatures who had given Her an honor guard fell away, except for the dolphins who chose to linger at the edge of the two worlds of air and sea. She smiled and shook some of the water out of Her golden hair.

As Her feet touched the shore there was a subtle stirring as the sea grass and scrub on the dunes rippled as if in a wind, as this sensuous tickle made it’s way inexorably from sea to shining sea as the natural world shivered, oh so slightly, at Her touch. People then abed rolled over in their sleep, smiling to themselves as their dreaming minds turned to thoughts of love and peace and beauty. Those who were awake at this limnal time between the latest of the night and the earliest of the morning sighed, and smiled, and felt a momentary yet encompassing sense of joy and inspiration. Lovers asleep abed snuggled close to one another, and those not asleep, well, they kissed and felt a moment of transformative love and life changing awareness and sensuality, and then they more than kissed.

Musicians played and children smiled and laughed, even in their sleep, and every dove and pigeon cooed and took flight.

She walked along the shore, delighting in the sensual ebb and flow of the water over Her feet and the sand. She came to a stop at a spot where a burnt out driftwood camp fire lay, out of reach of the high-tide erasing. Here they had gathered, She knew. Here they had sung Her ancient songs in a modern foreign tongue, not that it was a bad language, it had its rhythms and possibilities but it was not Greek. Drums with little cymbals, and sistrums, and wooden …flutes…no… recorders… they were called recorders…. These and those strange boxes that played the music… how sad that people should have to rely on those rather than being able to at the very least pound out a rhythm or pipe out a tune… at least some of them had the dance. She was glad of that… there was always the dance. She smiled to herself at that and birds across the continent stirred and burst into flight and into song.

She stretches Her lithe, strong, arms out over the ocean and begins to make a beckoning motion with Her hands. Slowly, against the direction of the wind, from over the waves the smoke that had been born from the fire traced its way back over the waves and began to gather itself back into the blackened driftwood. The burnt out grey coals began to rekindle and the fire began to burn backwards into itself as driftwood and bits of incense began to reform themselves in the flames.

She smiled as the pleasing scents of the incense drifted by Her on their way back towards the fire to rebuild themselves into flowers and chunks of resin.“

Honoring The New Year: Providing for ourselves and our Pagan communities…

On By PaxIn Carry Water, Chop Wood, Community Building, Honoring the New Year, Pagan Responses to Recession1 Comment

Honoring the New Year, is a series of posts highlighting sites and links, that I find amusing or inspiring when viewed through the lens of my identity and world-view as a Witch and Pagan.

So this is a bit of a rant and exploration of Gardening, Victory Gardening, and Pagan Communal Gardening…

The house I grew up in in Anchorage, Alaska had a huge back yard and a vegetable garden that my father worked in every summer.  I just barely remember the house in Fairbanks, having a greenhouse and garden.

Now live in a rental house, and The Big Guy and our roommate The Amazing Todd aren’t too keen on the idea of our starting a Garden… too expensive or labor intensive they say… I am marshalling my resources and working on my arguements and evidence.

See part of it is just my natural hunger, as an expatriate Alaskan, for a garden.  Alaskans are seriously into gardening, vegetabls and flowers, as after months of long-long Winter nights and cold snowy weather and getting a little stir-crazy… well Alaskans tend to go a little Garden happy in the short Spring and Summer months.  One of my hometown’s nick-names is “The City of Flowers” after all…

I also have a desire to reconnect to the land and the Earth and to Nature here in my new home in Florida, and it seems like Gardening would be a spectacular way to do just that!

I became especially intrigued with vegetable and kitchen gardening in the last year or two as prices have sky-rocketed.  In looking around the net I came across the recent Victory Garden meme…

Victory Gardens were a phenomenon of World War I and II, where folks planted vegetable gardens to help supply themselves and the troops with plenty of food in tough times.

Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit and herb gardens planted at private residences in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia[1] during World War I and World War II to reduce the pressure on the public food supply brought on by the war effort. In addition to indirectly aiding the war effort these gardens were also considered a civil “morale booster” — in that gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown. Making victory gardens became a part of daily life on the home front.” ~ from the Wikipedia entry

There are a couple of good sites, here and here, about the modern effort to revive the Victory Garden.

Gardening can also provide a much needed savings in gas and food costs, yes, there is an initial investment of money to start the garden… but in the long term there are savings… which is part of the reason I think my parents got into Gardening in the first place.  I was born in 1972, so much of my childhood coincided with the recession of the late 1970’s… folks were very concerned with saving money and providing for their families and gardening is one way to do that.

