Lunar reflections

So the day is wrapping up. Night is falling here, the sun well set for many of you. The day was the way it was, good, bad, anywhere inbetween. No matter how it was, it is now over.

How do you unpack your day?

I was pretty tired after mine, feeling all sorts of muck. My own orsplashed my way via aka thread, it really doesn't matter. So I took a shower. I drew a pentacle at the head of the... faucet and ritually washed my body. I washed the muck away. I played close attention to my belly, tuning into Fetch and washing away a days worth of grime attached to my stickiest of Sticky Ones. I opened myself up to the Goddess, I felt her Love.

I would like to report that I feel 100% better, but that would be a lie. But I do feel 75% better, and that's a start. I keep breathing, I keep returning my awareness to center, I'm writing. I continue to care for myself.

That is the challenge. It's easy to find center when you feel good. But if you came to Feri for easy, I'm sorry but you have a fundamental flaw in understanding our tradition.

But it gets easier.

You just keep going, keep breathing. You find a laugh where you can, you feel the love around you. And before you know it you have moved through.

So again, tonight I will breathe. Tonight I will Love.

Tonight, I will be.

I will Be.

New week, new beginnings

Hello again Monday, we meet again.

For many of us, Monday is like our own personal reoccurring villain.

"Do you expect me to go to work today?"
"No Mr. Puck, I expect you to die."

Yes, after two short days of sitting at home and doing whatever your heart desires, it is back to the grind. Or is it? Did you ever leave the grind in the first place? I realize that not everyone has a M-F work week, but follow me here and humor me.

I know calendars show us that Sunday is the first day of the week, but culturally most of us think of Monday as the beginning. Even if you don't work M-F, our first indoctrination to "The Grind" is in school, which at least for me was Monday first.

Today is a special Monday. As the ever so reliable Wikipedia defines Monday:

Monday (i/ˈmʌndeɪ/ or /ˈmʌndi/) is the day of the week between Sunday and Tuesday. According to the Christian, Islamic and Hebrew calendars, it is the second day of the week. But according to international standard ISO 8601 it is the first day of the week. The name of Monday is derived from Old English Mōnandæg and Middle English Monenday, which means "moon day".

Today is the day of the moon, and tonight is the full moon. One could argue that today could be seen as a day of great power. So just for today, let us suspend our adversarial relationship with Monday, try it just for today, and take this as an opportunity.

A day of New Beginnings of the Holy Day of the Moon.

A day to turn our attention away from the things that distract us from our spiritual reality, and to cultivate our True Self.

Have to work today? You could spend the day bemoaning the fact that it is no longer the weekend, but does that change the linear reality of Days of the Week? Or you could choose to find a way to cultivate your spirit in the work. Can't find a way? Well maybe your new beginning should be to spruce up your resume.

I am going to make kala. I am going to do my job to the best of my ability. After work I am going to play with my son. When he takes a nap maybe I will write some poetry, or do some trance work. I will seize the most Holy of days in my religion, the Day of Today.

So what do you choose for your Monday? Bond villain or Holy Day of the Goddess that is Yourself?

Manannan

His soggy feet squish in waterlogged boots
Walking along the shore
Is it laughter or the surf I hear?
Such a familiar roar

The old pauper clown, in colorful rags
Wants to show you a trick
You laugh, You boast, You fool, Poor Soul
You missed it, his mind was too quick

He beckons me close, I follow suit
And we begin the swim
To places of power and new depths unseen
This Old One I know to be kin

Father to many, by blood or by soul
Guide to help the lost dead
Keeper of power and oceans of mystery
My bindings are finally shed

Puck D Coyote
2/23/13

Rawness

So I wrote this poem about 2 years ago. It's short, and raw. It was written at a time when I had been feeling disconnected after a period of solid spiritual activity. But I see now the illusion of those feelings, because even in that dark place I still created. The Great Work isn't necessarily about feeling warm and fuzzy all the time. Sometimes our work makes us walk through the shadows so that when we emerge we can shine all the brighter.

