Magical tales 3, bindings and blowback

I've told you some stories before about Wife's magical workings, for example here and here. Both of those posts also included commentary by John Michael Greer, after I had described some facet of the working to him. Well, I've got another. This is one I had forgotten all about until the first time (a couple years ago, I think) that I read Greer talk about bindings.

A magical binding is a spell you cast on someone else that prevents him from doing some particular thing. Greer has talked about these more than once in his blogs, as a way to illustrate a point about magical ethics that he calls "the raspberry jam principle." The principle runs like this: You can't spread raspberry jam without getting it all over your fingers or the table. In the same way, when you direct magic at somebody else, the very same energies are going to affect you too. The idea, therefore, is that you should never aim a spell at someone else that you aren't willing to undergo yourself, because sure as anything the blowback will catch you.

This also means that if you want to use magic to control someone else's behavior, you have to be very careful how you craft the spell. Greer has told the story more than once that early in his career as a mage, he was good friends with a woman who was threatened by a rapist. (I don't remember if this was her husband, or a domestic partner, or a stranger.) Greer protected her by putting a binding on this fellow that prevented him from raping. And Greer explained to his readers that he was careful to prevent the offender from raping, and not from all sexual contact. His point was that he knew the very same binding would affect him too. But he accepted that consequence, because he didn't want to rape anyone anyway! So it was no problem for him that the spell which blocked the other guy blocked him too.

Anyway, in today's Magic Monday post, someone asked about bindings again. Greer told his story. And I remembered something that had happened to Wife almost 25 years ago.

Back when the Twin Towers fell, Wife was still unambiguously Wiccan. (Her entanglement with Christianity came later.) Like many people she was angry about the attack, and felt that she wanted to Do Her Part in some way. And she hit on the idea of putting a binding on Osama bin Laden, so that he would be immobilized. So that he couldn't do anything. 

I don't know the details of the ritual. (I was generally supportive of her worship, but I wanted to stay away from this working.) I do remember that she made a doll to represent Osama, and then bound it with rope or twine—so that, symbolically, it was bound hand and foot and couldn't do anything—and tossed it in the back of the closet to sit in the dark. Doubtless there was more to it as well.

To this day, I have no idea whether her working had even the slightest effect on Osama bin Laden himself. I kind of assume not, partly because Wife was no mage, and partly because there were so many other people in the world wishing him (respectively) good or ill that I figure her spell likely got lost in the shuffle.

But interestingly enough, she got very sick after that--so sick that for the next two years or so she could scarcely crawl out of bed even just to go to the bathroom. She couldn't work. She couldn't look after the children. (We had to hire a nanny, and I didn't make all that much money. Interesting times.) In fact, she couldn't ... umm ... do anything! Wait, really?

At the time I never connected her illness with her working against Osama. But now after reading Greer for some years, I no longer treat the synchronicity as a coincidence.

I posted this story on Greer's blog. His reply was brief, but to the point:

Typical blowback. Never, ever cast a spell on anyone else you wouldn't want to experience yourself...because you will experience it, whether you want to or not.

And that, I guess, is that.     

      

Vajrayogini

It's not really related to anything else we've discussed, but two or three years ago I stumbled across the most remarkable Buddhist deity. Her name is Vajrayogini, and that's a picture of her up above.

What's so special about her, besides the utterly mind-blowing picture? I think she might be a key figure to help communicate what I used to see in "high-maintenance" women.

"Living consistently with your values" part 2

This post follows on from an earlier post a little more than four years ago.

Last week—I think it was last week—I was talking to Debbie over Zoom. She had just come in from roasting marshmallows with her family: daughter Mattie and her husband, plus their two boys (Debbie's grandsons). Roasting marshmallows? I said. That sounds like fun.

Oh it was, she added. And then she told me the story behind it.

The older boy is now in ... I'm not sure, but I think it's first grade. And at the beginning of the week, his teacher handed out a flyer about the Cub Scouts. Anyone who wanted to join could attend a meeting at a certain date and time, and they would roast marshmallows. 

