Category Archives: Cosmology

Animal Totems, Animals, Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Fungus Totems, Meaning, Plant Totems, Plants, Science, Seasons, Totems, Wonder and Awe, Writing

Why Do We Make “Nature” Based Spirituality All About Us?

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A few times a month I get an email or other message from someone that goes something like this:

I saw such-and-such animal run across the road/fly into my yard/otherwise enter into my field of vision. WHAT DOES IT MEAN???!!!

My response is generally along these lines:

Chances are it was just going about its business and you happened to catch a glimpse of it. If you really, really think there was something spiritually significant about the event, try talking to the totem of that species to see whether it was anything of importance, or just coincidence. Otherwise, appreciate the fact that you got to observe a critter you don’t normally get to see.

Recently, I’ve been thinking more about the emphasis so many pagans and others place on animal omens and other supposed “messages from nature”. It’s as though we have to insert ourselves into every single sacred thing in (non-human) nature. We can’t just experience the wonder of a grove of old-growth trees, or the delightful surprise of a red fox racing across our path, or the split-second beauty of a meteorite flaring across a nighttime sky. No, we have to make it more meaningful to us in particular. We have to be the special centers of attention–“Nature noticed me! What a moving experience in which I was the special being chosen to have this amazing revelation given unto me by the spirits that have nothing better to do than place a well-aimed fox in my direction!”

I get that spirituality in general is, in part, a way for us to make sense of the universe and our place in it. And many of us were raised in religions and cultures that place humanity and our relationships at the center of everything. We want religion to give us all the answers and tell us what it all means for us. So it’s not surprising that when people enter into a version of paganism that’s expressly nature-centric, they still start with themselves and work outward. We want to honor nature (and, if applicable, the spirits and/or deities within it)–but we also expect to be paid attention to in return. We feel a bit cheated if nature doesn’t dignify our efforts to notice it with special signs and symbols meant just for us humans.

Yet every day, millions upon millions of animals, plants, fungi, weather patterns, geological processes, and other forces of nature go about their business whether we notice them or not, and it doesn’t change their experience much, if at all, just because we happened to be nearby. The fox only wants to get away from the potential threat we pose and continue on its merry way; the tree couldn’t care less whether we’re walking by so long as we don’t break off any branches; and the avalanche will come tumbling down by gravity’s pull regardless of how many hapless humans (and other living beings) are trapped in the way.

This isn’t to say there are never, ever any special moments in nature where we have that deeper connection, or where some spiritual being from the natural world makes contact with us. But it’s quite telling when the very first reaction someone has at seeing a bird in their yard is “What special message from the Universe does this bird bring to me? Why was I chosen to see this bird at this moment? Is it my spirit animal?” Not “Huh, I’ve never seen that species before; I wonder if they’re migratory?” Not “Wow, there’s a tiny dinosaur* flitting about my yard!” But “ME! ME! ME! MEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!”

Okay, yes, that’s a bit hyperbolic. My point stands: we’ve been making nature-based spirituality more about us than about the rest of nature. Really, it’s an extension of humanity’s self-centered relationship to the rest of nature in general: for the most part, we only value it as far as we can get something out of it. We want stuff and things from the bounties of the Earth; we want our metals mined and our food harvested and our wood chopped down and we want it NOW. And our nature spirituality has gone in the same direction. We want a totem animal dictionary to tell us what a particular totem means for us. We use dried herbs and crystals in spells to make things better for us. We spend our Sabbats and other seasonal celebrations thanking nature for what it’s done for us. And we want those answers NOW.

It’s a long-ingrained habit, and I think we need to spend some time breaking ourselves out of that headspace. We don’t need to abandon personal meaning and messages entirely; they do have their value. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to understand one’s place in the Universe. Hell, I still write books that are largely about helping readers connect with totems and other spiritual nature-beings, to include for one’s own spiritual growth.

But my own practice has been steadily moving away from a human-centered nature spirituality. I have my totems and other guides, but the work I do with them is less about me, and more about them and their physical counterparts. When I am out hiking and I see a new species of bird I haven’t encountered before, I experience a great deal of wonder at the diversity of life around me; it’s an occasion to stop, count all the plants and fungi and animals and other things I see, and be amazed by it all. I don’t study spells or rituals any more; instead I read books and watch documentaries on biology and astronomy and physics and geology. I don’t celebrate the turning of the seasons with rituals about humans and our agricultural cycles, or projections of ourselves through anthropomorphic deities; instead, I go hiking and observe the shifts in nature, and I do volunteer work to clean up my adopted beach along the Columbia, and I ask my totems what more I can do for them and their physical counterparts. That’s why, more and more, my books have emphasized the two-way relationships with totems, what we can give back as well as what we can receive from them. As my practice goes, so goes my writing.

It is impossible to divorce spirituality experienced by humans from being at least somewhat human-focused; we are looking at the world through human eyes, after all. But if our nature-based paganism really is going to be about nature as a whole, and not just the celebration of humans in nature, then we need to be critical of how often we place ourselves squarely in the center of our nature spirituality. We need to stop asking what nature can give us and teach us, and instead focus more on what we can give to nature amid the constant pattern of take, take, take. Some pagans claim that paganism is a solution to more overbearing, dominating religions; yet if we’re going to truly and radically make naturalist paganism a path of relationship rather than dominance, I think we still have some work to do.

In my next post (scheduled for next Monday) I’m going to go into more detail as to what that work might look like. (Hint: there’s no one true way!)

*Okay, so technically birds aren’t dinosaurs–but they’re directly descended from theropod dinosaurs, so the eight-year-old in me likes to think they’re just Dinosaurs 2.0.

Animal Totems, Animals, Artwork, Cosmology, Ethics, Rituals, Skin Spirits, Totems, Way of the Scavenger

Purification Ritual For Hides, Bones and Other Animal Remains

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My artwork and other practices with hides, bones and other animal remains have always been intensely spiritual. I didn’t like seeing them displayed as mere trophies or status symbols, and so set out to remake them as sacred creations and beloved personal artifacts, guides in costumed shapeshifting and curiosities for consideration. I wanted them to be revered, not merely possessed.

There are a lot of factors outside of my control in this. I can’t control who buys a particular item (other than turning away the occasional rude customer) or what they do with something I made once they have it. I’ve just had to learn to let go and let gods in that regard. But I can do my best to seek out my target audience and present my work in a way that will appeal to them, and keep working my intent into everything I create. And I add a bit of a ritual to it, too, whether you want to believe it changes things on a distinctly spiritual level, or simply helps me stay focused on my task.

