Category: General

Look for the Helpers: The Sikh Community by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

AnjeanetteI struggled with what to write about for my May post. Would I write about the ridiculous notion which has countless Americans buying into the idea that COVID19 is a hoax? I could write about how it is fool hearty for us to even consider lifting stay at home orders when the number of infected patients are still rising daily. The list goes on due to the rising pressures, frustrations, and anxieties that are surrounding each one of us.

Yet what I really want to talk about is a shining example of the goodness and compassion of humanity. During times of utter sadness, fear, and the unknown, we need to keep talking about things that warm our hearts, remind us there is beauty and happiness in life. So, for the next few monthly posts of mine, I am going to be highlighting specific communities, organizations, and peoples that are doing extraordinary things during these uncertain and challenging times. The first community that I want to talk about is the Sikh Community.

Continue reading “Look for the Helpers: The Sikh Community by Anjeanette LeBoeuf”

Drive-by Dyke March by Marie Cartier

That was sooo fun!!!
D-Y-K-E what’s that spell?
Dyke March!!!
Dyke March Long Beach Drive March 2020!! did the regular route and then drove by elders who requested a drive-by ♡♡♡ two hours all over town ♡♡♡ We had 20 plus cars and a posse of dykes on bikes! 15 miles of driving and spilling our joy into the night sky

Photos from the author’s collection from the historic first driving Dyke March, May 15, 2020, Long Beach, CA.

Continue reading “Drive-by Dyke March by Marie Cartier”

What the Mystics Say by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

When Rachel Pollack wrote the foreword to my book, When Moses Was a Shaman, she wrote a haunting line. She was discussing the importance of asking questions as a life practice. She wrote, “Perhaps Questions are the ultimate Homeland for all of us.” Respecting the power of the question, this blogpost poses more questions than answers.

I originally started writing about his idea when it was just authoritarian cruelty and creeping fascism that I had to worry about. Now there is a deadly virus afoot.

It seems to me that living among human suffering (war, famine, disease, inhumanity, abuse, prejudice) throughout history and even today is far more common than living in places and times of stability and abundance. And a goodly amount of it is human-caused. Why are we always drawn to suffering? Is there something to be learned from it? Or are we just an impossibly wounded species that insists on inflicting harm? I wanted to see what the mystics say about it. Continue reading “What the Mystics Say by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”

Foundation Collapse by Sara Wright

 I was writing an article when a sharp crack slammed through the house. I jumped out of bed to identify the frightening sound and found nothing. It wasn’t until I was in the bathroom that I saw that the floor had separated from its molding. Frightened out of my wits I crawled into my cellar to discover a supporting beam had collapsed. Others would follow. I was leaving for New Mexico in a week.

Frantic, I called around to find a foundation contractor, and cancelled my plans to go south. Why was it that every trip to New Mexico was preceded by omens, bad news and now a crisis? PTSD struck and I was walking on air. Uncomfortable with the person I found I managed to get the foundation propped up temporarily and left thinking I had someone who would do the work in the spring… Continue reading “Foundation Collapse by Sara Wright”

Reaching for New Language for the Sacred by Glenys Livingstone

The term ‘PaGaian’, which became the title of my work, was conceived in at least two places on the planet and in the opposite hemispheres within a year of each other, without either inventor being aware of the other’s new expression. It was some time before they found each other … one party in Australia, myself having published a book with PaGaian in the title; and the other party, Rob Blake – in the UK having registered the domain pagaian.org as the term seemed to him to express a cosmology constellating in his mind. The term PaGaian was actually conceived by my partner Taffy Seaborne in late 2003, enabling the book to manifest: heretofore the body of work developed there took six lines to express.

This reaching for a new word, was the reaching for a language, which is a power; to bring together an Earth-based – ‘Pagan’ – spiritual practice indigenous to Western Europe, with recent Western scientific understandings of the planet as a whole living organism – ‘Gaia’ as it has been named, and which by its name acknowledged resonance with ancient Mother Goddess understandings of our Habitat, as an alive sentient being. So, the term ‘PaGaian’ splices together Pagan and Gaian, and it may express a new autochthonic/native context in which humans find themselves: that is, the term may express for some (as it did and does) an indigeneity, a nativity, in these times, of belonging to this Earth, this Cosmos. For myself, the new expression consciously included and centralised female metaphor for sacred practice: that is, practice of relationship with the sacred whole in which we are, and whom I desired to call Mother, and imagine as the Great She. Continue reading “Reaching for New Language for the Sacred by Glenys Livingstone”

Fasting During Covid-19 by Jamilah Ali

My beautiful mask was made by my sister-in-law, Gloria

“O you who believe, fasting is prescribed for you as it was to those before you, that you may (learn) self-restraint.” Quran 2:183“

This month of Ramadan 2020 is auspicious for me as it is my 30th year of fasting after I converted to Islam in late 1989. For those who do not know, Ramadan is a month of fasting which Muslims are instructed by God to observe unless sick, pregnant or traveling. We are allowed breakfast before dawn and then no food, drink or sexual intercourse during the daylight hours.  Fasting includes your speech; not to lie, argue or backbite.

