Love and fungus

M. and I went mushrooming today in the Wets. The local news had carried the story of yet another lost mushroom hunter, so she kept reminding me that she had no sense of direction and it was my job to get us back to the Jeep.

We found a couple of good king boletes and also a patch of “Hawk’s wing,” Sarcodon imbricatus.

It was a new mushroom to us, but I sat down on a stump, whipped out my copy of Mushrooms of Colorado and decided that it would be OK.

Still, before tasting the main dish tonight at supper, I lifted my fork to M. and said, “I want you to know that I always loved you.”

“Have some more mushrooms,” she replied.

That’s how we keep the magic in our marriage.

Mushrooms

What about the dogs (cats, hamsters, etc.)?

I cannot agree with uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds, who said, “I think you should leave the dogs behind” when evacuating New Orleans (or elsewhere, I presume).

I have a contract with my dogs: You be good dogs, and I will see to your needs, take care of your injuries, and try to guarantee you a good death as well. There is a contract with the cat too, although some provisions are different.

Starving on a rooftop is hardly a good death, for one thing. I can see why some people would rather stay on than leave without their four-legged family members.

But dogs and other animals were left behind, and some people are trying to rescue them, although that effort does not receive the coverage of the people rescue. The Bark’s blog has collected a list of Web links to organizations helping out, like the Louisiana SPCA.

Cross-posted to Nature Blog.

We’ll drive cattle through your festival

According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, a planned Pagan event in the little High Plains town of Ramah had produced all sorts of bigotry.

Last month, the Secret Garden Coven decided to hold a fall festival as a fundraiser for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. Organizer Jerusha Doucette-Johnson said she paid a deposit Aug. 19 on the building. Then she distributed fliers in Calhan, Simla, Ramah and other towns advertising the festival, which will include a ball, craft show and midnight ritual.

…all to be held at that bedrock institution of small-town life, the American Legion hall.

[O]ne man said he didn’t want the pagans pushing their religion down his throat. He then asked whether [Doucette-Johnson] would be open to a Ku Klux Klan meeting in her front yard, she said…. The same man also said he could organize a cattle drive through the area to ruin the festival.

My Aryan fire-and-cattle cult tops your goddess worship, by Indra!

The friend who brought my attention to this article remarked, “Doesn’t it seem that Crazy Season (otherwise known as Samhain madness) is starting a littlee early this year?”

I think that she is right. I was in an Albertsons supermarket yesterday, and a clerk was stocking the shelves with black and orange candles and plastic skulls.

UPDATE: A member of the ColoPagan e-mail list who attended the meeting notes, “The Klan comment was actually, ‘I should invite the Klan to have a rally outside of this thing.’ The American Legion Hall has since agreed to allow the proceedings to take place and over ruled the booking manager who was swayed by the reverend. The reverend was also invited to speak the invocation over the dinner portion, but refused to accept or decline the offer.”

There might eventually be more information at the Earth Spirit Pagans web site.

Coyote’s Ten Commandments

You know Coyote, right? Culture hero of a thousand misadventures?

Suppose he came down from [sacred mountain of your choice] with 10 commandments. They might look like this. (Thanks to Infidels of Every Denomination.)

Pagan Carnival

Visit The Wildhunt Blog for the latest Pagan Carnival.

Requiem for a city

Trying to prepare to teach tomorrow’s classes, I have been depressed all day about a city that I knew only as a visitor. This Washington Post writer has me beat, of course:

For those of us lucky enough to have come of age in New Orleans — even more than for the tourist who falls for her instantly — the decadent majesty of the city is like a forbidden love. You want desperately to explain the depths of your enchantment, but you know in your heart that others will acknowledge it merely as an easy infatuation or a passing fling. You know they will never awaken at night drunk on the coffee-and-banana fragrance of her docks or the beery sweat of her pre-dawn streets or the humid hum of her streetcar summers. How could they ever understand the depth of your passion?

I find myself going here compulsively.

Did the Tarot card readers of Jackson Square keep turning up The Tower all last week? (If they did not, someone will create a fictional work in which they did.)

M.’s and my experience of being refugees for all of four days last July did make me more sensitive to scenes of people fleeing their homes. In this case, though, it would not surprise me if people from southern Louisiana and Mississippi will probably still be living in tent cities a year from now, a semi-permanent class of refugees.

[A]ccording to Shea Penland, geologist and professor at the University of New Orleans. “When we get the big hurricane and there are 10,000 people dead, the city government’s been relocated to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, refugee camps have been set up and there $10 billion plus in losses, what then?” he asks.

Interestingly, that was published five years ago.

UPDATE: God punished New Orleans because it was a wicked city, just in case you were wondering. (Link from Andrew Sullivan.)

Falconry in the Dreamtime

Hunting magic is still out there. Scroll down past the falcon photos to read the entry.

“What’s on your iGod?”

Mark Morford has some fun with the “spiritual but not religious” meme. He thinks it’s a good thing, too. I’m not sure where the “homogeny” is, however. I see plenty of variety in the passing religious spectacle. But let Morford continue:

I have seen [this profound change] at yoga retreats and Wicca gatherings and in all related offshoots, Druidism and Pantheism and Animism, etc. I’ve heard it in the talks of modern gurus and nontraditional pastors and felt it in our deep cultural fascination with mystical powers and dream energies and supernatural phenomena, and it is perhaps most visible in the Religion & Spirituality aisle of your bookstore, the most explosive section of the publishing market, $2 billion worth just a few years ago alone, countless thousands of titles shooting up like flowers and very few having to do with how to kneel in abject guilt-addled faith to a solitary sullen disapproving deity and instead almost every single one having to do with how to take some sort of larger view — or rather, a deeper, inner view, profoundly personal and free of typical religious dogma and churchy groupthink and send us your money now so the pastor can make his Lear payments.

Driving Audhumla

Driving Audhumla is a Pagan road-trip blog by Victoria Slind-Flor that I have been enjoying. Check out “Visiting Paganistan.”

The week I spent at the Sacred Harvest Festival was wonderful. It was unlike any other large-scale public Pagan event I’ve attended before in that it was overwhelmingly family-oriented. We had so many young families, families with adolescents, and young adults, in addition to the usual coterie of folks my age. Particpants mainly came from the upper midwest, with many from “Paganistan,” AKA the Twin Cities.