I realized recently that while I reference the ritual I do quite a bit, I haven’t actually written about it much. So I figured now would be as good a time as any to share it with you in detail. You’re welcome to try it out for yourself, modify it as needed, but please do give credit when sharing.

There are three parts of the ritual: the meditation, the purification, and the offering.

The meditation is the part that takes the longest. I’ll sit with each piece that I’ve created, and meditate with the spirits of the animals whose remains are incorporated into the art. I have a conversation with them, and ask each of them to show me what they’d like me to know about their lives and deaths. Sometimes I get a vivid, play-by-play of their last moments; other times I get highlights of their lives, especially when they were young (even other animals like to reminisce about childhood). I’ve often gotten some of this information already; as I create the art I’m having an ongoing conversation with them about what I’m creating and what they’d like me to include, and it’s a good opportunity to chat with them about other things as well.

The purification involves a physical smudging of the completed artwork. I used to use sagebrush, but these days I tend more toward cedar or sweetgrass as I like the aroma better. I generally only use a tiny bit at one time; rather than burning an entire sage smudge stick, I’d just pull out one lone leaf and light it. Part of this is to keep from aggravating my asthma, but it’s also so I’m using fewer resources. One leaf purifies as well as thirty in my experience, even if it takes just a touch longer to smudge the entire piece. It’s really an issue of quality over quantity. Other forms of purification can work, too, though I recommend against water-based ones since water can hurt certain hides and other remains. I also say a prayer over each piece at this time, asking that they will go to someone who will love them and cherish them for who and what they are, and thanking them for letting me work with them in the first place.

The offering is the part that’s changed the most over the years. When I first got started, I would offer small drilled stones and shells to the totems of the animals whose remains I used. When I had enough to fill a small leather pouch dedicated to that totem, I would make the stones into a necklace, and then give it to someone who worked with that totem. Over time I became less enamored of this. What was I going to offer to the totems of the stones I made as offerings to the animals? After all, they’re a part of nature, too, not just objects to be given and taken. So I instead diverted the money I would have spent on the stones and shells toward donations to nonprofit groups, and increased my volunteer time to compensate as well.

No purification ritual goes exactly the same way as another. Sometimes the meditation is brief, other times it’s looooong. Occasionally I get a spirit making a special request for an offering or other gesture. That’s why I don’t have this all written out in one big “First say this, then do this” format. It’s more a set of guidelines than holy writ. The point is to remind myself that I am working with skin spirits and sacred remains, and that what I do is meant to honor.

Note: If you enjoyed this post, please consider bringing home a copy of my book Skin Spirits: The Spiritual and Magical Uses of Animal Parts, which details my years of spiritual work with hides, bones and other animal remains, along with step by step instructions on how to make assorted ritual tools with them.

Animals, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Gardening, Rites of Passage, Sustainability

Her Work Is At An End

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This morning I went to my garden to water and weed, just as I do most other summer mornings. It’s early August, and the hot, sunny weather Portland has been getting the past few weeks has caused both my vegetables and the weeds to engage in furious growth. While I hate having left the weeds to get as big as they have while I’ve been gone for festivals, I do have to admit it’s more satisfying to yank up one weed and clear a six inch wide patch of earth than to scrape dozens of tiny weedlings with my trowel and hope their roots don’t regenerate quickly. I’ve managed to make enough space to transplant crowded parsnip and beet seedlings, and these appreciate the cool water that soaks into their new soil.

The other evening when I visited my garden with a friend, we found a dead honey bee still clinging to a calendula bloom gone to seed, entangled in the drying, withered petals. While dead-heading the flowers today, I noticed the little deceased was still there in spite of the human-brought rain from the hose. A few specks of soil clung to her fur, kicked up from watering and weeding. Her wings, slightly torn, stuck out at odd angles. I broke off the flower she lay upon; she looked almost as though she were merely taking a nap, one front leg tucked under her head.

There was no sign of trauma or injury. Perhaps she was a casualty of neonicotinoid pesticides outside of the community garden’s organic boundaries. Or she may have been too old, exhausted on her last flight, a spring hatchling now matured far into summer. She might have just come from her hive after being relieved of a burden of pollen and honey.

Had she died at home, there’d be no bedside elegy; bees are much too efficient for that. Her corpse would have been dragged from where she fell, then dropped unceremoniously into a refuse pile outside the hive. Here, nestled on the edge of a fertile calendula blossom, she was afforded a bit more peace, a few days to lie in repose. Probably no one but I and my friend took note of her passing;  certainly none of her hive-sisters would have noticed she was missing. There is no room in the hive for sentimentality when life is so brief to begin with.

I’ve brought her home with me. For now she’ll rest on my work bench, off to the side. I have ideas on how to honor her with my funerary art, but for the moment she’ll lie in state, a reminder of so many of the reasons why I do what I do–and a warning against working too hard lest I, too, only find peace when my own work is at an end.

Animal Totems, Animals, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Ethics, Meaning, Totems

Werewolf as Totem

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Recently, a fellow Twitter user, @LilMissCoyote, asked me my opinion on “the ‘werewolf’ as a spiritually distinct entity from a wolf”. I gave her a quick answer, but I wanted to go into more detail now that I’m not limited to 160 characters at a time.

A werewolf, of course, is a human being who turns into a wolf, often during the full moon, though some werewolves are thought to have more control over the shift from one form to another. While the werewolf is best known from European mythologies, wolf and other shapechangers are spoken of worldwide. They are on the threshold between humanity and the rest of nature; moreover, they embody that liminal space. That is the first part of what makes Werewolf different from Wolf. Gray Wolf is its own being. While all totems can act as bridges between their species and humans, they are still, ultimately themselves. Gray Wolf is not human any more than we are wolves ourselves. But Werewolf is some of both.

The concept of the werewolf has its roots in the differentiation between humans, and all other nature. Once, we were just another animal in the landscape, struggling with other creatures for food, shelter, and safety. At some point we gained a certain awareness of ourselves as a species, and particularly what made us unique among animals. We noticed our unique ways of communication and the advanced tools we created and used. Eventually, we got this idea that these things made us not only special, but separate from other animals and the rest of nature. Some even considered us to be superior to everything else, somehow chosen by a higher power or made in the image of the Divine. We ceased to simply be “the People” among “the Ravens” and “the Tapirs” and “the White Oaks”, and lorded ourselves over the lot.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Romulus_and_Remus#mediaviewer/File:Estatualoba.JPGSo began our supposed separation from the rest of nature. So began the birth of the werewolf.

