I love the concept of the liminal: the in-between place and time. Pagans have often embraced the concept: "...the hearth or altar is a liminal space, as it bridges the gap between the humans and the supernatural; the threshold, doors, and windows of a house are liminal, since they bridge the gap between inside and outside; and certain times of the year and the day (dawn, dusk, and several holidays) are liminal times."1 And in some tradition's rituals, we stand in "a place that is not a place; a time that is not a time". I even have the concept of the liminal in the very core of my beliefs, where I slip between humanism and theism.
I'm in medical limbo right now, waiting on an MRI. Studies suggest that waiting is often the hardest part, even of something as life-altering as a cancer diagnosis. I've been consulting doctors and getting tests for most of 2017 and right now my hopes are pinned on January 4th, 2018, when I will be getting the results of the MRI. If there's nothing on the MRI, though, my limbo may continue.
I've been working with a counselor on dealing with the medical anxiety, preparing for the MRI (I'm claustrophobic), and treating myself with self-compassion and breathing exercises. And it is all helping, but maybe I'm ready to move from tolerating and accepting this time of uncertainty to honouring it. It seems appropriate that this time of greatest liminality for my health concerns should overlap with secular culture's liminal time between Christmas and New Year's.
Everyone will experience the discomfort of not knowing throughout their lives. In my experience, it is easy to overlook that that is what's happening in your life, but to still feel the anxiety and stress. I'm hoping to re-name my limbo as liminal time and do some ritual around the process of sitting in a place without all the answers. I want to find a way to celebrate uncertainty.2 If you have any suggestions or resources, please let me know! I will add a link to my ritual here if I come up with something (ETA: here is my Imbolc ritual called Mindful Liminality).
And I drop into another liminal space, between concept and creation, between thought and action. It is more under my control, though. So mote it be.
The horizon during the moment of the full solar eclipse of August 21st, 2017.
You are made of elements created in the depths of a dying star. You are made of the universe. You are the universe embodied and breathing, and the universe experiences itself through your senses.
That swept through my mind as I watched the moment of totality during the August 21st's solar eclipse. I didn't know what to expect from that moment, so the tears that welled up in my eyes took me by surprise. The experience was literally indescribable1.
In the days leading up to the eclipse, there was a letter by an optometrist going around social media urging people to stay home and watch the eclipse on TV. I understand the importance of making sure people take the risks seriously2, but it was shameful to tell people to miss the miraculous experience of being there in person if they could be. No matter how good your TV is, it cannot give you the experience of the sudden coolness, the sudden darkness - the awe-inspiring sight in person.
Some beauty comes with risks and sacrifices, as when you go into faerie land to come back mad or a poet. Or as when you fall in love. You owe it to the sacred universe that you embody to experience as much love and beauty as you can in the short time that you are on this earth.
Three or four times a year, people find reason to blame the normal problems of modern life on Mercury going backwards in the sky - the dreaded so-called "Mercury retrograde". People who are normally quite rational seem to buy into this superstition.
It is silly enough to believe that the movement of a planet some 77 million kilometers away has an impact on our emails and travel plans, but to believe that an illusion of movement of a planet affects our lives is ridiculous. See, Mercury doesn't actually move backwards; it just appears to do so from the earth's perspective. If we were the centre of the solar system, Mercury would be moving in loops, but we're not the centre of anything. We circle around an average star in a mediocre neighbourhood, universally-speaking.
Humans, as a species, are arrogant. In mainstream Western culture, nature is about our needs. The God of the Bible created everything to feed and clothe and serve us, and we are the ultimate creation - the reason for all the rest. Some Pagans may say that we worship nature, but sometimes we fall victim to delusions of human importance too, and we end up worshiping nature only in relation to its utility to us, where autumn is all about our harvest and spring is all about our planting, and never mind that that's the human wheel of the year, not nature's.
That same thinking feeds "Mercury retrograde" fears. At it's core, that superstition assumes that the earth is the centre around which all things revolve and that we're so cosmically important that the fact that we see a planet going backwards from our limited viewpoint is enough to create communication and travel chaos.
