That’s the wizards of the Kingdom of Blog, of course. Leaving tomorrow to spend time with my munchkin grandson and then head over to BloggerCon to pull aside the curtain and see who’s working the controls.
Meanwhile, Dumbya’s kingdom feels more and more like some bad movie script. As Maureen Dowd explains:
Now Washington is consumed with the saga of how the glamorous C.I.A. officer and the dashing California surfer-turned-ambassador went from wedding cake to yellowcake….
Unable to find weapons of mass destruction, the Bush team has turned to weapons of personal destruction. It’s bad enough that the administration hasn’t come up with any plausible reason for not having uncovered any W.M.D., even as it’s requesting $600 million more to find them; now it’s practicing Crawford McCarthyism……
At his office yesterday, a block from the White House that he has turned into Bleak House, Mr. Wilson was calm, even as Republicans continued to rip him. For Bush officials, who have wielded patriotism as a bludgeon on critics, you’d think that doing something as unpatriotic as outing Mr. Wilson’s wife and endangering the lives of her C.I.A. contacts would be enough. Nah.
The group that fights so ferally to keep everything secret, from the cronies who met with Dick Cheney to the identities of the people it has tossed into the brig at Gitmo, had no problem spilling the beans on its own spy when self-preservation was at stake……

So, for the weekend, I’m heading down the yellow brick road away from Dumbya’s disturbing Land of Oz and escaping to what I’m assuming is a kinder, gentler world.
I’m a good witch doncha know?
Stay tuned for my outsider’s view of the gathering of the Wizards of Blog.

Busy, getting ready to go away this weekend for the second day of BloggerCon and to take my grandson shopping for his first pair of shoes. Dean Landsman beat me to posting about going ape for BloggerCon. Coincidentally, as I was watching the news report about the ape that got loose from the Franklin Park Zoo — to which my grandson just went for the first time a week ago –I was working on this “monkey-hood bath towel” to bring to him.

Busy finally finishing ironing the transfers onto the t-shirt that will announce who I am at BloggerCon. (Two small ones on the front and big one on the back.)

Busy contibuting to Howard Dean’s fund-raising push. This is only the second time in my life I’ve ever contributed to a campaign. The only other was for a friend who’s a civil rights lawyer and was running for Albany County D.A. He didn’t win. I hope I haven’t jinxed Dean.
Busy keeping up with all of the sordid news and trying to keep on keeping on despite my anger, frustration, and sadness.
Busy making Jeneane Sessume’s Jenna something girly for her sixth birthday, even though it’s going to get there after the fact. It’s such fun stuff to make but not quite the thing for my grandson. (It’s a bead-trimmed floppy hat and shawl/poncho, in case you’re wondering.)

Busy making signs for my craft fair booth.

Busy cooking up some meals to leave for my mother to nuke while I’m away in Boston.
And, finally, busy starting to read The Secret Life of Bees, which I love already. Thanks, myrln, for the recommendation.
Bzzzzzzzzzz.

