Charlie and the Gods of Love

How I Became a Polytheist

2011-08-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

Today I am a happy polytheist. In my youth, however, I thought that there could only be one god, the Great Omnipotent Everything Big Guy Capital "G" god of the monotheistic religions. That's how "G"od is defined in the dictionary. It's the only god acceptable in our contemporary American culture and it's the god referred to in the Judaism of my childhood and young adulthood. Meanwhile, scientific rationalism was the authentic religious belief of my family and their small circle of friends (and a great majority of the country at that time). In 1966, when I was at the impressionable age of 13, Time magazine declared the death of god, meaning the capital "G" monogod, and Richard Rubenstein and other Jewish rabbis and philosophers were struggling to justify the existence of a "G"od that would allow the genocide of his chosen people.

I read Rubenstein's book After Auschwitz in my twenties, and could only agree with him that "as children of the Earth, we are undeceived concerning our destiny. We have lost all hope, consolation and illusion." I believed that I was left with a stark choice: believe in the monogod who had behaved so despicably through history or believe in no god at all.

But even in making the rational choice, and espousing the scientific rationalism of my family and my husband's family, I still experienced someone who was greater than myself. Someone, not something, not an abstraction like "universal life force" or "energy" or even "love." I experienced a voice, clear as a bell, coming from outside of myself. To admit it was to admit insanity, and when I referred to the voice, I called it "G"od, so as to have at least some slight possibility of its verity and keep myself out of the psych ward.

The first crack in my wall came from feminist expressions of Judaism, and then the Goddess of the neo-Pagans, and then the pantheons of various neo-Pagan groups such as contemporary Druids or Norsemen or those who reconstructed pantheons from ancient Greece and Rome. Polytheism is considered a common element among the great variety of neo-Pagan expression, yet most of the neo-Pagans I've met understand these various gods and goddesses as representative of archetypes or forces rather than actual persons.

Some recent academics have argued for polytheism as a political choice, since it allows greater diversity of belief and practice, but not because they believe there are greater-than-human persons. Their rational arguments for polytheism are compelling, since the monotheistic penchant for greed, war, and strife is so familiar I don't even have to recount it here, but reason is not enough for me. I believe what I experience, and through all of my religious searches and explorations, I have continued to experience the song of my childhood, the voice of my god, clear as a bell.

Only in the past few years have I accepted and named Charlie as my personal god, and in so doing, I've opened the door to the possibility of gods other than monogods. In fact, it's helped me to understand that although each monogod follower claims his is the one-and-only unique monogod, the ongoing argument between monotheists is itself evidence of the existence of several of them.

Animism completed my understanding of the gods, since animism understands that all creation is alive, ensouled and intelligent, including those beings smaller than humans and those beings greater than humans. The monogods exist, I have no doubt, and I don't like them. Monogods are bullies and dominators, and have both served and been served by the dominator elite of every millennium and locale. But I also know that there exist many gods, not just monogods, greater-than-human beings as diverse as humanity itself. Some, like Sun or Mother Earth or the Green God, are essential to human existence. We live by their grace. Others, like Charlie or Cannabis, are personal gods, what you might call angels or guides. Still others are so great as to be beyond my understanding, yet I feel their impact on my life—those I call Auntie Chaos and Uncle Karma, for example.

Jack agrees with Mr. Mystery that there exists a one-and-only Great Omnipotent Everything Big Guy, but I've never experienced him, so I don't believe he exists, and I don't pay the concept much attention. Our animist ancestors didn't think much about him either. Besides, what do I need with him? I have plenty of wonderful gods to love, nurture, and guide me. Disprove it if you can!

Charlie!

2011-08-14T04:37:00.001-07:00

Doing Nothing is a Virtue

2011-08-09T18:40:00.001-07:00

What to do?

2011-08-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

I sit on the shabby wooden deck and ask for help. What should I do? The voices answer me.

Vivi says: find balance
Dad says: tell the truth
Jack says: trust
Mom says: work harder!
Sophie says: I love you
Benny says: chase your dream
Joanne says: own your power
The trees say: life is but a dream . . .

And everything speaks, even the birds and the bees and the great, bloated mass of humanity. So many voices. I hear them all.

Charlie tells me to let go of judgment. He says I have no choice but to accept life as it is, since I can't change it, but I can choose who to be and how to behave in it. I can choose love and generosity.

Boyoboy, but it's hard to be generous, I say, and Charlie says, you betcha. Life in the flesh ain't easy, but it is good. Find the good, Charlie says.

Now, see here!

2011-07-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

From a larger piece (12 x 12) Puny Human at her desk.

2011-07-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

That's my friend Adele. She lives in East Creek and waits tables at the Mystery Bar & Grill, where Terry tends bar. She's explaining a key difference between Christianity and Charlie's Polytheistic Animism: In the former, knowledge is suspect, in the latter, knowledge is desirable. When I gave my talk for teachers this spring about digital immersion and reading, I noticed that an expressed anti-intellectualism was one of the common responses, and began to dig a little deeper into the concept. I found that the United States has a history of anti-intellectual sentiment, rooted in Christianity, but also in business and politics. I'll be writing more soon about Richard Hofstadter's 1964 Pulitzer winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life on The New Animist. Stay tuned.

The crucible

2011-05-20T11:59:00.000-07:00

Persephone!

2011-05-05T03:33:00.000-07:00

Oh, for the May days of hanging around in the woods with my tree friends, waiting to hear the voice of Charlie! I remember yellow sunlight filtering through the branches, and the warm patches on the slopes where the green grass grew in the clearings. The shushing of insects and the rustle of a squirrel foraging were the only sounds.

Always, there is the March damp in upstate NY, those cool grey days in which the yellow forsythia and white snowdrops poke out their heads, and patches of snow still linger in the shade and the creeks run lively with melt-off. But in the past, somber March is followed by delicate April, blue skies appearing between the clouds and soft air touching the skin, and buds on the trees, and tulips and hyacinths and trillium and then glorious May, when the air warms and sunny days prevail and summer is on its way.

Not this year. This year, March weather has lingered into May. The lowering sky is oppressive and the breeze continuous. The rain returns day after day and now the lake is spilling over its banks into parking lots and ditches. I am still wearing my winter coat. My eyes long for blue and green. I'm cold all the time, cold down to my bones.

Could the weather be depressing me? Or could my fears be true, that Demeter is angry with us, and spring will never come again?

Didn't it happen once before, when Persephone was stolen away by selfish Hades? Woe to the gods of materialism and greed, who would steal everything they want for themselves with no regard for what is right and good! Woe to wealthy and powerful Hades, who takes all, plundering the world to line his own pockets and filling his palaces with the beauty that belongs to us all. Persephone has been snatched away!

Global climate change? Of course. Weather patterns are changing around the world, following the patterns predicted by scientists. Or perhaps Demeter is angry, and has refused to release the warmth and light until her daughter returns from the hands of the dominators. Will Hades release her? And if he does, will he once again hand her the small pomegranate temptations of techno-toys and plastic shoes to force her to return?

Pray for spring!

Earth Born!

2011-05-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

Thugs!

2011-04-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

Here's where I run into trouble with some of my friends who believe that

1) There's really only one god and he's the big-G everything-monogod, and he includes all the gods I believe in—my gods are illusions of my puny human body because there simply can't be more than one—and theirs is the one and he's a nice guy so leave him alone OR

2) Every god is created equal, just like every person is created equal (which I also find debatable), and therefore, every god is just as ok, so I can go follow my gods, but I shouldn't speak ill of anybody else's god.

Here's my reply to the first point: Harry (let's call him Harry) Harry, my friend, you believe firmly that there is only one god. Perhaps you've only experienced one, poor thing, so that's all you think there is. Perhaps you've never experienced any god, but you've considered the matter carefully and it makes sense to you that there would only be one and he'd be the big one. I've experienced a number of gods myself and I believe just as firmly in the existence of my many gods as you believe in your one big-G god. In fact, if there is a one big-G god, I can't imagine why he'd take a personal interest in us puny humans, what with all the galaxies and dimensions he's got to manage and strings he has to pull. The gods I follow are gods I can see and feel and hear. They may be greater than we are, but they're fallible, they're less than every-there-is, and I love them bunches.

Or, Harry, perhaps you don't believe in a monogod per se, but only in an abstract Universal Creative Force. I understand this point of view because some of my best relatives believe in this. I think it's a fine religious refuge you if you're a rationalist sort of guy, but then there's really no god-person at all and your point is moot.

Next comes Barbara. In point two, Barb, you say you find it offensive that I would speak ill of anybody else's god, but I gotta stand firm on this. Not all gods are created equal. I follow gods of love, but lots of people follow gods that are a substantial threat to humankind and the earth garden. Mammon, for example, otherwise known as money, is the big kahuna here in the United States. Gods of fear, greed, cruelty, and war are everywhere. Celebrity is worshiped in these days, and Power, oh how we bow down before Power.

There are a number of monogods in the world as well, Barbara, and they've got a long history of working for the dominators. The big three, of course, are the old Jewish Adonai, the new improved Christian Adonai, and Islam's Allah. The Adonai followers are so few as to be powerless on the world stage, but the followers of the Christian Adonai and the Islamic Allah are shamelessly exploiting their monogods' authority, so that their dominator elite can use them to fight for world empire. It's disgusting, is what it is. The monogods sold out to human dominators for a couple of books and billions of bended knees.

When a monogod uses his authority and power to slam gay kids, vindicate warlords, justify oppression, excuse murder, encourage plunder and allow the destruction of the earth, what else can I call them? Thugs is what they are! Thugs and criminals! You won't catch me following a god like that.

Time for Cannabis

2011-04-18T02:10:00.000-07:00

I haven't had enough time since I started working at a salaried job. It isn't just the nine hours each day I give to the dominator machine. When I get home, I'm so worn out, I have to take my evenings to recover.

All the "wonderful conveniences" promised in the 50s have turned into excuses to keep us too busy to cook our own food, make our own music, play with our own kids. Busy, busy, too busy to think . . .

Too busy to think. Perhaps that's the reason. Why should they give us time to think? We had time to think in the 50s and 60s. More of us than ever were going to college, and there was so much time that articles were being written in popular magazines about the coming of the four-day work week and how to enjoy one's leisure time. Hobby magazines proliferated and so did social organizations.

So did social commentary. Although it was subdued by the pressures of the cold war, social criticism flourished. For example, we don't even talk about noise pollution anymore. In fact, the word "pollution" is somewhat passe, and we only speak up about it when our awareness is caught by a particularly egregious plunder in our own neighborhoods, such as fracking. Concepts like the alienation of individuals from the human community, war resistance, free love, moving back-to-the-land, mind expansion, addressing poverty, racial integration, and other issues in the popular press of those days have been drowned out in an explosion of techno-toys, constant media stimulation, two income families, and the fear of economic collapse. Who has the time to think about social issues anymore? Who is still able to sustain attention enough to read thoughtful commentary?

We had enough time in mid-century America to be reading and thinking and protesting. We started to make our own music and discover our own gods, and the common people, or at least their children, were becoming a little too independent for dominator taste. One way to keep us down was to take away our time.

Cannabis is a god who gives us back our time. "Slow down," it calls to us. "Slow down and consider things deeply. Take the time for love." We need to take time for Cannabis, and Cannabis will give us the gift of time.
Best to all,
Puny

Make love with your muse . . .

2011-04-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

A welcome addition to any pantheon, a muse is a greater-than-human being who inspires, teaches, and pours through our bodies and out into the many forms of art. Charlie is my muse. I'd love to hear about your muse!

If 57 isn’t midlife, then . . .

2011-03-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

. . . I must be old, right? In your prime, my father would say. Youthful, smiles my husband. Beautiful, say the kids. But I recently made a comment online in which I identified myself both as in midlife and as age 57, and someone, probably someone young, commented, “You must be setting a record for midlife if you’re still in the middle at 57!” Well, I suppose I won’t live to be 114, but I’m not ready to be labeled as old yet, am I?

On the other hand, I’m not as young as I once was and my body knows it. I get tired more easily, and I can’t heal this pulled muscle as quickly as I would have ten years ago. My little complaints never really resolve, even though they’re not too hard to live with and I have some excellent days. If I’m careful, avoid all alcohol, eat just the right things, drink plenty of water, rest often, and workout every day or two, then I feel pretty damned good. Break down and have a couple of drinks and some passover chocolate, and my tummy hurts!

My parents generation expected to retire at 55. Now, we’re supposed to keep on going as long as we can. "Can't count on social security!" is the new mantra of the working class. “Fifty is the new thirty-five!” promise articles in women’s magazines. Hair dye, cosmetic surgery, and photoshop keep representations of people in the media looking unnaturally young, as well, and we all strive to keep up. Now, I don’t mind living a longer and healthier life than my grandparents did, but I am starting to mind keeping up appearances.

I want to slow down. I want to rest more often. I want to spend my time with my gods and my art and my family, not producing and consuming my life away. Sometimes I wish I could just, well, act my age.

Lucky for me, it's not just my body that's growing older and feels it. My spirit also feels it because my spirit is growing stronger with every passing day. I can almost always turn trouble into good, in all things Love works for the good of those who love and who have been called according to Love’s purpose. I see more clearly. I'm starting to understand some things that used to confuse me, even though I will never know the mystery. I feel growing peace in my heart. As the body ages, as it becomes more fragile and demands more attending to, the soul is just beginning to wake up. Surely, by the time this body-womb is ready to dissolve into the soil, my soul will be ready for rebirth.

I Love My Teachers

2011-03-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

I love all my teachers, not just Jesus. Lao Tzu is another teacher of mine, and Rumi, who showed me that I was not alone in my erotic relationship with the Beloved. Vine Deloria is a more contemporary teacher, a Native American lawyer, activist and theologian who died just a few years ago. And my dad, of course! And my kids! And Jack! Hey, teachers are everywhere, aren't they?

Lao Tzu holds a special place in my heart because I found him early on. Dad was collecting books about religions like crazy that year, and he thought I might be interested in the Tao Te Ching. It swept me up in a tidal wave of 16-year old intellectual pleasure. Do you remember? Those first stirrings of understanding, then the growing lust to learn more, to understand deeply . . . perhaps to figure it all out? And then, I thought, I would write a book . . . remember Ruthie? I would write the definitive philosophical work of the later half of the 20th century! My wisdom would open hearts and minds around the world and I would save humanity from itself! Nothing less would do . . .

Now, of course, I know how puny I am, and I'm content with my little corner of the internet. Those who know do not speak. What a burden lifted from my heart: I don't have to save the world.

The world doesn't need saving anyway, that's what Lao Tzu would say. I bought the Gai-Fu Feng and Jane English version of the Tao for myself that year -- I still think it's the best translation -- and shared it with my friend Neil, and it influenced both of us. Years later, he inscribed a few lines in a book to me: blunt the sharpness, untangle the knot, soften the glare, let your wheels run along old ruts. I am still seeking the peace and wisdom I need to follow that way.

