Musings: Carbon Nanotubes

I just had a spiritual moment reading about science. This is not unusual for me. Anyway, I was reading the caption for this picture of carbon nanotubes being made, and it said that sometimes when they heat the graphite to make them, they grow out like bulbs sprouting in the spring, and it occurred to me that carbon is what makes those bulbs. It's what makes all of life what it is. And what if this is another example of conservation of idea, of fractal patterning in nature? Atoms, planets, solarsystems, galaxies all sort of mirror eachother, so what if carbon naturally mirrors life? What if life is inherent in carbon? We happened because the idea that would be magnified to out own structure is already there in how the thing grows anyway?

I know, poor science, but it's the idea that blew my mind.

Pomagranates

I had my first pom of the season this morning for breakfast. I look forward to the times when they're available, and I wait all year for them-- this year it came a little early because the farmer's market had a little pile of perfect early poms, but all the associations are always there, regardless.

I eat them despite the fact that they're a pain in the butt because I like them-- but part of why I love them is because they're so full of history. Each of those little 888 ruby kernels is like a piece of history. The fruit was one of the first domesticated, and was common in the earliest civilizations man participated in. They're sacred to the feminine forces, and a vital part of myths. When I had my circle, we'd take them with us to the Esbats and Sabbats, and we'd crack them open and share them with each other through the fall and winter celebrations along side fire-brewed tea, honey-drenched apples and gypsy stew. They're part of my personal mythology, too, because of those nights, three beautiful falls and winters that seeped into my little pagan soul, and now I don't have a circle, but I can still have Poms and I can eat them and remember those shiny, innocent days before we all had to deal with the crap of an adult life in a mundane world, when we were all together and felt like we belonged.

So I have my yearly ritual of slowly eating and enjoying my first pom of the year, and this year it's early, but no less powerful. And I thank the Dieties for the chance. I'm planting the seeds to preserve this chance, just in case they're unavailable or far too expenseive next year.

Politics and Religion

Okay, okay, I'm a little behind the wagon, but I only just heard of this Palin protection-from-witches BS and so I've done a little research about how the various candidates feel about neopaganism.

First this whole Palin thing. Even if we assume that she's just going along with this and not the one whose idea it was to get protected from such things-- still, she's going along with it. Which either means she doesn't disagree enough to make an issue of it / agrees she needs the protection, or she doesn't have the willpower to stop such craziness. If she agrees with it or doesn't argue with it, that's an inquisition waiting to happen, and if she doesn't have the will power to take control of her own spirituality, how the hell can she take control of anything else? And this is not even taking into account that the rest of this guy's crazy involves a vision of a radical fascist Christian world-- with Christianity used as a bad word, a totalitarian soul-crusher, not a religion of peace and tolerance.

And you know, the more I find out about her, the more I hear her speaking, the more I want to kick her in the face and tell her she's a horrible insult to everything I believe in-- feminism, womanhood, leadership, environmentalism, rationality, literacy, common sense... She's more and more a joke, and that's really the only way I can deal with her, because if I take her seriously, the thought that she might become president by default is terrifying. I hope the Republicans realize what they've done and how they've damaged their own cause with this loony.

And you know what? The rest of the candidates are being really quiet about religion.

McCain managed to come off as a little too Christian and intolerant of Islam, but that's not that unusual, or unexpected, considering the cloud of other associations around him-- And he honestly believes that the people who founded America were Christians just like him, and not at all like Christianity was three hundred odd years ago, and especially not like Freemasons or social humanists or anything else. At least, that's how he sounds to me.

I can't find anything on how McCain OR Obama feel about paganism directly, but I can tell you that Obama supports more of the things that would gather pagan attention, like peace, tolerance, greening the country, alternative energy, honesty...


links:
Palin: the About.com page here.

