Z is for Zep Tepi

Zep Tepi: the first time.  (Sometimes translated 'the first occasion', or similar other things.)

Here is the crack of cosmic dawn, the Big Bang if you want: out of nothingness, light, matter, form.  All things in their proper place, the divine order making itself manifest, the out-folding of being from the spark of potentiality.

The heart of ritual is Zep Tepi.

The heart of the temple is Zep Tepi.

If you have no Zep Tepi, you got nuffin'.

Most seriously: there is an instant of crystalline perfection, that first moment, that first blink of dawn, utterly pure, utterly right.  That is the origin point of being.

And because it is the origin point of being, it is everywhere, an immanent presence.  Now exists - in all its glories and all of its muck - because Zep Tepi.

Which means you can get there at any time.

It is always, always possible to come to alignment, to open, to find that perfect note.  The song is always there, waiting for your voice.

The candle you light always has the potential to be the First Light, because the First Light is why there is a candle.  The incense you burn always has the potential to be the breath of the gods, because the breath of the gods is why there is incense.  These are ever-present, ever-available, there is no falling away and being lost from the possibility of clarity because clarity is wound-through and a part of every moment of living, if you just know to reach for it.

This is the Original Sinlessness.

You inherited it.

F is for Family

I sometimes get the impression that a lot of pagans are kind of allergic to thinking of religion as something that happens in families.

Yes, I get it: there's a substantial number of pagans who are dealing with the aftermath of having been indoctrinated into some form of religion that didn't work for them, which might even have been cruel to them, and who have resolved that they will never participate in that sort of thing.

But religious ritual isn't just about the cosmic. It isn't just about the turning of the seasons and making sure the sun comes up.

Religious ritual marks births, deaths, comings of age, marriages - not all of them in all religions (no marriage in mine, for example), but most of those big life event things, the things that form, transform, and change families tend to show up again and again in religious ritual. I can't see how to take family out of religion without taking the people out.

Oh, sure, you can do DIY family. Coven-oriented oathbound witchcraft is, as I understand it, supposed to be that: the family of the religion is the circle of initiates. But not everyone is into that sort of thing.

But still the books come out, with titles that end "... for the solitary practitioner". "... for one." The unspoken things in the books are so often either geared towards a young adult with no voluntary fixed ties or people even younger, still at home with presumably-disapproving parents. The assumptions are adult, independent, almost isolated.

My household is mixed-religion. It's important to me to support the religious Stuff of each of my family members. Which is why I spent some time a few months ago making a children's menorah so that Little Foot could learn about her other mom's Judaism in a participatory manner. She would light the candles for the adult menorah, and then we would go light little LED candles in the cups of the other one, and let them 'burn' until morning, a small child's miracle. And Little Foot loved the Hannukah rituals just as much as she loves helping tend my (Celtic pagan) liege's cattle shrine.

My ritual notebook has notes on formal grace prayers for the dinner table. It has morning prayers, evening prayers, bath prayers. Things that I could, when she is a little older, teach my child, because children thrive on rituals. When I look for how to celebrate my holidays, I don't just dig for the esoteric and "spiritual", the meditations, the ecstasy - I look for the things that a child can love, a child whose response to a candle is "Make fire!"

"Make fire!" is the core of so much of religious ritual, cross-traditionally. "Make fire!" is the foundation of the hearthside, the meal cooking, the resting in the long winter. "Make fire!" a child understands.

Which means a child can understand religion.

Make fire.

Inauguration Day

My patchwork heritage
Of Puritan blood on thieved land
New York millers
German soldiers
Migrant Irish workers
Polish woman driven from her heritage by hate
Painters and poets and patriots
Ministers and madmen
Scientists and subversives
Buried in Arlington
Stones and bones and old silver
Alcohol and backroom deals
Hardworking union workers
Ivory-tower elitists
Sewn-together pieces of history
Quilted by this land
Extending from then into now and beyond
And with the child resting beneath my heart
Conceived the fourth of November
We've all come to look for America.

Rolling Home to a President Like Me

Truth with all its far-out schemes....

I was raised on a diet of Pogo and Doonesbury, sixties protest rock and NPR. One of my standard jokes is that Album 1700 is my deeptape; I would sometimes listen to one side of the tape copy I had with the tape recorder under my pillow as I was going to sleep at night. (Other times it was one of the Charlie Brown musicals. Never say I'm not a bit eclectic.)

Lets time decide what it should mean....

I came to the first beginnings of real political awareness in 1986, listening to the Iran-Contra hearings and people stressing about the epic deficits of the Reagan era. I was a serious, earnest child, and I scowled while listening to the news and drew lopsided pie charts trying to figure out where the money should be going. I was sure that if I could just go through it, I could straighten it all out, and I wasn't sure why the people in the government couldn't.

It's not the time, but just the dreams that die.

The following decades kind of burned out that little spark of, "Oh, if I could only get at the stuff here I could make it all add up."