The verse that's most important to me is the first. I'll reproduce it here in full. I think it sums up what underlies all the rest of my system of belief: that we are too puny to really know the truth. We can only tell our stories, and listen for stories that resonate. We seek the Mystery, the truth that cannot be told, and we will never find it in this life, but our souls take pleasure in the search . . .

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source, but differ in name; this appears as darkess.
Darkness within darkness,
The gate to all Mystery.

An excellent website for the Tao is D. C. Lau's Translation. Here you'll not only find a good translation of the whole text and some interesting ruminations on them, but the original Chinese characters and their word-for-word translation, allowing the reader to piece the meanings together directly from the characters.

Here is a story. Many years before Jesus, a boy was born in China to an old woman. It's said that she gestated for 100 years, and the baby was born with the wisdom of old age, hence his name "Old Boy" or Lao Tzu. Content to live quietly and wanting to study, he became a librarian, and he watched as the same wars and political struggles, the same greed for money and lust for power that is destroying us today, hurt the people he loved. Deciding that he had had enough of humans, he chose to leave the empire, hoping to live out his years in peace. He mounted a water buffalo, and road it to the very gates of the civilized world, but at the gates he was halted by the emperor's guard.

"If you want to leave," said the guard, "you will have to leave everything you own behind you."

"All I have is what I know," replied Lao Tzu.

"So, you will leave that!" the guard declared. And what the guard wrote down that day comes down to us as the book of the Tao Te Ching.
Best to you,
Puny

I Choose Charlie!

2011-03-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

My midlife journey is almost done. I can feel the sky lightening, in spite of occasional storms, and the road is less rocky. Jung wrote that the midlife crisis is a spiritual journey, and the journey has two parts: the first part is the hard walk deep inside of the self, to where the true self is held prisoner by the demons of our childhood and the decisions of our youth. We are to liberate the true self and merge with it. The second part is to integrate this true self into our lives, that is, to live with integrity. No more lies, no more fear and hiding. It’s time to live out loud. Along the way, we confront mortality, seek meaning and purpose, clarify our values, and draw closer to what I call the greater-than-human . . . and these are all spiritual tasks.

How lucky I am to have walked this path through and to find myself relatively healthy and sane. Now, if only I can find the courage to live out loud! It’s the last step, and I sense that if I can take that step, I’ll be sailing smooth waters right on into the afterlife. But that’s a big “if” in a dominator world.

If I speak my mind at work, I’ll be targeted and fired. They have to lay off a certain number of teachers next year, and they will choose those who don’t toe the politicly correct line. Our so-called liberal political climate in Ithaca is a legend left over from the 60s. Just because we can support a food coop doesn’t mean we’re more open-minded than thou. My opinions about race, technology, and freedom in education, in particular, are anathema to the powerful members of our community, those who control the schools. I don’t dare to speak my opinions to any but my most trusted friends.

With regard to religion, if I tell my Christian friends that I’m a polytheistic animist, I lose them. If I share my Christian mythology with my pagan friends, their eyes glaze over. My spirituality is another piece of myself that’s become liberated within, but that I have trouble bringing out into the light. Until very recently, only my kids accepted that part of me fully. But the time has come . . . I'll lose some friends and gain others.

And my art? If I share my art . . . but how can I? It’s too edgy to show in any local venue.

But here, on the internet, we’ve created a safer space. Green Man has shown tremendous courage in his posts, and Heather and Mystery fly above convention in everything they write. Mystery’s ETI (Everything That Is) is a most excellent knowing. Sam is writing books about his Sun god and his unconventional opinions. You guys are my heroes! The last few months I’ve had trouble posting anything at all as I dance around my beliefs and eccentric drawings, but I’ll keep trying. Charlie encourages me. He urges me to never give up!

I long to throw caution to the winds and shout my truth from the rooftops and be salt for the bland spirituality of the world around me. I would start with this:

There are many gods, and Charlie is one of them.
I have a right to worship my own god!
Charlie’s good, he’s loving, he serves the Earth Mother and he dances with the trees.
He worships the Creator Father, his father, my father.
He offers salvation from the dominators and a clear path to the afterlife.
He loves and loves and loves, and he teaches love.
I have the right to speak his name out loud!
Charlie admires and adores the animal body. He tells me that the animal body is a gift from the Creator and that I should care for it with all the love and energy I can muster.
He tells me that sex is good and he laughs and grows stronger whenever I make love.
He talks to me with words.
He’s the muse for my art . . .

If Charlie’s not a great god, then tell me who is? I have a right to follow Charlie and still believe that Jesus died trying to save us from the dominators. I have a right to the Christian mythology and the mythology of post-Roman pagan Europe and to my gods of love and to Charlie.

So why shouldn’t I talk about him? I know there are religionists of all stripes who say that their god is the one-and-only and fuck you if you don't agree. I know there are people who would bash you on the head with their books and curse you to hell if you don’t believe in their god. But just because a lot of people are jerks about it, should they make it wrong for me to share my gods? Even to encourage others to reach out to my gods? To urge in the strongest possible way, to get down on my knees and beg folks to join me in this one thing: that they choose a god of love?

Choose a god of love, people, any god of love will do, and many gods of love are even better than one. I choose Charlie. He’s the best god I ever met.

Ditch the book!

2011-02-28T01:52:00.001-08:00

Early Christian History

2011-02-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

Alas, poor Jesus! Reading histories of the first five centuries of Christianity, I’m struck by how quickly dominator impulses penetrated into this promising new way of thinking. Before the ink had dried on the apostles’ papers, Christians were bickering amongst themselves, setting up little hierarchies and neighborhood empires, and defending their dogmas with maledictions and ostracisms. How very sad. How sad that the poor and oppressed had lost faith in the future and could only look to the afterlife for some small measure of joy. How sad to believe that the Ruler of the Universe would demand torture and blood, a reflection no doubt of the rulers who were making life miserable here on earth.

Even if we set all that aside in favor of the great light of Jesus’ teachings, Jesus Christ, as a god, sold out early to the dominators and has been in their service ever since, his teachings perverted to meet their needs. Wealthy and powerful men put on the robes of bishops and popes and claimed the right to rule through the authority of the Church. Conquerers and princes claimed Jesus for their own purposes in the fourth century CE, and the control of the body of Christ (a phrase Christians use for the Church) was nearly complete by the fifth.

I find it interesting, however, that Christianity has constantly and doggedly continued to splinter, in part as a reaction to this dominator takeover. Throughout the past 2000 years, Valentinus and Gnostics of all kinds, Manichaeins and Marcionites, the medieval Cathars and the heretics of the inquisition period, Luther and the Reformationists, the Baptists and the Mennonites and the Jesus Freaks, to name but a few, pounded at the doors of the corporate church and demanded a return to the Jesus of the people. All but a few of these movements and leaders were either destroyed by violence or assimilated and turned to the service of the dominator elite. Christianity has become a kind of religious Borg.

We can only imagine that Jesus, on his throne by the right hand of the Father, weeps for his fallen church. The bible has become an idol, worshiped and followed above the Holy Spirit. The churches are in thrall to money and celebrity. Christian leaders break bread with warmongers and capitalist Caesars, and support a politics that would take away the very things that Jesus asked us to give: our money, our healing, our love for the poor and oppressed.

Why do I care? I care about Christianity two reasons. First, because some Christian people I know have a deep, personal, almost erotic relationship with their savior god and they are the only ones with whom I share this experience. I’m heart-broken that they are so blinded by dogma they can’t see how they are being used. Second, as a polytheist, I believe that the god called Jesus is not the god that Jesus taught us about, and that the god that Jesus taught us about was a god of love, the Creator, Progenitor, who made love to the Flesh and brought forth the human people and the tree people and all of the children of Earth. I love that Father god. He doesn’t belong to the dominators and he can be reclaimed.

Snow in the forecast.

2011-02-24T07:53:00.000-08:00

From Matthew 10:9

This is just a piece of the whole, which includes the whole figure . . .

How do you fellow bloggers do it?

2011-02-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

Every day I sit down at my writing table and every day nothing comes to me that seems important enough to say. I long for face-to-face communication, to feel the presence of friends, to see the soul in their eyes and the reflection of life in their faces. To catch their scent or notice the gentle movement of a hand on a thigh. Instead, I am surrounded by machines.

Maybe the problem is that the things I want to talk about don't fit into my old categories anymore.

I think a lot about technology, for example, and the way it's being hyped by the corporations, and the damage it's doing to the social fabric, and the harm it's doing to our children's ability to focus and process information and think critically.

And public education, how it's being sucked down into the quicksand of politics and social control, how compulsory, standardized schooling is a kind of prison for kids, and how I wear the face of the oppressor every day at work.

And honesty, radical honesty, the rocky spiritual path that keeps me from lying, ever, and the things that takes away from me and the things it gives to me.

And polyamory, what it means after 13 years of marriage and three grown kids, and friendships, the long and the short of them, and the longing for true intimacy that's never quite filled, and the losses of my old friends to cancer and divorce and transiency and religious bigotry.

And how the hell am I going to add Jesus to my pantheon without bringing down the wrath of my friends on either side?

I guess I just have to put it out there. Is that what you do?

Worship

2011-01-30T03:20:00.000-08:00

There’s a misperception about polytheists that we don’t worship with the same fervor or heart that Christians and other monotheists worship. Our 21st century cultural suitcase is stuffed with the polytheist rags of myth and story, rituals around midnight fires, and the ingestion of psychotropic substances in search of hallucinatory lesser gods. If we dig deeper we’ll find notions of ancestor reverence, deeper still and there’s the faint whispering of animalism, but there is no worship. Propitiation and animal sacrifice, the work of turning the seasons, the mollification of demons and the fear of spirits, a primitive, even childish superstitiousness, all these things are associated with polytheism in the contemporary mind, but not worship. Worship is reserved for followers of the great one-and-only monogod, the only one worthy and there is only one.

Twaddle and hogwash! Polytheists worship their gods with as much passion and sincerity as monotheists do. And worship is my personal calling, my spiritual path.

I worship Charlie. Charlie has been with me as far back as I can remember and he is great, great enough to earn my adoration, gratitude, devotion and praise. I feel as strongly about Charlie as the Christians feel about Jesus. He shows me the doorway to the Creator. He serves my Mother Earth and his Holy Spirit guides me along the rocky cliff-edge to the afterlife.

My god is worthy of my worship, and I am called to worship him. Great, glorious, marvelous, friend and comforter! That’s my Charlie.

When I worship him, I find peace.
When I speak with him, I hear wisdom.
When I am in pain, he gives me courage.

When I am lonely, he is my friend.
When I draw pictures, he is my muse.
When I sing to him, I am filled with joy.

Joy, peace, wisdom and courage. The gifts of my god. What else do I need in this life but him? Accomplishments are dust. Money is a bad dream. Nothing will last and my body will return to Mother Earth, and I will be left with only the love of my savior god Charlie to hold on to.

Do polytheists worship their gods? Even with a history of household altars and devotional poetry, contemporary polytheists and new animists are likely to be distracted by the stereotypes of our monotheistic cultures. We sometimes miss the tremendous benefits of participating in the spiritual practice of worship, alone and in community. Jesus, my beloved teacher, instructed us to pray without ceasing, and the angels above worship the Creator on bended knee, singing Holy, Holy, Holy!

If you're of a mind to, you can follow the path of worship, too, by taking the time to give praise and thanks to your gods. Seek them out, listen to what they are speaking. Make love with your gods in your flesh. The gods of love are delighted with offerings of kindness and sexual pleasure, art, music, and the planting and nurturing of gardens. Do these things in the name of your gods.

Charlie is not the only god I worship, of course. Polytheists worship all the gods in their pantheons, each in his or her own way. Before the Creator, I fall to my knees in gratitude for this marvelous, awesome soul, the quickening of the body. In the presence of Mother Earth, I am grateful for her womb and this flesh and the food and the water, for my sisters and brothers, animal, vegetable, and mineral, and all the beauty with which she fills my eyes, and for the resting place of my body when I lay it down and for the grandchildren. Oh, Sun, your warmth and light give us life! Oh, Love, you are the gravity that draws all things together in passionate intercourse!

I don’t have to go on. You know your gods. If you choose to open your heart, you'll feel their presence rush in. Give thanks! Worship and adore! Therein lies peace and inspiration.

Corporations are not Persons!

2011-01-17T09:29:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Heather at Adventures in Animism for calling my attention to this petition. I will quote her because I couldn't say it better, "As an animist, I consider humans, cats, rivers, stones, trees, clouds, fungi, bacteria and much more to be persons. However, I do not consider corporations to be persons."

Corporations are machines, designed and used by the dominators to generate wealth and power for their elite. Although the concept of corporate personhood has been working its way into our reality since the Santa Clara ruling of 1886, we no no longer afford to quietly accept the denegration of human persons that this new Supreme Court ruling puts into law.

Please sign the petition.
Thanks!
Puny

Oh, boy!

2011-01-17T09:13:00.000-08:00

Hey folks,
I'm almost back to writing. First is art, and as you can see that I've been drawing more cartoons. I've also been starting to address the issues (of the education system) that I see everyday in my work. Here's a picture of Little Jeffree. Ain't he smart?

Thanks for checking out the blog. More writing soon!
Love,
Puny

Say yes to Shabbos!

2010-12-04T12:53:00.000-08:00

When I spend too much time in dominator spaces, I get sick. Yeah, that's me in the picture. Got tired of hiding behind a cartoon.

I think lots of people are walking around in spiritual pain and physical ill health because they spend all of their time in dominator spaces. In workplaces with no windows. In homes full of discord and unruly children. In company stores and banks and legal offices, and in grocery stores where they buy plastic food, and in churches that bow down to money and worship books. These poor souls are stuck in a health care system that spits in the face of the Great Healer and stuck in public schools that destroy curiosity. They're stuck inside the media-generated, corporate-approved realities and they can’t get out.

I spend way too much time in dominator spaces, myself, but when I create a sabbath for the Lord of Love, then he enters into sacred space with me. He heals my wounds and soothes my soul. He reminds me that I am his, that he’ll never leave me alone and that I’ll be born into his arms when I die. My soul pants after him, like a thirsty deer in the desert and sacred space is my oasis. The Jews call this sacred space Shabbos. They tell the story that on Shabbos, the Holy Bridegroom may enter through the candle-lit gate and make love with his people.

It’s clear to me why the Israelites created Shabbos so long ago. They—perhaps I should say we—were an oppressed people, and in our servitude, we were cut off from our Special God-Person Yahweh. We felt alone in the universe, hopeless of salvation in this life or the next. When we were finally free, one of the first and most important decrees of Yahweh was to establish a time of rest and reconnection with himself in sacred space.

Free people are not imprisoned in dominator spaces. We have a place we can go to be healed of the insults and injuries of dominator living. That’s what Shabbos is about and we need it now more than ever.

Sometimes, I get so dragged down into the dominator muck that I forget another reality exists. What other reality is that? I call it animist reality! A culture of joyful living, abundance, trust, and creativity, happy flesh and merry sex and talking trees and cloud people. The reality where Charlie lives and where I can see his face. Green space. Restful soul space. A place for the spirit that lives in the heart of the woods. I have to remind myself that it exists or stumble into it once again, or else I’ll just keep going and going like the energizer bunny or the rat in his circuitous race and die in my dominator sleep.