About McCain pissing off Muslims, here. The best response: "When the Founders wrote the nation’s Constitution, they specified that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” (Article 6, section 3) This provision was radical in its day– giving equal citizenship to believers and non-believers alike. They wanted to ensure that no single religion could make the claim of being the official, national religion, such as England had. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention religion, except in exclusionary terms. The words “Jesus Christ, Christianity, Bible, and God” are never mentioned in the Constitution– not once."

movies: iron man

I know, I know, I'm the last person on the planet to see Iron Man, buy you know what? It doesn't matter, because even on the TV, it's a pretty sweet flick. Glowing heart-sustainers! Explosions! Emergency Engineering! Socio-political Commentary! More Explosions! It's bright, shiny, snarky to the point where I almost actually forget that I never much liked Iron Man in the comics, and it's got layers that were unexpected from this genre: he manages to change without sacrificing who he is, he decides to do right in his own way, war = bad is proved without being too blunt or indelicate, big business = bad (when you aren't in control of your own interests) is proved, too... And the computer's voice is Paul Bettany, who I love, and who manages to be snarktastic even in a flat synthesized way. Additionally, there's Pepper Pots, who entirely understands her boss, her job and herself, who cares enough about him to get in the middle of a massive-robot battle, and cares enough about herself to keep the love-interest angle where it should be-- at least until he becomes capable of not wandering from model to model. Although, a loving, open, polyamorous super hero might be really nice...

And there's plenty of squee. Hints of War Machine, that whole section at the end of the credits, the classic Iron Man things like hand-weapons and crazy flying... Over all, a pretty solid and really fun sort of movie, with way more joy in it's existence than the last X-Men movie, which seemed to entirely forget that all this super hero stuff is just really really cool.

Real Life Adventures of the Pagan Variety

I had friends in town yesterday. They're some of the oldest friends I have, and some of them I hadn't seen in something like a decade. We were at the wine bar, drinking six different varieties and a sangria, and just sort of passing them around, with me drinking a large portion because all my oldest friends are lightweights and I'm the one with a religion based on revelry, when M turns the conversation to religion. She's semi-recently discovered that her family is actually secretly Jewish and converted under duress sometime after the Inquisition, so she'd gone back to being Jewish like her ancestresses, and it's freed her mentally and spiritually. A lot of what she had to say jives with what I've been thinking and what led me to an Earth-goddess-centered spirituality, so I was open and understanding and sharing info as I am wont to do in such situations-- which is to say, in the semi-defensive philosophical sense, rather than just jumping in an being all pagan up in someone's face. I hate when people do that to me, and I don't want to do it with others, and it's just polite to keep religion and politics on a more philosophical level then it is to be attack-ish about it, which does not help people to understand where you're coming from.

This is all good, and I'm happy for her, and I agree that faith means so much more when you find it yourself.

Then, we started talking about how we were raised, and T, the girl I've only just met, said something about her family being really conservative, and I sort of agreed, and M went straight to 'and you're Wiccan, right?'. It was unexpected, and I was a little drunk, and I couldn't find the place to start explaining that ten years ago I was Wiccan, and I've since moved on and consider myself more of an Ecclectic Heathen now. Which would have led to a conversation of what that even means, and since I don't follow any path but my own, it would have been... freeform. I like my spirituality that way, but I don't think people who don't know anything about neopaganism want their explinations that way. They want markers, definitions, facts, structure to hang things on, and that's great, but that's not how I work, and it's not how i can make it to make it understandable. ::sigh::

I don't mind Big Important Conversations About Faith, but when they broadside me when I'm a little tipsy, I always flub the answers and can't seem to distill over a decade's worth of adding and editing to create an easily-understood soundbite of what I am. It started as Wicca, and it morphed with eastern philosophies and native american ideas, mixed with mythology and an anthropology degree, got mooshed around and pared down with alot of my own personal experience both with other pagans and with myself, in my own head, and it came out as this system that works for me, and that I hope is cohesive enough to pass down to my children if they're of the witchy sort and want it, but might not even make sense to anyone outside my head.

Am I weird? Am I missing an easy way to tell people what I believe?

A Paganistic Future

It occurs to me that with oil and gas prices going so high, and global warming getting so hard to deny and recycling becoming so very important, the world is slowly shifting to a nicely pagan point of view. On it's own, even, and without realizing it. But haven't we been saying for fifty-odd years that you have to watch out for what you do because it comes back stronger and badness comes back worse? Haven't we been saying we need to look after and protect the earth instead of damaging and stripping it of all value? Haven't we been saying, at least since the 70s, that there are better ways to live and better ways to run a society?

