One Bear at a Time

I am participating in a fundraising campaign to benefit abandoned children in Nigeria who have been accused of witchcraft by their families and neighbors.

As part of this campaign, I am knitting 10 stuffed bears to be sent directly to a shelter in Nigeria that works to house, feed, clothe, and educate these kids. I also have a personal fundraising goal of $5000 to donate to Stepping Stones Nigeria, a UK-based organization that sponsors this shelter.

Please help me to make my goal in one of the following ways:

• Make a one-time donation either by check or on-line
• Sponsor my bears by donating a specific amount per bear that I complete
• Donate a set amount to the cause each pay period through the remaining months of this campaign

If you would like to donate by check, please make it out to the Chesapeake Pagan Community or CPC and send it to me at the address below. If you would like to donate online, go to http://charity.becomingdc.org. You can then donate via PayPal. Please send me an email letting me know how much you donated, so I can apply that to my fundraising goal. All monies collected will be sent via Chesapeake Pagan Community to Stepping Stones Nigeria at the end of September.

Together, we can make a difference in these children's lives.

Blessings,
Katrina

Katrina Messenger
PO Box 5223
Takoma Park, MD 20913
USA

If you would like more information about this issue, there are links to articles and the organizations at http://charity.becomingdc.org/.

Posted in

• Creativity
• Culture
• Magick

• katrina's blog
• Add new comment
• 235 reads

Anonymous is What I'm Talking Bout

Omigod! I am having such fun reading about the Anonymous protests around the world yesterday. I especially loved the reports about the London protests.

I especially love this image

This is both what I love and hate about Anarchists. They know how to have such a good time when they protest, and they bring such freshness to the entire discourse. And ... sadly, it is hard to sustain this kind of energy over the long term. I sincerely hope I am wrong.

It is just really hard to keep taking it to the streets. At some point, you have to have another strategy. Right now they are good looking, funny, good natured and more importantly ... not taken seriously. I hope to never see a Guy Fawkes mask drenched in blood ... or any of these good natured, smart and funny people in jail.

May their joyous spirits and deep intellect be heard, appreciated and welcomed. And may the gods of old protect their bodies, minds and hearts. From my mouth to the goddess' ears .... ashe!

------

On another note, I had another chance to be an urban avenger last night. It has been years since I was able to chase down a man abusing a woman. But last night, I did my current version of heroism.

I heard a woman screaming on my block, I rushed to the door to see her being beaten on a porch almost directly across the street. I stepped onto my porch and bellowed, "I AM CALLING THE POLICE, I AM CALLING THE POLICE, I AM CALLING THE POLICE" at the top of my lungs.

If you know anything about me, you KNOW how loud that had to have been. I then promptly ... called the police. Saying it three times meant it would get through to him that he not only was in trouble, but he had a witness unafraid to let him know who and where I was. The violence deescalated almost immediately. And the cops showed up in less than 2 minutes.

Later a fire engine came and the techs went inside the house with emergency medical supplies. Later the police walked out with the man in cuffs. All in all, a successful intervention.

I am feeling pretty good about myself at the moment.

Maybe I can't go and bust some heads, but I can yell and I can call for help. Yay ME!!

Posted in

• Culture
• Rants
• Politics

• katrina's blog
• 2 comments
• 280 reads

Alone

I wrote a poem many years ago called, “Single, Childless and Living Alone.” I have yet to share the mixed emotions that are etched within its meter; it is just too close to the inner workings of my soul. But today I consider the meaning of being alone.

And of course I am not discussing being physically alone. We have all, at some point in our lives, experienced solitude of some type – even if it is only the solitude of the toilet within a house of six children, two adults and countless visitors. That was the solitude of my childhood. I could only be alone with my own thoughts in our single bathroom.

After fifty years, I finally realized the bathroom’s symbolic potency within my dreams after reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. “Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, but recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams …”

And so the eternal search for a toilet within my dreams suddenly became meaning-full when I recalled how often I search within my life for the rare and often precious sliver of space or time just for me. And when I find this oasis, this pocket within my busyness, what do find nestle within?

I find myself, alone.

As an introvert, time alone is like a life giving elixir. It rejuvenates my souls and recharges me at all levels. I crave this solitude like a drug, like a junkie slapping my arm searching desperately for the vein to inject this glowing potion of quiet, calm and emptiness.