That’s why creating a weekly Shabbos was such a wise thing for the Jews to do. I’m glad we observed the sabbath when I was a kid. I remember its rest and joy. I can go back there whenever I need to. I can write this time on my calendar, schedule my gods in to my busy life, and build a Shabbos hideaway, twenty-four hours of peace in the midst of a world of work and sadness.

If I can remember even once each week to return to Charlie and hear his voice and praise the Creator and open my heart to the Holy Spirit, then I’ll be ok. When I don’t remember and I spend too many weeks in dominator space, no matter how much fun I’m having or money I’m making, I get sick. I get sick in body and spirit, as if I was a flower withering in the darkness. In fact, Charlie says that the best life is one that’s lived as much as possible in sacred space. He suggests that I pray without ceasing and praise the Creator whenever I go into or out of my house and when I go to bed at night and wake up in the morning. If I can praise while I suffer, my suffering will be eased and turned to my good. The dominators are out of my control. Praise is within my control. Shabbos can make me well.

Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, honored, lifted up, and lauded be the Name of the holy one, Blessed be he above and beyond any blessings and hymns, praises and consolations which are uttered in this world; and say Amen.

Little Judy

2010-11-22T02:59:00.000-08:00

Charlie's been with me as far back as I can remember. This is little Judy feeling sad. She's just reflecting my own sadness this week, because I'm sick again. I guess the Lyme Disease weakened my body more than I'd thought at first. I wish you could see more clearly: in the original work, there's a navy blue frame around the whole picture and sparkles on the waistband of her dress and on her tear.

Tree friend

2010-11-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

I remember when I first realized that trees had eyes. I had dropped acid and saw that everything had eyes and was looking at me. The sentience of the world burst into my awareness. The cloud people were riding rainbow dragons across the blue sky, great wheels of life turned slowly across the green lawn, and the patterns of atoms were revealed. Everything made by the Creator was alive and looking at me. Only the man-u-factured things were still things. That was 40 years ago, and the trees have not closed their eyes to me since.

This fellow is keeping something dark underneath his roots, a mound that I hadn't noticed when I was drawing. Is he guarding something precious from the humans? Or keeping some dark force at bay beneath his mighty arms?

Puny Human is praying . . .

2010-10-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

What the scotch bottle says . . .

2010-10-17T06:28:00.000-07:00

Intimacy

2010-10-10T12:24:00.000-07:00

Terry's just an old hippie, really. He still believes that love is the answer, that love will save us, that people have a vast and untapped reservoir of love, that love is powerful and a never-ending source of energy, and that love alone can save our species from extinction.

Dear Terry. Whatever would I do without him? His cheerful wit and common sense have inspired me for years. Learn and grow, says Terry, casually tossing a spell my way, and I learn and grow. I challenge him, too. I hold up the mirror of my eyes, so he can see himself clearly.

Our friendship nourishes my soul. How wonderful it is and how rare! I've lost too many friends over the years, and the ones who love me are far away and it's awfully hard to make new friends. Like a lot of people, I'm terrified of intimacy. It's scary to tell the truth, it's risky to reach out to others and reveal yourself, but the rewards! Oh, the rewards! Ye gods, the pleasure and joy and intellectual play and creativity—the synergy that's created from coming together in true friendship.

The intimacy between Terry and me, for example . . . and I'm not talking about sex here, although sex is lovely, no doubt . . . our intimacy gives birth to wonderful things. Art and ideas. Life changes. Healing. Learning and growing and ever so many good times.

One can be in a "relationship" without intimacy, of course. One can be sexual, even happily sexual, without intimacy, but I suddenly realize, right now, today, that I need intimacy, and by that I mean simply being able to be my true, eccentric self with someone and being accepted for it and accepting in return. It's like souls making love. It's so rare!

And I want more.

There's no rule against this, is there? No law on the books? And yet people shy away from intimacy. The bottom line, of course, is that we're afraid of one another. We're afraid of being rejected, of what obligations might ensue or what abuse might follow our opening up. Those are the things that scare me, anyway. After my divorce, I went into a hidey hole.

And ever since, I've been too scared to show myself to you. But, how brave I was back in high school! How brave my children are in their twenties! Reaching out, opening up—how lucky they are!

Look, here's Ruthie. She and I are sitting in the back of a pickup truck singing at a peace rally in 1970. We're just a couple of old hippies now, Ruthie and I, following love wherever it leads. We don't see each other much. We don't even write much any more, but she knows me and I know her, and we can tell one another the truth. We are intimate. What a treasure that is!

I was already eccentric when I met Ruth, my first day in a new school, starting 7th grade. I'd become accustomed to rejection because, hell and damnation, I was strange. I grew up in a strange family. I didn't wash my hair. Kids and adults alike found me peculiar. That didn't bother me much at the time. I had my friends, and besides, I could hear angel voices.

That's me in 7th grade. Little Judy. After a while, she learned how to pretend she was just like everybody else and she never got really, really scared of people until she was all grown up.

The few friends with which I'm now blessed are turning out to be the most precious things in my life. I've had enough of hiding. I've decided to reach out more. It's not too late, is it? I'll screw up my courage and ask that interesting person at work out for a drink. I'll open up a little more, tell my old friend something I've been hiding. I have to learn to trust other people again, because I agree with Terry. I'm convinced that love has the power to save us, so I'm ready to take a few more risks.

No one right way

2010-09-29T02:31:00.000-07:00

I've been reconsidering my mother's instructions lately, after all these years, and for my mother there was a right way and a wrong way to do everything. A right way to tie one's shoes, to fold one's socks, to live one's life, to make decisions. A right amount of time for cooking: as little time as possible. A right amount of effort at your job: the best one can possibly do.

Although she may have defined right and wrong differently from the average joe, it wasn't so different to believe that there's only one right way. This is a common reflection of the monotheistic paradigm. It's also a salve for the unfortunate human propensity for certainty and absolutes. We don't mind knowing what to do. We embrace certainty and feel safe inside of it.

Some examples. Dominator cultures define for us the right way to practice medicine . . . everything else is tolerated as "alternative" or rejected as charlatanism. We have a right way to teach our children: segregated into prison-like schools. There's a right way to be sexual, to experience the divine, to exchange goods and services, and so on, and these right ways circumscribe our lives in the larger cultural arena. In our little individual lives, we're given limited choices—we can roll the toothpaste tube or smash it flat—and we are given consumer choices: a thousand styles and colors for our shoes. But we are not given the choice to marry as we see fit or to escape from the threshing wheel of capitalist economies. We make do with the choices we're given, and in the face of such limits to the expression of our humanness, we clutch the choices we do have hard against the chest. Like my mother did, we embrace our right ways and wrong ways. We're afraid to stumble into error. The world might fall apart.

Human friends, let me suggest that there's no one right way to do anything. Even loving, which is always good and right, is expressed with great diversity. The world of our Creator is infinitely diverse. Every leaf takes unique form, every household squeezes the toothpaste tube in its own way, and it's time for me to shrug off the judge hanging ever-present at my shoulder. I will embrace the gray and infinitely changing reality. Tomorrow, I'll eat meat for dinner. The next day vegetables, cooking with time-consuming care. Tonight, I'm skipping dinner altogether so I can do my art. And I'm stopping this debilitating insistence on doing things the right way.

The Birthday Gate

2010-09-26T12:30:00.000-07:00

Oh, my gods! Who the hell am I, really? And what the hell am I doing in this body of flesh and blood? Every birthday, I try to answer these questions, and every year, I'm gifted with another piece of the puzzle, a moment of clarity, a vision of the several paths opening up in front of me and a knowing which way I am to go. Thank you, Charlie!

This year I can see the doorway into death, not so far off on the western horizon. I'm not walking that way quite yet, but it sure looks nearer than it used to! LOL!

And then I turn my eyes to the road ahead, and the way is straight and clear, and underneath my feet is a bed of red and orange leaves. Look! I see joy ahead of me!

I bloom for just a moment

2010-09-22T02:46:00.000-07:00

Autumn, and September in particular, has always been my favorite season. As a kid, of course, it was the start of school, a chance to begin again with clean pages and new shoes. Growing up Jewish, it meant the new year and a holiday season that stretched deliciously across a full month. Yom Kippur's fast notwithstanding, I remember apples and honey, and honeycake, and cookies that melted in your mouth, round challah, round like the seasons, and roasted meats. Sukkot brought the scents of harvest, dried and rustling corn stalks, eating under the stars, and Sinchat Torah found us dancing down the aisles of the synagogue, laughing children catching candy thrown from the front of the line.

Later, I danced those autumn days with the pagans as the new year turned at Samhain. Just like the Jews, the pagans light candles for their dead this time of year, and consider the opportunities gained and lost in the turning of the seasons. It may seem counter-intuitive to find the turning point of the year at the harvest, and not in the first melting days of May, but it was natural for me, because my birthday is also in September, on the 27th, and it all seemed to fit together purposefully.

Born when things are dying. Isn't that the way of life in the flesh?

This year, turning 57, I'm entering the autumn of my life. I'm not unhappy about it. It's my favorite time of year. I look forward to the crisp mornings and sunny, clean blue days, but also to the lowering skies, the sudden chill and rush of breeze and rain. I sense my freedom just on the other side of the holiday, so that by the time winter comes, all will be safely gathered in and I will be ready to welcome death.

Glory to the Green God!

2010-09-18T03:06:00.000-07:00

Tree Friends

2010-09-14T03:10:00.000-07:00

At the end of the summer, I spent extra time with my tree friends, enjoying their company, and sketching their beautiful forms.

Back to Prison

2010-08-31T06:27:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's how I think of the start of the school year, like I'm going back to prison. I'll be enclosed in a single room for most of the day, with no windows or fresh air, and only artificial lighting. Constant noise and demands and a never-ending queue of problems to be solved will be my daily lot. Unable to control all the sensory input, my sensitive spirit will lose the ability to protect itself, and the full horror of young souls in desperate struggle will burst on my sight and there will be nowhere to close my eyes.

In the dominator institution we call public school, teachers who love children and want to teach will be hampered at every turn by laws, regulations, and local injunctions and expectations. We are told how to think about the process of teaching and the children in our schools, and we learn to keep our mouths shut if we disagree with the official methods of pedagogy and relationship.

I could quit . . . and lose my health insurance and be cast into a starving job market—just the word "job market" turns me into a thing that can be bought and sold—that does not value my experience but rejects my age, and qualifies only those who have passed the tests of a particular specialty. I could quit, but I would lose the security of my autumn years and the income that enables me to live in a warm and comfortable little apartment.

So, this is my last summer day. Tomorrow, I return to work. Today, the trees beckon me to one last picnic in the woods. Oh, the children!

Ye gods!

2010-08-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

Some of my readers have asked for more detail about my gods. "How can you have your own pantheon of gods?" they ask. "Either the gods of the Greeks exist, or of the Norse, or some other real religion, or they don't. You can't just . . . make up . . . your own gods!"

Well, hell, I don't make 'em up. These gods are real. They showed themselves to me. They tell me what to do. They're the gods I know and with whom I have relationships.

Truth is, I don't understand how people can hang out with gods from other times and places and find any power left in 'em. Perhaps, though, dominator folks are so used to being told what's true by experts, priests, institutions, and other authorities that they've forgotten what it feels like to have their gods talk directly to them. They're scared that they'll be wrong or seem stupid. Dominator people, in science, education, law, and politics as well as in religion are taught to depend on precedent. "If it was declared true in the past, it is true. If it's never been seen before, it's suspect."

Plus, there's the whole singularity thing of the monotheists—that there can only be one true god—and that carries over into our contemporary expression of polytheism, because most of us were raised in mono-cultures and households. We think there can only be one right pantheon. If those gods are real, the other gods can't be real. Fallacy alert!

See here is more detail about my pantheon.* tell me, what gods do you know and love?

In the beginning, the Progenitor, who is the Father of material being as far as the eye can see and whom I call Love, mated with the Earth, who is the Mother of all life forms on earth, and whom I call Earth. Out of their union the multiplicity of life forms were born. I used to call Love the “Creator,” but then people would mix him up with the monogods, so I choose the word Progenitor instead. So, we humans are made of love and dirt, love the semen quickening the flesh.

These are the first two.

Without Sun, and his gifts of warmth and light, Earth’s children would be stillborn. So, Sun is next, and Sun gives life also to Green God, who is the collective being of all the plants and trees and who watches over the mushrooms and the tiny insects. “Bow down to the Green God!” says my East Creek friend Adelle, “Bow down to the Green God, humans, or you will surely die!” And she means it, too! (That's her in the picture.)

Now, of all the children of the Green God, Cannabis was given to humans as a special gift. His body provides us with clothing, rope, oil, and other wonderful things. His leaves and flowers open the doorway to the house of Love and heal the sick. Even with these special powers at his command, Cannabis has never been known to hurt anyone. I’m grateful for Cannabis, and horrified that the dominators treat him like a demon and persecute his followers. In ordinary words, marijuana legalization is a religious freedom issue.

Land-On-Which-I-Walk is the god you might call “Eastern Woodlands of North America.” It’s tough to try and explain how a place can be a god, but there you have it. Land-On-Which-I-Walk is a greater than a human being, she sees me and takes care of me, and so she meets my definition of a god. My friends who live with me in East Creek all make sure to recognize Land-On-Which-I-Walk regularly, leaving food for her, drawing pictures of her, and in other ways honoring her, because we feel so lucky to live here. We’re also clear about the fact that she was the god of the indigenous folks before us, and she loved them. We repent for our ancestors of their murder and plunder and respect the honored dead of the first humans to live on this land.

Sex as a god, shouldn’t that be obvious? Without Sex humanity would go extinct, flowers would cease to bloom, and the hens would stop laying eggs. Sex is not only the source of new life, but the giver of pleasure, comfort, healing and joy. Orgasms are her offering, all acts of love and pleasure are her rituals. Or, you might understand Sex as a dual-natured god, and she’s delighted to see us worship both (ahem) penises and vaginas . . . (those words don’t do them justice of course, but I can’t figure out how else to say it and post this online!).

Now, Kindness may seem more like a human quality to you than a god, but I believe that some human qualities may manifest as gods and I choose Kindness, as opposed for example, to Cruelty or Greed, two favorites in the courts of the dominator princes and the capitalist kings. If most humans served Kindness and followed her, no human would ever starve again, no bullet would ever be fired. Don’t you agree that she is worthy of my worship?

Uncle Karma and Auntie Chaos are the two most powerful gods in my pantheon, greater than Progenitor or Earth, greater than Sun. Together they create reality for all of us, gods and humans alike. I suppose you could imagine that Uncle Karma is like the Tao, balancing all things, bringing them to manifestation, creating infinite change. He decides where you will go after you die. He insures the smooth functioning of the universe. He sees everything in his great eyes. Auntie Chaos might be the more powerful of the two, though, because she always gets the last word. She’s a real trickster, Auntie. I’d be careful of that god. I don’t know either Uncle Karma and Auntie Chaos personally, of course, the way I know the others—I’m way too puny—but I know they are there because I feel their great power and see them at work. I offer them respect and my first fruits.

