Maebius Musings

I had a little post about our latest Boy Scout meeting, and how it looks liek it may start to become more than a jumbled disorganized mess… but then I read this entry from FreeRange Kids, which says things with a slightly different focus, but much more eloquently than I could.

http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/why-scouting/

One quote from the bottom summarizes what I was going to say already:

It is the same earth, but we have grown in this short time from 3.5 billion to 7 billion people.  The outdoor code, to be conservation minded is no longer quaint — it is part of the solution. To do your best, To be prepared…

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Update: re-editing since the original posting ate my words.  Darn you internet gremlins!    Here is it again, slightly re-worded but accurate enough for me to post on my work break again….

Today I’ve been musing about the spread of “social media” and similar internet-based services and games, which provide a lot of value in terms of keeping in contact with far distant people we may have never met in-person.

Combine that, with the opposing viewpoint of such “fake friendship” degrading the real face to face social value of knowing our neighbors and townsfolk.

I tend to fall on the positive side of the debate, and agree that the internet is a wonderful tool for social networking and communication.  Be it chat rooms, online games, or FaceBook, there are people I talk to on a relatively frequent basis that I would never know if not for my online presence.

Still, I do hold onto a little corner of my mind that wonders if the ease of internet friendship is just a little bit detrimental to the larger social scene.  Perhaps it keeps people just that little bit more selfish.

After all, on the internet, you can pick and choose your friends much more carefully, and align the interests of your friends “just-so” to match your own.  If someone angers you terribly, it is much easier to “unfriend” them and just stop interacting.  Distance and internet pseudo-anonymity make it easy to ignore the person. Especially if your preferred method of contacting them has an actual “ignore/privacy” setting.

In real life, if you don’t like the crazy old neighbor, it’s tough to “unfriend” him.   You may stop saying hello, but in real life there’s always a chance of interaction with the neighbor, barring such extreme measures as moving to a new house, or becoming an agoraphobic hermit.

My muse is, does this shift cause a slow degradation of our cultural acceptance and social skills?

I think I mused about this last year, too, but it’s on my mind again.    Does dealing with the weird and oft-times unfriendly neighbors provide people with a much broader “acceptance” outlook towards diversity, and the lack of such result in the continued undercurrent of xenophobia in many people’s outlooks?

Or is such thought reading too deep into things and merely “scapegoating” the technology from what may simply be a human-nature situation that would happen regardless, and Facebook, et al, is merely the most common outlet for those natures to manifest?

Hurm….

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Ever have one of those weeks where you have about 280,000 things to do, and five days to do it? That’s my brain lately.

Got a horse, have not done much more than feed her a bit of grain each evening.

Got a new computer,  it’s still in the box.

Got my next belt in Karate (well, will officially get it Friday, but passed the test to earn it last thursday), feel like I should be doing more practice in the evenings.

Got a patch update in my favorite computer game that Changes Lots and totally upends the mechanics of the character skills.   Have not logged on for more than 10 minutes in the last ten days.

Got a new book, from one of my favorite series, and am finding it difficult to sit down and read it.

Got a little faerie-hut (bird house) at the dollar store and painted it prettily, and yet can’t find a home for it, which bugs me a Lot  more than it should….

Gotta re-do the dresser decorations for autumn, and feeling terribly uninspired and procrastinatic[sic].

It all seems like tons of “fun stuff” is not getting done.  But then again, all that Fun stuff, and the lack thereof, is making me horribly irritable, wanting to crash in bed at 7:30 after work, and frazzled.

Must be the changing of the seasons… or the two days of frost that kit and cemented in my psyche that a Cold Winter’s Coming and it isn’t gonna wait.  And the least among us knows, Where you stand won’t change the way the wind blows…

..either that or the “sludge” in my brain rising to the surface after pouring in a bunch of water last week. 

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This phrase has been stuck in my head for a few days now, starting while I was inspired to make my “Wild Place” in the yard, and then reading a mere day later in a Percy Jackson novel that the Pan of that story dies. “Grover finds Pan and learns the truth about his disappearance and that he, the God of Wild Things, must fade away and leave the job of making the earth green again to Grover, Annabeth, Percy, Tyson and everyone else on the planet. ”

This resonated with me all week, in light of our barn collapsing, which makes the property look decidedly less ‘Green-natural’ and more ‘trash-heap’ until it gets cleared up. In true microcosm/macrocosm fashion, this just keeps reminding me what a mess we’ve made of things, and how nice it used to, and will look again.

