You got to serve something, ain't that right

I imagine that Portlandia wonders sometimes how Athena managed with Athens.

Portland wants desperately to be a city of art and craft, of good food and progressive politics, hip and clever, full of small businesses and neighborhoods that are still full of neighbors, a beautiful city full of art and nature. And it is those things! It is also a city shaped by racism and gentrification, a city that wants artists but where artists can barely afford to live, and a city that fails to live up to its ideals.

Portlandia has been on the city’s seal since 1878. A tall woman bearing a trident, she looks out over the Willamette River and her valley. She is described as the Queen of Commerce and a star shines over her head. I was first drawn to her because of this; I saw her as a relative of my goddess Mara. New to the city and job-hunting, I made offerings that we might find work. Ultimately we ended up in a suburb outside of Portlandia’s domain, but I kept circling back to her and to the city itself.

A bit over thirty years ago, Portland installed a large (second only to the Statue of Liberty) copper statue of Portlandia above the entrance to the then-new Portland building. This depiction of Portlandia does not tower over the river valley, but instead she crouches down, holding her trident out to one side and reaching out to the city inhabitants below. There is an amazing amount of emotion in her face and body, and it was this statue that helped me make that connection with her.

She is the city, and like the city, she wants to be better. She wants to make things better for her inhabitants. She reaches out to help. She offers a hand up. I have gone to her for help finding work and for help finding housing.

I’ve never seen her work alone; it’s always in concert with other local spirits when I get results. I call her with the rivers, with the bridges, with the city ancestors, and with the spirits of smaller parts of the city. The offerings she seems to like best are public praise (Portland is a little bit self-obsessed), taking care of the homeless, and taking care of the city itself. Supporting local artists, local presses and local businesses is good, too. When you can, battle gentrification and racism, and hold the city government accountable.

Do your part to take care of Portland and Portlandia will do her part to take care of you as well.

This post was inspired by Sara Mastros’s American Gods Project; there’s plenty of good stuff worth reading over there.

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Just recently I saw my first carnival of the season.

As I see Wodanaz in both the Hunt and the Carnival, the first carnival of the year is a moment like the first farmer’s market, where I am seeing a power shift from their winter self to their summer self and I stop to acknowledge the passage of time.

This is, of course, entirely UPG, but the role of carnivals in pop culture is liminal and dangerous, a place where the bad are punished and strange blessings and curses both might come up, so it seems reasonable to me that archetypal Carnival might feed on the same energies as the Hunt. And of course, I first met Wodanaz wearing the face of Mr Dark.

I know other pagans who mark their seasons with nature-based observations, noting when plants first sprout or ripen, but I suspect I’m just not sufficiently earth-attuned for that. I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the signs of the seasons, what the plants are doing and so on, and I can certainly note and appreciate it. It just doesn’t resonate for me the way spotting the lights of a ferris wheel on the side of the freeway does.

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who are you without your identity?

lay down, settle in your bones

let your self release above you,

a balloon you are disconnected from.

you are your body, too, what is left

when your soul leaves. feel your body

breathing, digesting, slowing,

churning, falling apart an inch at a time.

she keeps us alive, feeding us,

but in the Winter she will bleed us

and cut us down and leave us

to others who seek sustenance.

she is not concerned with

what comes after aside from

decomposition.

we break down with our

component parts. we go on to become

part of others’ cycles.

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I had a conversation today that reminded me that recovery is complicated.

Given that this started out being about re-learning how to think about wards and shields, it was appropriate timing to be talking about my ex and the effects she had on people.

Often I don’t think about my ex very much, but this was a very strong reminder that there are still places where, instead of working through difficult things, there are still areas where I put up a hasty drywall patch and moved on instead of addressing the structural issues caused by support beams she pulled out when she was renovating. If this was an episode of Property Brothers, they’d have discovered they need to pull out the whole ceiling or something.

(Following that metaphor, I guess the OCD would be like… Knob-and-tube wiring that couldn’t be replaced? I dunno.)

If I’m going to be a project, I think I prefer a metaphor like This Old House or maybe Rehab Addict: one of those shows where a whole season is spent taking the house down to the bones, figuring out what is worth keeping and improving and what shoddy work along the way did more harm than good. I’m not perfect; the ruts worn by choices are etched into me. But etching grooves into hard surfaces is how we get records and CDs and hard drives. We turn the scars of mortality into music and memory.

Fridays are for Brhenti, and so for today’s handcraft I needle-felted a pincushion. Felting is a lot of detail work and can be almost meditative, but sometimes that means I end up ruminating on unhelpful things. As always, I need to find the middle ground.

