Looks like a big year

It looks like this is going to be a big year.

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I went to the Ecosophian Convention in June. That was big, right there.

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I mentioned a while ago that I'm back to work on my book. My goal is to self-publish successfully this year. I don't expect to make a lot of money at it, although it would be nice if Fate proved me wrong. But it explains an obscure, niche topic. The natural audience is probably not large, and I've never been very good at publicizing myself. The goals that I hope to achieve include:

• proving that I can set and achieve a long-term goal;
• learning about the self-publication process, so I can plan to publish some of the other stuff bubbling in my head;
• opening up the possibility for my sons that they can achieve things in life above and beyond holding a regular job, because it is always easier to do a thing if you see someone else do it first. (To be clear, my own father was rather weak on the "holding a regular job" part, so that was the first thing I wanted to model for them!)

But there is more. Turns out that the world doesn't revolve around me. 😀

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Wife moved from living with Son1 to living near Son2. Son1 and Son2 organized the whole move between themselves, and are handling the aftermath.

Son1 will be moving in with Dorcas soon. Son2 proposed to Beryl.

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Debbie has had multiple spells of atrial fibrillation. Already this year she has had a device inserted into her heart to help regularize its behavior, and she is on medication to help with that as well. We still talk regularly every Friday afternoon, but more and more those conversations tend to drift over to talking about death. She's still making plans for the future, but more and more she talks about wanting things to be in order by the time she is no longer there to order them.

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Because Debbie has been thinking about death, she has been pushing our Unitarian Sangha to establish a Care-Taking Council. I wrote about the very first steps ... setting up an exploratory committee to review the idea ... back in 2025. But most of the activity will take place this year.

Also related to that, this spring our Sangha held its first ever Day of Mindfulness. We are slowly stretching out of a fixed and unchanging shape that we've held for some 20 years.

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Marie's favorite nephew was arrested by TSA. Turns out he was on a cruise with his parents (Marie's sister Cuñada, and her current husband). TSA explored his tablet, and found pornography on it. Some of the pornography involved subjects below the legal age of consent. This translates to five years in prison—automatically—without the possibility of parole. Marie is beside herself—partly at the fate of her nephew, of course, but partly because of the nature of the offense. She has not said so, but my guess is that years ago (before we got back together and she started to re-evaluate her attitudes towards sex), she would have approved of such a law. Today she hates it because it endangers Nephew. There are probably other complexities as well ... Marie generates emotional complexity effortlessly.

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I'm in a fight with my professional organization. I don't know why I care, and some days I don't. It's not like I'm working any more. My membership expires this month. Maybe I'll just let it go. Still, if I do, that's another milestone for this year.

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At the end of June, Schmidt wrecked his car. He described it this way:

"Driving to town for groceries and prescriptions.  Just a mile or two out of town, got distracted trying to let a wasp out the window, drifted just enough to hit a mailbox that (due to prior vandalism I suppose) was anchored with steel and concrete like a damn skyscraper and totally wrecked the car.  Flipped, rolled, slid... good thing I'm in the habit of doing only 60 on that part of the road!  Seat belt & air bags did their job and I crawled out the (pulverized) passenger side window with just some cuts and bruises.  Somebody came along just as I got out and used his cell phone to call 911 -- I was still dazedly trying to collect myself and wondering how to use my phone without  my glasses (knocked off and god-knew-where).... Cue EMTs, Highway patrol, tow truck -- tow operator finally found my glasses for me (way in the back of what's left of the car) so I can see again."

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My former boss wrote me that he is afraid of being laid off, because the huge company that we both worked for is doing lots of business except not in his country.

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Numerologically, 2026 is a "1-year" because 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 10, and 1 + 0 = 1. According to John Michael Greer, 1-years are: 

"Ruled by the Sun, this is a number of new beginnings and opportunity. This is a time of practical action and constructive change.  It's a good time to take direct action and to start new things in motion, so long as they aren't complex or evasive. Move ahead forcefully during this year."

All-righty then!

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Have I forgotten anything? Maybe. Probably

Is there more that I don't know about? Gosh, I hope not!

           

You can just do things!

A long-expected party

The Ecosophian community is an informal collection of people who follow the books and blogs of John Michael Greer. There is no formal organization; nobody collects dues, or organizes formal events, or publishes meeting minutes. But if you check out either of his blogs—Ecosophia, or Toward Ecosophy—you'll find many of the same people commenting over and over. And of course there are plenty of people (I'm one of them) who rarely comment or post, but who read the materials regularly.