Wolves, you see, aren’t that different from us in personality. We’re both social and have something of a hierarchy in our family-based groups. Once we humans came down from the trees, ate more meat, and headed north, we discovered that we could learn a lot from our lupine neighbors, and in almost every culture that shares space with wolves, these four-legged creatures have featured prominently in our mythologies. They are charismatic megafauna, big and impressive and noticeable. And even today we share space with their descendants, domestic dogs who are our closest non-human companions.

Wolves, then, became our symbol of the rest of nature, and the werewolf the bridge between that and us. How a given community viewed werewolves closely reflects their feelings on nature as a whole; benevolent shapeshifters reflect a more respectable and close-by natural world, while vicious, terrifying monsters often herald a fear of what lies beyond the light of the campfire. In Europe, particularly as Christianity took hold, werewolves and their wolf kin alike were seen as symbols of evil and desolation, and wolves were slaughtered mercilessly to “tame the land”.

Today, all species of wolves are endangered to one degree or another–those, of course, that haven’t been driven extinct already. And more would be extinct, too, had we not had a shift in our own consciousness, particularly those of us in Western countries where the most damage was done. Sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, as the modern environmental movement began to coalesce into more than a basic appreciation for nature, there came scientists and others who spoke up for wolves. Their narratives were not of bloodthirsty killers and two hundred pound monsters lurking in the trees, but of intelligent, family-oriented animals just as fragile and vulnerable to the challenges of the world as the rest of us. They awakened more and more people to the reality that we were more of a danger to the wolves than they were to us–and we were so close to killing them all.

Lon_Chaney_Jr.That change caught up to werewolves, too. Once a mainstay of horror fiction (and still keeping that throne, thank you very much), werewolves are being seen in a more sympathetic light. They may still be fierce and strong and capable of great destruction, but we get to see their softer, more relatable wolf and human sides–and even the occasional cuddliness, too. We see werewolf families, something Lawrence Talbot could never have dreamed of. We watch them muddle through dating and growing pains of all sorts, balance out a normal human lifestyle with the call of the wild, all to varying degrees of success.

And that’s how we see nature. No longer is nature something harmful to be tamed and turned to our service. Now we accept it as it is, value it for itself, appreciate it in all its blood and glory. We still allow it to have its fangs, but we no longer assume those fangs should not exist because they’re dangerous. And we see the need to preserve nature, kind or harsh, not just for ourselves, but for everything on Earth.

This is the primary lesson of Werewolf. Not bloodlust, not being a furry id, but balance, awareness, turning the strict duality into a continuum. Werewolf is the one who reminds us, more than any other, to come home to nature. Werewolf is the answer to the nature/human perceived divide, and the internal conflict we feel over what makes us unique as a species, and what of us weaves into the rest of nature. Werewolf allows us our individual adventures but waits patiently for us in the moonlight to show us our way home.

Note: This blog post first appeared as exclusive content available only to my patrons at Patreon. Want to be the first to see new content before it goes public, along with work in progress pictures, monthly perks, and other neat things? Support me here on Patreon–just $1 a month gets you the sneak peeks!

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wolf_tracks#mediaviewer/File:Wolf_print_on_the_Anaktuvuk_River._North_Slope,_Alaska.jpg

Animal Totems, Animals, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Science, Totems, Writing

Totem Profile: Gray Wolf

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(Photo source.)

One of the features I’m offering some of my patrons on Patreon is a monthly totem profile, featuring a different animal, plant or fungus totem each month. I’m still not a big fan of totem dictionaries for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being what a particular totem teaches me may not be what it has to say to you–if anything. So rather than offering up the usual “This totem means this, that totem means that” dictionary entry, my goal is to offer up fuel for your own explorations. It’s a little more specific than the exercises and ideas I offer in my books on working with totems in general; these monthly profiles provide some inspiration for connecting with a particular totem. However, they should NOT be seen as “Lupa says this is what the totem means, so you can just stop trying now”, and you should always keep yourself open to the possibility that the totem has bailiwicks that aren’t mentioned in the profile. And, as always, these profiles are from the perspective of non-indigenous, neopagan totemism, and are colored heavily by my own experiences and interpretations.

If you would like to receive access to these profiles, become my patron at Patreon at a level of $5/month or more. In addition to the profiles you’ll also get access to other patron-only content like work in progress shots of art projects, sneak peeks of completed blog posts before they go public, nature photos that I don’t post elsewhere, and other exclusive goodies.

This Gray Wolf profile is just a sample; I’ll be posting an additional profile on another totem for my patrons for August.

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Name: Gray Wolf
Scientific Classification: Animalia Chordata Mammalia Carnivora Canidae Caninae Canini Canis lupus
Range: Almost all of the Northern Hemisphere historically, now reduced to less human-populated wilderness areas of Europe, Asia and North America

Physical Characteristics: The largest existing wild canine, the gray wolf is a lean, powerfully built hunter made for long-distance chases and ranging over cast territories. Wolves are typically about twenty-six to thirty-four inches high at the shoulder and may be up to six feet in length. Average weight for wolves is seventy to eighty pounds, with females being slightly smaller. Wolves in northern areas are generally larger than their southern cousins. The wolf’s double-layered pelt can be a variety of colors ranging from silvery-gray to brown, red, yellow, and even pure white; black wolves, which often have paler gray hairs mixed in, are derived from lineages that crossbred with domestic dogs in the distant past. In the wild, the wolf’s average lifespan is six to eight years, though wild wolves have been known to survive up to thirteen years, and captive wolves a few years beyond that. Wolves are primarily carnivores, and will hunt prey ranging from field mice to moose and other deer depending on availability. However, they may also consume a smaller portion of high-calorie vegetable matter such as berries and fruit.