A new comment on an old post prompts me to repeat posting the words of my therapist-shaman-spiritual seeker friend, who sent the following out in an email a year ago.
Dear Friends,
Last night, on the evening of Rosh Hashonah, the beginning of the Jewish
New Year, I made a difficult decision. After attending Rosh Hashonah
evening services, I decided not to attend today’s New Year’s day service.
A strange decision. In the annual Jewish spiritual cycle, this holiday
time begins a ten day period of soul-searching and introspection,
purification and reconciliation. It is meant to prepare us for our next
year of life by beginning that year cleansed, uplifted, unburdened, and
wiser from reflection on our mistakes and the ways we have hurt each
other. What better place than a synagogue, temple or church to practice
such introspection and contemplation?
Indeed, many of the words repeated in the prayer service, in fact
repeated for centuries, are meant to bring us to such a place of deep
internal reflection. We declare that “we consecrate God by our acts of
righteousness.” We declare the Divinity is the source or morality. We
affirm that “the illnesses of our world will be healed by those who drink
deep from ancient wells of wisdom.”
I strive to drink from those wells not just today but every day. I
strive to consecrate God by living righteously. The entire meaning and
motivations of all my professional activities as – psychotherapist,
growth facilitator, journey guide writer – are found in these goals. The
beautiful words in our traditional prayers remind me of my own deepest
motivations, and that they are watered by ancient wellsprings living in
Jewish and other religious thought. Then why am I home writing this
instead of in synagogue repeating the words in person with a few hundred
others, and in concert with Jews everywhere?
The answer is alarmingly simple. My friend, a Jewish lawyer who has
dedicated his life of professional service to crusading for social
justice, told me earlier this week: “I go to synagogue. I assume that
Judaism means something to the people attending services. But I don’t
see or feel what it means. I don’t see my neighbors rending their souls,
struggling with the big questions, applying these difficult spiritual and
philosophical questions to our daily personal and collective lives.”
Services too often substitute for rather than encourage the soul-rending
that needs to occur on these days. Religion, meant to be the soul’s
guide through the difficulties of life and living, becomes a substitute
rather than aid and encouragement to spirituality. My friend asked how
he could make the holiday truly spiritually alive, what he could read to
guide his soul in the process.
I, too, want to rend my soul on this day. In this brave new world we
live in, where we are in a new form of war without end, where our
political leadership chomps at the bit to plunge us into another
destructive and morally questionable war, where ecological, economic and
social decay threaten all of us on the entire planet daily, there is no
better, no more apt time to rend our souls, to ask how to live
righteously, to ask how to honor God and celebrate the creation. For the
meaning of the Rosh Hashonah holiday is just this. The holiday is the
mythic anniversary of the day of Creation. We celebrate it by working to
make ourselves morally clean so that we can be good stewards of this most awesome gift of the Creator to us all.
With so much suffering, with such a degree of modern illness afflicting
us all, we must experience soul-rending. So, sadly, I stay home to rend
my soul in private contemplation because I do not experience that rending
occurring in the shared public arena. We are at war but we barely touch
its pain. We are about to go to another war but are not sharing our
terror. Our planet is frying, our fresh waters disappearing, yet we are
not agonizing over it and asking what we each can do as individuals, and
what we must do collectively, to help our beloved Earth heal. So how do
we celebrate and behave righteously toward the Creation? There is just
too much pressing our us, disturbing and threatening us, for today to be
a day of nicities: “Have a good year;” “Be kind to each other.” We must
ask much more difficult and terrifying and disturbing questions — of
ourselves, each other, and all our leaders. And we must demand a much
more difficult and uncomfortable search for answers.
I wish to go on with this reflection. I wish to apply the spiritual
demands of this holiday to our difficult political, social, environmental
questions. And I will. I will spend this holy day, the ten days of
repentance that follow, and the holiest day of Yom Kippur, in such
contemplation. I will ask about the unthinking sacrifices we are making
of our children and our earth — as indicated by the story of Abraham and
Isaac retold today. I will ask about how I individually and we
collectively must serve as good stewards of the Creation on this day we
celebrate its birthday and declare that spirituality and right moral
action are one and the same. I will personally apologize to those I have
wronged, and seek ways to stop further harm in my individual as well as
our collective lives. I will continue to dedicate myself, my work, my
life to ultimate concerns, remembering that power and money are just
tools to use for good or ill, and should never be pursuits in themselves.
I will tremble in righteous indignation at the daily abuse of our
freedom, and use of our power to abuse others and our planet. And I will
never agree to allow my children, yours, or distant strangers’ children,
to be sacrificed on the altar of our vanity and greed.
I will go on with these reflections in every way I can, hourly, daily,
yearly, and not just pay my public dues to the holiday and tradition by
taking an easy path. I ask, I implore each of you to do the same.
Thank you all for being my congregation of spiritual seekers,
soul-renders, and God-wrestlers on this anniversary of the day of
Creation. May you each and all have a year of blessings and meaning.
“…a year of blessings and meaning.” Yes.

