Light .... and shadow

Question on a Pagan group:

What is it with 'love and light' and 'Wiccan brothers and sisters'??????????

Why???

Why is such fluffy familiarity okay? And, without checking if the recipient even wants bloody 'love and light' and 'blessed be sister'??????

One reply (paraphrased and shortened): .I say those to people to express kind intent, to pass along the pure gentleness of my heart & soul...To express the truly sweet person I am, how I treat everyone from my friends to strangers. keep in mind that there are those of us out there who are REAL empaths, who are genuinely caring souls with true intentions.

Well.  I had to respond, because I am me.

First ... I'm still having trouble getting my head around "I'm an empath (but I can't understand that my words could be irritating anyone),"  

to get back to Liz's original question - why do folks always pushing light and love/blessed be

1 - not give a fig if the person WANTS that?

2 - not care if the person can HANDLE that?

3 - not VALUE the dark? Or the power of the lone path?

4 - Not respect that others have different boundries?

Look - for years I had stomach problems. My well-meaning husband always gave me milk 'to help settle my stomach'. Turned out I had lactose intolerance!  To put it mildly - my husband's 'cure' only made the problem worse.

 Pouring what may work for ONE person on everyone is NOT a good idea, NOT good magic, NOT good spirituality in my never humble opinion.

I have said this before, and I will say it again - intent isn't worth squat when you don't actually look at what you do DOES.  My husband TOTALLY meant to help me. His action HURT me.   

Addenum

The Empath responded: It's sweet that you have a well-meaning husband...Yet, irresponsible of you to not take your health seriously and take matters into your own hands to see a doctor. To me, that is someone not listening to their body - especially if you let it go on for years.


Baby girl didn't answer my questions .... and of course I HAD been to doctors.  Repeatedly. Because then I had good insurance.  But apparently if I did NOT have insurance and could NOT afford a doctor .... that is being 'irresponsible'.  Because the poor are irresponsible, I suppose.  

And I'm sure she still thinks she said nothing anyone can object to.  And she still thinks she's an empath. 

My Pagan Year

Blessings Darlings!

There was a bit of a debate about 'names for the full moon each month' in a Facebook group I'm in.  [BTW, if I may be so bold as to make a suggestion - if you say "I've done a huge amount of research on this" .... don't later change your story to "this is my UPG"] 

But I don't name moons, or care to do so.  I look at local plants and animals for my seasonal cues.

Imbolc - is when lambing has started in my area. And when I start seeds indoors

Beltane - is when hawthorn leaves the size of squirrel's ears (your squirrels ears may vary). It's time to transplant tomatoes to the garden.

Lughnasadha - the barley harvest is done, take a breath before the next heavy harvest work. Or .... in MY life .... first tomato is ripe in MY garden. Because there isn't much barley in my area. Wish there was, it would help my beer making.

Samhain - 3 days after the killing frost. Not the one that gets the basil, the one that kills those tomato vines noted in Lughnasadha.

Incidentally, I saw the first goat kids last week. Perfect timing if I celebrated Passover, since one of the songs sung there is "Chad Gadol" which translates as "One Goat Kid"

Frondly, Fern

 

Chocolate Egg Monday

Blessings Darlings!

Not only is today  Manure Monday, but it's also the day I rush out to the stores and buy half price Easter candy. 

I JUST finished the Valentines Day Dove Chocolate hearts, so I'm getting kind of .... desperate. I NEED a new supply.  Which is darn near the definition of First World Problem.  I might get some jelly beans, too.  And some .... drool .... chocolate covered caramel eggs. And ONE Cadbury Cream Egg for the Chubby Hubby (he's the only one who eats those here). 

So, I'm off to the stores!  See you later.

Frondly, Fern

Manure Mondays

Blessings Darlings!

I know what mot of you thought when you saw the title of this post - aren't ALL Mondays "Manure"? But I'm talking literally here, not metaphorically. 

I have a manure date next Monday! With the beautiful Suz (and by extension with her beautiful and bountiful manure producing ponies). We'll fill another 9 or 10 buckets with well-aged manure for my garden. There the wonderful if weedy manure will be layered with straw and I'll plant my veggies in it. 

Manure makes me happy happy.  I'm special that way.  The manure makes my veggies even happier than I am.  One year I got all the beans we could eat PLUS 8 pounds to freeze from 36 square feet of garden, all due to the combination of horse manure and a Beltane ritual that involved Epona. 