Evolutionary History: Some of the earliest known ancestors of today’s wolf were the creodonts, Cretaceous-era carnivorous mammals that were dwarfed by their dinosaur neighbors over 100 million years ago. About fifty million years later one branch of creodonts became the carnassials, which had evolved better jaws for meat-eating and began to resemble today’s canines. Miacis is the specific member of this group that we think gave rise to canines and related modern carnivores like bears and weasels. Miacis gave rise to Cynodictis around 35 million years ago, which then later evolved into Tomarctus at about 20 million years ago. We don’t start seeing truly wolf-like creatures until about three million years ago, and the gray wolf proper first appeared about a million years ago in what is now Eurasia, later moving into North America. Today around forty subspecies of wolf (including a few now extinct) are recognized, including the domestic dog and the Australian dingo.

Behavior: Gray wolves are among the most social of canines, living in packs generally composed of a mating pair and their pups from previous years; a litter averages four to eight pups. This social lifestyle offers the wolves the opportunity to hunt larger prey as a group than they would as individuals. Wolves hunt their prey by chasing it down, first getting as close as they can to the prey, then running after it to separate it from its herd and tire it out. Wolves have been known to chase prey in shifts, with new wolves replacing those that are tired out, much like passing a baton in a relay race. A wolf can eat up to twenty pounds of meat or more at one sitting, after which a long nap is generally warranted. Hunting is only a small part of a wolf’s life, though. They are quite playful creatures, both with their pups and with fellow adult packmates. They enthusiastically greet each other when they reunite after separation, and use a variety of sounds to communicate both close by and at a distance. The pack is highly territorial and will defend their territory from other packs with some ferocity. While most pack disputes are settled without violence, on occasions fights may occur, leading to injury or even death. Contrary to popular myth, wolves are generally shy creatures when it comes to humans, and usually take great pains to avoid us. It is only a very starved or very sick wolf that will attempt to attack a human being, though wolves close to human settlements have been known to hunt loose dogs and cats and, on occasion, livestock.

Cultural Impact: The gray wolf is one of the most recognizable wild animals in the Northern Hemisphere, and has had a significant contribution to the symbolism of various cultures throughout the land. The wolf’s ferocity in hunting and defending its territory have earned it a reputation as a powerful being, sometimes revered and sometimes feared–and often both. The Big Bad Wolf of fairy tales is just one of several iterations of the wolf as a terrifying monster, and is derived in part from the villainous wolf of Aesop’s fables and the Brothers Grimm. The Navajo in the southwest United States tell of the yee naldlooshi (popularly known as a skinwalker), a human witch who transforms into a wolf (or other animal) to attack and terrorize people. And Fenrir (or Fenris), a monstrous wolf of Norse mythology, is said to be the killer of the god Odin when the end of the world, Ragnarok, arrives. But the wolf is often seen in a positive light as well. Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were said to have been raised by a female wolf, and a similar lupine kinship has been adopted by cultures worldwide, from the Chechen people of Eastern Europe to the Mongols of Asia to several Native American cultures. The strength of wolves also makes them a common symbol of warriors and warrior culture, and their prowess in hunting has been emulated by humans for millenia. Today, the wolf is a common representative of the wilderness and the need to protect it, and several environmental groups use it as their emblem.

Totemic Inspiration: It is difficult for me to write about Gray Wolf sometimes because he has been such a significant part of my life from a very early age and has taught me so much of who I am today–persistence, drive, the ability to connect, but also a sharp tooth and not always at the appropriate times. Gray Wolf’s cosmopolitan children and high cultural profile makes her one of the most popular totems and almost sort of a “gateway totem”. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as he is often associated with teaching and guidance in neopagan totemism, and in my experience tends to be pretty patient (think of a wolf being gently mauled by a litter of playful pups!) Because wolves are persistent long-distance hunters, Gray Wolf may be called upon for help with staying the course in long-term projects and endeavors, though with an eye toward adapting one’s tactics to be more effective, much as a wolf must change course when prey darts off in another direction, or when a new prey animal becomes evident in chasing a herd. This adaptability is reflected in the wolf’s incredibly large range and ability to live in habitats ranging from deserts to tundra to forests, and for myself I’ve learned quite a bit about making the most of the resources available to me from Gray Wolf. Wolf is not without her shortcomings, though; while territoriality can be helpful when resources are limited and need to be protected fiercely, humanity in general has a lot to learn about generosity, particularly in cultures where there are many resources, but those resources are treated as though they are scarce. It’s not that wolves can’t be cooperative or benefit other beings; they frequently partner with ravens in finding food and in play, and a wolf’s kill can feed dozens of other animals. But Gray Wolf’s loyalty is to his own first and foremost, and this may need to be offset with a conscious reminder that as humans we do not need to restrict our intentional loyalty only to our nearest and dearest. Finally, as mentioned earlier, Gray Wolf and her children have become emblematic of ecological protection efforts because of the wolf’s place as a keystone species, and my co-blogger Rua Lupa and I discussed this earlier this year over at Paths Through the Forests. Please note that these are my interpretations of my experiences with Gray Wolf, and they should not be seen as “totem meanings”. Your mileage with Gray Wolf may vary quite a bit, so get to know him on your own terms if she’d like to work with you.

Sources/Further Reading:

River of No Return: Gray Wolf Fact Sheet
Wild Earth Guardians: Livestock Losses
Basic Facts About Gray Wolves
What Makes a Wolf a Wolf?
Wolf Origins
Lopez, Barry Holstun (1979). Of Wolves and Men. Scribner, 320 pages.

Animals, Cosmology, Death, Skin Spirits

I Really Love Skulls

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(Featured picture: drum fish skull)

Ask any scavenger of hides and bones what their favorite piece in their collection is, and you’re liable to get an excited flood of passionate words and stories. Sometimes the object of the collector’s affection is a rare, hard-to-get specimen, but it’s just as likely to be a commonly found skull or bone or hide, perhaps the person’s very first acquisition, or something that they found themselves on an adventure in the woods.

I personally find it hard to pick favorites. For a while, earlier in my collecting career, I was pretty big into whole hides. One of my earliest purchases was a very old Alaskan brown bear rug from an antique shop in rural Missouri; I removed the rug “apparatus” so all that was left was the hide, and that was the start of that collection. However, as I got older and continued to live in small apartments, it became incredibly impractical to have a bunch of large, bulky hides taking up a lot of space, so I made them into art and rehomed most of them over time. I still have a couple that are very near and dear to me, though, my bear included.

Red kangaroo skull
Red kangaroo skull

My fascination with hides was more the “Oooooh, shiny!” effect that a lot of newer collectors get, where they want to have ALL the dead things they can get. Later it transformed into acquiring and maintaining hides as ritual companions in dance and other sacred acts. And I have always enjoyed incorporating them into headdresses and other artwork.