I have recently read several articles that explain why Mercury retrograde is nonsense and then go on to say that the author believes in it anyway because they've experienced it. One author lists a whole bunch of reasons why they personally might be experiencing communication difficulties, including some long term stress, and somehow concludes that those reasons are not sufficient to explain some recent problems they've had and that the difference must be Mercury. Humans are awful at evaluating this kind of stuff. We have huge perception biases, we are terrible at calculating risk, and we often have little understanding of how certain factors actually do affect us.
I write this post on unceded Coast Salish territory, the ancestral and traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. As an uninvited guest on this land, I benefit from this land, its resources, and colonialism. Though acknowledgement is not sufficient to redress those wrongs, it is important for me, as a descendant of settlers and colonialists, to remember where I am situated physically and historically.
Ten years ago, those kinds of acknowledgements were the marker of a radical event - far left environmental protests, the memorial walk for missing and murdered women - but they have become extremely common, to the point where the local literary festival includes one. The City of Vancouver itself made an official acknowledgement a couple of years ago. Sometimes these words are said with solemnity and sometimes in a very perfunctory manner, and some acknowledgements are better than others, but at least there's a moment taken to remind everyone that the land we stand on has a history and that where we put our bodies is political.
My Paganism is an embodied religion grounded in the time and space where my body is located. I aim for rituals that use our bodies, our senses, and our movements to honour and celebrate what's happening in the natural world around us. I can't separate my spirituality from the body I was born with nor from the natural, political, economic, and cultural systems I was born into. I am a white, English-speaking, able-bodied, cis-woman born and raised into a middle-class family in Canada. I have huge amounts of unearned privilege because of the body, place, and time where I was born. Some of that privilege touches upon the earth itself, as it is why I can claim to own a small piece of land.
I don't think I'm alone in seeing my Paganism as being about the actual land I'm on. And most Vancouver residents will have heard these acknowledgements before - as I mentioned, they've become very common - so it seems very weird to me that I have yet to hear anything like this at a Pagan event.
This topic came up at Silver Spiral's Pagan Symposium and I've been contemplating the question of why Pagans don't (in my experience) acknowledge ever since. A Silver Spiral member raised an important theological point: For her, casting a Circle takes us out of the physical world to a literal in-between - a place that is not a place and a time that is not a time - so she would find it jarring to have a physical, political reality invoked in that Circle. However, setting aside the question of the politics of taking a piece of unceded land and taking it out of time and space, we were agreed that before we move into sacred space and after we cut the Circle, the physical space is relevant. We came to an easy agreement that both political and theological needs could be satisfied by making acknowledgements before casting the Circle.
So if the problem is not theology, than something else must be going on. My first thought is that I might be overestimating the political involvement of my fellow Pagans. Perhaps they don't go to the kind of progressive events, conferences, and workshops that make a point of territory acknowledgement. Perhaps these speeches are less common at suburban events, where many Pagans live. Perhaps a lot of Pagans attend mostly Pagan-run events and end up in a bit of a cultural echo-chamber. And perhaps when they do hear it, they don't really know what it means and they don't think about how it might apply to Pagan use of the land.
There may be something else at play here too: the mostly-white Canadian Pagan's complicated relationship to First Nations' culture. There are still some Pagans who elevate any drop of First Nations blood they can claim, who like to accessorize their faith with Native tools and art, and who often seem to engage in the "Noble Savage" mythology. Most Pagans - or, at least, most Pagans I know - seem to look down on these practices, realizing that cultural appropriation in Paganism is a real concern and that as a community, we need to build and maintain our own identities and not steal other people's, especially when those people are still around and have suffered very real hardships in order to keep their traditions in the face of attempted cultural genocide by some of our ancestors. I wonder, though, if in our justifiable concern about stepping on cultural toes, we've gone so far that we're at risk of erasing First Nations' existence from our concerns.
