Owlfoolery (awake after midnight)

It was the sound of a mournful puppy that drew me outside.

I’d meant to be in bed an hour earlier, but I just kept finding excuses to stay up a little later.  I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything, of course.  Just puttering around the house, unwilling to give up on a day that was almost over anyway.

11:58pm.

Ugh!

I’d finally decided that enough was enough, and was locking up, when I heard the noise.

Sad puppy, somewhere down the street it sounded like, making a noise somewhere between a whine and a bark.

I turned the deadbolt on my front door.  Not my problem.

The sound came again, and I turned the bolt the other way.

Stepping out, the night air was cool and moist.

The last few weeks, here in North Texas, have seen more rain and thunder than anything else.  It had rained, on and off, for most of the day, but for the moment the clouds seemed to be minding their own business, scudding their way across a grey sky and a few blurry looking stars.

I stepped out into the middle of the yard, away from the porch-light, and as I did, the strange yelping sound came again, and again – close!  And a strange blunt shape hurdled through the air from the side of my house and landed in the low branches just to my left.

Before I could fully register what had happened, the first shape was followed by a second, which flew past its fellow, and into the branches just a few feet in front of me.  The branches, just an arms length out of my reach, dipped low with an unseen weight, and that strange ‘puppy’ cry sounded again.

I turned back toward the first shape in time to see it launch itself toward and then past the second shape, its course curving through the branches, and coming to rest a little higher and on my right.  Its small, compact shape only dimly visible in the reflected glow of my porch light.  An owl.

Owls!

The second owl launched himself high up into the branches, lost completely to my view, until I heard it land, again to my left, very near to where his friend had first touched down, and the circle was repeated.

Once…,

…twice more, before they vanished off into the night, and I was left there, standing alone in my front yard, grinning like an idiot and truly awake again for the first time in months.

I listen to a lot of National Public Radio, and a couple weeks ago I tuned into a program discussing studies that had been conducted, showing that emotions are not just things of the mind, but that they possess a physical component.

The claim ran something like this: If you are sad, maybe you slouch and shuffle, maybe you frown, maybe you gesture and speak in a certain manner.  These are the bodies physical expressions of your emotional state.  The unexpected twist, is that according to multiple studies, if you slouch and shuffle, if you frown and gesture and speak in a certain manner, despite the fact that you are actually happy, you will BECOME sad.  The connection between mind and body runs both ways, and the mind will respond to the actions of the body with an alteration in mood.

In the days that have passed since I listened to that program (and for the life of me, I can’t remember which show it was), I have read a number of blog posts, from various writers, which all seem to touch, in one way or another, upon the subject of Orthopraxy versus Orthodoxy.

That is, Right Action versus Right Belief.

Certain religions of a monotheistic persuasion, hold that correct belief (i.e. the one true way) is the foundation upon which personal salvation rests.  From this perspective if you believe in the proper things in the proper way, your actions will follow suit and a glorious afterlife awaits.

On the other hand, if you are found to have committed incorrect actions (sins), the likely cause was your own failure to believe properly, or fully enough, to override your sinful nature.

Polytheists, on the other hand, reject the concept of ‘personal salvation’ and tend to be more Orthopraxic in nature.  When you believe in more than one god, and when the wants and desires of those gods vary, sometimes to the point of being contradictory, believing in anything like ‘One True Way’ is problematic at best.

What’s more, as pointed out in this excellent post over at the Shrine of Antinous, Polytheism is, “Not About Belief. Belief may flow from experience, and may impact practice (in fact, it should!); but, belief does not delimit experience nor determine practice.”

Experience and practice should be the root of belief.

Without action, belief is of little value.

We are what we do, and if we stop doing anything, what are we then?

***

When we act like we are sad, we become sad.

And when, to please others, or to mollify certain hurts among our loved ones, we set aside the things that we do and say, the things that inform our beliefs and make us who and what we are…,

…we sleep, and our beliefs become mere dreams, unfulfilled.

I have allowed myself to fall into this restless slumber.

The connection I once felt with the natural world, and with the otherworld beyond, has faded through lack of use.

I was worried, for a time, that it had vanished completely.

Until a few nights ago, when a pair of screech owls decided to play a game of leapfrog in the trees above me, turning circles around me in the night.  They were only there for a few seconds, and then they were gone, my laughter following them into the darkness.  But they left me awake to something I had almost forgotten.