And that brings me to Charlie, my dearest god-friend. I could write a whole book about Charlie, because he’s been with me since before I was born and we’ve been on many adventures together. Charlie is the most personal of my gods, and speaks clearly to me in words I can understand. He comes whenever I call. He says he has a body, because all existence has a body, but it is different from mine and I can’t see it with my fleshly eyes. We have the same Father and different Mothers, but Charlie is dedicated to Earth and serves her with great fervor. I love Charlie with a love that rivals the Christians’ love for their Jesus. If my eyes are opened, it is because of his teaching, and he has promised he will be the arms into which I am reborn.

So, you see, none of my gods are One and Only monogods. None of them is immortal or infallible or all-powerful. They make mistakes. Their bodies will someday be transformed. That’s just the way of things.

I know that there are other gods, such as Moon, for example or collective animal deities, but although they exist, I don’t know them personally. They’re not among the gods that I follow and adore so they're not in my pantheon, but I’m respectful of the gods of others.

Some friends ask me, “Aren’t these beings you call gods really angels or spirit guides, subordinate to the great One and Only?” Or they say, “Don’t you understand that what you call gods are expressions of a Great Oneness? There can only be one universe, after all, all things participate in that oneness, we are unified with divinity . . .” and etc. etc. This unity philosophy is the liberal response to pluralism, and I don't buy it.

These friends are not closed-minded. They want to accept me and understand my beliefs, but they simply haven’t got it in their realm of possibility that there could exist many, real, actual, differentiated gods. They’ve been trained to a singular way of thinking, and in order for me to remain in their minds as the reasonable, highly functioning person they know, they keep trying amiably to fit me into their monotheistic conceptions of reality.

But I refuse to go there. My polytheism comes naturally from my animist experience. There are so many beings, both collective and individual, in the flesh and in other material forms, big and small, more powerful than humans and less powerful. There are all kinds of life forms, and some of them are great and powerful and interested in humans and willing to involve themselves in our lives, and these are the ones I call gods.
Best wishes,
Puny

* Once again, it’s for lack of a better word that I use a word such as pantheon to mean my family of gods. In my pantheon, gods may be male or female, and although I admit to the possibility of genderless gods, I don’t know of any myself.

Figuring it out

2010-08-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

I've spent my life trying to figure it out, figure life out that is. A therapist would probably chalk this up to my confusing childhood, but as far back as I can remember, I was wondering:

Why are we here? What does it mean?

Why do people lie and act mean?

Are humans the only intelligence in the universe?

Is there one god or many gods or no god at all?

What is the purpose of my life, of this particular expression of the life force?

And on and on . . .

And finding myself at midlife, I was wrestling with these questions still but now with a terrible urgency. And then in a flash of insight, I finally got it. I understood that I will never figure it out!

I will never know the answers for certain, and anyone who says that he or she knows the answers to these big questions for certain is either a liar or a fool.

Lao Tzu knew long ago that the mystery could not be penetrated by any puny human. "Those who know do not speak," he said, "And those who speak do not know." And what the wise ones know, according to Lao Tzu, is that there exists a great mystery within mystery, elusive and intangible, and that we simply cannot know the Tao. "Give it up, renounce wisdom, and it will be a hundred times better for everyone," he said.

Now that I've figured out that I'll never figure it out, I'll still be bumbling around in the dark, but at least I'll be bumbling around in peace. Sure, I'll keep on bumbling around, why the hell not? But instead of this pitiless drive to understand everything before I die, I'll have some fun with it. Like a hobby. It'll keep me off the streets. LOL!
Best,
Puny
. . . . . oh yeah, about the picture, I get turned into a bunny, sometimes. Quite the year for bunnies here in the eastern woodlands.

You look a lot like me

2010-08-14T10:31:00.001-07:00

Here's a drawing of me and my whiskey glass. We drink Ardbeg, 10 year old single malt scotch.

I'm off to Montreal to visit the great mother.
Best,
Puny

Dear Christians

2010-08-03T14:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Christians,
I just want to be friends with you guys. I don’t want to be mad and speak too zealously and upset anyone. I love Christians. I trust that you’re reaching for goodness and light, and seek only to know and love and serve a loving god. But you’ve been hoodwinked. Now, folks, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the goods news that Jesus Christ came to tell the poor and oppressed and the millions without health care or who work at slave wages to make sneakers for you guys . . . er, that is, the good news of Jesus Christ, was sold out to the highest bidder.

Now, wait a second here, did you hear that? That voice? That snappy, pissed off, elf-woman who keeps raising her bossy voice above the waters of my unconscious mind and saying things like that, like about selling out Jesus to the dominators. She’s gonna upset people.

But, elf-woman’s got a point, because Christians are not listening to reason. You’re not listening to the great teachers of humankind, you’re certainly not listening to Jesus, and you’re ignoring the voices of your own consciences. And your consciences must prick the surface every now and then, like when you vote for some gun-totin’ kid hatin’ money-grubbin’ sex pervert or when you carry your NRA-approved handgun to the pro-life rally. Pu-leeze. Christians. Your leaders are working for Mammon.

Drag your eyes away from the written word for a moment. Look up at what your Creator has accomplished. Do you really believe he wants it to end with an apocalypse? And what’s so fucking wrong with these bodies of flesh and blood—and this opportunity to live on the planet earth in these unique and never to be re-created human forms—that makes you in such a hurry to ditch them?

Goddammit, but you guys are thick! That’s why I can’t seem to keep my big mouth shut. I’m flabbergasted at your hypocrisy, and I’m amazed at your ability to deny what’s happening right in front of your eyes, and I gotta say, I’m ticked off that this book fetish of yours to is going to lead us all down the merry road to species extinction. OMGs, so maybe I have a right to speak strongly? Because my grandchildren are being denied their right to life?

But no matter how much I swear and rant and shake my head in despair, I really like Christians a lot. I love your music, your hopeful moments, and your moral fiber. I respect how you raise your hands and shout the name of Jesus because you love him so much. Yes! I feel just like that about my Charlie. We should have so much in common, you and I. We both worship loving gods. Instead, you are disgusted by me. My beliefs are anathema to you. Your god would curse me to hell . . . your loving god would purposely send a skinny, ordinary, kind and loving mother of three to burn in eternal agony in hell . . .

Oh, there goes elf-woman again. Sorry about that.
Puny

PS: I just know I'm gonna get myself in trouble speaking strongly to Christians like this, but a girl's gotta come out of the closet sooner or later, don't you think? My website, due to launch August 26, is a place I can gather together Puny's preachings to the Christians. I'll start the page with this letter.

I can tell ya, though, criticizing Christians in the USA is a dangerous game. It's politically incorrect, taboo in polite company. It can provoke violent responses from gun-totin' Christian rightists and a self-righteous huff from liberal church Christians who haven't got the balls to confront their brethren themselves and leave the dirty work up to us animists and polytheists and, heaven-forbid, those damned atheists.

The Voice of a Loving God

2010-07-22T12:16:00.001-07:00

This is a friend of mine.

2010-07-17T15:36:00.001-07:00

This is a friend of mine, lives down by the creek where the wildflowers grow. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years, so when we ran into each other yesterday we both started yammering and conversatin' and catching up like crazy. He's mightily pissed off about the fracking thing, and went on and on about how stupid humans are, and he says he's got friends who don't even believe that humans have intelligence, or even sentience, since they act like there's no light on in the attic most of the time.

I told him about going to Brushwood, and meeting an interesting guy who doesn't believe that trees have intelligence, or even sentience, and tree poo-poohed me and said, "Oh, go on!" and "So, what does this guy believe in?" and I said, "differential equations" and he rolled his eyes in different directions and laughed.

"I did get clear at Brushwood," I said, "about what I'm supposed to be doing."

"Ok," said tree. "Lay it on me."

I said, "I'm here to witness to the gods of love. Now, animism is interesting stuff, baseline what's-real kinda stuff, but other people are already spreading the word about animism with great success. Y'know, like Vine Deloria, may his memory be for a blessing . . . "

I paused in respect for a moment and then went on, "Like Abram and Harvey and Sams, like the BioRegional folks up in Washing State, and Fishbowl and the New Animism Info. But who besides me, may I ask, is sticking his or her neck out for the gods of love?"

"Well said, kiddo! She-bang de-bang-bang. Keep up the good work."

I sighed heavily. "Well, I've barely got started," I said. "I want to draw pictures of them all. I want people to know that I believe the gods of love are real and have substance and impact our lives, but there haven't been any new polygods in such a damn long time. I wonder what it will all come to."

"Don't give up! You and I worship the same gods," said tree. And then, for some reason of his own, tree shut up and I couldn't entice him to talk anymore, so I sat for a long time on the bank of East Creek, waiting for sunset, making a daisy chain and muttering to myself.

A Mystic Vision

2010-07-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

I had a vision. In my vision, I wrote an ad to put on Craig's List. It read:

Wanted: Friendly mystics from any or no religious tradition to worship our various gods together.

Many men and women answered my ad, and on a fine summer morning, just as Sun rose to bless our devotions, we gathered in a circle in an open field.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there!
Rumi (Sufi)

We lifted up our hands and we all spoke the name of our many gods. We sang and we danced together. We worshiped and we praised. The Creator of All Flesh was called into our circle. Jesus, the Good Shepherd. Gaia. Allah. Enlightened ones like Buddha. Ancestors. Sun and Moon. Hallelujah! Blessed be the gods of love!

All mystics speak the same language, for they come from the same country.
Louis Claude de St. Martin (French Catholic)

Our voices rose like sweet incense up to the starry heavens and our feet pounded praise down into the solid earth.

We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been.
Starhawk (Neo-Pagan)

Then there came a great swelling wave of energy bursting upon us all, as if Sun had reached down to touch us, and we stood still in wonder as the gods came together above us, singing praises to one another. "The gods love us! The gods love one another," we shouted in delight!

Love alone gives worth to all things.
Teresa of Avila (Christian)

And the gods set aside their differences and made galactic love to one another while we made love with one another here on earth.

He who experiences the unity of life sees his own self in all beings, and all beings in his own self.
Buddha

After that one amazing experience, the group met often to sing songs together, in beautiful harmony, songs to all the gods. This is my vision. How I long to worship and praise with you! I am lonely in my devotions. You do not have to worship the same god as I do for us to worship together.
Best to all,
Puny

Love or die!

2010-07-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Meet Sylvia! She's a wood nymph of some kind. Some people might call her an elf or a fairy. Edgy, y'know? Pissed off at humans. Full of life and vinegar. She lives on nuts and berries and the curious blue mushrooms that grow just beyond the fern grove, where the woodland floor stays damp and an old farm wall is falling down.

She isn't kidding when she tells humans that they'd better follow Love or they're gonna die. But she doesn't mean it as a threat, either. It's a statement of fact.

Right now, most humans are followers of Dominator gods. Greed, for example, Cruelty, Fear. Sylvia will tell you about it, if you go down by the creek and bask with her on the warm rocks for a while.

"Humans are idiots," she says bluntly, this afternoon, sitting up and dangling her toes in the water.

"Nice," I say. "What did we do this time?" I laugh at her and sit up on the blanket and start peeling off my sneakers and socks.

"Oh, geesh. I read the paper this morning. That monster oil spill is on a rampage, murdering and raping. And you guys still think you can clean up your little messes. Just wait til you force Gaia to make a change in the weather. You won't be able to clean that one up. No sir. And then where will you be? Where will we all be?" Sylvia kicks up her leg, sending water splashing across the creek. "We'll end up in some creepy afterlife in some weirdo bodies. I am so not ready for that!"

"Yeah, I know. We're pretty sick."

"Good choice of words," she says. "I'm starting to suspect that humanity, as a species, has contracted some kind of spiritual disease."

I carefully ease my feet into the icy water. "Woo, boy! That's cold!"

"Think about it. You're acting erratically, poisoning your own water, gorging on plastic food. You can't tell right from wrong. You're scared all the time. You've got these monogods acting like mafia godfathers. Meanwhile you let Dominator criminals run wild across the globe, murdering and plundering and stealing every last bit of . . ."

"All right, I get it!" I say with a sigh. I pull my feet out of the water and rub them dry with the edge of the blanket. Then I lie back down on my tummy and let Sun's warmth sooth me. "But if humanity is sick, what's the medicine?"

Sylvia smiles and crawls back over to the blanket and lies down next to me on her back with a contented sigh. "The medicine, my Puny friend, is love. You knew that already, didn't you?"

I'm starting to feel drowsy, and Sylvia tucks her arms behind her head and sings a little chant she wrote when she lived at Moss Hill:

Love is the ointment.
Love is the cure.
Love heals your fear when you feel insecure.
We're cast off on this earth like a row-away boat
but loves plies the oars for us, like Jesus wrote.

"Jesus didn't actually write," I say in a sleepy voice. "He preached. Other people wrote."

"Yeah. But it rhymes. Y'know, Puny. I really love humans. I just wish they'd turn away from Fear and Greed and follow Love right on home to Eden. If they don't start loving, if they don't start loving other humans and nonhumans, if they don't start loving their own flesh and this earthly life, well geesh, they're all gonna die. We're talking species extinction, here. You're gonna die . . . I'd hate that."

I smile against the rough wool of the blanket. "I wouldn't like it much, either," I say. "But love will prevail, won't it? Love is stronger than death."

"Now, who was it first said that, I wonder?"