Clouds descend and the darkness falls
Hopeful dreams retreat from the shadowed mass
Anger fills me and I scream
No longer can I believe my lies
Gone is the radiance that once filled me
Ended are the days of light
Sacrificed to feed the Demon within

Puck D. Coyote
4/13/11

A Very Merry Feriversary

It really is interesting living where the seeds of my religion were first planted.  I can feel it in the woods outside my house, the primal energy that my Craft ancestors risked so much to worship in secret.  I can go downtown and see the building that was the church their coven would attend, so they could appear to be good Christians like their neighbors.  In a very Feri twist of fate, that building is no longer a church, but a Cabaret theater.  Walking up to the top of Lithia Park there are a series of pools in the creek that the locals refer to as "The Faery Pools."  You could cut the mana in the air there with a knife it is so thick.

It is beautiful living in our Mecca, but it is also a bit lonely.

By all accounts, that old coven disbanded before WW2, and Victor and Cora moved to California.  There have been other Feri folk who have lived here in the past, but as far as I know, I am the only one living here now.  I had grown so accustomed to having my coven brothers close at hand, I didn't realize how much their absence would pain me when I left.  For many years after moving here, it was so painful that I only practiced my tradition on a very superficial level.  I didn't go deep, I didn't really let the wild energy that is Feri course through me.  I couldn't; it was a reminder of what I lost.

Thankfully I have moved through that somewhat.  I remembered something very important that I had forgotten, that in a beautiful rite 5 years ago on this night I became one with the Goddess.  I can't be alone in my Craft, because I carry the Gods with me wherever I go.  That Feri isn't just about my loved ones far from me, but is really about the loved ones that are all around me.  

I don't hide from my power anymore.  I am even considering coming out of the broom closet at work.  Not overtly, not wearing it on my sleeve, but not feeling the need to hide anymore.  I stand strong and tall in the Crossroads.  I let the Will of the Gods come through me.  I let the Will of the God that *is* me continue to unfold.  I live, I breathe, I make kala, I LOVE.

I still miss my community, but I can connect to them in other ways.  I would love there to be other Feri folk here that I could do ritual with, and maybe there will some day.  I have taken on a student, although through a distance, and maybe other students who live close by will come.  Or maybe they won't.  It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. 

The only thing that matters is the I let nothing come between me and my God Soul as I swore to do 5 years ago. 

Even if that thing is me.

Breathe in deeply.

You are alive. You are a bright radiant star made up of stars.

Breathe in. Not only through your nose, but through your pores, your hands, your feet, your crown.

You are alive. Your three parts sing in harmony and that sweet melody is you.

Breathe in. Breathe in the grounding presence of the Mother below and the bright radiance of the Mother above.

... You are alive. You are love.

You are.

Breathe.

Good morning my friends.

Breathe in.

The Love of the Goddess is all around you. It is in the chair you sit on. It is in the words you read. It is in the air around you.

So breathe it in.

One piece of lore we have in our line of Feri is that Melek Taus is our collective Godsouls. I see it going farther than that. We are the microcosm of the Divine Twins made one within the macrocosm that i...s Him.

Another piece of lore we say, is that Melek Taus is our beautiful Lord of the Painted Fan when tempered under the hand of the Goddess. When out of her presence he is terrible.

I see this played out in the microcosm that is us. Will of the Witch alone is not enough, it leaves us flawed and damaged. We need to be tempered by the Love of the Goddess to reach our full potential.

So again...breathe it in.

Breathe.

Feeling blessed this morning. I look around and I see the love and support of a wonderful family.

Yesterday was another story. I got caught up in the pain of the things I don't have. We all have these things. A lot of the time it involves money, but maybe it's not that for you. But the point is there is always *something*. I want to go to Pantheacon and can't afford it. You may want some...one who doesn't return your advances. You may want a new job but can't find it. The what isn't the point, the awareness of the phenomenon is. There will always be something you don't have that Talker will grab onto and say "That! If I could just have that I would be happy."

I hate to be the party pooper, but no it won't.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't move and act to obtain things we desire, but when the want turns to pain over the lack of that we have a problem.