Finally, and most cringe-worthy, I think our community has a bit of a prosecution complex. Though we have for the most part laid to rest the myths of the so-called "Burning Times", I think we still want to embrace our minority status. Not to say that being "out" as Pagan doesn't sometimes have negative consequences, but we are not a group that faces daily discrimination like that caused by racism. I confess that I do wonder if some parts of our community have subconsciously avoided the standard "unceded territory" speech because that would be acknowledging that we are privileged.
My question to the Vancouver Pagan community is simple: Why don't you currently acknowledge traditional territories? What do you think would happen if we did?
When and where I grew up, there was winter. The snow piled high for weeks - for months - and we made snowmen and forts and I went sledding and cross-country skiing and we had a skating rink in our backyard. And we ate red delicious apples all winter because they stored well, so they were cheap all year around, even in the north of Canada.
There and then, spring came. It was a slow event, but it happened. The snow became mud and then soil and then grass and flowers. Winter-stored apples gave way to strawberries and then blueberries.
I'm elsewhere now, where the ocean and the mountains guard us from extreme seasonal changes. Still, people who grew up here remember winter. It was shorter and milder than the ones I knew, but there was snow. There isn't any longer. It got cold, here and there, but barely more than frosty. Fruit comes from California; there's no end to strawberry season.
I'm not exactly nostalgic for winter. I remember shovelling out cars and scary rides on icy roads and power outages and I never did like red delicious apples very much. But I do miss the unique pleasures of each season savoured because they were fleeting. The wheel of the year turns and relieves one season's pains and brings in the next's pleasures. This too shall pass...
Unless it doesn't anymore. Climate change has slowed the wheel to a near stop some places, and sent it spinning like a toppling top in others. Here, climate change has stolen our seasons. Our wheel of the year is cracked, especially in this city, and we could be set adrift into seasonless time, another step away from nature. We Pagans will have to stand with locavores and gardners and seasonal sports lovers and hold the wheel together, finding the seasons even in the changed, unchanging city streets and honouring the subtle shifts. Our magic cannot fix what has been broken, but we can hold the energy while we join others in trying to make the earth healthy again.
Ever since this past Samhain season, I've kept tripping over information about ancestor worship, working with ancestors, ancestor shrines... These things have never been a part of my personal practice and I still don't feel called to them now, or, at least, not in the ways I've seen them done. There's nothing wrong with those ways; just not my thing. But I do see the power of acknowledging where we come from.
I have two urges: To go very far back and to go very far forward.
I want to go back to the ancestors of modern homo sapiens - Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Adam - and honour our deepest origins and our beautiful shared humanity.
And I want to go forward and explore what it means to be the ancestors of the future, worthy of being honoured.
"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
We are stardust breathing and dreaming and thinking and creating. Our very bodies are made of elements born in centres of long-gone stars.
Eyes evolved and we saw the stars. We are stardust star watching. We are the cosmos seeing itself.
Critical thinking evolved and we thought about the stars. We are stardust contemplating the heavens. We are the cosmos exploring itself.
Imagination evolved and we dreamed ourselves among the stars. We are stardust inventing the future of the stars. We are the cosmos creating itself.
But we are not unique. Our world is made of stardust. Every life on this earth owes its being to the death of stars.
Our eyes are not the only ones seeing.
Some of the beings with whom we share this beautiful world see things we cannot and perceive things we are not equipped to observe. The mushroom, the crow, and the oak tree are all stardust seeing the stars in their unique ways. The mountain, the wind, and the ocean are all cosmos perceiving the cosmos with their different understandings.
We are not special, but we are part of something immense. Though we are the cosmos, it is also beyond our understanding, because to understand it requires the simultaneous views of the mushroom, the tree, the ocean, and the human. But we can pray and meditate and do ritual and get a little closer to our source. We are made of stardust and to the stars we will return.
We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. - Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980.