I helped create the BP oil spill after all, by continued use of petro-commercialism, as Anne said recently. I also helped set aside a patch of yard to be tended respectfully and minimally, and am looking into composting toilets and rainwater collection barrels. Each of us has potential for Change, both good and bad.

So, it seems this moon cycle is one where I find myself musing upon Pan more often than not. Pan in his many facets of untouched wilderness, his voice of Panic, and his [pro]creative drive.

Strangely, I have never been one to ascribe to any particular Pagan-themed diety in this manner. After a solid Lutheran upbringing, with appropriate Christians-tinted faiths, my own Pagan path has tended more towards generic elementalism, pantheism, and non-specified Druidic leanings. (Plenty of explanation of my spirituality on this blog’s archives.)

I had a brief stint of Faerie-slant which still sticks with me a bit. But the Gentle Folk are no gods. Otherwise, I’ve generally paid mere lip-service to other cultures’ Deities in acknowledging their existence on some level, but never joining their ranks. I liken this to knowing the Governor of Minnesota exists, but living in New York, if that makes sense. Yet everywhere I’m looking lately, I see horns. My own facebook page photo, for example, then wearing those self-same horns for fun while working outside last week “to be silly”. Looking back, are those silly head-decorations becoming something totemic? I don’t think so, but still, I’ve had them for years and never worn them much before now.

I even found my penny-whistle while cleaning up our closet on Thursday, and enjoyed waking some sleepy half-memories in my muscles by trilling a few songs out off my fingers. It’s no pan-pipe obviously, but the symbolism is surprisingly apparent when seen in retrospect, as they weren’t done with Pan in mind at the time. It’s interesting.

Did any of you readers with a more personalized relation with a particular Higher Power approach things in a similar manner, or were you off searching for a name specifically? Or, I suppose in other words, did you find your connections, or did They find you?

I also wonder if I’m just reaching for synchronisms that aren’t there. A bit of spiritual Apophinia, perhaps?

I also wonder if the webmistress of “The Gods are Bored”, or a Druid’s Apprentice, could get me a proper interview with Pan? *chuckle*

So, while I’m musing on all things goat-boyish, here’s two songs to entertain you. I just re-listened to them at work, which brought me merrily through that afternoon doldrum that hits around 1:30.

Enjoy. (and thanks to Nettle for sharing the songs initially with me recently!)

http://www.youtube.com/v/uxCPkg_Ee3Q

http://www.youtube.com/v/hztAzxNdL8c

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Last night, I started to prepare and set aside a small limnal patch of our back yard.   It is near the pond, and generally surrounded by wild thorns and sumac saplings, and situated in a way that makes it pretty difficult to mow or tend.  It’s farther from the house and not part of “grass yard” and not included in the fenced pasture for our horses due to the surrounding topology.   It’s a “junk patch” as someone once called it.

However, I had dreamed about this patch twice now in the past week.   The first, was the night I was trying to find a good location for a small Faerie Garden, or place to build a small Faerie-house.   In that dream, I was a rabbity creature caught in the thorns nearby and eventually settled into that spot to rest and recover, before hopping “home”.   The second time was last night, after a meditation on the Gulf Oil Disaster and lighting a candle to honor those beings who will lose/have lost their lives already for our greed.

In that second dream, I was not not there physically.  I merely watched, an invisible witness, as that patch of land grew from bare soil, filled with clover and sorrell and yellow dock, then got choked out by Motherwort, and eventually became an impossible full forest of minitature trees, with tiny fae-homes like the Ewok’s Village, or Lothlorien.

Thus inspired, I am in the process of trimming the thorns, slightly, but otherwise going to leave this parcel of dirt untouched.  It will be cleaned up of any litter and trash over the next week or two. (There’s a few bits of garbage from ancient farm-days in the crevices between the rocks. Rusty nails, broken glass and the like.  Not much, but some.  Folks from rural properties know the sort of thing I mean here, probably.)

After a sort of purification of the place, it will be allowed to grow and florish, as Nature deems suitable.   In times of extreme drought, I will spray it with the hose lightly, if we need to hose for our garden-proper.   If random winds blow refuse into it (roadside trash is an ever-present problem on our backwater street), it will be removed.    Otherwise, I promised the land it would be Wilderness.

To passers-by, no one will notice it.  Just another rough patch behind an old house.  I doubt I’ll feel called to decorate it with baubles and fae-toys (but am leaving the possibility open)  For now, it will be sanctified.