It is time to start doing things again.

It is time to start being again.

It’s after midnight, and I’m wide awake!

No Capes!

You walk into a room at a family gathering and you find uncle Elmo telling a joke so racist that you wonder if it’s not too late to have yourself adopted out of the family. Your boss is making sexist remarks at the company picnic and you start scanning the skies for the black helicopters which you are sure Human Resources must have dispatched by now. You’ve turned on the news only to hear another story about the Westboro Baptist Church picketing a funeral and you hope that in your next life you’ll perhaps be reincarnated as an otter.

One of the unavoidable truths about human kind is that eventually someone is going to say something that makes you cringe. It’s going to happen, the only requirement being that two or more people are communicating.

You have only to wait.

How long that wait lasts, well.., that’s directly proportional to the number of people in your sample population. The more folks who attend the party, the sooner you’ll feel that special flush of embarrassment that marks your search for the nearest exit.

So, last week, a lot of people within the pagan community (or at least the more vocal parts of the community) spent valuable time and energy debating the rightness or wrongness of worshiping superheroes.

It certainly wasn’t the first “cringe-worthy” moment I’ve experienced while watching paganism grow and change over the years. I have every expectation that more such moments are just waiting for their time to pounce.

Still, if ever there was a time that I didn’t want the rest of the world to be looking…,

Except, here I am talking about it. Why?

Because, however much you may want to leave the room when you catch uncle Elmo doing his normal shtick, if you just let it go unchallenged, you are condoning it with your silence. And I can’t bring myself to do that.

If you are worshiping superheroes, you are doing it wrong.

Now this is the point where someone jumps in and starts crying about how I’m being all mean and dogmatic and trying to trample their beliefs.

The problem with that argument is that I didn’t say jack about belief.

I said, “you are doing it wrong.”

This is not about orthodoxy. This is not about ‘Correct Belief’.

Wreck-It Ralph doesn’t like orthodoxy, or the long lines at Dallas ComicCon.

For those outside the polytheistic sphere who may not know this: we pagans don’t really care for orthodoxy. ‘One Right Way’ is more of a monotheist state-of-mind.

Polytheists are typically more about orthopraxy – that is, ‘Correct Action’.

Worshiping superheroes is wrong, not because it is an incorrect belief, but because venerating fictional characters is denigrating to the actual gods and heroes that we DO worship. You know, the REAL ones, the ones that speak to us through the world around us and not from the pages of a comic book or the latest box-office reboot.

There is a difference between fandom and worship. If you don’t see that difference, if you don’t feel it, then once again, I suggest that you are doing it wrong. True worship (or adoration, or veneration, or whichever word you want to use) should run much deeper than any feeling we may muster for a character we know to be unreal. Children may worship the likes of Batman and Iron Man with the same passion they hold for Santa, but not adults. We know that it was our parents who consumed the milk and cookies while setting out our gifts. I do not believe we are able to feel that kind of depth of emotion for something we know to be false.

If you can’t experience that fervor for the gods whom you claim to honor…,

Doing. It. Wrong.

Riddle me this: When is Iron Man like a rock band?
When she’s an Iron-Maiden.

I spent this weekend at the Dallas ComicCon. There were thousands of people (far more than I am typically comfortable with), men, women and children, all come together with a single purpose: to celebrate the fantastic heroes and villains of comics and the silver screen. So many people with a shared purpose should have been able to raise some pretty damned impressive energy! Such an event should have vibrated with unchecked ecstatic power as the multitudes praised and deified their heroes.

It was a fun weekend, make no mistake about that, but it didn’t feel like a religious rite.

And why?

Because fandom is not worship.

Worship involves pouring energy outward to achieve a result.

Fandom, on the other hand, is about the self. It’s about satisfying a need that we feel, filling a hole that our modern society has forgotten how to satisfy.

Has no one ever read Campbell’s ‘The Power of Myth’?! Seriously folks.

Tony is trying to raise some energy here. Hey, Pikachu, think you could give him a jump-start?

Superman and Skywalker and Katniss exist because we stopped telling the ancient stories, and when we do tell them, we are told at the outset that we should not believe them. We are a culture left without a mythology that we can believe in and heroes that we can accept as real. So we make stuff up to fill in the gaps left behind.

The superheroes are not a solution to our problems, they’re a symptom.

Their stories are grand.

Their stories are epic.

