After the Beltane Festival

Kinesthetic religion: my left arm was a little sore on Sunday from helping to carry the Maypole in procession—a pine trunk the size of a smallish telephone pole, ridden by a zaftig May Queen. And yes, we heard every ribald variation on “riding the pole” shouted from the onlookers. It was Beltane, after all.

The arm remembers the procession and the raising of the Maypole. What was said is not remembered. “Imagistic” religion trumps “doctrinal” religion—my take on Harvey Whitehouse’s work.

As for the workshop that I was fretting about on Friday, it produced a small but interested group. Contrary to the suggestion of one of my commenters, I did not resort to a joke book but gave them the “Calling It Nature Religion” chapter from Her Hidden Children and the “Where You At” quiz from “Nature Religion for Real.”

Every Pagan festival includes workshops, but I think that the larger the festival, the smaller the percentage of attendees that go to them. Is that workshop-learning model still working?

What draws the crowd are large-scale rituals and entertainment. Beltania, in fact, is billed as a “MusicFest and Beltane Festival” in that order. This year’s acts included Kenny Klein, Tuatha, Wendy Rule, Lunar Fire/INTI, Pandora, Mythica, and Skean Dubh.

And it was Lunar Fire, the biggest and showiest act, playing after dark in a haze of wood smoke and blowing dust, that really pulled the crowd. (Lots of free-range kids there—that’s good to see.)

Half the fun of festival-going is people-watching. You have those who remove as much clothing as possible to display their Pagan body art—and after a day at 6,700 feet elevation, their sunburns. You have the mild moments of cognitive wardrobe dissonance: black guys in kilts, a tattooed cholo-styling guy in a Renn Faire-ish velvet robe.

Then there was the guy who came to my workshop sporting a spiffy Panama hat. I saw him later during the Luna Fire set. Among all the dreadlocks and glow sticks and Pagan T-shirts and flowing robes—not to mention the billowing smoke—he appeared in the same Panama, plus white shirt, dark tie, and seersucker sport coat. He looked like the stereotypical Englishman in the jungle—definitely a contender for Best Costume.

Why Did I Agree to Do this Workshop?

Fire and law enforcement people gather as the Sand Guch Fire spreads.

Photo from April 29, 2011. All the gray in the background is smoke. I am in the yellow shirt, lower center, trying to get a word with the sheriff. (Photo from the Wet Mountain Tribune)

I have spent much of today being nervous about the weather (warm, dry, windy) while yet working on a workshop presentation on nature religion.

Nature is making me nervous. Ironic, eh? Even though M. and I have been back in our house for a week, we are still jumpy. After all, lightning season has not yet really begun.

At least my little volunteer fire department is suddenly taking training very seriously. And we have some new members.

Last night, when the festival was starting, I was at the fire house, working up an equipment order for the General Services Administration.  More hard hats! More yellow Nomex shirts! And what’s your size?

So today I had to finish the workshop for tomorrow. It’s too much like preparing a lecture.

The problem is, I’m not really a Pagan festival workshop guy.

I used to think I knew some things. Now everything is complicated, nuanced, and requires further thought.

A couple of months ago, this Pagan podcaster was after me and after me to appear on his show.  Finally I told him, “You have to understand that I don’t have a ‘shtick.’ I don’t go around to festivals (other than Florida Pagan Gathering two years ago, where I was  mainly on panels about Pagan history). In other words, I don’t do ‘how-to’ or ‘how ancient wisdom can make you a better Witch’ or anything like that.”

Never heard from him again.

If I had a shtick, I would be like my friend Thorn Coyle. I would walk out in front of a group, and inside of five minutes they would be breathing and moving and chanting and visualizing and liking it. That’s what she does, but it’s not what I do.

So I will try to talk about the ways that I defined “nature religion” in Her Hidden Children, I suppose. And give people an exercise or two to do. Maybe try to convince them that even if they are not capital-N Native (in some legal sense) they can still be “native” in an earth-based spirituality sense.

I have also decided that I am sick of the phrase “spiritual path,” at least on even-numbered days of the month. Being on a “path” sounds like you are trying to get away from something, but as that 1970s wall poster said, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

(Did the same people who said “Be here now” also say that they were “on a path”? And if so, did that mean that they were in fact trying to leave here and go elsewhere? Inquiring minds want to know.)

So, yeah, a workshop. Forty-five minutes worth of blather and then dismiss class early? That might work. This bunch will probably be talkative though.

Bollywood versus Desert Monotheism

A discussion (with lots of music and dancing) about why Bollywood movies are a devastating weapon against the more radical desert-father monotheisms.

There is some deeper resonance that [these movies] have, which is why people want them. . . . Young people in the Middle East are just lapping up Bollywood.

As I said earlier, Aphrodite will not be denied.  Fight fire with hotness.

Why I Have Not Been Blogging

Everything in my normal life stopped last Friday, and it is just starting to get back to normal. A 560-acre forest fire is not like all the tornadoes down South—for one thing, you can fight a forest fire to some extent—but it is a big disruption when it is close to your house—within half a mile, in our case.

After our evacuation order was canceled, and M. and I were back home, we started feeling the desire to clean everything. Not that it was smoked up, the house just felt grubby and messy after a long winter.

When I made my quick trip home on Saturday morning, the power was off, the house cool and dark,  shaded from the early morning sun by the ridge to the east. The previous morning’s dirty dishes were still on the counter, stuff was tossed around from our quick evacuation packing.

And so I though, “As soon as I get back here permanently, assuming that I do, it’s time to start paying attention to the house, the garden, and the physical plane in general.”