For a few years now, there has been a social gathering of ecosophians in Providence, Rhode Island, on or around the summer solstice.In the past, this gathering generally took the form of a big potluck. I remember seeing the announcements and thinking, "Gosh, wouldn't that be fun!" Of course I never went, because I don't live anywhere near to Providence. There was no simple or easy way to pop over and bring a contribution to the feast, so I didn't think about it beyond that.

You can just do things.

Last year, Greer traveled to Glastonbury, England, in early June. He announced his plans the previous November, and in the end his visit turned into a kind of impromptu convention. People gave talks and workshops. There were (by all accounts) good food, good beer, and good conversation. Of course it sounded like a delightful time in the run-up before it happened; and it sounded even better afterwards. But I'm an American, after all. Glastonbury is a long ways away. I toyed with the idea of going there, but I didn't take it very seriously. So in the end I stayed home, and read about it after the fact.

You can just do things.

Then after the 2025 potluck, the man who regularly organizes the events in Providence proposed that "next year" (meaning 2026) he wanted to change it up a bit. Why not hold a convention in Providence, just like the one in Glastonbury? Surely we have people on this continent who would like to give talks on some ecosophian-related topic? Or workshops? It can't be that hard. So he put out an announcement in July of 2025, for the following year, to get people's attention and start them thinking.

You can just do things.

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.     

      

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? 

   

Do breakups cause breakage?

So here I am, minding my own business, reading John Michael Greer's "Magic Monday" column, and someone writes in anonymously to say, "at the end of my marriage, everything started breaking, one thing after the other." Someone else replies, "The day [my partner] died my phone went haywire too."

And suddenly I remember. The first time I had Debbie as a guest in my new apartment, after I left Wife, I went to make us a pot of tea and the handle broke off the tea pot. (Interestingly, the tea pot had been a wedding present to Wife and me; I no longer remember who from, but since I ended up with it, it might have been from one of my friends.) Debbie suggested that this was a sign, and I should get rid of the teapot. But I kept it. Only now if I want to use it, I use hot pads so I can pick it up by the body to pour it.

And I remember the first time Marie came to visit me, a few years later. She broke a crystal butter dish that I had salvaged when Wife and I divided everything up. There was no way to keep using that, so yes, I discarded it into the trash.

So now I wonder: is this a repeatable phenomenon? Do breakups cause breakage?

Inquiring minds want to know ....  

     

Wrapping up last year

I keep thinking I should write something about the last … gosh, I guess three months of last year. I keep not wanting to do it. Not that there's anything bad about it. I just can't summon the energy.

This is an omnibus post. The only common theme is that I'm too lazy to break it out into multiple different posts. Or maybe I should say that empirically I have already observed a strong tendency not to write it. So tonight I figured, "Better to get it all written than to worry about the details." I count 14 different tags or labels on this post right now. Maybe I'll add more later. That should be a sign that it really does tell multiple stories.

October

Actually I guess I've already talked about a lot of it. In October I traveled to visit Debbie for a week, and we went on a silent meditation retreat. (The retreat lasted just a weekend, so we also spent time visiting her family.) Then I flew on to another town where Marie was attending a conference. I appeared with her at the big dinner, as arm candy, and otherwise wandered around town while she attended multiple sessions. I think I talked about this trip in this post here. (See also this one, for a slice of life around Debbie's family.)

November

In November, Mother and I joined Brother and SIL in driving all day to visit family in another state over, for Thanksgiving. I talk about some parts of that trip in this post here. There were other parts of the visit as well, but I don't remember anything so important that I need to remember it or write about it. Stan was better behaved than he was five years ago, and easily distracted with Monty Python routines. This time it was his little sister who was the terror, but not as destructively.

How to know your will

I can't believe I never posted this story before. But a quick search proves that I haven't. So here goes.

A couple days ago, I read a remark by John Michael Greer that he made three years ago, in the middle of a discussion about training the will. (I probably read it back then too, but in the moment this discussion was referenced from something more recent.) Anyway, leaving the context aside, what he said was: "You always do act in accordance with your will -- just not always in accordance with your conscious will."