Mattie and her husband told him No, they weren't going to sign him up for Scouts.The way Debbie described it, they gave two reasons:

1. The Boy Scouts require you to believe in God.
2. The Boy Scouts are homophobic.

Besides, said Mattie's husband, the main thing you do in Scouts is learn to go camping, and we already do a lot of camping.

But they were going to roast marshmallows!

So Mattie and her husband offered that the family could roast marshmallows on their own. And they did.

Psychological safety

Yesterday I too a couple of online classes related to job skills. In a sense it was silly of me to waste the time, because I'm retired—why should I need to improve my job skills now? But they were offered for free and I hated to waste them. Anyway, one of the classes was about how to develop your employees, and it made what should have been a commonplace observation: your employees need to feel psychologically safe before you can talk about developing their skills or their careers. Otherwise they won't take the risk.

Psychologically safe??

And right away I thought about this post here, plus any number of other times at work that the same topic came up (but I didn't write about it).

Looking back with the perspective of ... gosh, it looks like seven years by now! ... I think I was too harsh in my assessment of what was going on. You can go read the post itself for the Grand Narrative that I spun at the time, but I think the simpler explanation is that I didn't feel psychologically safe. And this was for a couple of reasons.

One is that I really felt our Human Resources department (by that time) was dangerous, or even predatory. Years before, when we had our own local HR staff, I had a good relationship with them. But by the time all this went down, HR was located elsewhere and I felt a distinct sense of menace from most of them.

Another is that I was working in a discipline that I had learned entirely on-the-job, and there were huge parts of it I didn't know. I had established a good position for myself over the years, but I knew that there were large provinces of my own field that I knew nothing about, and I didn't even know what the possibilities were in the profession. So I had no idea where to start a conversation.

Finally, I could never really bring myself to care about making any serious, long-term contributions to the business. I talk about this phenomenon here.

All in all, I think the lack of psychological safety I felt at work was largely just an extension of my status as the Consummate Outsider. (And see also the story about Aristotle that I tell in this post I already referenced.)

Is that a good thing? No, I guess not. But it's not as discreditable as the Grand Narrative I came up with seven years ago.    

Failed again, 2

This afternoon I logged into my bank account, and on a whim I looked up what you have to do to link a savings account as the backup to prevent overdrafts on a checking account. I discovered that the service is free. Next I wondered: Since I'm still listed on Son 1's accounts—that's why I get copied on his overdraft notifications—I wonder if I have the authority to link his savings account to his checking account?

Only one way to find out. So I tried it. Less than five minutes later, it was all done.

This should prevent future overdraft notifications, I think. Unless things get really bad, I mean.

I emailed Son 1 to tell him I had done it, and to explain that he could undo it if he chose. (I think.) I have heard nothing back from him, but I didn't really expect to. I hope this solves the problem.

    

The cat-whisperer

Last week, I was back in farm country visiting Schmidt again. I spent all day on Saturday the 9 driving there, and all day on Monday the 18 driving home. Marie visited too during the exact same stretch, except that she went back home the next day. We visited some, listened to music, watched some old movies, and generally hung out. Some notes follow.  

What was the occasion?

Schmidt had hernia surgery scheduled for Monday the 11. His doctors told him not to lift anything heavy for six weeks after. Schmidt had already explained to us that he had no intention of following this instruction literally, because he knew ways to use leverage to make the work easier on his healing incision. And he made a big point of saying that he could manage by himself if he had to. But he needed someone to drive him home from the hospital, because he would still have a lot of opiates in his system then. And yes, he supposed he could use some help with a few tasks around the farm in the early days.

So Marie and I came to visit. We drove him home, and we fixed dinners for a week. When we all went out shopping, I carried the big carton of cat litter that he bought (to supplement one he already owned). He pushed the cart so that he could lean on it. So I guess we helped in little ways. We also kept him company.