But more recently my eye has turned toward skulls, and there’s a decided natural history flavor to my current interest. Comparative anatomy is one of my little amateur naturalist geekeries. I love how one particular basic structure–the skeleton–can take on such strangely varied forms. A mass of collagen and calcium stretches, through natural selection and genetics, into shapes and sizes ranging from the massive bulk of the skull of an elephant, to the finely sculpted lines of a garter snake skull–and the accompanying bodies, too. Skulls have evolved to consume all manner of foods, to act in aggressive and defensive manners, to house the tiniest and largest of brains.

And it’s all out of necessity. A skull is a tool for a job, and the animal that has a skull better suited for its job than the next animal is the one more likely to pass its genes down to the next generation. The hummingbird whose bill is just a tiny bit longer can reach more nectar and therefore have more calories to work with. The bighorn ram with stronger horns and a thicker skull has a better chance of winning–and surviving–fights with other rams for the privilege to breed. So it is that from one generation to the next, tiny mutations can lead, over time, to great changes and adaptations.

White-thighed hornbill
White-thighed hornbill

You can see this concept throughout the entire body of any vertebrate–or any living being, really. But skulls are perhaps the most dramatic illustration of comparative anatomy, and to my mind among the most beautiful. Not everyone shares my appreciation, of course. There are people who feel the collection and display of skulls and remains is a morbid subject; this is a relic of our culture’s inability to properly deal with the reality of death. We’re supposed to go through life pretending death doesn’t happen, and acting only with horror and sorrow when the topic is broached (and then wondering why people don’t deal with grief very well). There’s an element of hypocrisy to the criticism of skulls, taxidermy and the like, too: People who routinely eat dead animals, plants and fungi have given me the hairy eyeball for my hides and bones. I suppose the idea is to not think of death once the remains have gone down one’s gullet, but it all feels a little like the teapot calling the kettle black.

But that’s part of why I have the collection that I do. Death is just one of the many realities of a multi-staged life cycle, and you don’t have to be a member of the Addams Family to appreciate it. More practically, it’s a lot easier for me to display the skull of a feral hog next to that of a white-thighed hornbill than to have the living creatures in my tiny apartment! And they sit alongside very much alive and thriving houseplants, and on the other side of the sliding glass door from my little balcony garden and bird feeder, both of which entertain a wide variety of living beings which I love and appreciate as much as my skulls.

In the end, I am a naturalist, if a mostly untrained one. And as I build my own museum, I am creating an ever-growing altar of curiosities dedicated to the wonders of the natural world, that which I consider most sacred. I would not be here today without the development of the vertebrate skeleton, or the evolutionary flexibility this miraculous structure has shown through millions of years of natural selection. I celebrate this marvel through the display of skulls, demonstrating the artistry and practicality of nature’s amazing processes.

Note: If you enjoyed this post, please consider bringing home a copy of my book Skin Spirits: The Spiritual and Magical Uses of Animal Parts, which details my years of spiritual work with hides, bones and other animal remains, along with step by step instructions on how to make assorted ritual tools with them.

skulls

Cosmology, Environmentalism, Food, Gardening, Gratitude, Plants, Sustainability

How I Spent My Summer Solstice

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(Honey bee on mullein flower, community garden, Portland, OR. Image by Lupa, 2014.)

Ever since I moved to Portland in 2007, I’ve spent every summer solstice at Sunfest, a local pagan festival west of Portland. I’ve collected many fond memories of the event, and last year I led the opening, closing, and main rituals, an incredible experience with an incredible group of people on beautiful land. This year, though, I opted to stay home, not because I don’t look forward to Sunfest, but because every so often it’s good to take a break, and I intend to go back next year refreshed and rejuvenated. (I heard people had a great time, there, too!)

So what did I do instead? Well, I’d been out of town the previous week, and while I was away it rained much of the time. This meant that upon my arrival back home, my community garden spot had a healthy crop of weeds popping up amid the more intentional plants. So a good bit of my weekend was spent with my hands in the dirt, digging up crabgrass and Russian thistles and a host of other unwanted invaders. I ended up with scraped fingers and sore shoulders, but by the time I was done things were looking a lot better (if not perfect).

I also took the time to plant out my little balcony container garden, which I admit I’ve been neglecting some as I’ve wrangled with the weeds down the street at the larger plot. But my herbs were all doing just fine, and the volunteer marigolds and petunias that sprouted from last year’s dropped seeds all ended up gathered together in one long planter box. Soil was freshened up, fluffed, and fertilized, and I planted out beans and arugula and other seeds. I also made my yearly pilgrimage to Fred Meyer’s clearance aisles in the garden section, where I brought home eight tomatoes and two unlabeled squash in sad condition which I’ll be attempting to resurrect with some TLC. Along with these I bought a very marked-down hanging pot of petunias; I thought the hummingbirds might like it.

Still little. Still lovely. My balcony garden <3 Still little. Still lovely. My balcony garden <3[/caption]Wait. Hummingbirds? Okay. For those of you familiar with my work, you may have noticed that I've historically been against feeding wildlife, birds included. Putting out food where raccoons and possums can get it, for example, encourages them to be less afraid of humans and causes them to be more of a nuisance (we see this writ large in the black bears at Yellowstone). However, I was researching something on the Audubon Society website, and discovered that some of the things I had learned about feeding birds, to include the risk of interrupting migration and causing them to neglect natural food sources, were actually incorrect. I figure if the Audubon Society says it’s okay to feed birds, then there’s probably something to it. So I’ve had a bird feeder on the porch for the past couple of weeks and have entertained several scrub jays, crows, and house sparrows at it. (I figure two native species out of three isn’t bad, especially in this urban a setting.) It’s located where I can look right out at it while I’m working at my computer, and it’s been beneficial for both me and the birds. They get food with minimal effort and no threat of predation, and I get to watch their daily tiny-dinosaur dramas play out at the feeders (will the sparrows get a full meal before the scrub jays chase them off? Can the crows cope with the fierce competition for sunflower seeds?)