A big point of this website is to explore the intersection of religion, especially Paganism, and science. My first exposure to the idea that we are made of star stuff wasn't through Paganism, though I'd been Pagan for six years or so, but in a second year university geology class. My professor taped Christmas lights to the blackboard and turned out all the lights and told us about how carbon and almost all the other elements that our world is made out of were formed in the heart of long-dead stars. He ended with the Carl Sagan quote above and I got goosebumps. I was so inspired that years later, I wrote my biggest ritual to date based on this idea: the Stardust Ritual.
Episode 123 of The Wigglian Way podcast included a review of the tv show Cosmos1. As part of the discussion, the two hosts, Mojo and Sparrow, mentioned the show's occassional anti-religion jabs and a star stuff quote:
[Stars] get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All was cooked in the fiery hearts of long vanished stars. ... The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. - Neil Degrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, episode 2, 2014.
Mojo: "... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] also mentioned that there's a good possibility that everything on the earth - everything alive - came from the stars; that we are in fact made of star stuff... does that sound familiar to anybody? That we are made of star stuff? So not only is Cosmos not disproving my religion, it's only proving it more. We've always said we're made of star stuff."
Sparrow: "Exactly. ... Science is coming closer and closer to what we believe all the time."
The idea that we're made out of stars predates Carl Sagan. Quote Investigator found uses as old as 1913 and 1918, both from science. The only non-scientific origin seems to be a "Serbian proverb": "Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble for you are made of stars." Serbia has been Christian for a very long time, so I don't know if we can count that as Pagan origins. And that's assuming it truly is a Serbian proverb; the earliest source seems to be Guy Murchie in his 1978 book The Seven Mysteries of Life and he did not provide any documentation. It is an interesting idea that Pagans, ancient or modern, may have always believed that we're made of star stuff, but I couldn't find any proof of this. Mojo hasn't gotten back to me with his source.
Until a Pagan source can be found - and I am keeping an open mind about that - I will remain a bit disturbed by this possible re-writing of history. I know modern Pagans are not, as a community, all that good at history (you don't have to dig very deep to find people who still believe that nine million women were killed in the "The Burning Times" and in Gimbutas' ancient gynocentric civilizations), but that's all the more reason to guard against the tendency to add more unprovable or false stories to our collective history.
We can be the religion that embraces and welcomes science; the progressive, flexible, growing religion that isn't threatened by new facts or by change. I don't want science to prove my spiritual beliefs to be right; I want to take on new knowledge and incorporated it into my beliefs and rituals. And maybe that's something Carl Sagan, scientist and self-proclaimed agnostic, could get behind:
Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. ... Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
It is a modern metaphysical puzzle of sorts: I'm never where or when I am.
At my day job, I start my day dealing with yesterday's paperwork. Towards the end of the day, I work on tomorrow's paperwork. In between, I send emails that put my words into some indeterminate future when the recipient reads them, and I am on the phone, metaphorically placing me where the person at the other end of the phone is. I am never fully in the present.
I live as much in cyberspace as anywhere else and the nature of that - words written one day on one side of the world and read on another on the other side - means I slip around time and space casually. I need Pagan ritual to ground me into the present time and place. Never mind "this is a time that is not a time and a place that is not a place": I need to be right here and right now. I don't create a Circle to set space aside; I want the Circle to centre me right there.
It is typical of me that, as we head to Beltane, I'm writing a Lammas ritual. It is what my group needed of me this quarter, and I was struck with inspiration this past weekend... though I do question the authenticity of inspiration for a harvest festival found when the fruits we will be harvesting is still buds and blooms. By the time the wheel makes its graceful turn to Lammas, hopefully I will be there too.
Three or four times a year, people find reason to blame the normal problems of modern life on Mercury going backwards in the sky - the dreaded so-called "Mercury retrograde". People who are normally quite rational seem to buy into this superstition.
When and where I grew up, there was winter. The snow piled high for weeks - for months - and we made snowmen and forts and I went sledding and cross-country skiing and we had a skating rink in our backyard. And we ate red delicious apples all winter because they stored well, so they were cheap all year around, even in the north of Canada.
