Aw man, the passage of time? Again??

my calendar said it was on the 28th but chabad.org said it was today so

keeping an eye on this guy...

asking some good questions

the stalks would fall over

We have to embrace the falling over. I say we let the starchy mass grow underground.

you invented potatoes

omg it's the inventor of potatoes! praise them

another shoutout to people who's neurodivergency interacts with their worship. people with deity introjects. people who struggle to differentiate between spirit interactions and psychosis. people who have been a victim of gaslighting who repeatedly second-guess their signs. those with ptsd who can't pinpoint the intention of their gods. those with adhd or autism who struggle to find a routine in their worship, or over-routine their worship.

this isn't even the beginning of what can happen, but just know i'm proud of you.

Circle Round: raising children in Goddess traditions, by Starhawk, Diane Baker, Anne Hill

If you are curious, no, I haven't read the other, more famous Starhawk book yet. It's on my shelf. I am putting it off because the library is yelling at me to give this one back much more urgently 😅

I have read many "how to witchcraft" books, and a few "how to witchcraft (with kids)!" books as well, but this book is a gentle, loving book on how to raise your children in magically rich household, the reading experience made even richer by having multiple contributors to provide crafts, songs, rituals, and grounding for a world that isn't exactly built around Neopagan sensibilities. There are several stances the book takes right off the bat, all which I was very grateful to see:

1) Do not force your kid into anything. Force is counter productive to your endgoal: having a happy, loved family where children feel comfortable with your craft and their place in it. If you would like your child to be interested in participating, leave them as many invites and openings as there are rituals taking place, or encourage them to make something that will be part of the ritual at another point. You can do this without trying to strongarm them into it.

Yes. Absolutely. This is a great point to make up front. Especially when children can be embarrassed that their parents believe in magic, or are part of a coven that partakes in rituals. 2) Cultural appropriation is not tolerated. However. If you only expose your children to European stories, mythologies, and traditions, they are only going to see the world through a lens of eurocentrism. Diversity in materials is the key to a well-rounded view— in life, in magic, everywhere.

When I got to this part of the book, I about stood up in my chair at work. Yes. We can appreciate, value, and learn from multiple cultures by engaging with them respectfully. It is important to be exposed to as much as possible in life, lest we become too used to only one perspective. I use the same philosophies towards diversity and global representation as I work to stock the kids' section at our library. 

I loved that the book had songs (and sheet music!) in it; I loved how the book was only as feminine as you would like to engage with, even as it centers in a Goddess tradition; I loved the crafts, the recipes, and the realistic day-to-day tips, all aimed at a level where younger children could engage with the material without missing out; I loved how the collaborators rounded each other out as they went, so there was hardly a section that felt too heavy with one person and ignored the others, and everyone contributed something different to the book.

As a kids librarian, reading this book smacked me in the face with the realization that kid rituals are largely just Goddess-themed storytime sessions. If you're a children's educator in any capacity at all, ever, and the chance to read this book comes up, take it, if only for the weird feelings blending your day job with theology! 🤣

If you're very sensitive to something that "feels Wiccan", well, this does smack of it, but if your actual problem is with cultural appropriation, misogyny/misandry, transphobia, or homophobia, I am happy to say that, on my first reading, none of the issues people tend to cite as their problem with Wicca made an overt appearance. That being said, I was reading this book at a desk with many distractions. 

I liked this book, I appreciate this book in its role and its content, and now that it's returned to the library, I'll likely try to purchase myself a copy. 

Blessings!

Happy Earth Day!

I have been saving this since last year. Happy Earth Day everyone.

if you dont want print media to die, buy physical copies of things. if you don’t want independent journalism to die, subscribe to a local newspaper. if you want more libraries and skate-parks and arcades, get a bunch of friends and call in the individual charge of your village or town or whatever and ask for one to be built and use the existing ones. if you want more native flora and fauna, start looking at the ones that already exist and how to preserve them. this is your world too. fight for it. get rid of the rot of passivity.

ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google "Hobby Lobby" and get a page full of results that make me go "wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq"

#sorry what??? #I knew them as the store with the Christian right wing owners that refused to pay for employee birth control as part of health insurance #what is this about cuneiform tablet looting

They are also that! And it comes from the same place.

Since 2009, the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby started taking advantage of the wars in Iraq to buy stolen and looted cuneiform tablets and clay artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of them were suspected to have been stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the chaos of the US invasion in 2003. The Hobby Lobby owners used HL profits to smuggle these artifacts into the US (taking them out of Iraq is illegal so they listed them as tile samples from Turkey and Israel, more friendly nations to the US). Eventually the customs officials seized them, and the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2017 when the news really broke about just how many ancient Middle Eastern artifacts were smuggled into the country. They were doing this to stock their "Museum of the Bible" that purports to prove the literal truth of the Bible... using stolen Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, somehow. Idk.

They also had sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries but that's only tangentially related.

Hobby Lobby and its owners were fined and ordered to return, again, thousands of artifacts back to Iraq. For years they KEPT finding more artifacts of Hobby Lobby's that turned out to be stolen, looted, and smuggled. It's one of the biggest artifact smuggling scandals in recent history. And it separated artifacts from their context and permanently damaged the ability to learn new things from them, even though archaeologists subsequently have been trying.

The court case was called "United States v. Approximately Four Hundred and Fifty Cuneiform Tablets."

I like the expression new-fangled. I don't know what it means for something to be fangled, but I sure as hell know it was recent

It’s from the Old English word feng, which can mean “to take”, or also “to grasp, hold, or embrace”. So something that’s newfangled is something that was taken up recently.

The reason it’s using this pretty archaic root is that it’s an older word than a lot of people think. Here it is in the Canterbury Tales.

Minutes after posting: "Why did I write archaic when I could have gone with old-fangled?"

Reblog to fangle this post

Sometimes the older words are best. "Early-adopted" doesn't have anything like the same grip. :)

advice for years later

you will be over it, and there will still be some stupid fucking thing on a random Tuesday that slips sideways through time and blindsides you with grief. it happens. it just happens.

live through it. put the shovel down: there is, I promise you, nothing to dig up that you’ll enjoy more than what you planted on top of the grave of what you lost.

(Guy whos never been at risk from systemic violence voice) No i think all violence is bad guys. You know. The cycle of violence. I think both sides are bad!

I'm talking about colonialism not your movie or fandom