If we pay attention we may notice that their stories are ultimately about finding the humanity they have lost along the way.

Their story is our story.

The story of the superhero is not that of a god caring for mankind.

The story of the superhero is that of a people trying to find their way.

Do it right. Honor the gods. And remember, “No Capes!”

…and Everything Nice

She asked me to take her out into the snow.

The rest of the family, related by either blood or bond, and gathered for the yule/christmas celebration, is busy inside the house where the fire I have been tending keeps them warm.  Some have been trying to tidy the living room, still strewn with torn paper and bows from packages unwrapped.  The kitchen is a flurry of activity as the holiday meal is being prepared.  Talk and banter suffuse the toasty air inside.

But it’s snowing outside and Taylor wants to go out and play in it.

Back inside, an entire rainbow of new plastic toys litter the floor, forgotten.  Somewhere, an entire team of toy developers and marketing gurus are pulling their hair out in clumps as a little girl (and I hope, thousands, even millions like her) ignores the results of countless of hours of careful design and focus-group play-testing, in favor of the simple magic of crunching her way through fresh snowfall.

I watch her stretching out her arms to catch the falling crystals, and I am glad.

I have never wanted children of my own.

It’s not that I don’t like them.  I actually think kids are pretty fantastic, in small doses and under controlled conditions (as if anything is every really under control where children are concerned).

I also happen to be quite good with them.  This is a fact that often leaves those who think they know me well, but have never seen me around children, astonished.  I really don’t seem the type, but at gatherings where children are present, I often end up entertaining them.  Don’t tell anyone, but you can easily avoid dull conversation and engage in a fair bit of play when the other adults think you are just trying to keep the little ones occupied.

And they are so very hungry for attention from adults.  It makes them so happy to be noticed at all.

Most of the time, when I see children at my workplace, the poor things have been dragged along like baggage by their parents, busy running errands.  I see them gazing wide-eyed at all the people and things around them, trying to soak it all in.  Sometimes they are fussy, or bored, or angry, and usually because their parents are ignoring them.

They act out, and their parents scold them, and then go right back to ignoring them again.  I’m not a parent and I believe that I would make a very poor one, but I do know that if you only give your child attention when they misbehave (even if that attention is negative) they are going to act out all the more.

The children are watching us.  They study our every move, learning what they need to know to survive and to interact with others.  When you break your toys and then shout at me because you want them fixed, what lesson do you think you are teaching your children?  To whom will you complain when they treat you in the same manner?  What legacy will they then pass on to their own children?

Back outside, little Taylor is still wandering her way through a snow-covered fairyland.

She has new mittens but we forgot them inside and her hands are chilled in the winter air.  Her fingers hurt a little, she says, but she does not want to come in from the cold just yet and I don’t push the issue.  She’ll be okay for a few minutes more.

For the moment, she needs me to look out for her safety – yes, but not to ruin for her the magic of snow.  Kids are resilient, far more so then we typically give them credit for.  When her discomfort is enough she will want to come in on her own without me making the decision for her.  We will warm her hands by the fire and she will feel the prickling numbness which slowly gives way to warmth that I remember being fascinated with as a child.

Let her be a child while she still can.

We must teach her to make her own decisions about the world around her, because soon enough folks will be lining up to make them for her.

Already, the Madison Avenue people are doing all they can to shape her likes and wants.  They spew movies and cartoons which are little more than glorified advertisements, designed to sell their brightly colored bits of future landfill.

It will not be long now before the Texas State Board of Education, with it’s distorted views of history and science, gets its hooks into her.  How much longer before Political Parties and Fundamentalist Religions begin to vie for her attentions, desperate to fill their diminishing ranks.  These people don’t see a little girl, they see a resource waiting to be ground up and purified and made to power the engines of Rapacious Consumerism,  Religious Orthodoxy and Conformist Ideology.

I can’t protect her from that and neither can her parents.  No one can.

All I can do is to join her in play on those rare occasions we are gathered together.  I can show her that she is worthy of the attention she naturally craves.  I can show her that she does not have to be a slave to the wants of those who do not truly care for her well being, by not being a slave to them myself.

I can’t do it alone.

She is going to need many examples to follow if she is going to find her way out of the trap that our society has built for itself.  If the fates are kind, she will find others who will not let her forget that snow IS magical, and that the best part of herself will always be that happy little girl who was made of sugar and spice…,