This, then, was my ritual. I haven’t formally celebrated the Sabbats in years, but if I were to call this summer solstice anything, it would be a harvest festival. I’d been picking beet greens all month for salads and pulled up and stored my spinach, which was threatening to bolt, just before I left town. But this weekend’s haul was even better–a nice big handful of bush peas, ten nice-sized (but not too big) red beets, and a bright bouquet of calendula for both eating and prettying up the apartment a bit. This is my first year really getting to use my garden, and I don’t think I could have envisioned how lovely the harvest would be back in February when I first sowed the seeds. (The beet roots roasted beautifully, by the way, and the leaves and the rest went into a glorious salad.)

All in all, it was a good time to renew my bond with the land through this direct contact. I try to spend at least a little time with my garden almost every day, but the timing worked out that a lot of effort needed to be put into it right now, and instead of being a chore all the weeding and harvesting and replanting was a celebration of gratitude. I’m grateful for my little gardens and the life they support, including my own. I’m grateful that I have the time and schedule flexibility to be able to devote to them. I’m grateful I can invest a bit of money in seeds, starts and other short-term needs in order to get a long-term payout. I’m grateful the weather has cooperated (mostly), and that my plants have survived spring hailstorms and hot days to thrive. Most importantly, I’m grateful for the lessons my gardens have taught me, not just about necessary care and potentials for change and growth, but about what draws me so near to the land here. We give to each other, and I vow once again to be a good caretaker of my tiny corner of the world.

Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Health and Healing, Magic, Meaning, Memories, Psychology, Rites of Passage, Science, Skepticism

When Meditation Becomes Mental Masturbation

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I’ve always had a pretty psychology-heavy approach to spirituality, even before I went to grad school. I confess that I am one of those people who studied psychology in part to figure myself out; while in some ways I am a very capable, functional and adaptable human being, I do have my challenges. I’ve used therapy for years to help treat my anxiety and other idiosyncracies, but even when going on a weekly basis, I still have to attend to myself the other 167 hours. For a good long while I used meditation, with a strong focus on emotional processing, as a big part of my personal psychological toolkit.

It worked pretty well for several years. It gave me an outlet for exploring the weird twists and turns of my mind, particularly regarding my past. I grew up in a pretty safe and loving household, and even if I seemed to be a peculiar child, I was never, ever unwanted. But I also grew up with a constant onslaught of bullying at school, starting in second grade and going all the way to the end of high school. I had very few friends, and most of the ones I did have would often turn on me with no notice. For years I found refuge outdoors, alone and mostly unsupervised, able to immerse myself in the fauna and flora and fungi around me. But there was an additional trauma when the woods I took refuge in were suddenly and brutally bulldozed, and I found myself with nowhere to turn with my grief.

My twenties were tough, and I spent a lot of time trying to detangle myself from all these early influences. And for a while, it served its purpose. I gained more awareness of why I behaved in certain ways, and felt a little less like a badly programmed automaton. I even did some rite of passage work to banish certain behavior patterns or the effects of particular memories as a way of trying to reprogram myself.

But knowing how my brain worked and doing one-off symbolic actions wasn’t enough. In fact, beyond a certain point, it became counterproductive. I started spending too much time in my head, and would retreat into it as a defense against the anxiety, stress and other nasties that had plagued me for so long. I thought that if I could just tell my life story a little more clearly, I’d somehow be free of it, once that final piece was laid into place.

Yeah. About like that. http://bit.ly/Tcft0Q
Yeah. About like that. http://bit.ly/Tcft0Q
That’s not how it happened, of course. I just obsessed over my past more and more. More destructively, I was judging and measuring and nitpicking my every move and thought and trying to determine “Well, why am I doing this?” I was my own special little lab rat. I’d do a thing, and then I’d analyze it to death, and then I’d write up the “results”, usually on Livejournal. I don’t even want to think about how many pages-long posts of agonized processing I word-spewed onto the update page (thankfully hidden under LJ-cuts to spare my followers who didn’t give a crap what was going on in the deepest convolutions of my gray matter). It can basically all be summed up as “I THOUGHT ABOUT THIS THING FROM MY PAST BECAUSE I DID A THING NOW THAT REMINDED ME OF IT AND NOW I’M GOING TO TAKE AN EXACTO BLADE AND SLICE IT UP INTO TINY BITS AND SCRUTINIZE IT UNDER THIS MICROSCOPE AND LOOK AT HOW DEEP AND INTROSPECTIVE I AM EXCUSE ME WHILE I GO MEDITATE AND REFLECT AND PROCESS IT SOME MORE IT’S NOT MUSHY ENOUGH”.

This was all amplified when I ended up in a relationship for a few years with someone who also did a good deal of internal processing and past-picking. Now I had someone else encouraging me to dig deeper, spend more time “sitting with myself” and my problems and my pain and otherwise focusing on the stuff in my head. Some of their suggested techniques were different than what I was doing, but the result was the same–I stayed stuck in my head, a broken record skipping over the same crack again and again and thinking that the sound I made was the music I was supposed to hear. Eventually it became something of a horrible feedback loop between us, especially when we’d fight–instead of dealing with the problem itself, we’d take turns explaining exactly why we were each behaving the way we were, sometimes spending hours in this war-storying* circlejerk. Unsurprisingly, the actual thing we were fighting about rarely got addressed, and it would just come up again later. In the interim, we’d both meditate and otherwise “reflect” on ourselves and our quirks and flaws in an attempt to gain control of them, which invariably did little good. I was supposed to be visiting my past in these meditations as a way of giving myself control in my everyday life, but instead all I was doing was reinforcing the neurological pathways in my brain that led to the anxiety and other problems.

This approach to “fixing things” continued until I became involved with my current partner a few years ago and began trying the same processing patterns with him. Not too long into our relationship, I had a bit of an anxiety attack, and my immediate response was to open up the mental Rolodex of “Why is this happening? What patterns in my childhood led to this response behavior?” and so forth, going over the same tired examples in the hopes of finding some new little twist I’d missed before. He’d seen this happen a few times, and he’s a pretty observant person; I’ve actually learned quite a bit about empathy and active listening from him.

So he stopped me in mid-sentence. I forget exactly what he said, but it was something along the lines of “Lupa, what are you trying to do? You’re not ten years old any more; you’re not fifteen, and you’re not twenty. You are who you are now, and you need to stop hanging on so tightly to who you were back then. Be here now.” And then instead of letting me continue to obsess over the reasons for my anxiety attack and what created my anxiety disorder in the first place and who bullied me, etc. etc., which kept my anxiety heightened until I exhausted myself, he carefully walked me through the anxiety, calmed me down, and grounded me in the present.