But deep within the darkness, swimming deep down within my fears and sorrows lives another kind of alone. Loneliness can be such a cruel mistress. She raises her head above the threshold of awareness and suddenly without warning I am gasping for air, clawing along on the edge, fighting to keep my head above water.

And that is where I discovered myself at the end of last week. After several glorious days of contentment, I was suddenly fighting against chains stretched taut around my heart. What happened? How did I end up here?

The melancholy lasted all weekend, till just as suddenly I remembered – I had watched a movie. The movie was Notes on a Scandal, starring Judi Dench. And in it was some of the most heart-breaking narrative of her as a desperately lonely unmarried ageing woman. And it was that narrative that had triggered me and, as I wrote in my journal, had literally stolen the joy right out of my mouth.

It is not the first time that something in a film touched me so deeply within my core. But it has been a long time since something snuck in past my defenses and sucker-punched me without my even knowing it had happened.

I have been very good at explicating sub-text and identifying misogynist and racist messages. But now, with me in my early fifties, I find that I am now more susceptible to messages about women and ageing.

And oh my gods did it hurt. It was gut-wrenching, soul-numbing sorrow upon sorrow, fear upon fear … and all that lives inside my darkness – oh my gods, I had no idea it was so huge.

So now I know where my work lies. I have discovered yet another frontier within me. It is the path of age. I have dipped my hands into it briefly from time to time, and now it beckons to me from beyond the land of dreams. I turn my steely gaze toward this land, not with strength or courage but with humility and surrender. I do not plan to give up, but I do plan to let go and release whatever is toxic within me. And claim back the ancient heritage of crone, the throne of the bearded woman and the narrow eyes of the waning moon.

And once again I walk the path of a shaman and witch into the unexplored territory of the next leg of my journey – a journey into my inner world and my journey into and through the worlds beyond me. My journey along the path of ageing.

Happy trails…

Posted in

• Culture
• Rants

• katrina's blog
• Add new comment
• 288 reads

Cosmologies: Sex versus Birth

One of the problems I have with the western magickal tradition is how so much of it is informed with sexually based imagery, and heterosexual imagery at that. With all the active thrusting into passive orifices, one wonders how early alchemist, qabalists and magicians managed to get any work done between masturbatory reveries.

So I often wonder what would have happened if the reigning metaphor had been birth instead of copulation. Lessee, a smallness sleeping cradled within the larger darkness, awakening to sensation and movement. Being pushed toward consciousness and manifestation. And ultimately being born into the light.

Many creation myths are in fact based on a birth metaphor. What is interesting however is how so little of the cosmologies associated with western (or even some eastern) spiritual traditions retain this metaphor. So many fall back on dualistic systems that immediately forces one of them to be the bottom, er the submissive female, within a heterosexual pair.

Although many systems recognize the mother and child polarity, Demeter/Persephone, Isis/Horus, and Mary/Jesus come to mind, at some point many revert to a sister/brother or husband/wife metaphor where most if not all of the gods are married off. Some pantheons combine the two metaphors into mother/consort or god/human combinations such as Inanna/Dumuzi. And still others completely eliminate the feminine principle and focus on the father/ruler exclusively such as the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions. Catholicism’s adoration of Mary, both with and without her son, seems almost healthy by comparison.

But what is so hard about retaining the birth metaphor beyond creation and allowing it to inform the spiritual symbology and philosophy anyway? The cycle of birth, ripening, consummation, repose and death/rebirth are not so hard to comprehend. Then we get have our sex but also our adolescence, maturation, old age and transformation too.

We have this cycle somewhat in triple gods like Hekatae, Brigid and Thoth/Hermes. We see it in the cycle of maiden, mother and crone. We sense it in both the solar and lunar cycles. I am talking of course about the cycles of life itself. Sex metaphors only work so far it seems to me. Whereas birth metaphors seem to include the totality of life at all levels and, notably, no one has to bend over unless they want to.

So as a Libra / Scorpio cusp child, constantly choosing between sex and death, for the moment I choose death -- or rather, death and rebirth – as my cosmological principle. Now all I have to do is to re-craft a Tree of Life, an alchemical process and an entire symbolic vocabulary to match. For now, however, I am just going to let it gestate just a little bit longer.

©2007 Katrina Messenger

Posted in

• Myth & Folklore
• Spirit
• Culture
• Rants
• Magick

• katrina's blog
• 1 comment
• 854 reads