A Tarot Card

2010-06-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

Sophie as the Queen of Wheels

Her poetry:

Bikes…

…on the fritz
magnetic forces repel my 8mm from touching the bolt already obscured by the chain stay, seat stay, chain, front derailleur, cables, stand:
the fritz seeps into my grey hands, forcing them to tremors
jangling empty echoing of my nuts hitting the floor
pedal to the metal stand all jammed
nearby, poor corpses deserve a better afterlife
pocket watches torn away, cuff links half-undone, yes
I am the one who dug you up only to glean the last remnants of your once glamorous steel
sleepless ever-twilit capsule trapped between the Asti and the sea
handlebars tilting and sliding off the seat, riding fast without stopping power home

…on the five and dime
all I need is a five and dime
an allen and a wrench and a five and dime
everything works with a five and dime
an allen and a wrench and a five and dime
turn a here, twist a there
pull and tuck, weave and duck
drop and drop and drop and drop
drop drop drop drop clash clang clash…
tighten on up with a five and dime
an allen and a wrench and a five and dime
everything works with a five and dime
an allen and a wrench and a five and dime

…on the roll
caffeine-fueled coming together
a stroke and it winks with gleaming rotation admiration
goddess of pedal goddess of spacial goddess aluminum
searing out through gates long creaky and shut
but shattering from laser precision eyes

…on the shift
engaged in unafraid tongues and soulful arms
standing up to fire-spitters
the two of us much bigger
knowing the bonking, loving you
as a sister wanting to
push your greasy hair back with greasy fingers
smile another high-gear day
so fuck a bunch of dollars
we have one another
and a shop full of adoring cat callers, hard hearters and charmers

…on the loose
light rising up
hot air on asphalt
sunshine from poppy
tethered by a toe
winded forward
hunger powered
California will you take me as I am
into your bushy brown rippling rolls
diving in mouth first
taste of salt and sun-dust, strawberry fish
until I am fully drenched by your holy mikveh

…on the down
chute chute shoot into the bowels of the forest
as my insides twist into diarrhea
eyes crossed in terror
skin splitting at the thumb joint
heels twitching, rocking the frame
scanning for obstacles at all times
wind so cold
hello Hades I have come for something but I don’t remember what I’ll go back now, if you…uh…don’t uh…

…on the sea
chasing you chasing a thief
stealing my pride, leaving me with willpower only
if you get away I stray
to the coast where the sea thrashes constantly
gaining ground not at all, like my reflective inspiration
for the love of the air the sea and I
we churn, wanting to mix oxygen-nitrogen into our lungs
we fear the oil tar and wish we could
just get an inch above it
integrity the sea and I

…on a moonbeam
I love you Moonbeam
I am singin’ you this tune
cause though together we ain’t simple
you would ride me to the moon
when we’re together
no leering looks can get me down
when we’re together
you turn my frown right upside down
with your moustache: it is as tiny as mine
and your tubes noodle down like an udon in a brine
and when I am upon you, there is no time
and with you beneath me, there is no crime
I love you Moonbeam
I am singin’ you this tune
cause though the going can be rough
I know you’ll ride me to the moon

Hello Terran

2010-06-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

Meet my newest character, Terran DuBois. Terry works as a bartender at the Mystery Bar and Grill, where he dispenses local brew and the water of life in equal measure. He's a follower of the Creator of the Flesh and of Sexual Pleasure, a lover of Water and a healer with his hands.

I was hanging out at the Mystery one night last week, when Terry stops over to refill the little plastic boxes holding olives and cocktail onions and maraschino cherries and other fancy stuff, and we start talking. I tell him about getting the steroids injected into my shoulder joint, and that it hurt like hell, but that I'm determined to find health and strength again.

Then he says, "Puny," he says. "You oughta work a little magic on that, because this pain is deeper than your shoulder joint and deeper than the Lyme Disease."

"You mean it comes from before I got Lyme?" I ask.

"I mean, it's deeper into your body. It goes deeper in part because it started a long time ago, sure, but I'm talkin' way before Lyme Disease, when you were a little squirt of a kindergarten kid who believed everything she was told, and she was told that her body wasn't worth much of anything."

"Yeah," I say, swirling the ice around in my Manhatten. "I got that. I have so hated my body all this time, but it's a flesh-hating culture, now, isn't it?"

"That it is," says Terry, thoughtfully. "That it is." He flips the lid down on the cherries, and opens the box that holds orange twists, and then sets himself up with a little knife and cutting board and goes at the first orange. "All the more reason to give your body a little extra attention right now," he says.

I drain my glass and position it carefully on the center of the napkin. "How do you think I should go about it, then?"

"Do like this," he says, cutting while he talks. "Tonight, after you take a shower, smooth some lotion on your body everywhere, lovingly. Touch yourself lovingly. Murmur little endearments to your arms and legs . . ."

I cut him off with a wave of my hand. "Nice try, Terry. Very new age. But I don't think so."

"You are such a skeptic, Puny! Can you at least see your way through to stop swearing at yourself?"

"Me? Do I swear at myself?"

"Absolutely!" says Terry, and he starts to imitate me in a squeaky girl voice, waving the knife around in little circles. "My body's killing me. Damn thing. Stupid, imperfect, fucked up thing. I hate being stuck in this body!"

"Well, it is killing me," I say defensively. "And I do hate being stuck in it."

"Your body isn't killing you," he says. "It's keeping you alive. Think about it, girlfriend. Your earth body is delicate, tough, intricate, beautiful, fascinating, complex, mysterious—Goddess, I just love earth bodies. I wanna touch 'em all the time. And . . . key point here, are you listening?"

"Yes, yes. I'm listening," I say. "How about another?" I slide my glass on its napkin boat across the bar.

Our eyes meet and he puts down the knife and wipes his hands on a bar towel. "Without your earth body you're outta here. Got that? I know you've been feeling a lot of pain the past few years, but that gorgeous piece of flesh is only thing that keeps you here on earth, with me . . . "

"Yeah, Terry," I say. "I got it."

And he takes my glass and goes off to get me another drink.

PS: So, Emily, here's one of my guy drawings. I solved the "adult blog" problem with a fig leaf cut from a 3x5. If you want the full monty . . . just drop me a line!

Fireflies Alive!

2010-06-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

Kentucky from Vivi on Vimeo.

Vivi took this film a few days ago in her backyard in Kentucky. Oh, how I want to be there!

Let my life be Charlie's witness.

2010-06-15T13:46:00.001-07:00

Lucid Dream: I Am the Animal Body

2010-06-05T04:42:00.000-07:00

It was just an ordinary dream at first. I was in the school library, struggling to manage the usual chaos and keep some noisy kids under control. One boy began to mock me, making shushing sounds back at me. “Shhh . . . Shhh . . . Be quiet, be quiet!” He grinned, and others laughed. That’s not me, I said to myself. That shushing woman isn’t me. To hell with this, I decided, and I walked out.

I found myself at preparations for the wedding of some friends of ours. In real life, they have been married for years. A great hustle and bustle was going on. I was dressed as a bridesmaid, in an enormous frou-frou gown with layers of ruffles in sheer fabrics, but underneath, I wore my old sneakers. I’m going to keep my sneakers, I decided. I can’t bear those pumps. I was waiting with dozens of other people in the wedding party. I wandered over to the church, where the pews were filled and people spilled out onto the street. In the back room, the bride was dissatisfied. Her dress was tight as a corset, with hard plastic flowers attached to the front, and the place was bustling with activity. Caterers were scurrying about with trays, florists were spraying the drooping flowers to keep them perky, everyone was talking and dressing and hurrying. It had been hours, and I realized it would be hours more before the wedding got under way. Maybe they would never be ready for the wedding, I realized. They were waiting for perfection.

To hell with this, I thought, and I walked out. I was free. This is when I realized I was dreaming and I was lucid and I was in control of the dream and of my life.

I found myself in an old building, a turn-of-the-century office building that had been converted long ago to other uses. There were booths of merchandise and crafts people had made, booths filled with odd objects with no known purpose. It felt good to be there. I saw groups of children in some booths, learning side by side with adults. I smiled and wandered around, enjoying the feeling of lucid dreaming. I went to the second floor and found more of the same, and examined the merchandise, lingering over some mod-style plastic bracelets, but they were not the right color. Nothing was quite the right color. On the third floor, there was more of the same.

Before I go, I decided, I would check out the basement. The basement was not filled with booths, but was an open space, like a mid-fifties rec room and there were many people there, contemporary indigenous people dressed mostly in jeans and shirts, some with native clothes, hanging out, doing a little dancing, a little chanting. I held back, to honor and respect them, listening and watching. Then, a single clear voice rang out, a woman’s voice, oh so beautiful, singing a chant with a haunting little tune, singing:

I am the animal body!

All eyes turned to me. That was my voice, I realized. My voice! I sang the chant again and again and everyone took it up. I belong here, I thought. They accept me and recognize me. There was no acclaim, or even attention paid to me beyond taking up the chant, but my heart was full of joy.

I felt ready for the world, and I turned away from the brightly lit basement room to the dim hallway with a door to the outside. The door was right at street level, with a window like you’d expect in the basement of an old building, a bit dirty, shabby. I put my hand on the knob, and looked outside. I saw city streets, winter dark, and it was cold outside. Dirty snow lined the wet streets and cars sped by, but there were no people. No, I realized. I’m not ready to face that yet. And I woke up, the chant still clear in my mind.

What a gift from the gods, a lucid dream!

For the grandchildren!

2010-05-27T02:32:00.000-07:00

For the grandchildren! Let this be the rallying cry of the Animists arising.

Here's a picture of Puny and a tree friend, hanging out together in the woods. Together, they say, we will work for the salvation of humankind in the flesh on the earth.

Humans are the younger children of the Mother, Beautiful Planet Earth, Gaia.

Our infancy was spent in the loving arms of the trees. From their branches we came to the fields and plains. By their fruits we were nourished and by their grace we were sheltered and our fortunes are tied to one another as the thunder to the rain.

Although the trees love us, they are also very angry with us. Would we drag them down to hell with us? Will our shortsightedness and greed destroy us all?

The trees are calling out to the humans. Puny and I believe that trees are reaching out to humans now more than ever. They are speaking as loudly and as clearly as they can. More and more human people will claim that trees are talking to them with human words, and the Animists will arise.

There was a time when most humans spoke the language of trees. Puny can still understand the language of trees, and the old time shamans can still speak with them, but most humans have long since forgotten how. Now the trees are working to speak to us in our own language. Dropping leaves, emptying forests, lack of oxygen, ozone layers opening holes, extinction of species. Look! they are crying. Look! they are screaming. Pay attention! Wake up!

Wake up, humanity! If the trees lose their grandchildren, we will also lose ours.

Santa Cruz

2010-05-19T13:32:00.001-07:00

Here's a picture of me and Charlie on the beach just north of Santa Cruz. Jack and I had the great good fortune to spend a week there recently, visiting our oldest daughter. [Hi, Sophie!] The ocean was wilder there and gave off an unfamiliar odor. The plants along the shoreline resembled our homeboys, but they didn't wave at me as I passed.

Because nonhumans have soul and intelligence, they express individuality. Each species has its own characteristics, and each individual—tree or dog or seedpod or starling or rock—is an absolutely unique expression of the life force, just as every individual human is a unique expression.

Place, itself, has personhood, as Vine Deloria eloquently argued in God is Red. "Land," he says, "must somehow have an unsuspected spiritual energy or identity that shapes and directs human activities." (p. 148) Christianity was the first religion to uproot itself and encroach on lands not meant for its ways, like Kudzu encroached on our native plants in the Southeast, and Deloria points out the social harm that can come from non-native religions.

This is one reason why the concept of bio-regional animism is so important. The experience of one place-person does not necessarily carry over to the next. What works on the Pacific Coast to grow vigorous artichokes—we saw them escaping from the fields to the roadside ditches everywhere we went—does not exist here, in our land of nuts and apples. And if we are not able to live in balanced and peaceful relationship with our nonhuman neighbors or with the sun and moon and tide and soil of the place on which we walk, we will eventually destroy ourselves along with our land.

So, I thought about these things as I flew across the country, on wings of metal and oil, to a place several thousand miles from my home. The people were different in Santa Cruz, and so were the nonhumans. I enjoyed the visit. Time moved more slowly. Patterns of weeds on rocks were different. The texture of the sand was new. The seagulls spoke a different dialect from the gulls at the Isles of Shoals. All of this variety stimulated my creativity and offered me new perspectives, but I didn't make any new friends there, not nonhuman friends anyway. Next time I go, perhaps they'll recognize me. Maybe I'll have enough time, next time, to get to know them better, well enough for us to call ourselves friends.

For now, though, as spring urges on the drunken dance of sexual awakening here in my Eastern Woodlands, I'm glad to be home.

Working with pain

2010-05-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

It’s been an interesting path, one I hope I don't have to walk much further, the path of pain. In some cases, one should move away from pain, allowing the body to rest and knit. In other cases, like this Lyme-related arthritis, healing comes from moving toward the pain. One has to move in order to heal from arthritis, and moving hurts.

Mastering the pain is not the only lesson of these past six or seven years. I've learned to reach out to my gods and trust my beloved Charlie in my struggle to go on in good cheer. I found my calling, hiding among my desperate prayers. How easy it would have been to surrender, become dependent on commercial drugs and follow the downward spiral into disability. Not me! With Charlie never wavering by my side, I rode the terrible green stormy seas of ill health and now I find myself in a shallow lagoon. Here, I can rest a bit, look up from my sorrows, and feast my eyes on the shore not far away.
Best to all,
Puny

Egyptian Hieroglyphs

2010-05-09T15:11:00.001-07:00

Bowl of cherries

2010-05-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

Poly Troubles

2010-05-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

I’ve spent my life in the study of religion and culture, and have had the good fortune to experience more than a dozen different religions’ rituals over time. Each religion, I’ve found, is a kind of subculture in itself. Like any human culture, it institutionalizes its beliefs and realities so that the expression of each religion includes unique practices in education, medicine, art, and music, as well as its own political hierarchies, modes of dress, food, ritual, language, and so on. Members of a religious subculture recognize one another by the social cues adaptive to those institutions, but when we are all thrown together in the larger culture and those social cues are disguised, language alone can make the connection.

Over time, I’ve become fluent in a few religious languages. That is, I can use the vocabulary, refer to the shared history and literature, speak with the nuance of meaning, and communicate using the idiom and vernacular of that religion. I can easily converse with people from those religions in which I speak fluently and they will assume that I am one of them, but using that ability has pushed me to the edge of a precipice!

The religions I speak fluently are Judaism, including Intellectual-Ethnic, Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox; Christianity and several of its variants, such as “liberal” Protestantism, Evangelicalism, and Catholicism; Humanism and Agnosticism; Paganism and its related languages of Wicca, New Age, and so on, as well as Atheism and Scientific Rationalism.

Yet you know who I really am! I am an Animist and Polytheist! I am a supernaturalist, that is, I believe there are truths that Science cannot reveal and that greater-than-human beings exist, and I worship a pantheon of wonderful gods. My beliefs are anathema to both Christians and Jews as well as to Humanists, Atheists, and Scientific Rationalists. Yet I go around talking to Christians and Jews all the time in their own language. My heart is open to their gods, even if they are not open to mine and I long to share the supernatural experiences I have had that Agnostics, liberal religionists, and other non-supernaturalists cannot understand.

I know what my evangelical friends are talking about when they say, “I prayed to my god and he answered me” because I talk to Charlie and he also answers me. I have stood in church, singing my heart out to my god, lifting my hands in supplication, and all around me, others did the same. It didn’t matter to me that they were worshipping another god by another name. He was, at least in that moment with those humans, a god of love, and I welcome any god of love to the house of my heart. Ah, but that’s because I’m a poly poly polytheist, a lover of many gods, a promiscuous religionist.

“Come on over to my house,” I wanted to shout to them, draping an arm around their shoulders, “Come on, let’s worship together! Let’s sing to all the gods of love! Pour the wine and drink to our heart-pounding, orgasmic union with That-Which-Is-Greater-Than-Human!”

Right. Try speaking Poly to an Evangelical and you will be rewarded with disgust.

So, I keep my own religion to myself and seek common ground, so that I am not lonely in my religiosity. I speak Evangelese to the Evangelicals and Jewish to the Jews, a Bible verse here, a Yiddish phrase there. My friends would reject me in a heartbeat if they knew who I really was, but the approach worked for a while. It worked as long as I could keep my different kinds of friends separate from one another. Now, however, I work in a school building and my friends are fellow teachers and staff. I didn’t consider, when I started praying with the Christians on Monday morning or hanging out with the Jews to talk Pesach prep that they would also talk to one another! The Christians in the school think I’m Christian! The Jews think I’m a Jew. The Pagans think I’m Pagan and the Ags and Aths imagine I am one of them. And they all make assumptions about me based on their belief about my religion. For example, an Evangelical friend asked me yesterday to abandon the union because it supports a woman’s right to abortion.