And suddenly I was reminded of a Full Moon ritual put on by Wife and a couple other members of her coven, some 36 or 37 years ago. One of the young men (later ordained as Sun-Bear) drew the lot to serve as Priestess, so the Lady was invoked into him during the Aspect. (For a rough overview of the Full Moon ritual, see this post here. At the ritual I'm describing now, I was not the one to do the invocation.)

"Neopagan disability cult"?

A few days ago I was reading John Michael Greer's latest weekly blog post—plus the comments, which are always valuable—and in replying to one comment he made a passing reference to something he called the "Neopagan disability cult." Someone asked him what he meant, and he explained as follows:

Waiting for the end of the world 7, summary

So why did I title this series "Waiting for the end of the world"? When I stumble up out of my chair after doomscrolling through Twitter for days at a time, what is it that I think I see coming?

Well, if I list them grouped according to which entry in the series I used to discuss each one, I find myself fretting over the following:

1. The dollar is at risk of collapse, under the weight of decades of deficit spending. If it collapses, it will pull the American economy down with it.
2. Political conversation in this country has become toxic, so I can't discuss this stuff except here where I am anonymous.
3. Society encourages lunatic opinions and penalizes people for saying things that are obviously simple facts. (Example: "A man cannot become a woman.")
4. We have forgotten how to conduct normal politics. We have started weaponizing the justice system against political opponents. This is how we slide from a Republic into a Principate.
5. Our Presidential politics are dominated by a senile and obstructionist gerontocracy. This means we have no real chance to change course. Again, this is how we slide from a Republic into a Principate.
6. Our irresponsible support of Ukraine means that we are actively provoking World War Three, which we will lose badly. Even without Ukraine, it's pretty likely anyway because of troubles in other parts of the world

Is that enough to deserve the title "Waiting for the end of the world"? 

Maybe I should add that I don't expect a sudden, apocalyptic end. World War III will be bad, but the odds are that someone will survive. Or we might come to our senses and avoid it somehow. Avoiding a Principate will be harder. (In fact there are good reasons to think we may already be there.) But it any event, my point is not that we should expect the country to look like Lear's blasted heath a week from next Tuesday. 

What I really expect is a long slow decline, what John Michael Greer calls The Long Descent. Life will get harder and things will get more expensive. Tools will break down and we won't be able to fix them. Government agencies will get more troublesome and less useful, until one by one they are shuttered "temporarily" out of "budgetary concerns." We will still have some kinds of technology, but we will gradually stop using others. (No, I don't know which will be which.)

Greer talks about this in a lot of places. You might check out this essay here (from back in 2004), or his archived blog The Archdruid Report, or his current blog Ecosophia. He has widened his topics over the years, but The Long Descent is never far from his thoughts.

In any event, I need to get off Twitter and stick my head outdoors once in a while.

P.S.: This same month, I've been writing a couple of posts over on the Patio, also about the end of the world. You can find the first one here. I expect to write the next installment soon.

  

          

Learning the lessons of freedom

A year ago—or gosh, it's been longer than that—I wrote a post about how numerology calculates your "birth number." According to John Michael Greer (magician, occultist, and former archdruid), this number "represents the fixed framework of your personality and your life, and it sums up the things about you that won’t change no matter what. It defines the lesson you have come into this incarnation to learn." 

At the time I explained that Brother has a birth number of 4 ("the challenge you face in this incarnation is to learn self-discipline and build solid foundations") and I have 22 (basically the same as 4 but with a rich inner life).

Wife and Marie are both 8's ("the challenge this incarnation sets before you is that of worldly accomplishment"). Son 1 and Son 2 are both 6's ("the challenge you face in this incarnation is learning how to accept responsibility for others").

But I wasn't quite sure what to make of Mother. Her birth number comes out to 5, an unstable number about which Greer says "you are impatient with routine …. you do unexpected things and are constantly heading for new places, and when you get into trouble – which happens fairly often! – you are good at finding a way out." But when I look at her today (in her 80's, admittedly) she is a respected professional in a field that demands a certain level of routine; her recent travel has all been to visit her siblings and their families; and when Father was acting so fecklessly as a businessman, she kept things grounded and running. Somehow none of this fits well with the almost-chaotic temperament I just described.

A successful marriage after all?