Many of us, as Pagans, are also concerned with our relationship with the natural world around us.  Gardening, even container gardening, is one way to to experience that relationship and to build upon it!

I’d also like to mention the idea of co-operative gardening for our community, or as I think of it Pagan Communal Gardening.  Not all of us have big back yards, and some of us have the land but not the time, this is where we can not only provide for ourselves but encourage our community at the same time…

Get together with a few friends from the Pagan community and form a Gardening club… you meet once a week at the Garden site, work the land, hang out, have some fun… when it comes time to harvest each member gets a share of the harvest to do with as they see fit.  Maybe each of you needs the extra food… or maybe some of you want to offer it to a local Pagan community Elder in need, or perhaps you want to donate it to your local branch of Feeding America in the name of your local Pagan community!

Together, we as a community can save money, provide extra food for ourselves and our neighbors, and do good in the world!  All in an afternoon’s work!

Here are a few links from my own files… when in doubt talk to your local nursery and garden stores and search out your State or regional dept. of Agriculture… they often have resources for the home gardener, the last of the links is a good example of this…

Backyard Gardener (d0t) com

Florida Gardener (dot) com

Kitchen Gardeners International

National Native Plant Nursery Guide

Vegetable Gardening in Containers

The Journey goes on…

On By PaxIn Carry Water, Chop Wood, remembering, Seeking, Solstice, The Gifts of Giving1 Comment

So I have been working on this site, adding links, and adding some new pages here and there, one of which is published if in continual progress.  The new page of this site is one on Daily Spiritual Practices.  An important topic and one that I can tell I needed some more reminders of.  Perhaps I should do like T. Thorn Coyle and regularly change my daily practices so they do not become routine?

On the other hand, while changing it up would help me remain mindful of my daily practice, as one blessed with ADHD routine… or at least structure, can very much be my friend…hmm… time to think on this I think!

I have also been working on an article I am hoping to sell for publication.

I am also now engaged in a permanent part-time position (hooray!) which in the theme park world is a lot better than being a seasonal employee.  Money is still desperately tight, but then I am not alone in that this Solsticetide Season.

Sunday will bring with it the Anniversary of Pearl Harbor and an opportunity to honor some of The U.S. fallen heroes, and those who currently stand guard over our freedoms.  While I may disagree with how we got into one of the Wars we are in, I will never hesitate to honor those who serve in the armed forces.

The Full Moon follows next week, with an opportunity to observe some aspects of my own personal Solstice observances.  Which I also need to think about in the near future.

Off to think and to bed!

Peace, and Blessed Be!

Pax

Chop Wood, Carry Water…

On By PaxIn Carry Water, Chop Wood, Chrysalis1 Comment

“Before Enlightenment, Chop Wood, Carry Water,

After Enlightenment, Chop Wood, Carry Water.”

~Chinese Proverb

The Big Guy and I are going to be visiting some of his family for the next week for Thanksgiving.  Part of this involved getting the cargo/topper for the back of his truck out of the back yard.  We have this Bougainvillea that grew in the corner of the front yard in front of the gate to the side-yard.  We figured we’d cut a few branches and get it out…

FOUR HOURS OF YARD WORK LATER…

~sigh~  The plant had grown in on itself and there were brambles and tangles and thorns like some nearly impenetrable wall of purple flower bearing thorn filled doom.  But, we did it!  I am tired and sweaty and dirty and yet, paradoxically, I feel cleaner and (on some levels) more energized that I have in weeks.

There was something deeply powerful about taking that tangled thorny bush, whose beautiful and placid outer layer hid a mass of dead and dieing thorny branches, and taking it apart and hauling it away; and behind it was the gate.  Not just a sense of accomplishment but a living metaphor for getting things done and dealling with obstacles and painful problems.  Some useful triggers for my visualizations in the future!  I also found a couple of potential wands, but I need to do some research on Bougainvilia to see if I can really use these wands for my regular work or if they will be a special ocasion item… or the ingredient for some new charm or spell.

I have a feeling that the sense of power and metaphor and magic I felt during this unexpected bit of hard labor both culminated something I needed, and will serve as a useful tool and experience in the relatively near future.  I will have to do some work with the Tarot and some meditation this week…

Peace, and a Happy Thanksgiving!

Pax

PS- Please go to the upper right-hand corner of this page and click on the Links! link, I am trying to build my resource pages and am inviting any and all to post some suggestions for more links and more categories!  (It’s very much a work in progress right now, sorry for the mess!)