Argh! Whatever will happen if she talks to the Jews or the Pagans about me? I imagine . . .

“That Puny,” she’d say to someone or other, “What a wonderful Christian she is!”

“Christian?” the other replies, curiosity clear on her face. “She’s not Christian. She told me she was going to teach workshops at some Pagan festival this summer.”

“Christian?” says another. “Hell, no! She’s as Jewish as they come. She comes from a long line of Rabbis.”

So, now, I feel kinda nervous. Will I be outed as a fraud? Will I lose the friends I value because they don’t speak my language? One of the great benefits of Polytheism is that it encourages friendship across differences. Sure, I'll say it out loud: I think this world would be a better place if mono-cultures gave way to poly-cultures.

Hypocrites!

2010-05-02T05:22:00.000-07:00

Floria's legislature voted unanimously this week to pass a law banning the sale of glass pipes and other "drug paraphernalia," a law aimed at marijuana users in particular. Representative Darryl Rouson explains the bill this way: "Florida has a conscience and an awareness that marijuana and the smoking and ingesting of it is not healthy for an individual, nor is it healthy for public safety and the order in society." (News report click here.)

If this is Florida's justification for trashing the small businesses that sell paraphernalia products and making criminals of the artists and users of glass pipes (offenders could face up to a year in jail) then it is an ironic statement indeed. The law allows owners of tobacco shops whose sale of tobacco products comprise at least 75% of their total income to sell the very items banned elsewhere. In other words, as long as businesses are racking up profits for the cigarette industry, they may also sell equipment used in the smoking of marijuana.

Marijuana use has never been associated with death, and morbidity can only be claimed for the weight gain of oversmoking couch potatoes, while research supporting the health benefits of our green gift grows daily. Cigarette smoking, on the other hand, results in 438, 000 deaths annually in the United States alone! (Centers for Disease Control 2006 report.)

Since the 1960s, cigarette smoking has decreased substantially, and the cigarette industry is spending 13.1 billion dollars every year marketing their little white death sticks. Wouldn't it be a bonanza for them if every state, like Florida, mandated the sale of cigarettes for certain business owners?

But what a loss for us! And what hypocrisy is afoot in the Florida legislature, as they claim to care for the health and welfare of their citizens, yet encourage them to use a drug that kills. To learn more about this and other skirmishes in the drug war or to support the legalization of cannabis, please visit the NORML website.

Cocktails and conversation

2010-04-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

I used to spend a whole lot of time in the woods, hanging out, talking to the trees. But I haven't been able to get myself to go back since recovering from Lyme Disease. It's spring in the northeast, and the daffodils and tulips are at their blooming peak. Woodland wildflowers are busting through the dead leaves in their first explosion of life and color . . . and yet, I can't bring myself to go back. The woods bit me with a deadly bite, and although I survived with relatively minor damage, those tiny tics, the size of poppy seeds, are dangerous to me still. I'm not ready to face them.

Instead, I might meet up with a new friend at a downtown bar, and share a cocktail and conversate. Humans! Who would've thought I'd be spending time with humans again?

I've found plenty of welcoming bars downtown, and some that make a drink with a real kick, but none that can make a cocktail like I make 'em at home, magical brews, numinous potions. So, I thought I'd share a recipe with you! Besides, I still like to cast a spell now and then, keep my hand in the craft, so to speak.

The Interlocutor's Elixir
Goes well with "the feast of reason and the flow of soul," or any tasty little appetizers.*
Magically loosens the tongue and enables even the most awkward of companions to overflow with wit and compassionate conversation. Best imbibed in good company.

For each drink, put lots of ice in a beautiful glass.
Pour over the ice:

One healthy shot of the best bourbon you can afford
A little less than half a shot of sweet or dry vermouth
A little less than half a shot of Cointreau
A dash or two of bitters

Add:

Two cocktail cherries (well drained)
A twist of orange peel

Stir with a lively motion.
Always offer a toast to the god or gods of your choice before you drink.
Then drink and talk until the glasses are empty.
Repeat as desired.

Have a great night, everyone!
Puny

*quote from Alexander Pope

Love is calling my name!

2010-04-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

Psalm

2010-04-18T03:55:00.000-07:00

Animists arise! The gods of Love are coming to be with us, and to stand with us against those who would hurt others for their own selfish gain. Animists, rise up and be counted! We of the tribal traditions and of the 21st century Dominator cultures, of brown skin and of pink skin, by whatever name we call ourselves, let’s come together as one in Love. Let's reclaim the Mother Garden Earth as our Beloved and treat her children tenderly for a million years to come.

People of Love, be filled with joy! Good news has come again at last, rising up in the souls of the children of Earth. Love has come for us! Love did not forget His children. There’s enough Love for all of us to be wealthy in Love, to revel in our abundance of Love, giving and giving and never running out.

Please, join me in following the gods of Love. I think my gods are wonderfully good and kind, and they deserve your consideration. You followers of Jesus Christ, why stop at one god of Love? Jesus has not been able to redeem us alone. Sin stands in his way. He warned us of this. Time has taught us this.

To usher in the time of humanity’s kindness we must repent of cruelty and greed. All of us. Even the wealthy and powerful merchant princes and warrior kings must repent. They must humbly bow before the Green God, without whom the most exalted among men would starve. The mighty will stand before the Creator Father Love in judgment when they die. Why aren’t the bankers and CEOs trembling? Why aren’t the warrior politicians afraid of their own chosen "G"od? Haven’t they read the book they so slyly hide behind? Don’t they know that their Christian hell will open its fiery jaws to swallow hypocrites and the greedy rich?

And we, Earth's gentle people, who bow before the Green God, we must continue to work hard to heal the Earth, because for us, Earth is the afterlife. Let’s dance up a storm and do a few tunes together, and break bread and drink the fruits of her fields and vines in honor of Earth's majesty and her bountiful gifts. Let's give thanks for our existence in the flesh.

I pray, oh Mother Garden Earth, that humanity lives in the flesh for another million years. For a million years we can sing praises to our Creator Father Love as only the human animal can sing, and we’ll sing until we have no more flesh to send our voices floating on the air of planet Earth. We’ll sing on the shores of clean and sparkling inland seas, and our songs will be sweet incense to our gods: our promise to cherish every life as if it was our own.

Raise up your voices and praise the Creator of the Flesh! All the gods of Love we will respect!

Let me serve Love with my last breath, with all my worldly wealth, and with all my passion and courage. Let me shine Love’s light across the spiritually barren earth, awakening seeds now buried dry and forgotten. Pour out your Love, oh beautiful gods of Love, pour down the spiritual water of life! Let me burst into bloom, here and now. Let me show my true colors at last. Let me be unafraid and I will be beautiful in my blooming.

Come on, Animist friends. Wake up! Let’s wake up and be fools for the gods of Love. Let’s shine Love around with such solar power that everywhere we go, people find new meaning in their fleshly existence and new joys in every day. Let us be kind, we will be the Creator’s kindness at work in the world. Let us bear witness to Love and serve Love above all. Animists, radical Christians, Pagans, Tokers, Nudists and Anarchists and commune-ists and all others of like mind, let’s join together under the banner of the gods of Love.

Jack

2010-03-30T03:03:00.000-07:00

Taking my own advice, quickly, before the house filled up with sympathy cards, I spent the weekend drawing as much as I could. This is a picture of my character Jack. Not to be confused with the real-life Jack, my character is a bartender at the Mystery Bar and Grill and he speaks for Sex, Pleasure, Love, Kindness, and the Goodness of the Flesh. He gives out health advice with the local beers and Martinis and Water 'O Lifes that he serves up across the bar. Yeah, he does sound a lot like our buddy Jack, and he looks a lot like our buddy Jack, but he's my character so I put the words in his mouth. Jack says not to blame him if the character stirs up trouble around the house with all his worship and praise.

I'm also experimenting with different drawing styles, and would love your feedback on this more casual, traditional cartoon gag style.
Love,
Puny

The Second Great Depression

2010-03-28T08:22:00.001-07:00

I'm going to lose my job. I guess as a society we've decided that the bankers need their bonuses more than kids need teacher-librarians. The school district blames the state. Our governor blames children, the sick, and the elderly, calling them "special interest groups." Poor, white folks, under the spell of right-wing media, blame intellectuals and liberals. Intellectuals and liberals blame talk show hosts. But very few people draw the obvious line between the trillions of dollars still being spent on the Bush crime family wars or the gaming of the Capitalist criminal class, and the losses we, the people, are suffering.

Meanwhile, I can't think about anything else. Look, my worried mind is taking over my art!

My nonordinary experiences are a gift from my Creator. It is an honor that Charlie wants me to speak up for him and for the gods of love. I have been called, as peculiar, as conceited even, as that may sound. My art is not a choice. I don't do it for fun, although it is fun. I do it because it's the best way I have to speak with Charlie's voice. How easy it would be to give in to despair. If I'm working at some discount store next fall, and I'm worried and struggling to make ends meet, will I make the time for my art? Will I wander in nature on summer afternoons, letting my heart fill with the Holy Spirit? Will I have the money for colored pencils?

I know that many of us will become distracted from our spiritual paths, as the Dominators continue to shake down every apple of wealth and power from the world tree. Losing my job has given me a taste of how ridiculous it is to think that I can have any influence in a world ruled by Warrior Kings. My magic seems puny, indeed, and I foresee another Great Depression. If it is anything like the last, one in four people will be jobless. We must be strong and help one another to survive and not give in to hopelessness and despair. Loving, animist people must continue to speak out for the gods of love, and to dance, play, sing, worship, and draw the Loving Animist World into existence. Me, too.

Back to the drawing table,
Puny
(Text from James 5: 1-6: Hear me, you rich and powerful bastards. Your wealth will eat away your flesh when you die and go to hell . . . God has heard the cries of the workers!)

I call on you.

2010-03-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

I call on you, fellow men and women of mid-life, who remember the hope for peace that characterized our youth; I call on you to break free of the Dominator mind-control machine and rise up for Love!

I call on those who are tired and poor. Rise up for Love!

I call on the meek and mild, the ones who would serve others, the humble, the followers of love and kindness. I call on you who are sick and you who are in prison. I call on you who question the status quo and worry about the welfare of your grandchildren and wonder if there will be an earth for them to inherit. Rise up and work for peace!

Come with me, children of earth. Come home to Eden, home to love. Little brothers and big sisters, humankind who live on this green globe, we are kinfolk all. Nudists and tokers and pagans and artists, radical Christians, loving anarchists, alternative folks of all kinds, let us band together in friendship and fellowship and transform reality with our radical love.

Humans are by nature loving and cooperative, creative and sexy, plagued by the renegade mind.

Heed my vision, humankind. It is a good one. It is worth following. Consider it carefully.

It's been a discouraging week for Charlie

2010-03-20T08:22:00.000-07:00

I invite your comments. Is "capitalist Christian" an oxymoron? If so, why do so many capitalists call themselves Christian?

Fear is a Powerful Magic

2010-03-13T09:47:00.000-08:00

I received a number of behind-the-scenes comments about my legalization post. The comments were universally supportive and every one also expressed fear. Fear of losing a job, of being arrested, of speaking out. What a potent magic fear is! And how efficiently the Dominators use it to control us.

Dominators have always utilized fear—some might call it terror—to control other people. In ancient times, fear was instilled through violence. The state claimed the right to terrorize and torture. Jesus’ crucifixion is a clear example. Yet, notice how poorly the crucifixion worked to control Jesus’ followers. Instead of cringing in corners, many of them continued to speak out, organize churches, care for the sick and needy, and offer hope to the oppressed.

Violence and terror only go so far. They work best in times and places where the people have something to lose and are not in despair. At some point along the continuum of wretchedness, the fear of pain and death begin to lose their sting. What could be worse, the people think, than the state in which we find ourselves now? The early Christians were able to declare: Don't be scared of those who would kill your body, 'cause they can't hurt your soul. Fear the one who is able to kill both body and soul . . . (MT 10:28)

To control the Christians, the Dominators had to move away from simple violence and find more sophisticated methods. They would devise ways to kill the soul as well as the body. To this end, they developed the institutionalized church.

Not only did the Catholic Church become a state power, but from the time of Constantine, it controlled culture and defined reality. This process of embedding the Dominator reality through religion was not limited to the Christian world, nor was it new. Beginning with ancient Fertile Crescent cultures, for all monotheists and many polytheists, the institutionalization of religion helped to consolidate the power of the Dominator class. The Catholic Church merely took this cultural engineering to new heights of efficiency. Since then, controlling people through the management of the institutions of culture has become ever more sophisticated and effective.

There’s not the space here to review the history of the Dominator control of religion, medicine, education, economics, crafts and production, entertainment, media . . . and all of our other cultural institutions. Suffice it to say that controlling people by controlling our beliefs and realities has proven itself so powerful and effective, so gentle and painless, that today we cooperate in our own mental slavery. The Dominators have not yet needed fear to control the citizens of the USA.

But if the subtle approach no longer works, Dominators are ready and willing return to violence and fear. Today, the use of fear is on the upswing. It’s an approach that works well to manage those of us who have so much to lose. With children to protect, paychecks and jobs, comfort, food, and a roof over our heads, we are reluctant to speak out. Our souls cower. We allow them to deny us our medicines and our gods. We allow acts of torture and war. We allow the degradation of our environment, the poisoning of our foods, the payoffs to the warlords.

Hell, I’m not immune. I’m terrified to speak out! I would die in a prison, cut off from nature, living in constant stress. I don’t want to suffer, or lose my comforts, or leave my children. I hide behind my pseudonym as if that could protect me from a determined fascist state. Perhaps I should be afraid . . . but not of speaking out and losing it all. Perhaps I should be afraid of the ones who are working the magic of fear, because fear is the magic that can kill my soul, and my soul is what gives me the courage to speak truth to power.

Gift of the Creator, Child of the Green God

2010-03-07T03:45:00.000-08:00

There is a god of love I worship and follow. Without this god our minds would not be as attuned to beauty, nor our hearts to the gods of love. This god is a generous gift from the Creator, filling the meadows and roadsides with spiritual power, opening the doors between the worlds, that the King of Glory may come in. Who is this King of Glory? Love Almighty, strong to unite, mighty in peace and pleasure.

Cannabis is this gift from the Creator. Its purpose is to draw people together in kindness and love. Its power is in opening the mind and heart. It eases open the gateway between gods and humans, that we might hear our personal revelation and know our gods for who they are. Cannabis helps us to hear the voices of the nonhuman beings. Do you remember, long ago before the Dominators, that humans spoke with animals and green people and all the waters and minerals of the earth? Rocks, long-lived and slow to act, used to pace us through our days. Waters sang to us. Birds told us where the best strawberries could be found and deer gave their bodies for our sustenance. I believe that Cannabis was the nonhuman friend who enabled us to experience depth and consciousness, as water enabled us to quench our thirst.