You all know that my marriage was in many ways a slow-moving train wreck: very slow-moving, but ultimately a wreck all the same. So it has always amused me … well, "always" since I read the relevant post … that the system of numerology propounded by John Michael Greer says it should have been a success. But this evening I thought of another way to look at it.

I won't summarize my marriage, because you can just go re-read all of my posts here from December 2007 through June 2017: I mean all 932 of them. It's easy. But maybe I should recap what Greer says about the numerology of relationships.

"May they name a disease after you!"

There's a great Yiddish curse which runs, "May you become famous, so famous they name a disease after you!" (See, for example, references here and here.) But once upon a time I actually contemplated this for Wife. 

As you know, Wife was diagnosed years ago with systemic lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder where the body's immune system overreacts to simple, normal stimuli and ends up attacking healthy tissue. But think for a minute how exactly this description mirrors Wife's temperament, as she chronically overreacts to minor setbacks or random bad luck with outrage and fury, as if the Universe were out to get her, personally. There were years where I thought, "If only we could document this correlation and submit it to a journal somewhere, Wife could be immortalized by having the syndrome named after her!"

Turns out other people have had the idea that there might be a connection between personality and disease. In a recent blog post, John Michael Greer explains that Eliphas Lévi wrote "Most physical maladies derive from moral maladies, according to the unique and universal magical doctrine and due to the law of analogies." (The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, chapter 20) And on his other blog, Greer has written that when he worked in nursing homes, experienced aides could identify what disease a patient suffered from simply by the patient's personality type, without ever looking at the chart:

• The heart-attack personality is "the famous Type A personality."
• "The cancer personality represses his or her emotional life, takes on extra responsibilities, and is constantly worried about not being good enough."
• "The diabetic personality is self-indulgent in a particular way, and -- yes, I know, it sounds like a pun -- rather sweet."
• "The multiple sclerosis personality is the kind that will ring the call bell fifteen times in an eight hour shift because the patient wants you to adjust the position of some little item on the nightstand, which the patient could adjust herself. It's weakness and constant requests for help as a means of feeling in control."

So maybe there's a "lupus personality." Maybe I can get someone to name it after Wife.

   

Asking about the baby priestess

Last spring I wrote you about the time before we were married, when Wife (then a Dedicant in her coven) promised to Cerridwen that "I will bear a daughter and raise her to be a priestess for you." It didn't work out, although at least once Wife tried to bear this daughter and bore Son 2 instead. Because of the circumstances around Son 2's conception and birth, which seemed to suggest some divine intervention, we both wondered whether that let Wife off the hook as far as her promise was concerned.

Well, this afternoon I was looking through an old notebook of mine, and I found the answer.

What could be wrong with metta meditation?

 One of the standard Buddhist meditations—at any rate you find lay practitioners in America using it a lot—is the so-called "metta meditation." It's a meditation you can use to wish for peace and metta (loving-kindness) for every living being in the world, or the Universe. One version goes like this:

May I be filled with loving kindness.

May I be safe from inner and outer danger.

May I be well in body, heart and mind.
May I be at peace and completely happy.

May my loved ones and friends be filled with loving kindness. 
May they be safe from inner and outer danger.
May they be well in body, heart and mind.
May they be at peace and completely happy.

May even the people I have difficulty with be filled with loving kindness.
May they, too, be safe from inner and outer danger.
May they, too, be well in body, heart and mind.
May they, too, be at peace and completely happy.

May all beings everywhere be filled with loving kindness.
May all beings everywhere be safe from inner and outer danger.
May all beings everywhere be well in body, heart and mind.
May all beings everywhere be at peace and completely happy.

Swallowing bitterness, or, Did I rediscover tonglen meditation?

A while ago I was reading through the comments to a post by John Michael Greer, and one of them struck me. You can find the full comment here, from a reader who goes by the sobriquet Northwind Grandma, but the gist of it is as follows:

... Several readers have asked “how can I help during the decline?” Start with one’s intention. If one wants to “help the world,” breathe in the bad and breathe out the good. Close the eyes, and do this twenty minutes a day for the rest of your life.... It is not a meditative practice for the weak. It may sound easy. It is a practice that makes or breaks a world, not to mention what it can do to a person.

It turns out this is a well-known practice in Tibetan Buddhism called tonglen meditation. You can also learn more about it here. Anyway, several people had further comments in the thread—starting with Mr. Greer himself:

Northwind, if that works for you, by all means, but I emphatically don’t recommend this for anyone at all. I know people whose lives went straight down the crapper when they did this, without doing any measurable good for anybody else.