Just remember - horse manure is "hot" compared to ruminant manure in that using it without it being aged will damage plants from too much nitrogen too quickly.  It is also comparatively very weedy since horse digestion doesn't deal with the seeds they eat the same way ruminant digestion does.

Remember - the buckets are all 3.5 gallon to 5 gallon ones, mostly with lids, that I got for FREE.  All food grade, too, not that it matters for manure (when I use them for storing wheat/other food stuff that matters).  I get them by checking at the bakery departments of any grocery store I go to, especially when I get to the 'big city' to go to the bank or Costco.  They are in hot demand where I am now since this is rural rather than the suburban area I used to live in.  Folks here keep farm animals, and buckets and farm animals go hand in hoof/paw.  Carrying food, carrying water, collecting waste, collecting eggs, milking - you name it and a bucket is involved in it.  You cannot have too many buckets.

Suz and I used to 'package' the manure in big black trash bags.  But they tear, are awkward to fill, etc.  Buckets are better.  OTOH, using the now-rare buckets I can get for manure rather than food storage would be a problem for food storage.  I guess it's a good thing I can't afford to store any more food right now, eh? 

So I'm having a happy Friday, anticipating Manure Monday!

Frondly, Fern

Who's Green?

Blessings Darlings!

Earth hour was March 31.  I KNOW I wrote about it a few years back, but I can't find where.  It might have been somewhere other than my blog.  Oh well.  I find it rather a feel-good gimmick, similar to clicking 'like' on a picture on Facebook thinking that's going to change something.

But it got me to thinking about how environmentally 'green' most neopagans are, by looking at me.

By most of those 'measure your environmental footprint' things .... our family uses less resources than 'average' in America.  Which of course means NOTHING, since the 'average' American uses a disproportionately high amount of resources.  And those measurement tools don't count how many resources your job uses.  We're lucky that way - since we work at home at least it DOES take that into account for us. 

But .... if we used our fireplace for heat, using the 100% non-fossil fuel of wood, it would be GREAT for helping stretch out the end of oil .... but it would be TERRIBLE for air quality, pumping incredible amounts of particulates and carbon dioxide into the air.

I'm online a HECK of a lot, as a part of my work.  That means that I share responsibility for the raping of the groundwater in Silicon Valley, the work conditions in factories in Asia, environmental damage from mining and refining rare earth elements used in the batteries and such.

It's not like my coven is in the town I live in, either.  It's 65 miles away.  The denomination covenstead is 190. 

I can, and pretty  much do, recycle every scrap of paper, every bit of plastic, every bottle, etc. than comes into the house.  That does not negate the energy that went into making them, the pollution they generated, the mining/drilling/etc.  Heck, recycling some of them take more water than creating them from scratch.  Recycling doesn't mean not consuming. 

Right now my dishwasher is running.  In part because it uses less water than washing that many dishes by hand, and in part because it sanitizes the dishes better than I can do by hand.  Saves water, saves electricity used for heating and pumping water, but uses electricity to run. 

The fact that I cook from scratch actually causes me to use MORE energy than if I didn't.  It woul be FAR more energy efficient to have a central bakery do all the baking, a central kitchen do all the cooking.  Cafeteria food is efficient.  It is not what I'd like to eat.  It is not HOW I'd like to eat, giving up deciding what to feed my family personally.  But environmentally -  not having every house have a kitchen thus saving on all the appliances, cooking in big batches not individual family servings - is better for the environment.

All this before even looking at the coffee and chocolate issues.  Or citrus issues (that's sure not a locally grown item, either).  Or my beloved avocados.

Yeah, I only spend 12 minutes a week showering - I time it.  In, wet down, turn off water, soap, rinse, do the same for the hair.  Rain water, mostly, for the garden - tho' right now we're kind of droughty already so who knows what this summer will be like.  Clothes line for laundry, but I can't afford to get the washer fixed and the cold water line is blocked .... so it's washing with warm to hot water, not cold. 

Everything has trade offs.  We have cats, how much less can I vacuum without cat hair being everywhere?  How many holes in my husbands underwear before we have to toss it?  Bleaching the tighty whities isn't happening, the better to make them last longer.  They are now tighty off-whities.

