Samhain at Katwood. We brought in New Light and Old Gods. Present were Datura, Tamriel, and Galen of Katwood: Omega and Beorn of Arcadia;  Eisbaer and Sharon of PagaNet, and Butch & Trinity, folk local to Katwood.  The energy was good and the signs seem positive for the coming year.

Between this Samhain and next the entire world may change.

Of course that's always true, in any year, and maybe it's not much more true in this one.  Nevertheless...
 

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11/05/99
My Grandfather fought in a war against Fascism. A lot of our Grandfathers did. Which makes me wonder why that generation has been so quick to adopt Fascism at home. What am I talking about? It was this generation that bought the lies of McCarthy and Nixon, who profited by the Viet Nam War, and cheered when their brave troops shot down those hippies at Kent State. It was this generation that said saving the planet was a waste of time, since it did not help their bottom line. It was this generation that said civil rights for people of color were part of a Communist plot, that God hated homosexuals and taught their children that violence against gay people was a sign of manhood and virtue. It was this generation that received more total help from the government than any generation before or since, but has mobilized lobbyists to see to it that poor mothers in America get nothing unless they will flip burgers or empty bed pans. It was this generation that voted in the deficit spending that we now have to pay back, taxation without representation, and it is also this generation that plans to retire on the interest we pay them for holding the bonds: so they get to rip us off twice, and tax free. This generation says that global competitiveness demands that American children live on peanut butter, Slim Jims, and lettuce fished out of restaurant garbage cans. And yet it is this generation which demands that it retire in style and die in luxury, regardless of the cost to anyone else, because they say we owe it to them.

Well, that sounds a whole lot harsher than I mean it to.  In truth I believe most members of that generation have done right as much as they could by their own lights, and that's all one can ask of a person.
But...
What does it say about a society when it abuses 1/5 of its children, as a matter of national policy, while the old are virtually embalmed alive with publicly subsidized drugs designed to keep them alive without freedom or dignity?

Gee, there I go again.  Why am I so frightened to write this? What taboo am I bumping into?  I guess the ugly truth is that a large proportion of children in America are neither white nor middle class, but a large proportion of "seniors" who actually survive ARE both white and middle class ... and of course the needs of white middle class people come first: anything else is charity (LISTEN to old people sometime: a lot of them really think this way.)

That's how they can rail against welfare, and in the next breath complain that their "assistance" might be cut.

On
the other hand, I guess they are just scared. They feel all alone in a world that has turned upside down, where all the "values" they were taught have been deconstructed so that the bare lies shine through for all to see.  They are surrounded by young, quick, strong, apparently violent people who speak an English they have never heard, if it's English at all.  Nothing is familiar.  Nothing is safe.  That nice young man on the phone is probably trying to rip them off.  Durn right they show up on election day. Durn right they write letters.  They see themselves as victims, and so they are able to justify anything they do on the grounds that they must keep their heads above water.  I guess ultimately what they want is to be rid of that fear and that sense of victimhood, but their attitude of circling up the wagons and throwing the children to the wolves does not draw the kind of genuine warmth and familial comfort they crave.

So we have an impasse, the impasse that is America: the Upstanding Citizens in their white Cadillacs with Republican bumper stickers who perceive themselves as victims, (though this could describe conservatives in France or Uruguay or Japan) lined up against artists and hippies of the International Youth Culture with heads full of Surrealism and Punk Rock, and in the middle is the Herd: the thirty-somethings and forty-somethings who say they hate the system and yet they ARE the system. They are just too busy doing the work of the system to realize it.
This is America, but clearly it goes beyond America.  Conservatives in America have more in common with conservatives in Russia or Japan or Iran or South Africa or Columbia or Indonesia than they do with mainstream Americans, even though they may regard those foreign conservatives as an enemy of sorts.  Likewise the youth art and music community has been self-consciously global for decades now, and a Hippie in Paris looks a lot like a Hippie in Tokyo or New Delhi or Buenos Aires, and a young dood in Baghdad listening to black market rock-n-roll *wishes* he could look like that.

So the Culture War (to borrow the term that Pat Buchanon borrowed from his mentor. Aldoph Hitler,) is a global phenomenon.  The forces of Old and Rich and Stupid are circling up the wagons all over the world against the Dionysian onslaught that began in 1968, or in the 1930's, or in 1848, or in 1776, or in 1215 or in 33ad, or 500 bc with the death of Socrates, depending on how far back you want to trace it. (Prometheus maybe?)  It seems we have been on the very cusp of victory so many times, only to collapse back to being ruled by those who worship power alone.

So as we prepare to Shake the Pillars one more time, I am awed by the self sacrificial futility of tossing our youth and vibrance once more into the breach for goals that have never been achieved and that all "reasonable" people know to be "impossible," but also I am awed by the tools available to us now, and never before, and the perspectives that are possible now that smart men could only dream of even 100 years ago, and by the fevered insistence that just maybe this time as we approach the cusp of victory, we will get it right and usher in a new age.

Otherwise we chalk up one more to experience.
 