Then there was some additional discussion, for example in this comment here and this one here.

What struck me so hard about this discussion is that I used to do the exact same thing with Wife, or almost. I didn't think of it as a meditation practice, and so I didn't go through all the formal steps that, for example, Pema Chödrön outlines in her article above. In my mind I called it "swallowing bitterness," and I wondered if it might be a practice someone could apply pragmatically in, say, political re-education camps, or perhaps Hell. 

Magical tales 2, the baby priestess

Back before Wife and I were married, she missed her period one month. I don't remember if we bought a pregnancy test, but we were convinced she was pregnant. It was definitely a bad time to have a child: we weren't even married yet, she had a job, we were trying to get into graduate school—life was busy and confusing. A child would have upended it completely. But we also felt queasy at the idea of abortion. (We could bring ourselves to support it politically, in the abstract; but actually going through one? Shudder.)

While we were still trying to decide what to do, the full moon rolled around and we went to her coven's Full Moon ceremony. Part of the ceremony was regularly given over to magical work, if anyone had anything they wanted done. Sometimes the whole coven worked on something together, and sometimes they just backed up a single person who did some work alone. 

Wife announced that she wanted to place a petition with a deity; and after thinking it through she decided that she wanted to petition Cerridwen, the Crone Goddess of her pantheon. Cerridwen later became Wife's patron, too, but at this point Wife wasn't consecrated to anyone yet. Anyway, she said she wanted to make a petition, without (apparently) having discussed the idea with her High Priestess or anyone else. So the rest of the coven backed her up, while she called to Lady Cerridwen, and asked for her help in eliminating this "misbegotten" child. And then she went on to say, "In return I promise that I will bear a daughter and raise her to be a priestess for you."

There was a silence after she finished, and it seemed to go on for a long time. Finally her High Priestess broke it with a soft, hushed "So mote it be." (That's what her coven used in places where a Christian would say "Amen.") And I really don't remember if there was any discussion after about whether that kind of promise was a good idea.

Fast forward a dozen years. By then Wife was trying to get pregnant, and was experiencing serious infertility problems. After a while the doctors found a silver bullet to treat her infertility, and Son 1 was born. It took us a while to adjust to having a baby in the house, but adjust we did. And Wife started thinking more and more about her promise. So at one Full Moon ceremony, she asked the Goddess to let her get pregnant easily for her next child, so she could bear the daughter she had promised. A couple of nights later, she got pregnant. We know the exact night, because it was the only time in that whole month that we fucked—and by the end of the month she was pregnant, where she hadn't been at the beginning. It was also one of the best nights of sex we ever had together—unplanned, but everything clicked just perfectly to make it wonderful for both of us. That almost never happened (our communication around sex was generally very poor), but it happened brilliantly that night. We later joked that to conceive Son 1 required a huge battery of infertility treatments; but to conceive Son 2 required no more than a pot of spaghetti and a bottle of merlot.

Anyway, the baby born from that pregnancy was Son 2. A boy, not a girl. Not a daughter, and not someone that could end up a priestess. (Also, Son 2 has shown no interest in Wicca, for whatever it is worth.) Did that mean we were going to have three children, two boys and then a little girl? We talked about it as a possibility. Once upon a time, three children wouldn't have been at all remarkable; maybe it's still not. 

But Wife's doctors started to tell her that a third child would be a really bad idea. Son 2 was born early, because her condition was starting to deteriorate. They waited long enough that they thought his lungs ought to be fully formed (I think that meant 36 weeks) and then scheduled a Caesarian section to pull him out before her health got any worse. They told her it was likely that another pregnancy would cause her to have a stroke. And then, before we could make any hard and fast decision about what to do, she entered menopause very early and the decision was taken away from us.

Once, at a subsequent Full Moon ceremony, she asked the Goddess what happened? Wife reminded Cerridwen that she (Wife) had promised to bear and raise a daughter as a priestess for her, but added that she couldn't do that if her body wouldn't bear a daughter. Before Son 1, she apparently couldn't get pregnant at all; less than a year later she was pregnant with Son 2; and after that she was told not to have any more children. How exactly was she supposed to fulfill her promise?

