Samain Moving Moon
Quiet. Peaceful. Holiseason lights are up. Songs of the season are in the air.
Greedy commercials which equate holiday delight with a diamond from Jareds or the latest, greatest tech or the it toy this year smear themselves across our television screens.
I’m holding out for the long night, the Milky Way, Orion rising and snow falling. Lodgepole pine and aspen singing in the wind. Mountain air. Quiet. Peaceful.
That’s my holiday. The big one for the year.
Samain Moving Moon
Torture. Dick Cheney. George Bush. Especially Cheney. The Torture Report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence–which I have not read–has not raised huge protests or expressions of outrage around the world. I heard this on NPR this morning while on the way to breakfast. Made sense to me. Why? It’s just not news.
That’s different from it being very important. The report is hugely significant for our democratic culture, significant in a way very similar to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA. We allowed (and were prevented from allowing, too) erosion of our personal liberties, especially relative to personal privacy.
Torture and the Prism program connect at a critical point, the invasion of personal space. Obviously they are very different, one physical and the other cybernetic, but in the focus on an individual, on penetrating domains normally forbidden to others, except those who love us, they are remarkably similar.
In the name of fighting a War on Terror we followed Nietzsche’s keen insight. We fought the monster and while doing so became the monster ourselves. The abyss not only stared back at us, it flowed into our actions as a nation. I blame Cheney, more than any other.
And, I also believe, with a columnist for the New York Times that he should be pardoned. As should anyone else identified as creating this regime of terror and personal degradation. Seems strange to do, but I agree that it is probably the only way we will get acknowledgment that these things were terrible and that they were done. The hope is that such an action will inoculate us, at least for a while, against allowing these things to happen again. May it be so.
Samain Moving Moon
Breakfast at Key’s with Woolly Frank Broderick. He gave us a bowl by Robert Big Elk with smudge in it for purifying the new house. There were also six prayer ties for protection on our journey a week from Friday.
My first introduction to Frank was his shamanic drumming, 20+ years ago. I’ve gone on many shamanic voyages to his drums over the years. He walks with the Lakota people as a friend and ally.
Frank’s a Celtic guy, as am I, he more purely than me. My Germanic heritage is probably stronger genetically and reinforced by upbringing, but it was not the heritage I embraced when I began writing over 25 years ago. It was the Celtic.
Not sure why I made that choice at this late point, but I know that the Celtic world felt and feels very close to my soul’s journey, especially in its intimate linkage to the natural world. Of course, if I’m honest, the Germanic scholarly mind has made an equally strong imprint. I’m a combination of the two: wildly passionate and captive of a need for scholarly precision. An uneasy mix.
Sadness, I’ve learned, is a measure of value. As we love, so are we sad. I’m sad to leave Frank behind, as soul brother and as political fellow traveler.