I’d still like to find the perfect spot to create my own “Shrine of the Mists“, with a different name.  Something formal, and such.  But I’m feeling kinda awesome about seeming asked by our land to “Leave this alone, and Love it”.

I’ll have pictures once it’s cleaned up properly, and walked away from on the New Moon.

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I’ve been doing a little meditative work for “The Circle of Shamans Without Borders” over the past two weeks. Not every day, but as best I can, and often closer to 10:00 pm than 7:00 pm on my timezone.  Still, it is something that at least lets me feel -slightly- better about ending my day.

I have a deep-rooted Dread (yes, with a capital D) regarding society today that I have tried to keep under wraps and dismissed as over-dramatic conspiracy-theory-ish folly.  Then again, I also think that dismissing such things is what got us to this point to begin with.   Thus, the unbalanced mood lately, and inability to focus on the details of things.

Recently, however, I found myself feeling altogether different about the whole topic of the Deepwater Oil disaster.

I was sitting outside last night, trying to visualize my opening ‘circle’ and was struck by a profoundly angry sky.  Physically, it was overcast and warm; a wonderful summery evening to sit outside.

Metaphorically (Etherically? Astrally?  Mentally?  I’m not really shamanic in my practices), it was an oppressive weight crushing me to the grass.   I cried.  Real little-kid-upset tears, at being berated so sternly by the Sky.  I was an ant, helpless and afraid, and scraping my meager scraps of glucose from the blades of grass and gathering dew while dreaming of building a fortress in the sandbox.   It hurt my heart, and cut my spirit.   The oil, it flows, and there’s nothing I could do about it, except be blamed for everything I did to cause it.  I was at fault.  Knowing even a single human being, made it my fault.

Honestly, it was scary as all heck, and something I’d prefer not to repeat again.  If that’s shamanic work, I’m not wont to continue it.  Yet, I think I should.

I should, because after being left feeling raped and shattered, I picked up the shards of Me and went back inside to get a drink of orange juice.  I needed something cold and soothing.   I began to feel Lighter then, and a strange sort of hopeful and bittersweet about the whole situation.

Like lancing a boil to drain the fluid before it infects the surrounding tissue, I felt relief, but not closure.

I’m left today at work with a sense that while there is nothing I can immediately do to affect the oil spill, I should continue to apply energies to the healing of the land.  It’s nature responding to humanity’s greed, and rather than fight upstream against the flow, I need to merely turn into the current and help steer away from the rocks below.

It sounds totally depressing to try typing into words, but I can’t help but feel better that it happened somehow.  Fish will die, coastlines will need cleaning, and a terrible tragedy has been unleashed.  I do not deny this.   I feel bad not feeling worse that it happened, though.

The cynic in me thinks maybe this waste of oil will speed along the endgame, so that it’s not quite as deep a trough we are sliding into? The optimist in me feels conflicted with the caring/feeling person in me that maybe lots of stuff dying will help more stuff stay alive?   (Hiroshima stopped the war, after all)

I’m not sure what I think.   It is almost a sort of Ennui, but more cynical, and resigned at Fate.

But I think a bit differently today than I have been.

Bear with things… it’s a weird river I’m rolling on…

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Yesterday, my parents were in Florida to watch the final flight of Space Shuttle Atlantis, which was a long-time dream of my fathers (to see a launch live).

I still vividly recall when I was much younger, we were standing on the beach watching the countdown to Challenger, which had aboard it a schoolteacher.   I was inspired, I was in awe, and I was quivering in anticipation.   That tingly-feeling I talk about now from time to time to describe a deeply religious experience.   Awe-some.

Sadly, when we were visiting Florida so long ago, the launch got delayed and I had to return home to the northeast.  Doubly-sadly, that very next attempt had infamously bad results, and all aboard were lost in a fiery explosion.  I’m almost glad I wasn’t there…

Still, I watched the launch today, sharing Virtually the experience that my parents were living Live, and still felt the catch in my breath, the profound piloerection (goose bumps), and the empowering Awe of a great event.   It brought me back to my teenage years, and beyond, when the world was somehow less complicated, and the innocent optimism of youth was not quite as jaded as my adult mind is now.

I had even more words to say, about how even amidst our problems, and the cynical response to “wasting” such resources in today’s downward-spiraling economy… but I think Will Wheaton says it best:

We humans are a flawed species, to put it mildly, and I think we could do a much better job taking care of our planet and each other … but when I see what we’re capable of doing, it gives me hope that the future I pretended to live in twenty years ago will actually arrive some day.