Cerridwen's reply was simply, "He was Our choice." No further explanation. [Update: Turns out I got that quote slightly wrong. You can find the whole conversation in this post here.]

And that might have been the end of it. Maybe it was the end of it. But a couple days ago I got an idea to pose another question to John Michael Greer. I didn't give him all the details, but just asked this much:

What happens if you make a promise to a god and then don't keep it?

To be clear, I'm NOT planning any such thing! It's about someone I know who promised something years ago and hasn't done it yet, and now there's no way it will ever happen. (Not in this lifetime, at any rate.) Also her life is kind of a mess. Is that a coincidence? Also, do promises like that carry over from one life to the next?

His answer was short and grim.

You'll keep it. If not in this lifetime, then in another, and the grief will just keep on piling up until you do so. No, the smoking crater of the person's life is no coincidence. That's what happens when you break a promise to a god.

So now I wonder. When Cerridwen said that They chose Son 2, did that let Wife off the hook? Or does Mr. Greer's remark answer my question in this post?

Or is it None Of The Above? Maybe that's always an option too.

P.S.: I realize I also allude briefly to this story in my post "Suzie's Dream."

            

Magical tales 1, spells for money

There are stories I haven't told you yet. Actually there are a lot of stories I haven't told you yet. For all that this blog is over 1200 posts old, there's a lot of older stuff I never got around to. Maybe some day I'll scan through to see if there are stories that I promised one day and never told—and then tell them. Wow, completeness. What an idea.

But in some cases it's not just laziness or indolence. In some cases I feel genuinely funny telling the stories. Of course, that's why I have the blog in the first place: so I can tell true stories without having them traced back to me later. So here goes.

I've mentioned several times now that I've started following John Michael Greer. He writes about a lot of things, including politics and magic. And I'd noticed that several times he mentioned casually in passing that it's a bad idea to do magical spells to ask for money to drop into your lap. So one day last fall I sent him a question asking why.

I know someone that I think may be doing some kind of magic for money to drop into her lap. (Haven't confirmed yet, but from circumstantial evidence.) [Of course I was talking about Wife.] I know you have said this is generally a bad idea -- I mean, as opposed to doing magic that some venture turn out successfully, which is different. Have you ever written a full post explaining the likely consequences? If yes, can you please point me to it? If no, what are they?

His reply was straightforward:

That's one of the classic mistakes beginners in magic make, until they get enough instant karma to teach them why it's a bad idea. What happens is this. If you do magic to get money without earning it, your intention implies that someone else ought to earn money and not get it. That guides the blowback straight to your door. Everyone I know who tried this kind of magic ended up suffering a sudden financial loss -- their job went away, or their investments took a nosedive, or their car got totaled and the other guy's insurance refused to pay, or something like that. It's as reliable as tomorrow's sunrise.

If you want to do magic to become wealthier than you are, on the other hand, that's easy. Do workings to help you find opportunities to make money, and then follow through on them. You'll have to work for it, but you can do very well indeed that way.

Fair enough. I contacted Wife, asked her if she was doing such magic (She said, "If you were in my situation, wouldn't you?"), and sent her this information. I told her I had stumbled randomly across it on the Internet.

But I also started to think about it. In the first few years of our marriage, Wife used to do spells or prayers like that very regularly. (You remember that Wife used to be Wiccan, right?) After a few years, she let them taper off. I never kept a log of when she did such spells and when she didn't, but I have a rough, general idea.

Also, Mr. Greer regularly claims that magic is an empirical science. He claims that you should be able to trace cause and effect in magical workings. So I thought about it, and tried to figure out if we had experienced the kinds of sudden, unexpected financial losses that he talked about. Here's what I came up with.

1984: Wife and I marry. We both start graduate school, at the same place.

1985: Wife's graduate department accidentally screws up her paperwork, with the result that she loses her funding. 

1986: Wife interrupts a burglary. For various reasons she decides she has to drop out of school and leave town. I take a leave of absence (that later becomes permanent) to follow her. Wife gets a well-paying job right near the new town where we settle. A month later, she's fired. She gets a second job doing something similar, also paying pretty well if not quite as much. After two weeks, she's fired. (Finally she gets a third job, with a 37-mile commute. I get a job.)

1987: The heat in our apartment goes out in February. (Strictly speaking, this is the landlord's expense.) Later, we move. At this point we are both driving old hand-me-down cars from our parents. Her car dies. After a lot of searching we buy her a new car. Then my car dies.