Here's my hope: These are all just growing pains. I hope that within my life, fuel costs will force a drastic shift toward cleaner, renewable energies, and that this forced shift will drive the whole mentality of the country and the world toward a Gaia-centric place, where we seek to save the world, not use it up, where we try our damnedest to be clean and renewable and post-industrial and useful to the planet and humankind. My hope is that we can green up our cities and power our lives with wind and water and light and not have to give up the technological freedoms we've developed, but can adapt them to better help us improve the species as a whole. That's the goal I think we've all forgotten-- we want the species to survive, and the best way to do that is to repair all the damage we've made and keep the planet alive.

Mabon

I am a bad pagan. I missed Mabon again. Maybe it's something that's wrong with my life or my life-view, but I always miss the First Harvest, like it doesn't even matter, when the whole point of a harvest is to reap the rewards of all your hard work. Wouldn't it have been nice if I'd gotten a job that day, because that's where all my hard work is going right now...

Maybe it's the fact that I'm living in Florida, where it's still pretty summery as far as sun and rain are concerned, and we've still got months left on our growing season. The hurricane killed all my tomatoes, which would have been starting to actually produce now that the nights aren't so hot, so I'm already missing that little connection to the Wheel. I've got my peppers and eggplants, but they only just started budding and fruiting again, so that's a false message, as far as a temperate-climate calendar is concerned.

Maybe it's the fact that the afore-mentioned temperate-climate calendar just doesn't apply here? I've been playing with the idea of figuring out a non-temperate calendar for myself, moving the holidays around to fit their equivalent placements in a Florida year, but that would require a large chunk of the holidays to be crammed into the small segment of the year that isn't summer, and Mabon's an equinox, anyway, so that's set even if the rest of the year doesn't like me. I'd have to separate it from the equinox, and that just seems... weird. Wrong? I don't know, something like that. Of course, I'd be able to have two calendars running at once like the Maya did, and that could be neat.

But this post is supposed to be about Mabon. Here's what I've reaped in this first harvest:
- an understanding that retail is not what I want to spend my life stuck in, and an understanding that the state of the american economy might make that necessary
- a little knowledge in how to market myself, and the vague feeling that it's degrading-- and yet, less degrading then dumbing myself down for a crap job I hate
- the belief that without a circle, I kinda suck at being a pagan, and the existential question of whether religion even matters to the world if you only share it with yourself?
- one pepper from the garden, but lots of basil all through the year
- a renewed dedication to getting my fat ass thinned down, even if I sometimes forget the exact day I'm supposed to be dancing on
- a refreshed love of cooking

What did you reap?

Stonehenge

I read an article from National Geographic a few days ago (which I can't seem to find now, so there's no proof it exists) that said they've decided recently that Stonehenge may have been an ancient Lourdes sort of place, with religious significance and the idea of magical healing. The idea is based on the fact that all the bodies they have found were damaged or sick in some way, not all of them with obvious injuries of the sort that could be called 'sacrificial'.

I admit that I've never been there, but based on my obsessive devouring of all the new info and theories, I think this one is the most cohesive and multifaceted. It absorbs the ancient evidence from before the stones were set, the fact that lots of celebration sites have been found without a lot of evidence of long-term living in the immediate area, it explains the abundance of burial mounds in the area, takes into account the previous discoveries at Woodhenge and along the river, and doesn't try to discount the idea that the whole place is specifically aligned with the heavens. And I'm a big fan of cohesive, all-inclusive theories. People are complex, and I think just because we perceive their technology as simpler, it doesn't mean their minds were, or that their cultures were. Everywhere people go, every site that people use, has more than one purpose, even if it was founded for one specific thing, and to try and make it mean less than that is to sell people short.

We know it wasn't built by Druids. We think we know that it was used long afterward but Druids, and I think that's just a natural extension of how it was used before-- even without knowing the purpose or who built it, anyone walking onto that plain can see that it was an important place, that there had to be a reason to move such big stones so far and arrange them in entirely-not-easy-to-accomplish ways, and if you're the sort that's open to energy-patterns, you'd be able to feel all the focus and belief the place was steeped in. I think that's what draws millions of tourists there every year-- not just the idea that it's a great mystery, but the idea that there's all this energy that people don't recognize these days but still has the ability to alter your view of the world, even a little bit. There's a voyeauristic thrill to looking in on places where other people once worshipped, and a connection to a past we no longer have roots to, and whatever drew those people there to begin with is still there, underneath it all, unexplained, still doing whatever cosmic thing it has always done.