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2010/05/some-of-us-are-looking-at-the-stars.html

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I recently talked about Perspectives in terms of seeing wildlife in your backyard as a boon, and a symptom of imbalance.  I had been pondering that lately, and realized that the two options were not mutually exclusive, and to look at them in terms of extremes was jsut as bad as ignoring one side of the question itself.

For today’s musing, I present to you this:

What is it?  

A few options present themselves to my mind.   For example, it’s an apple, Obviously.  Thinking further…

• A fruit.
• a red -skinned food-item
• a healthy snack
• a worm house
• the fall of mankind via Eve
• a potential tree
• a jpg file
• an electronic pixilated representation of a physical object
• …etc.

I could probably think of a few other increasingly esoteric and creative answers to “What is that?“, but I think the point has been made. The question of “which is the correct answer?” is somewhat moot.  They are all correct.

The same ‘thing’ like that apple pictured above, can be many many things depending on how you look at it.   It’s a less extreme example of the three blind men and the elephant.

Like our own concepts of Spiritual Truth, I believe that just about all of them are valid, for the honest practitioner.  Some may call a spade a spade, and others a shovel or a playing-card, but there is Truth behind the respective words, that has validity.

Think about that the next time you dismiss someone as “wrong” in some subjective topic.  They may be less Right to you’re perspective, granted.  We can also change our own minds in light of continued evidence.  Yet, I am finding that the idea of wholly Wrong-ness is the cause of most troubles in society lately.

Lets stop comparing those apples to themselves, and just make fruit salad with the oranges we find too.

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This saturday, I was driving to meet a friend for dinner when I struck and killed a deer. My new car (3899 miles *sigh*) is a bit broken up, and the young button-buck was killed.

It may sound gruesome to some, but we kept the deer and are in the process of preparing it for venison this week.

Additionally, I have plans for a number of bones (and the skull) if I have success in cleaning/preparing them, which is a learning process for me. Prior animal bones I have had access to were found outside and pre-bleached by time, weather, and biological processes.

My pondering now, (and question to any readers here) is how to best preserve the animal remains, both in the literal physical sense, and a more spiritual/shamanic/etc sense.

I’ve honored the spirit of the deer with a quiet candlelit ritual saturday evening, but I’m completely learning-as-I-go in the idea of actually ‘harvesting’ the other parts respectfully. Wish me luck!

My dog has already requested a leg bone, and another is destined for a “talking stick” type of scepter. One rib popped up in my dreams last night as Useful, but no details as to the final use. The skull will hopefully preserve well and be gifted to a friend of mine with a great affinity to Deer. The rest, will most likely join the compost pile and garden for added calcium and to treat the nibbling field mice in our barn.

The car will be repaired, my own physical health is unharmed. I’d like to make the most of the noble animal who was ‘sacrificed’ in the accident.

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A bit late for the new-moon musing I had planned to write this as, so forgive a hectic life and sleepy shift-changes (again).

Recently, some relatives of mine who live in a rather suburban town of 9000 people, expressed great joy and wonder at the recent small explosion of wildlife in their yard. They have a small bit of grass to mow, and a tiny creek burbling in the backyard, which has always been home to muskrats and ducks (the muskrats go through annual trap-removals, but always migrate back in to mess up the yard).

Lately, a hawk/falcon has made it’s aerie on the block’s tall pines, Great blue Herons have been seen wading in the feeble stream hunting minnows, and the neighbor’s house got an infestation of rats, with rumors of a raccoon lurking around the garbage pails at night.

On the plus side of this, my relatives happily tell tales of bird watching, squirrel feeding, and muskrat/rodent removal. All that wildlife up-close is great for semi-retired folks sitting on their back porch with a cup of coffee. The nepphews get to share soem of the joy I remember in my youth of feeding squirrels and watching BlueJays fight over peanuts, along with the more “exotic” Herons and hawks swooping around on rare occassions.

Sadly, while I can’t help but smile and delight in these wonders of nature while I visit, there’s a part of me that is saddened and worried for that same wildlife.

They see abundance and natural wonder.
I see habitat decline and forced migrations to a suburban environment. It doesn’t help that the hill I once stood atop of to stargaze with my father in my pre-teen years is now a development of sterile townhouse-clone-rows.

I like stars as much as I like seeing wild birds and critters.

I also prefer going to visit them, instead of the reverse.

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