1988: We buy me a cute little second-hand VW Bug. Then its reverse-gear breaks. For several months, until we can afford to get it fixed, the only way I can back up is to put the car in neutral and push. Good thing it's a VW. 

Also this year (I think it was the same year!), Wife decides we need a chest freezer in our garage. That way we can buy meat in bulk, you see, because it's cheaper-per-ounce that way. So she buys the chest freezer. Then she plunges into an orgy of shopping, and fills the whole thing with meat. A little later, we are doing some kind of work in the garage that requires temporarily unplugging the chest freezer ... and we forget to plug it back in. All the meat spoils. The stench is so overpowering there is no way to clean the freezer. There's a construction site across the street, and we get their permission to toss the whole works―freezer, meat, and all―into their dumpster. I have no records to tally up how much money went straight down the tubes because of that foolishness.

1989: Wife gets a new boss, whom she hates, and leaves her job. (I forget if he fires her or she just quits.) She gets a new job that she hates even more. Also my job is thrown into tumult. The contract is being changed at a high level; and even though my role is pretty insignificant, I somehow get caught in the gears. In the end I learn enough diplomacy fast enough to save my job, but my two co-conspirators both lose their jobs with extreme prejudice.

1990: Wife is admitted to another graduate school in a new town, so she quits her job and we have to move. My car is totaled on the freeway. I "borrow" my grandfather's car. Its radiator explodes, and I borrow another old car from my parents.

1991: I don't remember. There was probably something.

1992: My work relocates three hours away so I have a crazy commute on weekends and have to find a way to stay there during the week. Somewhere along the line the car I've got from my parents also dies.

1993: We buy another new car. Wife fails her qualifying exams and leaves her graduate program at the end of spring. She finds short-term jobs, but not until November 1995 does she find a job that she can hold more than a year. Also in 1993 I get my first solid (non-contracting), professional job in the field that leads to my career.――The next year (1994) we buy a house and start to think that we are joining the professional middle class. After a while, Wife stops doing magical spells to get money to drop into our laps.

... or at any rate she pretty much stopped until we sold the house and she was once again living on her own. I don't know what she did after that, but I think she started up again. Also her financial situation started deteriorating.

My memory is a little sketchy for this kind of detail that far back. (I can remember stories; but after a while the dates blur.) But I'm pretty sure this is close to accurate. And it means that for most of the first ten years of our marriage, Wife was doing magical spells to get money to drop into our laps. And for most of the first ten years of our marriage, we had at least one major financial crisis each year. So yes, maybe that counts as being "as reliable as tomorrow's sunrise."

If so, a concatenation of that many dramatic coincidences does kind of suggest that magic may work. Also, don't try this at home.

   

Crime, revisited

The more that I read John Michael Greer, the more that I find myself in worlds of thought that are different from the ones I used to frequent. And so an idea occurred to me earlier this week — a silly one, trivial really, but I figured I'd record it here because why not?

For years I'd joked to myself that I'd married Wife deliberately, knowing it was going to be a painful slog, "as punishment for my sins." I'd say this, knowing that consciously I didn't believe in any metaphysics that could make sense of it, knowing that consciously it had to be a joke, and yet feeling that at the level of some subterranean emotion there was something to it. A few years ago I even tried to think my way through this paradox, in a pair of linked posts here and here. And maybe that explanation is the true one.

But Greer is a magician and an occultist. So he takes ideas like reincarnation and karma absolutely seriously, and talks about things like "the work you have to do in this life." And so it occurred to me, ... did I deliberately choose a life where I'd marry Wife, in order to burn off some karmic debt acquired earlier?

More generally, I thought about the affection I have always felt for narcissists and crazy people: people I've known personally, like Wife, Scarlett, D, and even Tartuffe back when I was a little kid; but also authors, like William Blake, or Julie Powell, or Robert Pirsig. (See also this movie review.) And all of a sudden I wondered, "Might it be that some of the work I have to do in this life has to do with dealing with crazy people? This could explain the inexplicable attraction" I feel towards them. In other words, if that were defined up front — before my birth — as a boundary condition, it wouldn't have to make sense to me in-universe (as indeed it doesn't) so long as it was a fact (which it is). 