And sometimes, when the room is still...

I'm registered as unenrolled, which means that I can vote in whichever major party primary I feel more strongly about. Which means that if I hadn't been stuck in a morass of bad nerves in 2000, I would have voted in the Republican primary for John McCain.

Time, with so much truth to kill ....

I wouldn't have voted for him in the general, but I felt that his dedication to talking about issues rather than playing the mudslinging game was something worth supporting. Given the choice among a Democratic field that didn't excite me terribly, and the possibility to make a difference to the flavor of the Republican Party for the next while, I knew which way I wanted to gamble.

Of course, it turned out I was too busy being mad to vote, but that's how it would have gone if I had.

Leaves you by the windowsill so tied.

In November 2000 I was up until some ludicrous hour of the morning talking with my ex (we weren't exes at the time) and watching election results go wildly everywhere, and I commented that when I'd been walking down to the polls I'd seen a man on a unicycle bouncing a basketball as he crossed a minor highway (sometimes catching the ball in front of him, sometimes behind his head), and said, "This is gonna be a weird election."

Without a wing to take you high.

I watched the people I knew online start to slowly melt down, my newsgroups become less and less readable and more and more hostile, an atmosphere that only got worse after 9/11.

Without a clue to tell you why.

I went, a year or so later, to a local hearing on same-sex marriage access, intending to speak in favor as a heterosexual married in Massachusetts. I put my name in the hat to speak to the legislature, and I waited, and I waited, and I listened for hours, and I have stories about this, but the long and short of it is that I wound up having to go home without speaking, in part because my husband had another obligation, in part because I started gushing blood from my nose for no particular reason other than, I suppose, it being cold and dry.

Now, I just want to keep my name ....

Time crawled onwards. I watched my country slowly slide into a perdition that I felt I could do nothing about. My personal activisms started to burn out quietly, between my perceptions of the risk and my lack of hope for effectiveness. In the 2004 election, I voted in the Democratic primary, for someone unelectable whose voice I wanted at least heard a little, and I watched a lackluster Kerry campaign fail while wondering what happened to the war hero who had been elected.

Not bother anybody's game....

Time continued crawling. I grew increasingly insular, increasingly weary, increasingly disgusted, and increasingly helpless. I needed to protect my own people, a wide and varied group of various sorts, and had no energy to spare for anything outside of that. I cut what I did down to the bone, preserving sanity and energy for what slowly started to seem like the inevitable need to defend. I couldn't see the world changing to suit what I wanted it to be unless I went up and did it, and I could not afford to do it - not the mental cost, not the risks to my family, none of it. So I knew it wouldn't happen.

Without ideas of gold or fame or...

When the election season rolled around again, I could not bring myself to be terribly interested. There was nothing that would stop the slide downwards, after all; "politics as usual" would be the same established interests, the same voices, the same faces, the same donation sources, the same sorts of policies. I had reasonable confidence that whatever Democratic nominee made it through would have the ability to win, given the overall status of the Bush administration, and that was all I could bring myself to care about, all I was able to invest in.

Insane heights.

I have friends who are political junkies; I absorbed things they said quietly, without really engaging with any of it. I poked around and did "Which candidate matches your views" quizzy things occasionally, on a lark. I mostly ignored the process for a long time, finding myself unable to care terribly much which of the sets of talking heads got the nomination. I mostly watched the Republican side, because they made me anxious, and I knew whichever one of them came out on top of the slugfest would be setting a tone - and I wanted to know where my enemies were going to be coming from. I needed to defend, after all. That was all I could believe in.

I don't want a lot of money, I don't want a Playboy Bunny....

I don't remember when that started to change. But I remember listening. I remember Jon Stewart on the Daily Show saying, "... gave a speech about race that treated the American people like adults." I know that was after I started listening, started paying attention, started thinking about possibility.

Started waking up.

Just a love to call me honey late at night...

And I still didn't want to talk about politics, talk about the races, talk about the vast dramas played out on the national soap opera stage. But there was something different out there - not the same old figured with their various policies, but all basically a part of the flow of The Way Things Were. There was a possibility of something being different, and someone doing it other than me - that thing I'd had no hope of.

In my arms, by my side, in my arms, late at night.

Quietly, in my own space, I started reading party platforms. When it was down to Clinton and Obama I laid their websites out side by side and compared the issues. When McCain looked likely to take the Republican nomination I remembered 2000, and had hope for a shift back to what he had been then and there. There was ... something there, a possibility, the sort of world that I would like to see, where the people who had their differences could address them themselves.

But I don't know, I ain't been told...

There was a little spark there, that the era of hostile campaigning might come to an end, that people might have a vision and work towards it, something might change - and it wasn't policies that I wanted that change in so much as zeitgeist.

Everybody wants a hand to hold....

I thought a lot about the civil rights movements that this country has had, working for racial equality, for women, for gay rights, for so many things. It flowed in and out of my mind, the old tunes, the ways of being. I watched Across the Universe and read that speech, and I felt myself in tears.