Today’s coin is a St Anthony medal. St Anthony has a personal symbolism for me regarding my relationships and how hard it can be to recognize an abusive relationship for what it is when you’re in it, but on a simpler level, the image represents finding what has been lost, especially with the help of higher powers. I found several things that I’d thought lost this month, so even though I’m still unsure whether I actually did this the way it was “supposed to be” done, I’m glad I jumped in and did it anyway.

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Not the library I was at today.

It’s Wednesday! I’ve done four complete weeks. It feels like I just started, to be honest. Today started early, as I had a follow up doctor visit to make sure I was recovered from last week’s “event.” I knew I wanted to make today’s prayers at the library before I even went to sleep last night, though, and I had my bag packed with the books I needed to return.

The morning was gray and wet and windy, and no amount of cover helps much when the rain is blowing sideways. I got some quality solo train time in, which hasn’t happened much since we moved. Along the way I took care of some paperwork that needed to be done and visited Portlandia for the first time in a while. It had lightened up some by the time I was walking from the train stop to my office, but it stayed gloomy and damp right up until about an hour before my shift ended, when the clouds thinned and the blue spring sky came through.

After work I was practically skipping on the walk to the library. For the last Wednesday, my offering was joining the Friends of the Library, a proper commitment to the town and the library wights as well as an offering for Pillai.

I need to spend some more time with the new lesson from the Court of the Work In Progress but it’s got me thinking about my writing, and the spirits I already work with and the spirits I could turn to for help with that. The course has thus far done an amazing job of happening to be just what I need when it comes into my mailbox, I have to admit.

One last day with Pechak and Velos and this experiment will officially be complete, though I have to finalize the prayers and their format. And now that I’ve laid this groundwork, it’ll be time to move onto the next thing.

Today’s coin is an Algerian 1 dinar coin. The back features a prominent star and crescent symbol and a hamsa. The star reminds me of the Dark Lady, and the crescent I hadn’t used to associate with her, but pairing her with Monday has made me think about it. I hadn’t spent enough time with Redbird to see it before the last few months, but the Dark Lady and the Bright Lady are very much two sides of the same coin. The hamsa is a protective symbol, so this coin I take as the Dark Lady’s blessing.

 

 

 

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It was never really about the candles. Even when I was lighting them every night for Mara, even when it was the only thing I seemed to be able to do, it wasn’t the candle that mattered. It was the remembering to do it. The attention. The energy they represent can be offered in other ways.

Representation and symbology is at the heart of not just sympathetic magic but many other techniques as well. I’ve been thinking about this off and on. Much of what I’ve been doing from Project Protagonist on has been about figuring out what symbols resonate for me and what they mean – not for other people, or according to this or that source, but what clicks in my head. Frankly, the more I play with divination systems, the harder a time I have with popular systems like tarot and runes.

I was reading this post on divination systems from Kylara earlier and her system of charms reminded me of the Magpie Oracle, which reminded me of the Found Objects oracle (the link for which is unfortunately offline) which in turn reminded me of Felix Warren’s Road Bones.

I feel better when I can point to the chores I’ve done. I feel better without the daily “frog” hanging over me. (And I know Bug’s been watching a lot of Doc McStuffins… I feel better, so much better, thank you Doc for taking all the ouchies away.)  This isn’t perfection and it doesn’t have to be, after all. Systems like the road bones and the found object oracle are meant to be actively changing systems, just like us. Pieces join. Sometimes pieces leave. The symbols we need in our lives change over time. Father means something very different now than it did five years ago.

I pulled a coin from Mara’s bag tonight. It was a charm from an old tourist attraction that reads “Frontier Town USA Salutes the Man of the Past.” A lot of the pieces in the Calvinbag set, as I’m calling it in shorthand, are pieces I’ve had since I was a kid. They have layers upon layers of meaning thanks to my past selves. I know at a touch which of those star charms represents space and science and which represents magic and fae and yet it’s only the current me that can draw the connection between them and conclude that stars represent knowledge.

The Dark Lady reminds me that this evolution is necessary and important. Who I am in the dark has never been who I am in the light, and both of those people are constantly changing. I am a shapeshifter, after all.

 

 

 

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It’d be a bit more thematically appropriate on the Dark Lady’s day, but Mondays are very bad days for minor spiritual breakdowns so Saturday is a perfectly fine choice. We were at the church tonight for social time and I stepped away after dark to call to Tzymir there in the darkest part of the yard.

Maybe it’s just because it’s Saturday and I get so little response from him, but when my kid woke up screaming from a nightmare, I found myself laying with her in the dark wondering if I was even accomplishing anything with this work, and then if the fact that I was wondering about it made me feel I hadn’t accomplished much at all toward  unpacking my hangups regarding warding.