It boggles my mind that until that point no one had ever effectively done that for me before. I’d gotten a lot of dismissive remarks like “Just get over it” and “What are you making such a big deal for?” I’d gotten yelled at and bullied and retraumatized into shutting up by those who couldn’t handle what was happening to me any more than I could, even by people who were supposed to be helping me. And I’d both inflicted on myself and had reinforced by others this idea that if I just “sat with my past” it would fix everything and empower me to change; in the end, people who thought they were helping me by leading me deeper into myself were just perpetuating the problem and hurting me even more with their “expertise”. And yet someone who had only known me for a handful of weeks was able to see where I was stuck in my head and gave me a lifeline out of it.

It took me a while after that incident to break myself of the instant response of “INTERNALIZE! PROCESS! REFLECT!” whenever I got hit with stress. There were plenty of times where I realized, or my partner observed, that “Lupa, you’re doing that thing again. Quit it. Come back here.” And being that I was deep in grad school at the time, I was embroiled in upper-level psych and counseling classes that kept unearthing things in my head (this is why my program required every student to receive at least ten hours of therapy before starting their practicum). So it was a hard fight out of my internal cage.

But eventually I got there. I don’t remember the precise time when things shifted; like so much growth, it was gradual–as opposed to the sudden growth spurts I think I must have been expecting with every new revelation I discovered about my past during meditations and processing sessions. It’s been a couple of years at least, though, since I can remember it happening.

Of course, some things are still the same old Lupa–I still have anxiety attacks now and then, usually from fairly predictable stimuli. But at least now my panicking brain focuses on the here and now, along with some catastrophizing about the future. The catastrophizing I can get around by reminding myself that I’m looking at the worst case scenario and the future hasn’t arrived yet so it does no good to worry about it now, and so then I can get down to the business of the present. And because I’m shifting my focus to the present, I become aware, most of the times when an attack happens, that my mind is going haywire because my brain and body are flooded with fight, flight or freeze chemicals, and I hang onto that awareness til the chemicals flush out of my system and I can think rationally again.

More importantly, I’m not constantly reinforcing that connection with my past. While I have an understanding of how my past shaped who I am today, it’s no longer the central focus of my identity like it used to be. Instead, “influences from my past” is just one of many and varied threads of self that all weave together to create who I am in this moment. Nor do I have to nitpick every single thing I do under the magnifying glass of my past. If I happen to notice a connection between past and present, I note it briefly, usually with a bit of curiosity and “Huh, okay, that makes sense”. And then I move the fuck on with my day.

For me, some grounding techniques are less like the third prong on a plug, and more like sticking a knife into a live outlet. http://bit.ly/1ouNaoc
For me, some grounding techniques are less like the third prong on a plug, and more like sticking a knife into a live outlet. http://bit.ly/1ouNaoc
This is a big part of why my path has shifted so drastically to the physical in recent years. Pagans talk about “grounding” in the sense of visualizing one’s self being energetically rooted into the earth. Sometimes it involves symbols of nature, like pretending to be a tree and putting down roots, but it’s still a technique based on being in my head. The best thing for me has been being grounded right here in the moment, not pretending to be a tree or a beam of light or a cloud, but being me, Lupa, in the flesh. I’m tired of willful dissociation, and I’ve wasted too much time on it. Now, when I feel overwhelmed, I go back to what worked first in my life–I go outside, preferably alone and where it’s quiet. It allows me respite from my thoughts, and it does things that reduce the physiological causes of anxiety and stress, like lowering my blood pressure and letting my senses drift instead of focus hard. My answer to problems is not to think more, but to think less for a while, and rest from thinking. When I come back, my thoughts and plans are more calm and steady, not frazzled from reaching inside for THE ANSWERS.

Does this mean I’ve written off meditation entirely? Absolutely not. But these days I use it as an antidote to overthinking; my meditation is based in mindfulness, not magic. Even when I do guided visualizations I’m not trying to power my way through chakra blockages or go on quests to seek the grails within. Instead, what I visualize are things that reconnect me with the physical world. With my eyes closed, I try to pinpoint exactly where a particular sound is coming from, or to remember where I am in location to a specific tree. And then when I open my eyes again, I am fully here and now again, not rabbiting off down some path to the mean old past yet again.

And that’s made all the difference. A few years ago, if I were talking about my relationship with meditation down the years, I’d be hyper-analyzing every detail of the story, and finishing it with “…and that’s why I am the way I am today! Look how smart I am for recognizing that!” And that’s it. This post is a curious note in my thoughts today, where I realized “Oh, hey, remember that thing you used to do, Lupa? You haven’t done it in years!” And my response was “Oh, hey, that’s cool.” I thought maybe my cautionary tale would be of interest to some readers, maybe if others are stuck in the same headspace; I got out, and maybe you can, too.

As to my ongoing work to calm my anxiety? I acknowledge that my brain doesn’t quite work right; maybe that’ll change someday, maybe not, but I don’t need to try to figure out every single thing that led up to it being the way it is. It’s okay that I’m able to largely ignore injuries of the past and let them work on healing while I do other stuff. I’m like this little puppy with a busted leg all wrapped up, run-stumbling around Tumblr lately:

tumblr_n69yogDayq1qb5gkjo1_500

Like Tumblr user iraffiruse said about the pup:

Some people might feel sorry for themselves in this situation

Puppy don’t care

Puppy’s got stuff to do

Puppy’s got places to be

Puppy’s got people to bark at and things to sniff.

And I think I can relate to that little ouch-legged pup in that.

* War-storying is a term I picked up from when I was interning at an addictions treatment facility in my final year of grad school. It refers to a phenomenon in addictions treatment where the client spends their time telling and re-telling stories from their past to get an emotional rise out of themselves and, as they hope, their audience. It isn’t particularly effective, as it’s just reliving the experience rather than attending to its effects in the now. It’s also very similar to some of the “internal work” I was attempting to do.

Animal Totems, Cosmology, Rites of Passage, Totems

Red Fox as Animal Totem

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Most of my totems that I’ve written about here and back at Therioshamanism are ones I’d consider rather uncommon. I talk about the totems of plants, lichens and fungi because I want to reinforce the idea that they’re out there and are every bit as important as their animal compatriots, and even the animals I’ve written about, like Dusky Arion, aren’t the big, popular totems. This time around, though, I want to talk about one of the more ubiquitous totems that I’ve been working with for a decade now: Red Fox.