They're so afraid of being old....

I was quiet, and focused, and almost reluctant to make comments supporting one candidate over another, because of the weariness of those years. But there were the songs in my heart again, and I remembered them, and hummed them quietly to myself.

So scared of dying so unknown, and all alone....

Something in me started to live again.

Rolling home.

I watched the hardening of the discourse, the negativity, and folded in on myself. The insulting terms that were thrown every which way about the candidates and their supporters depressed me almost catastrophically.

But at the same time, I saw people inspired. Creative. I saw LOLcats. I saw an entire blog of photos of Obama with kids, his own and others, and just this sense of comfort and ease with small people. I saw occasional images of his relationships with his family, laughing with his daughters, heard about the puppy so that when he spoke about it in his acceptance speech I said, "A puppy!" before he mentioned it and drew funny looks from my men. I saw pumpkins. I saw all these different upswellings of feeling, and creation, and, yes, being talked to like an adult.

And there was new music, too. New music, my gods, new music.

There was a story, sometime in there, where a bunch of reporters found Obama in a diner and wanted to get his opinion on the Crisis Of The Moment, and he looked at them, and was reported to say, "Why can't I just eat my waffle?"

Why can't I just eat my waffle?

That was a clinching moment for me, oddly enough; this eminently human reponse, this realness, this sense that here was someone who wasn't going to just spew talking points or declaim on positions at the drop of a hat, but who was a real human being who occasionally has breakfast.

A friend made me a livejournal icon of it.

And I watched the first campaign that actually started to speak my language. Not just in terms of what I called the first political campaign of the 21st century in terms of its grassroots and internet work. But in the sense that somehow, somewhere, someone knew about that little girl who drew little pie charts about the budget, putting huge slices of it towards education, because damnit, if we only had the numbers we could do something to put it right. Someone wasn't ashamed of having been the little kid who said, "Hey, I'm smart enough to figure this out, just let me at the problem," in a country where politics has had a strong anti-intellectual current for my entire lifetime.

And I saw, just before Halloween, a photo of Obama on some tarmac somewhere, talking with an aide, with a pumpkin tucked under one arm, as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do.

I had never seen a politician preparing to carve pumpkins before.

You want the real America? Goddamn, a politician with a fucking pumpkin.

A friend posted this image today and I laughed at the sticker on the computer, but, again, this is a real human thing, something familiar and real and I laugh not just because it's silly but because it's human and known and damnit I wish I'd thought of that, you know?

And it's a trivial thing, a silly thing, not enough to put a vote on ...


... but it's enough to make the vote I cast mean so much more.


Because I voted for a President who's actually like me, and I never thought that would happen.

I never thought it would be okay to be the little girl who hoped her government could be fixed again.

Scale to Skin

There is a snake on my leg. A winged snake, coiled to protect an egg.

She is wrought in blood and ink and time, from my initial vision and the skilled hands of an artist who knows how to work flesh.

She is a sacred snake, a royal python, who guards her eggs when she lays them. She is a sacred snake, winged like the uraeus, the guardian of the king (though the uraeus is a cobra).

I was born in her year, the Snake, though just at its transition; my summer boyfriend when I was sixteen, four days younger than I, was born a Horse. When I was a child, we caught a garter snake once, kept it in a jar a while to study it and learn to have no fear, released it in the stump at the bottom of the yard, into which it wriggled and vanished like a mystery.

She is wise, is the snake, a liminal creature. She knows the mysteries of rebirth, shedding her skin to be made anew over and over again, many times in her life. She is a primordial, one of the first gods, guardian of secrets. There were times she bargained with people, to live in their homes and keep them free of vermin, in exchange for the warmth of their hearth, the protection of their children. She gave oracles, sometimes in the dangerous edges of the effects of her venom. Her reputation as a healer is multicultural, touching many worlds, many serpents.

She spreads her green, feathered wings widely, wrapping my leg in a gesture of benediction; green for life, living, birth, rich against her fertile browns. She can freely move in any direction she chooses, and chooses to mantle protectively over one egg, tucked luminous dark into her coils.

The egg she protects is a pisanka, an egg of old, old tradition among certain of my ancestors. An egg now marking and celebrating the mysteries of life and death, the shedding of the skin, being born into salvation. Blue for breath, breath for soul, ruach the colour of sky; the starburst sun in white and gold, pure and joyous and the brightness of the laughter of children.

She is my ancestor mark, my protector always with me. She is my memory of those who came before, my promise to those who come after. She is wrought in flesh and bone and blood and breath, etched under skin, holding close and gentle.

When the healing skin peels away, it will look and feel just like snakeskin.


(As I started writing this, some weeks ago before the work was done, Stephen Bodio's Querencia linked to this post at Atomic Nerds about ink and the shapes and meanings thereof, and what people will see.)