At this moment, the tally for the total comments left on this weblog is 1111. Last July, I posted about seeing the numbers 11:11. When I went back to look at that post just now, I noticed that the total comments on that post is 11.
Since I don’t know who most of the commenters are, I’m assuming that they found that post through Google.
I sure am not alone.

Thanks to Frank Paynter for clueing me in to a major Crone, Kathleen Jenks, whose scholarship and writing I find interesting but from whose approach to personal spirituality I diverge when it comes to believing in past lives and all of that kind of stuff.
Nevertheless, her Myth*ing Links web site is chock full of mythic stories that I hadn’t read before, and her Crone Pages section of essays will having me linking back there for a while.
Right up front, I was most interested in her essay on “Artists and Muses: the Creative Impulse.” After relating the new-to-me Navajo myth of Changing Woman (as she creates the first sand painting), Jenks offers a quote from Anthropologist and Buddhist teacher, Joan Halifax, who commented in a 1996 interview that:
Traditionally, there are three female archetypes: the maiden/virgin, the mother, and the crone. I think there is also a fourth, and that is the woman of craft. She is the woman who takes her creativity and turns it toward the healing of the world. She can be a weaver of textile or a weaver of text. I think that’s where the women of the twenty-first century will find themselves. They will be virgins, mothers, crones and wise women, and many of them will be women of craft
I guess that has been my fundamental intent as a woman of the craft of blogging — to “take my creativity and turn it toward the healing of the world.” While that sounds arrogant, I don’t mean it that way; I mean it as a statement of positive purpose. Of course, I recognize that sometimes my positive efforts require some sword-wielding, but that’s the Kali way, you know.
Jenks’ essay on “Prometheus and Me: The Mythic, Artistic Life in Which We All Share” offers a really good description of how we “live” archetypal myths in our own lives. As she considers the Prometheus myth, she realizes:
Those were the pieces I needed: night, art, rebellion, healing, fire.
Like many intense people, I’m a night person. That’s when I heal. The too bright sun, the demands of clocks and colleagues — all these tear me apart. In the daytime, there’s no respite. Time itself turns rabid and ragged. I’m clawed apart –always have been — and the projects birthed in the night, the rich and fertile night, arrive painfully stillborn and burnt black by day’s sun, Zeus’ eagle. It was right in front of me all the time, hidden in the glaring sunlight: the myth living the greater part of my creative life has been Prometheus.
It was a shock to recognize this, but also exhilarating, for it tells me that my nature really is to steal fire for others, but also for myself, for I too need that numinous magic, that gladness.
I know just what she means. And, as she continually points out, it’s not just a Crone thing or a female thing.
Paynter ends his post about Jenks with some poems by Marian W. Love, whose work Jenks apparently recently published. I particularly liked this one because it’s about the artist’s hardest task:
Discarded Beauty
Collecting rare
rocks by Lake Superior.
“Now throw away half.”
It was hard to
discard so much
beauty.
“Now half again.”
Poetry.

Down for the count this weekend with an abcsessed front tooth. Fat lip. Can’t eat. Barely sleep. Waiting to hear from endodentist if he can squeeze me in before noon tomorrow. On penicillin since Friday. Major Motrin doses. Feel too crappy to blog.
But feel even crappier after hearing mental troglodyte Bill O’Reilly’s interview on 60 Minutes last night about his 10 Rules for Effective Parenting. I echo what non-blogger myrln had to say. (The capitalization is his):
— Discipline is essential, but no parent should inflict FREQUENT physical or mental pain on a child.
— A good parent will ensure that home is a refuge — a place where a child feels protected and loved. There will be no RANDOM violence, intoxication, sexual displays, UNCONTROLLED anger or vile language at home.
Does the first mean “occasional” pain is okay? And the second that “planned” violence, etc. and “controlled” etc. are okay?
It’s bad enough to have a toothache. Listening to O’Reilly makes me really want to escape to Fantasy Island.
The pain! The pain!