Tales from the jolly bungalow

When I started filming Imbolc celebrations for my channel, I quickly realized that hands do not celebrate holidays; whole people do. All my videos so far had featured my hands making things, with occasional glimpses of my hair. I couldn’t tell this story like that. Why was I so nervous about showing the rest of me? I’m no actor, for one thing. For another, you don’t see many crones on YouTube. Would I be relevant to all viewers or would I be regarded as old and irrelevant? Mature women face this discrimination all the time. This is more so than ever in this current climate of cruelty and hatred.

I was lamenting this yesterday and a good friend reminded me that my mother never bowed down to the idea that you are ever too old for living your life. She never hung out with just people her own age. Most of her friends were far younger and appreciated her age , wit, and wisdom.

I can’t allow myself to be erased. Tomorrow’s video shows me celebrating the rituals of Imbolc. Today’s affirmation is: I am seen and I take up space.

Yes, I am counting the days. Yes, there are a lot of them. The last time that president was in office, I vowed never to speak his name, and the same goes forward. I won’t give him the childish satisfaction of counting me as another mention of his name. I also believe names have power and to speak one gives vitality to its owner. if I say “that president” or “that old felon” you will know who I mean. Something new this time is the collective term I have chosen for his government and I’ve noticed a few friends already using it. This is not a government nor an administration, for it appears intent on doing neither. It’s a regime. That’s what tin-pot despots have.

People will argue that the flag is for all of us, and not just for the regime. Yes, technically it is, yet it has been weaponised to mean things that are not my values, and I stopped using it long ago. In truth, I just live here. I have never felt patriotic thoughts because they are based in odious comparisons, most of which are untrue, and all of them limit our ability to see the excellence in the rest of the world and to embrace it for our betterment. Honestly, if I didn’t love my woods and enjoy my friends so much, I might live elsewhere.

My parents and grandparents taught me this mindset. They lived where they did because of family, moved elsewhere for safety or love, and valued the local community over the broader one. there is nothing wrong with that. That view is practical and allows a person to be objective about what they need to call a place home.

What do I need? A renewed emphasis on civility and kindness. Less interference in others’ private matters. A better sense of relativism, to be able to engage in respect for others who are not like you, to say yes more than no.

The regime has gotten off on a bad foot with that.

In other news, I’ve put up a video on crafting and activating sigils. Please subscribe so that I don’t have to keep mentioning it so often.

“When it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government. Independence is my happiness, the world is my country and my religion is to do good.”

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

The philosophers of the eighteenth century are calling to me right now as I preemptively seek solace in the face of the upcoming regime. I do not afford it the dignity of being called an administration.

In my student days I never read much by Voltaire, John Locke and Thomas Paine, the leading voices of the Age of Enlightenment, and today I cannot get enough of them. What they presented was so rational: advocating the separation of church and state, positing that one could have faith in the Divine, but not expect Them to have a hand in solving the problems of everyday life, acknowledging that certain rights are inherent, and fomenting a revolution or two. They viewed the act of governing as practical and productive. It was hands on stuff, filled with discussion and civil discourse, new ideas, and immense promise. Where did we go wrong?

In this age of outrageous sound bites/bytes from politicians, disappearing human rights, and “thoughts and prayers” as a substitute for substantive action, it’s clear that we have taken several wrong turns on the rational path.

Enlightenment is my word of the year. I need to embody its rational approach and demand the same of government. I challenge them: Don’t just stand there mouthing platitudes..Roll up your collective sleeves, practice compassion, compromise and consensus. Govern, or get out of Washington!

Wasn’t I sitting in the quiet of my retreat, gently what-iffing about the things I might do come Imbolc and the end of my retreat?

First, you choose your seeds and then plant them. Nurture the tender seedlings, and plant them out when ready. Repeat this every year. Isn’t the beginning of winter the season where the only things that grow are your to-do lists?

I seem to have entered a different cycle that was already in motion, and accelerating fast. Once again I am running to catch up, and timing my rhythm to jump fearlessly in, between a pair of skipping/jump ropes. Its exhilarating.

What I believe I connected with were the echos and remains of a project I began twenty-odd years ago. It must have been intertwined with the course I had abandoned around the same time. I had picked up the book again, realised that I had a month or two of the year’s work left to finish, and decided to finish it for the sake of finishing. It was a course in Wicca, and I left Wicca behind many years ago, for the path of Druidry. I’ve recently returned to magic, primarily magical herbalism.