Of course, when we came home, it was snowing, but we’ll take all the moisture that we can get.

I do have some blog posts stored in my head and will be getting to them over the next three days. Then it’s festival time.

Practical Magic, a Blogging Roundup

• From Lupa at Therioshamanism, “How to Talk to Dead Things.” Dead animal things, that is.

• From Strategic Sorcery, on why setting goals is not the same as accomplishment.

• From Gangleri’s Grove, thoughts on working with ancestors and a ritual for “elevating” them.

• From Witchful Thinking, a reminder about the basics of Moon phases in practical magic.

Clickety clickety clickety DING!

It’s the end of an era.

I still have two machines, one out of the old Colorado Springs Free Press building, for which I paid $5. And another that I hold onto for sentimental reasons, because I bought it with the money from the first short story that ever sold, at age 17. (I think it was the only short story that I ever sold, for that matter.)

UPDATE: Apparently I—and a lot of other people—were suckered. It was just the one factory in India that closed. Typewriters are still being made elsewhere.

Gallimaufry with Book Porn

• “Interview, Chaos, Spiritual Machines, Circles, Readings, and Book Porn” at Plutonica.

• A Heathen-metal concert review at The Movement of Sound. (That is one genre you won’t hear on A Darker Shade of Pagan.)

• Anticipating a movie based on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods at The Witching Hour.

• Bo at The Cantos of Mvtabilitie lists favorite blogs, which must pass tests of both stylishness and spirituality.

The Higher-Ed Bubble

Talk of the “higher-education bubble” seems to be increasing. This short article from a North Carolina-based think tank  pretty well sums it up:

Like the nation’s housing bubble, which eventually burst, the college bubble is caused by a number of factors. But the biggest force is, as my colleague George Leef has often pointed out, the overselling of higher education. The housing bubble was created, at least in part, by the conviction that everyone ought to own a home; the college bubble is occurring because so many peoplebelieve that everyone ought to attend college.

It’s depressing because so many people whom I know are employed in higher education, want to be so employed, or are connected with it, such as through academic publishing.

Speaking of the United States, what is the figure for entering freshmen who actually complete a bachelor’s degree in a generous six years? Under 50 percent, right?

Yet every high-school guidance counselor tells kids that even if they take on a pile of debt to get a degree, they will earn it all back and more. Not always true.

I don’t think making university education dramatically cheaper is the answer either. Some countries do — and then they end up with large numbers of young people who are now “above” working with their hands.

So they get jobs in bloated government bureaucracies, sit around drinking tea and soliciting bribes — or they emigrate.

(I’ve heard enough horror stories from the international students, of whom my university has quite a few.)

After decades of growth, starting post-World War Two when university education was subsidized for returning servicemen, then when the Baby Boom went to college (1960s-1970s), and then the “bubble” years following those,  it is really hard to think that higher education might be contracting.

But it might. And we have to have some response to that, right?

This is Indo-European Music

Delhi 2 Dublin, playing and explaining panj-ab / Keltoi fusion music.

The 4C’s: Still Lost in Theory-Land

When I started teaching college writing classes (here meaning mainly rhetoric and composition) in the early 1990s,  I attended the national Conference on College Composition and Communication at least three times at university (i.e. taxpayer) expense.

One of them produced an early Letter from Hardscrabble Creek piece back when it was a column appearing in print: “A Pilgrimage to the Parthenon.” I was learning how to pursue my own agenda.

I did that because the “4C’s” conferences themselves increasingly bored me. They were full of grad-student-ese (“foregrounding the hegemony”) and the usual citations of Foucault, Bakhtin, and Paulo Freire.

I heard papers written in perfect, grammatical English about how students did not need grammar, etc. Were the authors part of a conspiracy to keep practical language skills down so that people like themselves could succeed? Or where they so far under the spell of Freire, etc.., that they neither practiced effective rhetoric themselves nor taught it to their students?

Attending the 4C’s, I learned a lot about university writing-teacher culture but much less about teaching writing to my students.

Apparently the 4C’s conferences are still the same, only more so, according to Mary Grabar, whose piece “Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years” is a reaction to her spending “four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta.”

She quotes a presenter  who is all too typical in my experience:

“We are bigger than comp/rhetoric. . . . We do language,” she declared to nods of agreement.  Because we do “critical analysis,” we occupy the most important position in the academy.  But her own comments and repeated references by others to Marxist theorist Paulo Freire, “post-capitalism,” and “Marxian” readings, betrayed her call for neutrality when teachers engage in classroom discussions of  “what is good for society.”  In bypassing the traditional modes of argument, teachers deny students the very tools necessary to make and  [any?] “critical analysis” of their teachers’ political objectives.

It is true that a  lot of university writing teachers want to teach “critical analysis,” and true that they often have politically desirable outcomes in mind. I saw that happen frequently. Not all are that way: the honest ones can appreciate (and fairly grade) an argument that runs counter to their own personal positions.

The second group, however, is  not that much represented at the 4Cs.

One problem is that the issues faced in the first and second-year composition classes don’t make for exciting conference papers. How does the student learn to paraphrase without plagiarizing? How does the student learn to intellectually evaluate difference sources? What sentence structure best reinforces a desired rhetorical effect?

But at the 4Cs, these bright, verbal products (increasingly) of graduate-level comp-rhet programs can set aside their huge stacks of papers to be graded and instead delight in deconstructing Facebook’s “colonized vision” or whatever, well-mixed with political group-think. Think of it as the scribal class at play.