The freezer that saves me HUGE amounts of money on food ... uses electricity to run, and wasn't great for the environment to manufacture.  Two cycle engines, like on tillers for the garden, are TERRIBLE for polluting the air.  Deer netting is made from plastic - other mesh is from metals that involve mining and refining, too. 

The 'measure your footprint' things say I'm green.  I look at my life and know I'm not. At all.  "Relative to other Americans' is a foolish comparison.

Frondly, Fern

Fire Protection, Redux

Blessings Darlings!

As many of you recall, last August/September there were some terrible fires in the Texas region, brought on in part by severe drought.    Some Pagans on Facebook got together to fight the fires by trying to get a hurricane to hit the area, as I noted here.

They never updated their Facebook page to say if they felt that they succeeded, or if they didn't how to do magic better.  I'll do that for them right here because I'm nice that way.

Here's the USGS Drought Monitor summary for last year.  It seems to be missing the last few months but DOES include the ends of July and September - the time the group was working in.  What happened? The drought continued to increase.  Here's the summary for the first 12 weeks of 2012, so you can compare the beginning of 2012 to the beginning of 2011.  What happened? The drought is worse now than it was early last year.  I'm having trouble finding any archives of the fires from last year to link to, sorry about that.  As I recall ... the number and acreage involved increased during September.

I am NOT here snarking about trying to do big magic. I am all for that. I AM pointing out that the group didn't like me bringing up how they were going to measure success or failure to the point of refusing to consider doing any measurements.

Looks to me like the magic failed.  Just like the magic my coven did for "Peace" during the Olympics .... and within a week Russia and Georgia were at war.  Not all magic works, and when it doesn't - heck, even when it DOES work - you need to look at what did and did not work.  That is how you LEARN.  That is how your magic IMPROVES.

Have a few extra bucks and want to improve your magic?  Pick up one of those "Spell a Day" books published by Llewellyn, and do the spells .... and look into why they call for this, that, or the other 'ingredient'.  Or look at the goal and make up and do your own spell for that.  Yes, a spell a day. Just like if you were learning piano or martial arts you'd practice daily.  Just like a baby learning to walk practices and practices and practices.

Go forth and be wonderful.

Frondly, Fern

Cheap Eats - Refried Beans

Blessings Darlings!

I haven't focused on cheap eats recently, and given the economy I really should.

Tonight's dinner is going to be the Taco recipe I posted before, the half beef/half bean taco mix.  A fact I forgot about last night before going to bed - I had planned to start soaking the beans then.

But I didn't.  I DID remember them when I awoke at 1 am. And hauled my sorry butt to the kitchen to sort, wash, and start soaking two cups of dry black beans.

Have I mentioned that I tend to be my own worst enemy?  Then again, in my experience, that is true of us all.

This morning I drained the soaking liquid then pressure cooked the beans.  Since I only needed one pound of cooked beans, the two cups of dry beans resulted in FAR more beans than I needed.  Which is great, it allowed me to make refried beans.

I'm sure all y'all already know that 'refried' beans aren't 'refried' at all.  Refritos, in Spanish, means 'twice cooked'.  First the cooking to make them soft and edible, then the cooking with seasoning and mashing them to make then tasty and give them a creamy texture.

This is a VERY laid-back recipe.  I don't measure a damn thing, it's all mix/taste/adjust.

REFRIED BEANS

Several cups of cooked beans. Any type, really, except garbanzos, because then you'd be making hummus. I probably used around 3 cups this time, and the water left from cooking them.
A chopped onion. You pick the size. I used a large but not huge one.
Chili powder. I probably used  about a tablespoon
Salt, I used at least a teaspoon
Minced Garlic, I used 3 cloves this time. Mince this first - it allows antioxidants to develop
Pepper, black, I dunno how much, I ground the pepper mill for a bit.
Ground coriander seed, maybe 1/3 tsp?
Ground cumin seed, maybe 1/2 tsp?
Oregano, a dash or so.
 Some oil.

So, put 1 - 2 tablespoons of cooking oil in a heavy pot.  Let it get shimmery over medium heat.  Add onions, cook 'till translucent.  Add minced garlic and seasonings, let them 'bloom' in the hot pan for 30 seconds.  Add beans.  Heat. Mash. Adjust seasonings, add water if needed. 

Serve with chips, or baked tortillas, or cut veggies. 

Frondly, Fern