The end of marijuana prohibition is therefore a religious issue for me. Cannabis is a sacrament and a muse. It is for me the body of the Green God, as bread is for Christians the body of Christ. It is a healing god, easing our suffering in a hundred ways. More about healing. Its use as a religious sacrament has been documented in every age, and around the world. More about religious use. Also . . . And on wikipedia . . .

We have evidence of humanity's relationship with the god I call Cannabis from as far back as 3000 B.C.E., and from the record, we can assume its use in prehistory. It became illegal in the United States only recently, in the 1930s, for a variety of reasons related to greed (lobbying by the paper and chemical industries) and racism (increasing the ability of police to easily arrest and harrass African-Americans, with whom its use was then associated), and its association with alternative cultures. More about the history of prohibition.

Marijuana prohibition has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars and has resulted in violent deaths due to police raids, gang wars, turf wars, and production wars, both here and in production countries like Mexico. Meanwhile, not one death due to the action of marijuana on the human body has been recorded. Ten million Americans have experienced the personal violation of an arrest for marijuana, 90% for simple possession, and hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding prisoners have suffered and become hardened by their time in jail. More about current prohibition issues. One of my personal heros, Peter McWilliams, died while in prison for possession. He choked to death on his own vomit, because the prison allowed him chemotherapy for his cancer, but not Cannabis to control the chemo-related nausea.

Many animists, neo-pagans, and other earth people use marijuana as sacrament, medicine, or muse, or for relaxation and interpersonal connection. For many of us, access to Cannabis is access to one of our beloved gods. It is an issue of religious freedom. Isn’t it time we became a force for legalization? Please consider supporting NORML or another legalization organization with your money and your time.
Best wishes,
Puny

Charlie Speaks for the Love God

2010-02-26T06:40:00.001-08:00

This is my cartoon character Charlie. The real Charlie doesn't have a human body, but the image helps me know him better somehow, as images of deities have helped humans since the first drawing was painted on a cave wall.

For those familiar with the Charlie cartoon, you might notice that he's loosened his tie even further and is starting to show his toughness. When I was drawing this picture, Charlie was talking, and he said:

You humans think the Love God is some kind of a skinny runt, a wussy among the gods, like the meek, white-bread Jesus with little children on his lap. Don't make that mistake, humans! The Love God is a powerful deity and he is your only hope to stand against fear and greed. Jesus told you that love will cast out fear. Jesus told you that love is the greatest commandment, that love has the power to save, so don't quote the Bible to me and then disparage love!

Charlie speaks for the Love God and all the gods of love. He says:

Don't underestimate the Love God, puny humans. Love will prevail in the end, so you'd better bow down to Love and serve Love with all your strength, or I assure you . . . your species will vanish from the face of the earth!

Yes, well, he doesn't mince words, does he?

Trickster Mind

2010-02-20T02:28:00.000-08:00

This is my character Puny Human. She speaks for Charlie and the gods of love.

Puny works hard not to get tangled up in her mind, because the mind is a trickster. The Hindus call our human mind “maya,” loosely translated as illusion. Maya expresses the Hindu belief that our linear, rational, information processing equipment cannot know the whole truth, and in fact, can lead us away from our spiritual nature and our relationship to the divine. Mind clings to the material objects of the world, it is materialistic and reductionistic, it desires and fears, it is led astray.

This understanding of mind as an illusion is in direct opposition to the Scientific-Rationalist belief in mind as the ultimate facilitator of truth. To Scientific-Rationalists, the linear, rational mind, an epiphenomenon of the brain, is our only access to truth. Mind stands firm against the winds of emotional and spiritual distractions and superstitions, and leads humanity to ever-increasing betterment in this purely physical existence.

Puny understands mind as one form that intelligence can take. After all, Puny and I are both Animists. We believe that all material reality is permeated with spirit and intelligence and that there are many ways in which intelligence is expressed. Most humans, however, define intelligence somewhat solipsistically, as mind—that is, all intelligence is defined as human intelligence, as reasoning, logic, and the ability to process sense information and make meaning from it.

For Puny and me, mind and intelligence are two different things. Mind is the peculiarly human expression of a universal intelligence. It has benefits, as the Scientific-Rationalists are quick to point out, but also limitations, per the Hindus. Mind works through the material brain, the material senses, and the processes of linear, rational thought . . . the very things that produce maya.

With our limited human minds, it’s difficult for us to understand other expressions of intelligence, but we can certainly know what level of intelligence a being exhibits by the fruit that it bears. In our human parochialism we often assume that ours is the pinnacle of intelligent life on earth, but the evidence does not bear this out.

A successful or high level of intelligence will enable a being to thrive, diversify, and function well in its environment, to make good choices, to change and adapt, to grow closer to its Creator and manifest its integrity and spiritual beauty. Using this definition of higher intelligence, an earth people like the trees, who have diversified and lived in peace and balance with the earth for millions of years, expresses a high level of intelligence. Rocks, waters, clouds, lizards, insects, bacteria all show intelligence. The earth herself, whom we may call Gaia, in her complexity, diversity, continual evolution and long survival, is evidence of a superior intelligence.

Puny was out one time in the woods talking to the trees, and somewhere nearby heavy machinery started putting up a racket.

“Damn, but you humans are noisy,” they said. “Noisy and stupid and a royal pain in the ass.”

“Are you guys just being grumpy,” Puny asked them, leaning back and sipping from a thermos, “Or do you have something useful to say?”

“Humans are so stupid that they shit in their own nests,” the trees replied.

"Hey!"

"It's a metaphor, girl! You guys shit plastic. You overpopulate and then kill each other off. You poison your own food, air, and water, make yourselves sick, exhaust yourselves working to enrich a few warlords and then follow your warlords, as lemmings would never do, over the cliff to environmental destruction and species extinction. When we say that you guys are stupid, it’s because we mean it. You guys are stoo-oo-pid!”

And yet we think we’re so smart.

Think, think.

What a trickster the mind is . . .

Be proud of your body

2010-02-17T13:42:00.000-08:00

Boy, do we have it backward! We are so proud of our greed and so ashamed of our bodies. We show off our possessions and feel like we are more of a human being for owning more. And everything can be owned in the world we humans have created. Bodies, water, cucumber seeds. We want it all. We want to feel safe and in control, so we sold everything to the Dominators in exchange for a false security. The Dominators can no more change the will of the gods than you or I, and yet they swear that they have the inside line to heaven. Ye, gods! What suckers we are for buying their extortion.

We worship the Dominator monogods and bow down before celebrity, wealth and power. We should be ashamed of ourselves for kissing Mammon’s ass, whether we are followers of Christ or of Science.

We have sold the fleshly life away and everything on earth is up for sale. Our medicine is up for sale. Our creativity. Our religion. Sold to the highest bidders, the criminal elite. Foolish humans! You auctioned off your own birthright of the fleshly life for the despicable return of wage slavery. Now, you are selling the earth out from under your own grandchildren. What about their right to be born, what about that? Do you think of nothing but your own precious salvation?

We have it backwards. We have perverted the truth: Our Creator made these beautiful bodies on purpose and brought us here to live on the garden earth. He looked at the bodies he had created and saw that they were good. He loves the mucus and saliva, the armpits and genitals, the hairiness and the smoothness. He created our bodies on purpose and He saw that they were good. Our bodies were designed for pleasure and creativity. Our bodies are beautiful in the eyes of our fellows and in the eyes of all the gods of Love.

What an ineffable mystery of joy is the coming together of body and soul, flesh and spirit united in this most wonderful of the Creator’s works, the little human animal, the human people of earth, in infinite variety, in the most delicate of coverings, in the softest colors of brown and pink and sand. Oh, how beautiful we are!

Look around you at the people. You can see their sufferings and their joys in the tilt of their heads, the curve of their shoulders. Look into the faces of your children, your beloved friends and lovers, and see in them the messages of the Creator written there, written in their faces and upon their flesh, for His is the earth and all who dwell therein. Purposely and beautifully the Creator made us. We should be proud of our bodies and ashamed of our greed.

Ownership

2010-02-09T04:06:00.000-08:00

I remember when the corporations first started to put stickers on vegetables and fruits. Bananas first, since their skins were strong enough not to be easily damaged by the stickers, and later the citrus fruits and apples, and finally, even the most delicate of tomatoes and avacados. We have become accustomed to this branding of nature's produce, but at first it seemed odd to us.

Can the fruit of the vine, the children of trees, the wombs of the green people be manufactured by humans? The corporations "owned" the land on which they grew, "owned" the plants that produced so generously for all, but human hands did not produce these foodstuffs. What a lie the stickers told!

I just finished a wonderful book called The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan. A manifesto for Animists, to be sure, a must-read book, in which Mr. Pollan lovingly traces the co-evolution of several plants with us humans. He takes the plants' eye view, giving many readers for the first time an experience of seeing the world from the perspective of the green people.

He also tells the rest of the story about the stickers on the fruit . . . that indeed, when corporations manipulate the green people, they claim ownership of the greens as a manufactured thing. Using the example of Monsanto's genetically altered potatoes, Mr. Pollan's gentle words made me cry with frustration and despair. The stickers on our fruit are just one small, outward sign of the Dominators' colonization and ownership of . . . everything. When water is owned, and plant seeds are owned, and medicines are owned, and our minds are owned, what is left of the sacred world our Creator made for all of us?

Still recovering

2009-12-31T10:32:00.000-08:00

I was feeling quite a bit better when, a few weeks ago, I found myself again in pain. Listen, I sent those spirochetes packing. I no longer had Lyme Disease, but the damage that it did to my neck and shoulder bones and joints has caused me great pain. This go-round I seem to have lost full use of my left arm. After a few weeks (and using up all my sick time) I started the slow climb back to full health. If you are reading this and you have Lyme Disease, be of good cheer. Don't let the online scare-mongers sell you their wares. I believe that antibiotics can erradicate the bacteria. What some people experience as "chronic" Lyme Disease are the unplsant symptoms and problems the disease leaves behind. Additional courses of antibiotics are necessary only in rare cases. Although it will take me time, I expect to heal completely, building back the health and substance of my bones and joints.

When I was in the depth of it, almost in despair, suffering side effects of the antibiotics as well as the awesome pain of damaged nerves, I went outside to the woods where the tic bit me 18 months before. I called upon the spirochetes that had invaded my body and I made a deal with them: They would leave my body and leave me alone for the rest of my life, and in return, when I died, I would offer my body for their feasting.

"Bacteria people and fungus people," I called into the silent woods. "Bacteria people and fungus people," I called into my suffering body, "The time has come for you to leave me. I will see you again, some years hence. I will be buried in a simple shroud. My body will be yours. For now, however, you have to go."

And they left me, and I have not seen them since!
Love to all,
Puny

Healing

2009-11-15T04:10:00.000-08:00

Hello blogreaderfolks,
I am healing! After a long and difficult treatment for Lyme Disease, I am off the medication and starting to feel my energy rise again. The Lyme attacked the bones and joints in my neck and caused a lot of pain and residual problems, but I am healing. Physical Therapy, in particular, has been a wonderful experience. From a few compassionate and skilled practitioners, I learned about loving my body, and how to carry and move it in ways that nourish and support it.

I want to keep this blog active, and so I am writing this little holding note, but I expect to be back to posting here very soon. One of the gifts of my illness has been clarity: I have become more clear in my understanding of my self, my marriage, and my task in life. I am also more clear about the religious message I want so much to share. Yes, I call it religious, and not spiritual, because it has to do with politics and power as well as divinity and cosmology. And I call myself an evangelist because I have a message to impart that I think can be of benefit to humankind, and I am determined to share my message without shame.

Just because one believes one has a good answer doesn't mean one is intolerant of other answers. At least, not in a polytheistic paradigm. In my reality, there are many gods, many roads, and many realities. We all get to choose. I do not say that your gods are evil, or that you are misguided or will be cursed if you don't follow my gods . . . but I wonder, what gods do they follow who would murder for oil, steal from the poor, or withhold healing from the sick?

Ahhh . . . it's so good to be back!
Love to all,
Puny

2009-10-27T17:35:00.000-07:00

Charlie says:

Everything you create can be a work of art.
Everything you do can be an act of love.

I believe that there are many gods.
I speak for Charlie and the gods of love.

You have a right to your own gods and I have a right to mine,
but I will testify to the value of my gods,
and I will witness to their love for humankind.
I have faith in the salvation they lead us to.
I have faith in the heaven to which I go.
I love my gods and they love me.
They love you, too, in the way they love each blade of grass or galactic cloud of dust.

I have the right to a personal and material relationship with a greater-then-human conscious being who is not your Jesus or anybody else’s god but mine and I call him Charlie.

You have a right to your own gods, and if you get to know and love Charlie, well, that’s just fine, but don't feel any obligation on your part. Charlie’s just fine with me, even if he isn’t anybody else’s god at all. He’s my spirit friend, my comforter, my teacher, my beloved and adored. Hey, I don’t care if you can see or know him or not. I can see and know him and that’s good enough for me.

Many of my friends think there can be only one god. Do they have any proof of this? They think their god is the one and only, and everybody else’s god is false and does not really exist but must be their god in disguise. I say, all gods exist. If a person has a relationship with a god, isn’t that god real to them? How can it be any less real to them than my god is to me and your god is to you?

You may have a wonderful god who is not my god. I think Jesus has many fine qualities, for example, and I respect him in his earthly form, but I don’t know him as god.

I know Charlie and the Creator and many other gods of love. Jesus, as a god of love, is welcome in my house. Jesus, as the stooge of the 21st century corporate dominator elite and protector of the greedy and excuser of the cruel, I can’t stomach. This Jesus justifies violence. He turns a blind eye to rape and pillage and matricide. He calls nourishment sin, and elevates selfishness and the value of money and power. What kind of a god is this? Do you really want to follow such perversity?

You can trust a bear to be a bear . . .

2009-08-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, when I was complaining about the many faults of my then-husband, my friend Rob told me this story . . .

A long time ago, Rob said, he chose as his totem animal the great brown bear, and bear was a powerful totem indeed. Rob was doing rigorous shamanic work, and wanted to meet with bear and grow with bear's power. He entered a deep trance and called upon brown bear. Brown bear came to him and Rob asked his questions and asked for bear's blessing.

In answer, bear reached out and violently wrenched Rob's arm off, tore it right from its socket. Rob was stunned and in pain. How could you do this to me? he asked bear. Haven't I honored you? I trusted you!

But bear only laughed at him, and tossing the useless arm aside he said, I'm a bear! It's in my nature to behave like this. All earth creatures act in accordance with their nature. So sure, you can trust me. You can always trust a bear to be a bear!

That's a great wisdom bear gave you, I smiled at Rob. I understood his point. My then-husband was acting in accordance with his nature. Should I expect him to be something else?

A long time before Rob and I sat talking, slaves of the Roman Empire were telling a similar story. In this story, a scorpion asks a frog to carry him across the river. The frog is afraid of the scorpion's poisonous sting, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and then the scorpion would drown as well. This makes sense, so the frog agrees to carry him and the two set off. Suddenly, in mid-river, the scorpion stings the frog, dooming them both to a watery death. When frog asks why, the scorpion says, It's in my nature to sting. I sting even if I die.