I think, intellectually, I have made progress. I know I’m doing more and asking for more overall. But tonight I feel like I’m wandering aimlessly in Tzymir’s labyrinth and I’m not sure how to get out. Gonna ask Redbird in the morning if sleep doesn’t help.

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Sometimes happenstance makes things obvious. Last Thursday it seemed like pure luck I ended up at the confluence of two rivers to call on Pechak and Velos – I hadn’t given any thought to the fact that I knew those two rivers met near there, and it didn’t even seem relevant enough to mention in my post last week. Today at lunch it was beautiful, and I felt tugged to walk a little ways from my office, down toward the place on the edge of the Willamette where I first made offerings when I interviewed for this job.

Also it is the spot where a large creek enters the Willamette.

A confluence isn’t the same as a crossroad, energetically. It’s a mingling. These two things are separate, and then they are joined. It’s a little like a marriage, or a merger.

I noticed the repetition as I came down to that overlooking spot and as I offered the day’s prayers. There’s some ideas to chew on there about why a confluence of rivers is sacred to them. Two separate, distinct powers that operate in concert or in opposition but always together… hmm.

For the most part, Pechak and Velos are very straightforward. I ask them for protection from those who would harm our household. There’s some mysteries to them, but those aren’t necessary to get anywhere. They can be blessedly straightforward, and that’s a nice way to start winding down the week. I darned another sock today, and I put dinner together. I’m trying to stay on top of the to-do list thing, in a combination of not being too hard on myself and not being too easy.

Let’s see what Brhenti has to say about that on Friday.

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This morning was pretty unremarkable – I got dressed, started the dishwasher, took out the trash, said morning prayers on my way to work, got on the phone. The usual. I started playing with the new to-do tracking in my bullet journal. Then around 11:30 I noticed something was weird on the edges of my vision. Some of my peripheral vision was missing, and more was weirdly blurry. It didn’t last very long, and was followed by a headache.

Normally I’d just try to forget it as soon as possible but I ran it by my spouse to see what they’d say and their reaction was “uh, nope. call Advice Nurse.”

So I compromised and emailed Advice Nurse, and you know it’s a bad sign when you email Advice Nurse and she calls you back almost immediately. I described it to her and she wanted me to come in today. Just. you know, in case. Because of my medical history.

(Have I mentioned how much I hate that phrase?)

So off I went, in the middle of the day, and it was resoundingly not awesome, but everyone agreed it was for the best that I came in just to make sure.

In other news, I have ruined my streak of not having migraines since the early 2000s.

The streak I have not ruined is doing this practice every day, because I dragged my sorry butt down the creek anyhow, and called out to Tuesday’s power, who’s starting to acquire epithets, at least. He is called the Stolen Crown and the Maligned One and Dread Fairness. He’s extremely formal when I’m in ritual but can turn around and smirk at me the next minute, and he’s not what I thought he was at all, but that’s just par for the course for me, ain’t it?

Anyway. Three weeks down and off we go again…

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Today was a slow day. Bug’s not feeling well and we didn’t have anything we needed to do, so we just stayed in. I darned another sock until my wrist started hurting (time to get my supports back out) and worked on coupons and laundry and bead organizing. And I did find time to get outside while it was nice out and go down to the creek.

Apparently we’ve reached the point in daily practice where I am getting somewhere. I know this is happening, not when I start getting inspiration, but when I start getting my ass kicked. Part of my invokation of Redbird is asking for creativity and today she basically called me out on it.

I have lots of ideas, and that’s wonderful, but my follow-through is lacking. Some of that is executive function issues, some of it is compulsive tendencies, but a lot of it is just dicking around on the internet. (And there’s a lot of overlap there, because infinite scroll + OCD can be a baaaaad combination, but still.)

I have a lot of projects that I am in the middle of, and even more that never seem to make it past acquiring the raw materials. Sometimes that’s because an idea doesn’t pan out, and that’s fine. Sometimes projects are going to take a while, especially if I’m spending the time on things like playing with Bug or taking care of the house. But this isn’t those things.

What did I tell you not to do?

Get distracted.

And what did you immediately do?

… Get distracted?

And if I was satisfied with the way I was spending my time, that’d be something else too. But, once again, I’m not. I look up at midnight and wonder where the time went. I like my hobbies! I want to do them more often!

I’m not sure what the solution is. Maybe I go back to using a blocker in my browser for specific websites, or I try more specific, time-limited goals, or I try some new ways of actually working on my to-do list, or… I don’t know.

But she’s right. I gotta do the thing if I want to do the thing.

Maybe that’s something I can address the next two days…

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