I don't know what to think of the doctrine of reincarnation itself. In fact, I wrote out my thoughts on it earlier this evening and posted them here, on the Patio. But the idea did cross my mind.

        

Hair, part 4

I think I just saw a connection between two themes I've written about at different times.

One of them is hair. You know I have written that I don't like the shaving of body hair, for either men or women. It's not that I insist the hair has to be heavy -- for some people, it just isn't. It's shaving it off that bothers me. I've discussed this here, here, here, here, and here, for starters.

The other is monasticism, which I discuss in my posts "Contra monachismum," "Pro monachismo," and "De monachismo." (I list these three by title, because I'm likely to search on one of those titles when looking for related posts in the future and I want to find this one too.)

And the linkage? That comes from a couple of discussions between John Michael Greer and the commentariat who contribute to his blogs: briefly here, and at greater length here. The gist of these discussions is summarized in one remark as follows: "Religions that grow the hair and cover the head don't tend to favor celibacy and are comfortable with emotional and intuitive experiences, while religions that shave the top of the head tend to expect serious practitioners to be celibate and to focus on clarity and self-control."

Really? Who are these traditions?

Some of the traditions that shave or tonsure the head include:

• Christian monasticism
• Buddhist monasticism
• Jain monasticism
• ISKCON (Krishna Consciousness) monasticism

Do you see a pattern in that list?

By contrast, some groups that grow the hair include:

• Orthodox Jews
• Sikhs
• Hindu sadhus
• Rastafarians
• Ancient Greeks
• Cherokees and some other indigenous American peoples 

These groups don't have a lot in common. But one thing they do have in common is that none of them are monks, and all of them somehow accept the world rather than rejecting it. Even the sadhus, who -- yes -- are indeed renunciates, reach that point only at the fourth stage of life, after having led a full life as a student, and then a householder, and then a retired elder. They are not fleeing from life in the world, so much as consummating it.

And ultimately this is where I find myself too. In my "De monachismo" post I quote George Orwell on the irreconcilable difference between those who choose this world and those who choose the next. And one way or another, I choose this one. I see a lot that's beautiful in certain kinds of Christian life, and in certain kinds of Buddhist life -- just as I see a lot that's attractive in the secluded life of scholarship. But I still choose this world over the next. Who knew that this choice was connected to my opinions on shaving?

     

Silly coincidences

A couple weeks ago I mentioned a blog post by John Michael Greer on numerology, which has to be the least plausible form of divination I've ever heard of. But Greer is an interesting fellow, so I continue to follow what he writes. And today he posted another one, here.

This one is specifically about how to calculate your "birth number" and what it is supposed to mean. How to calculate is easy: write out your birthdate in numbers and add them up. Suppose you were born on July 4, 1976: then your birth number = 7 + 4 + 1 + 9 + 7 + 6 = 34, and 3 + 4 = 7. So you would be a 7. And his post gives a long paragraph about what it means for your personality and destiny to have "7" as a bith number. (Normally when you get a two-digit answer you add the digits to get a one-digit result. But there is an exception for 11 and 22, each of which gets its own description.)

I'm not going to quote any of his descriptions: you can go read his post for that if you want to. But I was struck by a number of coincidences, by which I mean pairs of people I know who both have the same birth number.

Hosea: 22, which has its own description but shares a lot in common with 4.
Brother: 4

Wife: 8
Marie: 8

[The description of an 8 is very close to what Wife used to be like before she got so sick and basically became a whole different person.]

D: 9
Debbie: 9

Schmidt is also a 9, come to that, but I don't think of him in quite the same way that I think of D or Debbie. 

Son 1: 6
Son 2: 6

[I suppose this could explain why Son 1 has made a point of taking in Wife to make sure she has a roof over her head.]

The descriptions don't always work. My mother comes out as a 5, which doesn't describe her at all. But maybe that's what she used to be like before I was born …? No idea. (My dad was a 7, in case you wondered.)

[Update a year and a half later: I revisit my mother's birth number in this post from May 2023, in which I conclude that it makes a lot more sense than I thought at first.]

But my brother and I are both 4 (more or less); my sons are both 6; my first two girlfriends (Marie and Wife) were both 8; my two romances immediately after Wife (D and Debbie) were both 9. I mean, sure, the odds for finding a pair here or there probably aren't that bad. But it sure looked a little funny.

Maybe I should stop talking about this now.