11/6/99
I have begun a much-needed overhaul of this site. Experience has taught, for example, why it makes sense to use a separate sub-directory for each page rather than have it all in a pile, as it were, as I have at the Acmecity site. So what I have done is acquire space at Geocities, and I am reconstructing the site there. So far, the index page, the main page, and all the journals are there, and most of the links should work, though some will throw you back to Acmecity for the stuff that's there, and then you will have to use your "back" key to get back to Geocities, since at this time there's no link going that way. Please bookmark this:
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Wetlands/5380/index.html

The Autumn here has been just gorgeous, as you may have ascertained from some of the pictures. It's a much much kinder season than Summer here, with less to make you itch and sweat, the brisk snap in the air that gets the blood moving.
And hunting season. Of course, hunting season. Once gun season opens, no one is safe in the woods. It's necessary to wear hunting garb to reduce the chances of being shot down on your own property. It's also necessary to be at least as heavily armed as the hunter is, since killing deer seems to bring out the Dirty Harry in everybody. Years ago I caught some of my "neighbors" poaching on our land, on a Thanksgiving Day, and running the deer with dogs, which is both unethical and illegal, even here. I caught them because they were firing high-powered rifles blindly toward the sound of their dogs, down in the hollow, where I was. When I confronted them, and pointed to the "No Hunting" sign, (they were right next to the road, also illegal, even here;) they laughed in my face and said they would leave when they were finished, and they looked significantly at my pellet gun. So I was shot at, and then humiliated, by neighbors it would not be good to start a feud with, them having the same last name as about half the county. So I vowed then and there that I would not again be out-gunned by a red neck, and that if dropping one of them in his tracks on my property was necessary to get their respect, then I was sho' nuff ready to do it.

I've reached the same conclusion about other troublesome people under similar circumstances, and found something surprising: once I made up my mind in this way, the troublesome people stayed away from me. It was not that I said anything to them. It was more an attitude of "...and I'm NOT going to take any SHIT from the likes of YOU!"

I was up at the Nemeton (the rock at the top of the property.) I was standing there with the shotgun loaded with 00 buck, to lend credibility to my land title vis-a-vis the hordes of armed drunks that invade the hills this time of year. My dogs sprung a 4 point buck not 50 yards away, and he ran right at me. As he crashed almost lazily through the cat briars, I could tell he was more annoyed than scared of the dogs, and was playing with them. He ran within 12 feet of me, and we locked eyes, he sensing no danger from me, as he ran by. I watched him with joy and reverence, projecting the honor I felt at being visited in my sacred space by an aspect of my God. When he thought he was clear of the dogs, he stopped and turned to look at me. But then Hampton put on a turn of speed and they continued to play on down the mountain.

I don't think I could kill one of them unless I was actually hungry and had already asked my neighbors if they could spare some shoulders and hams. (different neighbors: enthusiastic hunters but with a sense of honor, unlike the others.)  If I had an actual need to kill one, I'm sure one would present itself to me. It would be no real trouble: I know their habits, where they eat, where they drink, where they bed down, and where the really heavily traveled trails are.  I can't see that it would be any real "sport" to lie in wait pre-dawn downwind of some likely spot with a clear line of fire, and "be vewy vewy quiet" as Elmer Fudd would say, and pick one off as they went to drink.

Maybe that's part of the reason I want to puke when I think of the macho trip these local doods get on about hunting and the hardships they endure hunting and all the skill and knowledge it takes to shoot a deer, and what "Men" they feel like when they do it.

I think Real Men don't kill for fun.

But on the other hand, ironically for all involved, the Great Hunt is one of the last of the real old time Pagan male mysteries that's still practiced. It is a carry-over from a time when it was believed to be a parent's responsibility to make sure the offspring at least knew the rudiments of hunting, fishing, gardening, and gathering.
In the Autumn of the year, while the Sacred Deer enter their rutting season, the season of sex and death, local men grow in their beards and dust off their 4-wheel drives and take the clan sons into the woods for male mysteries. There they douse themselves with doe piss... (actually I don't know what they do with the doe piss, maybe just pour it on the ground like a libation, but I like the image of Bubbuh and Billy-Bob pouring piss on each other, secretly, in the woods. Do they get bonus points if the buck has a hard-on? Naw, that's mean...)
The primary focus of the hunt, whatever anyone tells you, is the antlers. The meat is eaten, and the hide, sometimes, is used to make something, but it's the antlers (or "hawns") that the hunter hangs on the wall, often over the bed or over the door. Of course Bubbuh does not _know_ that he's invoking the power of the Horned God to protect his house or give him sexual potency, but habits of millennia die hard. And the Cult of the Horned One is alive and well here in the veritable
HOLSTER OF THE BIBLE BELT
(GOSH WHAT AN IMAGE! YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!)
HERE ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE COUNTRY, WHERE GOD KEEPS HIS SIX-SHOOTER.

But anyway, sometimes the trickster in me would like to see what would happen if a bunch of Xian Fundamentalists realized that the tradition of hunting was Pagan in origin, and peppered with almost unconscious Pagan ritual, and concluded that hunting was Satanic, and even more fraught with moral peril than public dancing. Guys would quit going to church. Marriages would collapse. And the Red Neck Pagan movement would be born.  

east window

Hazel "Nuts"

crossroads

rocks at west end of property

dolmen

Lada's Well

small red maple

looking downstream from Dragon

Rocks South of the Circle.
 

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