The fasting hours in my locale this year are from 5 am to 8 pm.  The evening meal after the fast is called iftar and is usually a time to gather at the mosque or friends’ houses to eat together. During Ramadan there are extra evening prayers and the whole Quran is recited. Ramadan is based on the lunar calendar, so the date moves up by 11 days each year. At the end of the month we have community prayer, a sermon and a three-day celebration called Eid.

2020 is like no other Ramadan in memory. The irony is not lost on many of us fasting this year that God timed it this way. During the pandemic, quite surprisingly I am more connected than ever. Normally, as a Progressive Muslim the month is a little lonely for me. Usually my girlfriend is supportive, but not to the point of fasting with me. We had a group who met together to read Quran, but we never completed the effort in full measure due to logistics. We would meet for an iftar every year at a member’s home.  I may go at least once to break my fast at the traditional mosque. Usually Eid was the celebration we would look forward to, meeting with the whole community for prayer and then out to breakfast wearing our best outfits.

Continue reading “Fasting During Covid-19 by Jamilah Ali”

Hagar and Intersectionality by Marilyn Batchelor

I began to follow Kimberlé Crenshaw a little more than five years ago when I first learned of her theory of intersectionality as a more concise description of oppressions stemming from race, age, gender, sex/sexual orientation, religion and socio-economic status. 

In Delores Williams’ book, Sisters in the Wilderness, there is a closer look at womanist theology as it relates to Intersectionality. The focus on traditions of biblical appropriation that emphasize liberation of the oppressed “showed God relating to men in the liberation struggles,” Williams says in the introduction. “In some African American spiritual songs, in slave narratives and in sermons by black preachers, reference was made to biblical stories and personalities who were involved in liberation struggle.”  Continue reading “Hagar and Intersectionality by Marilyn Batchelor”

Moments of Beauty by Sara Frykenberg

Last week a friend of mine started a post asking people to share something that they’ve enjoyed or appreciated since shelter-at-home orders began across the country and globe. This friend was in no way trying to minimize the very difficult situations that so many of us find ourselves facing during this pandemic. Rather, the list she elicited and generated helped to create, at least for me, a moment of hope or peace—a moment that I suspect many of us need right now.

Inspired by my friend (who has quite a talent for pointing out the potential for joy or happiness), I would like to add to her list here by sharing a couple of my “moments of beauty” in the hopes I can share this hope or peace. Continue reading “Moments of Beauty by Sara Frykenberg”

Birthright by Christine Irving

I am a priestess of the divine feminine, ordained in the Fellowship of Isis.  So how did I end up becoming ordained for a second time in the Christian Gnostic tradition?  It seemed to me, that there were several paradoxes inherent in the situation.  My questions and conflictions made me an utter pain to both my mentor and fellow classmates.  Ironically, in the end I was the only one who stayed the course.

I rejected Christianity at thirteen and never looked back.  It took me a long time to say, “I am not a Christian,” aloud.  The first time I made that declaration, I thought I was having a panic attack because my heart was beating so fast.  The next time I felt that kind of fear I was alone in our apartment in Dubai, writing the liturgy for my Gnostic mass – the final requirement for becoming a priest.  Sitting safe and sound, of no interest to anyone, in a country that wasn’t even Christian, I was suddenly swept with the temerity of what I dared to do.  Women have been burned for much smaller crimes and all those ancient memories flared up at once.  The memes that infect us as children stay with us, vocal and insistent at the least opportunity and it may take a long time to manufacture the antibodies our souls need to regain health. Continue reading “Birthright by Christine Irving”

Women Invented Agriculture, Pottery, and Weaving and Created Neolithic Religion by Carol P. Christ

When I look at the two chapters on Goddess history in my book Rebirth of the Goddess (1996), there is very little I would change, but there is new evidence I would add.* Before discussing that, I would like to underscore two important points I made in discussing Goddess history that are often overlooked or ignored by other writers. The first is that women were the likely inventors of three new technologies at the beginning of the Neolithic age: agriculture (because they were the gatherers of plants and the preparers of plant foods), pottery (primarily used for food storage and preparation), and weaving (women’s role in almost all traditional societies). The second is that the so-called “age of the Goddess” is not a more “primitive” or “unconscious” stage of culture that needed to be superseded or overthrown by more “evolved” or more “rational” patriarchal warrior cultures.

Cultural theorists like the archetypal psychologist Carl Jung assert that “the feminine” represents the unconscious and nonrational ways of knowing such as intuition. From this it follows for them that the age of the Goddess was the age of the unconscious. This sounds good to some women and even to some feminists who have experienced aspects of so-called rational philosophical, theological, and scientific traditions as dogmatic, authoritative and wrong! Wrong about women and wrong when they exclude other than narrowly defined “rational” ways of knowing. However, there are important reasons to reject Jung’s theory.

The theory that earlier more “feminine” or pre-patriarchal cultures are unconscious or pre-rational has been used by Jung and his followers to justify the overthrow of earlier cultures by patriarchal warrior groups in order to allow humanity to develop so-called rational ways of thinking which are identified as “masculine.” That the so-called rational men of these cultures were warlike, subordinated women, seized other people’s lands, and held slaves is rarely counted against their alleged superiority. Moreover, the theory that the pre-patriarchal Goddess cultures of the Neolithic can be categorized as unconscious in no way accounts for the technological inventions that define the Neolithic era. Continue reading “Women Invented Agriculture, Pottery, and Weaving and Created Neolithic Religion by Carol P. Christ”