But here is the bright side. We all do it. It's part of the human condition. So don't beat yourself up over it, just notice it and move on.

Breathe. Return to center. See the blessings you have all around you.

I am blessed by my family and the beautiful land around me. What are you blessed by?

Names and Patterns

Coyote has always been an appropriate name for me. My good friend has a tendency to say "Silly Coyote, tricking yourself again." I have a lifelong pattern of leaping before I look.

This time it was following along with a deity during trance to do a very heavy duty rite involving demon work. I was so caught up in the moment that I didn't stop and notice that perhaps this was not the best moment ...in my linear timeline to engage in such emotion heavy work. Hell, I didn't even stop to think that it would be emotion heavy work. I was too in the moment.

Now, every time this has happened I have always come out the other side the better for the experience, but I seem to manifest these experiences for myself in extremely painful ways.

The purpose of this posting is twofold. First, when working with close, trusted deity, yes they have your best interest at heart, but they don't quite grok our linear existence. "You're here, I'm here, let's do this thing." They tend not to think about external consequence, so when deity presents you with work, it is still your judgement as to when to do it.

Second, you must know your weaknesses as well as your strengths and hold them without judgement. A warrior rushing to battle needs to know where their armor is at its weakest, but also needs to not keep stabbing themselves there. Shoving our pain into the darkness and covering it over is how complexes get strengthened; how Demons come to life. You must own and love your shadow, because that is still you. That is still God.

Just because we fall does not make us any less worthy. It simply makes us human.

Yes, it has been a LONG time since this page was updated.  At the recommendation of a close friend I am branching out across multiple social media sites to get my messages across.  There will be a lot of cross posting between here and the Facebook page, but I just wanted everyone to know we are alive again here!

What's in a word?

How do you define Justice? It is a word we use and hear rather frequently, but when you try to put a hard definition on it, it seems that there really isn't any consensus as to what we think it means. What about Beauty? We can say I find this beautiful, but can we really put that into a hard boxed in definition? We try of course, Beauty could be defined as “Something one finds esthetically ple...asing,” but those words seem so flat, hardly representative of something as glorious as true Beauty.

In Shinto, the word for a spirit is kami, but it doesn't just end there. It is also the word for the feeling of awe one gets when perceiving the beauty of nature. I don't mean to say that these are two separate things that share the same label, but that in Shinto these things are inseparable. But again, it is just a word, and a hard definition cannot contain the entirety of what the word is supposed to label.

What do we say when we say The Goddess? Or Godherself? Or even God? What comes to mind? Perhaps those three words have very different emotional charges for your Fetch, perhaps not.

Is Justice something real? Something tangible that we can put our finger on and say “There, that is Justice”? Would every other person agree with what you are pointing at? And yet, there is the word, the feeling, the idea, that such a thing as Justice exists.

Such is the way with Spirit, with our connection to the Divine. We may use shared language, words like God, or Spirits, or The Way, but the assumption that we mean the same thing when we say those words is false. So when people start to invalidate the experience of others because it deviates from their Way, it shows a lack of understanding of the Immensity of Spirit. The Way that can be named is not Absolute, for no name is Absolute enough to hold The Way.

God is a feeling. God is an experience. God is not a tradition. It is not a label. Traditions and labels are vehicles, not the end result.

God just IS, and who am I to tell you that your IS isn't the Way?

I guess the ultimate question is, Who am I?

THAT'S the work, that's the path, that's the goal. Discovery of God through our experiences. Those experiences come in every shape and size. When we have our attention spend on condemning the experiences of others, that is attention taken away from your own experience, your own relationship with God.

“Abstain from all interferences with other wills. ‘Beware lest any force another, King against King!’ (The love and war in the previous injunctions are of the nature of sport, where one respects, and learns from the opponent, but never interferes with him, outside the actual game.) To seek to dominate or influence another is to seek to deform or destroy him; and he is a necessary part of one’s own Universe, that is, of one’s self.”
-Crowley from “Duty”