And so I am going through the daily exercises from the course, completing the odd exercises I had skipped because life was too much that day. I’m up to a series designed for the Spring Equinox and the course was structured that you do the lesson whenever in the year that you encounter it. I had done the meditation and noted the symbol that emerged from the meditation.

Now all I had to do was draw it on the shell of two eggs, hard boil them, then soak them in food-based colouring. The ritual involved eating one egg to draw in the energies of the symbol.

The symbol had come to represent an informal school and studio I wanted to start, where the lessons served to reintegrate students with the natural world. I wrote a business plan and then shelved it as my caregiving and career responsibilities consumed me.

Dreams hibernate but they never die. This is how I launched out of my retreat and ran full tilt into YouTube and Athena the Crafty Witch.

P.S. I made a devilled egg of it and it was delicious.

Each year after Samhain, I start my winter retreat, a slow withdrawal from everything that so many people hold dear. I don’t want the frenzy of the pre-Christmas retail blitz. I want to walk my land in silence and reconnect to the truth. I didn’t have a question to ponder at first. As the days grew shorter, I find myself thinking about the hardships that my family endured on the home front of the war. My mother spoke of the additional responsibilities she took on as the men in her office were called up to serve. There was a great sense of having another cuppa and carrying on. I understand that, and carry on they did. I was a bit more surprised at the wistful tone that crept in about when she told what happened when the men came back, now viewed as heroes, carrying the assumption that everything should go back as it was before the war, and could the office ‘girl’ please get them a tea? The 1950s were a shock to many a capable woman.

The first wave of feminism drew some of its energy from stories like this, and from Rosie the riveter, and Queen Elizabeth training as a mechanic.

I don’t know how displaced women’s rights will become in that President elect’s regime. Part of resistance is keeping the old truths alive and not normalising the propaganda and the untruths that are its foundation. Remember all the achievements of women throughout the world. Even in the US, which has lagged behind the rest of the world on this, women have held every meaningful political office, except for POTUS. This is the pinnacle upon which we stand, and we will rise up again and rise even higher.

Resist. Remember.

In the First Berkshire Anthology is a poem that ends with the phrase…people who do everything beautiful twice. That captured my imagination long ago and if giving a possible form to my resistance to everything cruel, bigoted and hateful. Doing something twice or more begins to create a habit and doing it even more starts a movement or at least a way of life.

Last week I wrote about the fierce love I have for my local community and the more populous valley below. A supermajority of the residents share my values and most of those who hold different truths are respectful of the rights of others.

I want this region to thrive, and that means directing as much resources as I can into local sources. With that aim, I just joined my second food co-op. I’ve been a member-owner of The Old Creamery Co-op for a couple of years longer than I lived in the area. I joined when I was just passing through the area. They are in a tiny building and can only stock so much. I find it challenging to pop in and buy all the ingredients for making a spicy vegetarian dinner. I’m not a facile cook. I read the recipe, make a list of ingredients and if I can’t get all of them, I sigh, put everything back on the shelves and have a bowl of porridge for dinner instead.

I just joined the other co-op, nearly twenty miles away, but this one is much larger and I usually can get what I need there. In fact, I can start locally and get a few things at the farm-market-with-delusions-of-grandeur, get a few more things at the Creamery, and finish my list at River Valley.

This is doing everything beautiful thrice! I am keeping more money in the local economy, eating better food than they sell at the supermarket, and when the FDA abandons their mission and lets the agribusiness corporations decide how toxic the food supply can be, I’ll trust these regional organic farmers who supply the co-ops to keep on carrying on.

I find that a misty, rainy day allows me to slip gently into the alternate time and space of the Jolly Bungalow. I haven’t been here (or is it more properly “there?) in more than two years. The uncertainty and newness had faded from the new normal of life and I was preoccupied with rebuilding the treehouse, acquiring two antique printing presses, and living in the halcyon days of the Biden administration.

When that went all pear-shaped earlier this month, I had to re-group and try to figure what will be threatened. This is what I know.

• That president-elect does not have a mandate and the country is still of two minds about the future.
• I am not going to abandon my values. Women’s rights are human rights, LGBTQ+ rights are human rights, and racism is evil.
• Climate change is real.
• Corporations are not people.
• No one really needs an eighth yacht.
• The government must serve all the people.
• I may live in the US but I am a citizen of the world in my heart.
• And I am a resident of a wonderful local community that means more to me than any nation.
• I am reclaiming my power as a witch.
• The same moon shines over us all each night.