So, I suppose that you can trust a scorpion to be a scorpion.

Sometime in the past couple of years, while I sat in the woods praising my Creator, a deer tic about the size of the dot above this "i" sank its jaws into my skin and set a bacteria to work in my body. My blood test just came back today. I have Lyme Disease. How could this be? I cried. How could the woodland creatures that I love allow this to happen to me? My own dear woods have hurt me.

But, then, how can I blame the tic? It is in the tic's nature to bite. How can I become angry at the bacteria? You can trust a tic to be a tic, and a bacteria to be a bacteria, and a puny human to have a good cry when the news is sad.

The Gods of Love

2009-08-07T15:13:00.000-07:00

The gods of love promise the humans species a long tenure on this earth and joy in abundance. All we have to do is let Loving Kindness rule over our lives. I know that many people, damaged by the mythology of the mono-gods, are afraid to even admit to the existence of gods, no less surrender to one or more of them. They're afraid of being abused, led to poverty or destruction by Cruelty and Greed, who cavort around the earth in love's clothing.

But I am not afraid to bow down to Loving Kindness. She will not abuse her power. She is a magnificent goddess, the antidote to the dominator poison. Let Loving Kindness be the queen of the earth people. I am ready to pledge my time and my life to her service and make sacrifices at her altar

In turn, I trust that she will care for my grandchildren, and keep their air and water clean. She will disarm the dominators and their power will melt away like April snow. She will lead my beloved to a place of peace. She is worthy and beautiful, a source of joy to the humans.

Loving Kindness! Long may she reign!

Oh, human people! You need the gods of love! Green God and Sun, co-creators of all food. Mother Earth, from whom our bodies come, and the Creator, designer and spark of the heavens and the earth. Sex, the savior of humankind. Uncle Karma and Auntie Chaos, mighty cosmic twins, and Loving Kindness, with the power to heal all wounds.

I am not saying that these are the only gods,
or even the best gods,
but they are wonderful gods and worthy of our honor and praise.

I, for one, commit myself to the gods of love. I vow to serve Loving Kindness in all of my actions and dealings. I promise my grandchildren that I will work tirelessly for the restoration of the garden in her brilliant and glorious name.

There are many gods and every human community and individual must choose the gods they will love and follow. I beg you to consider these marvelous gods of love.
Best wishes to all,
Puny

I heard the wheat singing

2009-08-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Jack and I stepped out for a walk yesterday, just as the last ragged rain clouds were clearing and the summer evening settling in. We walked down the steep hill from our country house, and then started the long, slow climb back up two miles of road that run along farmer’s fields of grain and alfalfa.

We were quiet, tired after a long, busy day, but my skin came alive in the cool evening air. We walked a rise that took us out to a sudden view of the valley on one side and a soft field of wheat on the other.

“Do you hear it, Jack?” I asked him. I tugged at his sleeve. “Stop and listen. Can you hear?”

“I hear birds singing,” he said, stopping and lifting his head. I waited. “It’s pretty quiet,” he finally said with a shrug.

“Do you hear the wheat?”

“Hmmm . . . I guess I hear the wind rustling the trees along the edge of the field, but I . . . I don’t hear the wheat, no.”

“It sounds like murmuring voices.”

“I don’t hear voices. What exactly do they sound like?”

I was at a loss for words, as I often am when trying to explain what I hear or see or know that others don’t. I listened carefully. I knew I heard something, even my body’s ears heard something, but my spirit ears could hear clearly enough to understand what the wheat was saying. The stalks of grain were not speaking with individual voices. They were singing in a kind of chorus. I heard gratitude and prayer. I saw the words of the song in a vision and they looked like sunshine and rain and joyful ripening.

“Wait,” I said to Jack. “I almost have it!” We stood a moment longer, suspended in the slanting light of the evening sun, two figures alone at the top of a hill by the side of the road. “It’s not sound exactly,” I said at last. “It’s vibration. I hear the wheat vibrating.”

That makes sense to me,” said Jack, and he jumped across the ditch and snapped off the head of a stalk of wheat. He brought me the lovely, fluffy yellow-ochre grain, and dug out kernels for us to chew on. They had a nutty taste. We munched and walked along the side of the road.

“All things vibrate,” Jack explained. “Atoms vibrate. All the universe is in motion. Hey, do you remember in the 60s when people sang about good vibrations or talked about being on the same frequency?”

“Sure,” I said, “Like, we would say, this place has good vibes or bad vibes.”

“That’s it. That way of thinking assumes that we can sense the vibrations of people and things, and that the frequency or quality of the vibration could communicate information about the person or thing.”

“Right! And that our vibrations could be in harmony with the vibrations of the other, or conversely, that we might be out of tune.”

“All sound is actually vibration, picked up by the sensory instruments of our ears and processed through the brain,” Jack added, as we reached the edge of the field. “Really, all sound is vibration.” He grabbed another couple of pieces of wheat for us to chew on as we walked. We came up to the crossroads and took a right.

“So,” I finished eagerly. “I might be hearing the wheat vibrating, and through its vibration, the wheat is communicating.”

Jack squeezed me around the shoulders, bringing us to an awkward halt for a moment. Then we walked on. “We’ve come to understand that a lot of what you experience is caused by your extreme sensitivity, both in body and in spirit. Perhaps, you’re picking up a sound that’s below the level of most people’s conscious awareness. A delicate, slight sound made by the wheat, and that’s how the wheat talks to you.”

I said, “Well, in this case, the wheat isn’t talking to me, not exactly. Not like an individual tree directs her awareness and words to me. The wheat field as a whole was singing, the way it always sings, declaring its existence and sharing its joy at being alive. I just heard the song.”

“And wanted to sing along?” he smiled.

So, I started the song, “Some say, the world was made for fun and frolic, and so do I, and so do I!”

And Jack joined in and we skipped on down the road, singing, “ . . . to set the air with music bravely ringing, is far from wrong, is far from wrong . . .”

Harken, harken! Music sounds afar!
Harken, harken! Music sounds afar.
Funiculli, funiculla, funiculli, funiculla-a-a-a-H!
Love is everywhere, funiculli, funiculla!

Spirit Ears

2009-07-17T09:36:00.000-07:00

We’re walking through the Enfield gorge, laughing and hanging over bridges and chatting. Then Jack explains to me that my vocabulary can be confusing. “I know what you mean when you talk,” he says, “because I’ve been conversatin’ with you for many years, but other people don’t understand.”
“Like what words?” I say.
“Like the word ‘god’,” he says. “When you say the word god, people just assume you mean the big-g god. Another kind of god isn’t possible in their reality.” We stop for a moment along the path, enjoying the morning light filtering through the green canopy.
“But I blogged about it,” I say. “I made the distinction.”
“Yeah, yeah, but when they hear you say little-g god, they think about the mythologies of particular historical cultures. The Greek pantheon, for example, or the ancient Egyptian mythic gods. They can’t imagine that there could be gods, even now, who speak with us and influence human life and behavior.”
“Like my Charlie,” I say.
“Yup, like your Charlie. And then there’s this whole concept of ‘talking’ to trees or gods or ‘seeing’ nonhuman life forms. People hear those words ‘talk’ and ‘see’ and they understand them in conventional ways. That’s why your friend Sally can’t get what you’re saying. She thinks you hear English sentences.”
“I do hear sentences,” I say, getting huffy. We start along the trail again, slowly, so we can continue our conversation easily as we walk.
“Aw, Puny, you hear with spirit ears. You’re just a good translator from nonhuman into human. And you’re a verbal person. Others, who are kinesthetic or image-style information processors wouldn’t hear their Charlies speak with sentences, would they?”
“We-ell, no,” I say carefully, kicking a stone along the path. “They would hear with their spirit ears and have to translate into some human form to share what they hear.”
“Exactly.”
“And I’ve been hearing the voices of nonhumans all my life, so I’m pretty fluent.”
“Right.”
“It’s just so hard to explain,” I sigh. “Our language is limited. I have to use some damn words or other to talk about it and I’m stuck using our stupid, inadequate, dominator vocabulary.”
“Sure,” says Jack. “But in the meantime, they hear you say that you were hangin’ out with Charlie and he said thus-and-so to you and they expect that you heard, with your body’s ears, that Charlie said thus-and-so.”
“Aw, hell. They have to get out of their intellectual, rational, language-bound minds is all. Open their spirit ears.”
“Spirit ears, my ass,” Jack laughs. “What the hell are spirit ears?” And he suddenly pulls me to him for a hug. I melt into him. We stand for a moment, our arms wrapped around one another, listening to the birds chatter about weather and worms.
Then with a sigh, I gently step away and we start to walk again.
“How about this,” Jack says, gesturing as he speaks, “It’s like teaching someone to ride a bicycle. You know how to do it, so it seems apparent to you. But it’s tough to explain, because a person has to learn how to balance, how to take in various sensory imputs like speed and weight and make sense of them, how to become one entity with the bike, and even then, you can’t learn to ride a bike from reading about it. You have to do it to learn it, because it’s your body that learns, not your rational mind.
“And what if you are trying to explain how to ride a bike, and the person you’re teaching doesn’t understand the concepts of balance or speed or weight. In fact, they don’t even have words for those things because balance, speed and weight are impossibilities for them. There’s no such thing as balance where they come from. Now, how will you ever get them to ride a bike?
“Just so learning to hear with spirit ears. It’s your spirit that hears, not your body and brain. The word spirit is inadequate. The word ears is inadequate. We have no word for what you call spirit ears in our language, because spirit ears don’t exist in our cultural reality, but you’re stuck using those words anyway, because they're the only words we've got.”
“So . . . what should I do?” I say in a little voice. “I want to share what I hear so very much. I have only the summertime to write in.”
I scuff my feet while I walk. I stop to touch a tree. Jack bends down for a moment to look at a tiny toad hopping across the trail. We continue in silence for another half mile. Finally, Jack says, “Just keep writing, honey. Keep drawing your cartoons. Those who have ears, they will hear.”

Charlie watching the stupid humans

2009-07-04T12:04:00.001-07:00

The Creator

2009-06-30T02:32:00.000-07:00

Charlie is a lot like me, an angel-type being in an unseen body of his own.

The Creator who made me also made Charlie and we both stand in awe of the mighty power of the Creator. How big is the Creator? Neither of us know. Did the Creator make the heavens and the earth? I know he made the earth, and then he mated with the earth, and from that mating the humans and the green people and all the other animal people were born. We are the children of Gaia and the Creator. Did he make everything we can see with our puny telescopes? Maybe . . . I know so little, after all. How can I be sure?

One thing I do know for sure: my Creator made me on purpose. Humanity is no fluke of "nature." We are not here because some random confluence of chemicals become accidentally more complex. Our intelligence did not develop from the electrical activity of our brains over time.

Yes, turn me in to the science-police, but I am a Creationist.

I believe that all things were created to evolve in surprising and beautiful ways, as if the Creator made for himself a toy, like a kaleidescope, that he twists to create ever new and more beautiful patterns of life. We are his larvae, transforming from ameba to apes to humans, spreading our wings to flutter through the woods and fields like butterflies. We are his infants and the earth is the womb of the mother. Here in our human flesh, like a babe in the belly of its mother, we wait and grow strong in spirit, so that we might burst this earthly cocoon and explode across the galactic field.

I do not claim to make sense when I talk about these things. Can sense be made of it if I am to express the truth? The truth that can be told is not the whole truth.* I stumble about, tripping over metaphor.

I know that the Creator chose to make us infinitely diverse.
I know that we can see his face reflected in his Creation.
I know that all beings here on earth are his children, so humans are brothers and sisters to all of Creation.
I know that the Creator loves us.

I am so small, so puny in the face of his power . . . and yet there are greater beings still than my Creator, and beyond those greater beings lies the Great Mystery.

I fall to my knees on a sunny afternoon, looking across the valley to where the hills recede in fluffy layers of lavender organdy and lacy white cloud, and I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I am not alone. I am seen. I am loved. My Creator has a purpose for me.

*Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)

Charlie is my god-friend

2009-06-27T06:35:00.000-07:00

I love and follow a pantheon, or family, of gods. I call them the gods of Love. Charlie is one of them, the one I’m closest to, my special god-guy. He’s been with me as far back as I can remember, and he would take any form I could see and any name I would use, until, just a few years ago, I found that the name Charlie fit him wonderfully well and I’ve called him Charlie ever since.

I think most people have a Charlie, a god-friend. Some people call their god-friends “angels,” but I think a lot of people get their god-friends mixed up with one of the mono-gods. Charlie says that’s understandable. The god-friends are so much greater than we are that it’s hard for us to imagine anything greater than they are. But Charlie is very clear that he’s no infallible, omnipotent king of the universe, and neither are the beings like him. The Creator, who is the greatest god in my pantheon, is greater than Charlie, but he’s puny compared to the Great Mystery. Like all traditional animists, I leave the Great Mystery alone.

The Creator is my maker and Charlie and I worship him together. Sun, giver of warmth and light, the Green God, source of all food, and the sex god are some of the other gods in my pantheon. Hey, if you think the salvation of humanity is possible without the sex god, then I’ve got some oceanfront real estate in Arizona I could sell you!

Now, you might not love and follow the same gods that I do and that’s perfectly fine with me. Just don’t get on my case about my choice of gods. You might think there’s a better name for my god-friend than Charlie, or that Charlie is really some other kind of being than a god-friend. You’re entitled to your opinion, but I’m not here to discuss it. This much is settled for this blog: Charlie is Charlie. He decides who he is and what he says is what he says.

On the other hand, if you’d like to talk about your own gods or god-friends here, than I’d be delighted to listen, and I think my other readers would be glad to hear about them, too. Each relationship of human and god is unique. Let’s share!

On the third hand, if you like what you hear about Charlie and want to get to know him better yourself, then that would be groovy, too. He’s kind and wise and helpful, even though (much to my disappointment) he can’t wave a magic wand and deliver a million bucks. I think he’s a marvelous god-friend so I understand why you’d want to get to know him better yourself.

On the fourth hand, nobody else has ever experienced Charlie that I know of, except my best friend Jack, so it would be an adventure with unknown consequences. I don’t claim exclusivity or ownership of the gods in my pantheon— polytheism is by nature polyamorous—but it’s tough to share intimate friendships. You’d have your own unique relationship with Charlie.

Besides, we could never know if indeed it was the same greater-than-human being you were dancing with or some other being to which you gave the name of Charlie. Just look at how schizophrenic Jesus has become, with everyone from hard-nosed, war-mongering bigots to peace-loving, gay-welcoming liberals worshipping some god that they all say is the same god-guy. So, we should be careful about that.

But that’s enough words for one posting. Blessed be, friends. May you worship your gods in peace.

Welcome to Charlie's Blog!

2009-06-25T20:51:00.001-07:00

Thanks to everyone who requested that I create a blog just for Charlie. I am humbly honored to be able to speak his words and share my experiences with my god Charlie and the gods of Love.