As I mentioned in a previous post, 2004 was kind of a rough year for me, but it also produced a great deal of growth. During this period of chaos, I was going through a lot of internal changes and realizations, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Some of my worst traits came out under the stress; as is common with primary totems, I identified quite deeply with Gray Wolf, and all too often under stress my fangs were showing. I’ve talked about secondary totems as those that enter into our lives to help us through a particular period of time or teach us something specific. And that’s where Red Fox came in.

In some ways, Red Fox is much like a gentler Gray Wolf–still a predator, still possessing sharp teeth and keen senses, but not quite as aggressive a totem. My relationship with Red Fox started with her helping me calm down some, finding a bit of focus in these hard times. I did a great deal to invite her into my life more, even dyeing my hair red with henna for a number of years, and that helped to break me out of my usual headspace and introduce me to new ways of viewing the world. It didn’t fix everything, but it helped.

See, I had a very lupine-centric narrative of myself (not at all surprising). There were certain expectations of myself that I had, behavior patterns that I’d always exhibited that weren’t especially healthy, but that I just assumed were permanently a part of me. And Gray Wolf didn’t really have answers for me as to how to fix them. Other totems I worked with didn’t really have a deep enough connection with me to be doing that sort of intensive internal work–except Red Fox. She helped me to learn that I could change, that i wasn’t destined to stay the same person forever, and at a time in my mid-twenties where I really felt I was far behind other people my age as far as life developments went, it was incredibly good for me to be shown that I wasn’t a complete failure.

And the work we started together a decade ago never really ended, either. Red Fox has ridden every shakeup with me, every time I’ve blown my life up and put a new life together from the pieces. She encouraged me to write my first book, and she rode with me across the country to the Northwest. She sat with me through divorce, through grad school, through living alone and moving in with my current partner, through working for others and working for myself. She was one of the totems to encourage me to look beyond the animals and explore the world of plant and fungus totems, and even further into the totemic ecosystem than that. She was there for every crisis of faith and deep realization, and no doubt will continue to witness my ongoing evolution, even as its rate levels out some with age.

I don’t do a lot of ritual work any more, but when I do, I still call on the animals of the four cardinal directions. Red Fox is my South, my fire, my Change. She is the shapeshifting force in my life, and with her, I’ve become so much more than I thought I would be. I am still a Wolf’s child, of course; my name is still Lupa. But Red Fox is right there, working with Gray Wolf and alone as well, adding her fire to the metamorphosis of my life.

If you liked this post, please consider buying a copy of my book New Paths to Animal Totems, or one of my other titles on totemism and nature spirituality. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Activism, Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Ethics, Meaning, Skepticism

Yeah, I Don’t Like “The Secret” Either.

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Last week Lon Sarver wrote a fantastic post called The Past is Not Gone, about how the Law of Attraction is utter bunkum. For those who aren’t aware, the Law of Attraction basically says that if you think reallllllly hard about good things, then good things will happen to you. It’s basically the New Age version of the just world fallacy, and I’ve seen it lead to some pretty egregious ignorance, up to and including people explaining away others’ disabilities, poverty, and misfortunes as “well, they just kept thinking negative things!” (Not to be confused with that other well-meaning-but-utterly-clueless claim that “Oh, they’re just paying off karma from things they did in a past life!”)

The great thing he does in this post is outline a number of people and forces in his ancestry that contributed to where he is today. Not all of them are pleasant; he points out where he personally benefited from Manifest Destiny (I can say much the same) and that he is descended in part from people who were once slaveholders. But that’s part of the issue of privilege or the lack thereof–the accident of our birth may confer or deny certain advantages, and not everyone gets to be the hero who overcomes a rough start. And anyone who doesn’t make it out of that hole, no matter how deep, is seen as a failure, and therefore they must have brought it upon themselves.

Here in the U.S., there’s a strong cultural emphasis on individualism (rugged and otherwise). The ideal is of one person in peak condition, able to attend to their own needs, and contrasted against the weak masses huddling together un helplessness. Yet as Rua Lupa, my co-blogger at Paths Through the Forests, pointed out yesterday, we are enmeshed in a complex web of interdependence with people around the world, not out of weakness but out of necessity. Just because we pretend it isn’t there doesn’t really make it go away; that trick doesn’t work any better now than it did when we were young children who thought no one could see us if we just closed our eyes.

We do the same thing with the rest of the world, too, human and otherwise. We consumers are deliberately kept from seeing the sources of all of our conveniences and trinkets, from pre-packaged food to fossil fuels to shiny diamonds soaked in someone else’s blood. In just a few decades, it’s become the norm to not have to think about where your food came from and what living beings (animal, plant, and more) died in its creation, who sewed your clothing together and how little they were paid, and other unpleasant realities.

And it’s that milieu of ignorance that births such codswallop as the Law of Attraction. The lotus-eaters who sit back and bemoan the state of the world and continue to think happy thoughts of manifestation are just another product of our denial. In order to really get things done in the world, we have to get our hands dirty, literally and figuratively, and meet the harsh realities of the world head-on. Action speaks louder than attraction.

At the same time, there is value in keeping an optimistic, if realistic, mindset. If you focus only on the bad news, it’s going to drag you down eventually, and you’ll find yourself unable to do much about anything. That’s why self-care is so important, not just for activists, but for anyone who faces any level of stress. It’s okay to appreciate the beautiful things in the world without automatically thinking “Yeah, but here’s the ugly side”. It’s fine to keep a positive outlook even when you’re in the thick of dealing with (rather than denying) big, scary challenges. We need a respite from the times that try our souls now and again.

The Law of Attraction, on the other hand, is escapism. Worse, it blames the victim. And even when a person really has done themselves a bad favor and made some unwise choices, all the Law of Attraction says is “Just think everything better!” That’s not much preparation for rolling up your sleeves and cleaning up the mess you’ve made.

In the end, it’s people wanting to have a simple answer for complicated problems because they just don’t know how to deal with them otherwise. While I’ve had times where I wished I could just wave a magic wand and make the bad things go away, I don’t try to make a life philosophy out of it. And that’s really the problem with the Law of Attraction–it tells you you don’t need to worry about things like privilege, and environmental injustice, and climate change, and the basic fact that life really isn’t fair and there’s no way around it. I think we all need a better set of coping skills than that to get us through.

Save the cod, not the codswallop!
Save the cod, not the codswallop!