The path forward seems to require resistance, or at least being true to what I believe no matter how others behave, and it requires calling out those who emulate the crass, bigoted and and hateful behaviour of—well, you get the picture.

One of my uncles was Headmaster at a boys’ school, so he knew quite a bit about crass and unkind behaviour. He was the master of the stern look and when he spoke quietly but strongly, “That will do” spoke volumes. I need to practice that!

It’s hardly a strategy yet, but identifying the values that are most under threat. It makes sense to identify the what before the how.

Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate the holiday. The cats and I do not observe it at the Jolly Bungalow. Our holiday is the Spring Equinox, called Alban Eilir in the druidic tradition. It is the time of sowing seeds, real or metaphorical, and celebrating the wonderful re-growth in nature that occurs each spring. I had a lovely holiday, thanks.

I have explored the motifs of Easter before and seen the overlap with mine. I’ve also tasted some traditional Passover foods and read about the Seder. I like to understand what others do and believe. 

This year I created an Easter basket of sorts. Hmm, eggs and chicks. Might that be something left over from the old ways of celebrating the seasons?

In an artisan-made pottery basket, lined with grass made from tow linen,  I arranged a felt chick and two free range hen eggs from a farm stand. The light does not capture their natural pale blue color. Isn’t that prettier than all that plastic decor you see in the supermarket? It may not have been what you were given as a child, but you know the harm of plastic now.

This year I have not felt the weight of everybody celebrating something that I do not. Why do I think of it as a weight? I guess it’s because I often want to do ordinary things that are closed on some holidays. This year, we are all just staying home (I hope). It’s the same day for us all.

I try to treat the day with a little bit of respect for those who celebrate it. I would not mow the lawn or engage in something that was bothersome when others are sitting down to a holiday meal. Interestingly enough, I have a neighbor who seems to make a deliberate fuss on other peoples’ holidays. Right now he is running the leaf blower, and I can remember last year at one of the holidays he decided to burn brush around the time everybody would’ve been sitting down to their holiday meals. 

That’s not what I do—even when things like this happen on my holidays. I accept the fact that people don’t get my holidays as a day off from work and they go through the day pretty oblivious to the fact that it is anyone’s holiday. 

There is a part of me that wishes my holidays were a little more known. Wouldn’t it be nice to be wished a happy harvest at the autumn equinox and to see featured displays of cheese in late winter,  and fancy breads and craft beers featured at the grain harvest?

Maybe if we tried doing some of the traditional things people do for their holidays (interpreting them though our own lens, of course), we could find common ground. I don’t expect anyone to believe in all that is behind another’s holiday, but to sample it and think about what it means to those who believe in it. So happy Easter, and may you find a sense renewal in your beliefs as I do in mine. 

Fine powder snow is falling, and that is always enough to make me feel very jolly. Usually it is not enough to make me shout “Woo hoo” to the cats or to feel positively giddy with joy. Apparently, this reaction is typical of what you feel when you were finally able to book an appointment for your coronavirus vaccine jab. I thought it was a bit daft to feel this way, but when I called a friend who had just succeeded in booking her appointment, she admitted that she felt the same way.

We spent a bit of time on the phone talkibg about things that we will now be able to do once we have our two jabs and wait the requisite time afterward. I spoke of simple things like feeling safe to hike on a busy trail, to eat at Elmer’s Restaurant in Ashfield, and to buy fabric in person. We talked of the sheep and wool festival at Rhinebeck and the NYC holiday bazaars and all the little things that we once took for granted. The possibility of doing these things fills me with unbridled joy. I don’t care if I still have to wear a mask for the few people who cannot get the vaccine (yet or ever) or even for the others who refuse to take it. 

I have always been a problem solver and a doer. The thing is, the pandemic required the whole nation to be doers against it. That ex-president did nothing, and sadly many followed him. With the advent of the vaccine, I can finally do something more to stop the pandemic. And that makes me positively giddy. 

I was but a little girl when we lined up to take the red liquid on a sugar cube (polio vaccine). I was old enough to remember it but not old enough to understand it completely, although my father tried to explain it. He said it was something you did to make the whole community safe and well, and that I should feel proud to do my part. 

Dad, that is still good advice for today.