The cat-whisperer

Schmidt discussed his approach to training cats. (See also this post and this one.) He actually used the phrase "cat whisperer" for himself, as an allusion or hommage to the work of Buck Brannaman (see also this documentary), who has been nicknamed "the horse whisperer." Schmidt's basic point is the same as Buck's: it is your job to understand the animal you want to train. You can't expect the cat (or horse) to understand you, or to think like a human being. You have to think like a cat (or horse), and use that insight to encourage the behaviors you want. Schmidt went on to say that the conventional myth about cats being arrogant and uncooperative is just that—a myth and no more. He said that using his methods, he has had geat success—within reasonable limits, of course—getting his cats to do what he wants.

Schmidt and Marie talked about cats a lot. I didn't have much to contribute to those conversations.

Could Wife have Asperger's?, 3

OK, the last time I asked this was five years ago. I think the answer is definitely "Yes" based on lots of experiences that are all more or less summed up in this post. Wife herself thinks the answer is "No" (or that's what she said when I asked her), as described in this post and then this one right after.

But then this evening I was reading John Michael Greer's Ecosophia blog, specifically the comments to this post, and he makes the following remarks in comment #58:

My late wife was the same way — she was on the autism spectrum, and from late childhood on preferred to hang with boys (and then men) rather than girls (and then women) because she disliked the informal-power realm and never could do it well. That’s one of the reasons why she became the first female presiding officer of an Odd Fellows lodge in Washington state; when the Odd Fellows decided to let women join, the brothers of my lodge (who all knew her via social and charitable activities) asked her to join and then voted her into the big chair because they all knew her, liked her, and knew she’d follow the rules of formal power rather than trying to twist them into comformity with the ways of informal power.   

I read this, and right away I thought of Wife's career as a high school teacher.

She spent four years teaching at all-boys Catholic high schools. (That's one year before graduate school, and three years after.) Then she finally had a chance to teach at an all-girls Catholic high school. She jumped at the chance: partly for practical reasons (it was a lot closer to home, and her daily commute had become very difficult), but mostly for idealistic reasons. Wife called herself a feminist. She had gone to an all-women's college, and valued all-female spaces. She looked forward eagerly to training young women so that they could achieve the best they had in them.

Be careful what you wish for.

Wife was very successful in teaching boys, but she failed utterly at teaching girls. She held that job for only one year. If she had not been accepted at another graduate school after that (which rendered moot any question of her further employment) she would surely have been fired, and might have had to go back to secretarial work.

Of course I wasn't on campus. I had my own job. But the way she described it, the girls were all two-faced and treacherous.She often summarized the difference like this:

Back when I was teaching boys, I'd do something one of the boys didn't like and right away he'd shout out in the middle of class, "Oh, Mrs. Tanatu, that isn't even fair!" Then I'd tell him, "Suck it up, Johnson, this isn't a democracy." And we'd be done—the whole problem would be over. But with the girls, any time I do something they don't like they smile and smile just as sweet as pie. I never even know there's a problem. But then they go tell all their other teachers that I'm picking on them, and the other teachers come and ask me quietly, "Why are you being so mean to Sonya? Or Tanya? Or Suzie? Or Betty?" And these little conversations in the hallway are the first I've heard of it! I literally never knew there was a problem before this. But now the whole faculty thinks I have some kind of crazed vendetta against this or that girl, just because she never turns in her homework and wants me to coddle her anyway. God, but I miss teaching boys!

Is it just me, or does that sound pretty much exactly like what Greer says about his late wife? That she—like my Wife—understood formal power and could work with it effectively, but that she—also like my Wife—was totally at sea when it came to informal power, those quiet conversations in the hallway, and the focus on whether you like someone rather than on whether she's following the rules.

Sara Greer was like this because she was on the autism spectrum. Isn't it the most natural thing to assume that Wife was also somewhere on that spectrum, if she got identical results?