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1. Gypsy Scholar says

   March 30, 2017 at 9:08 pm

   On this day of the return of Venus from the Underworld (March 30, with the middle-east crescent moon), it’s always good to hear the VA’s (behooving) Spring Equinox talks—when she’s usually at her most eloquent and witty (with a little help from her musical friends)—, it makes me wish that I could have been there in Washington DC in real time on the day before the equinox (I live on the west coast of KPFA)! I don’t know if the recording was available before today (it wasn’t broadcast last week’s show), but this was my first time hearing it—and makes me want to hear the rest of it!

   Yup, it’s always good to remind us of our integral connection with the natural world, as our own (pagan) ancestors recognized and honored/celebrated the new season of rebirth in age-old rituals set aside from the workaday world. Since we modern, urbanized people need reminding—we get sucked back into the old routine (maybe just a week later) in our hectic lives so easily—, it’s good to hear this Equinox talk and its “sky-earth story”! (At least for someone like me, who tends to soon forget the traditional meaning of this special astronomical/astrological event and gets spiritually waylaid by the demands of the day-to-day world—and it’s socio-political realities. So, if I could celebrate the Vernal Equinox not just for one day, but rather (like our pagan ancestors customarily did) for a few time-out days or a whole week, then its spirit would probably stay alive in me for a longer time!)

   And let me not leave out mention in the Equinox (neo-animistic) picture here (i. e., the “enthusos” of “Spring’s Green Fire” animation) that (because the show is not only about astrological “animism” but political “activism” married) it’s also always good for those of us who would say they are “politically active” in their communities (geographical or internet) to be reminded by the VA about not getting so caught up in the heat of the issues of the day that we lose our “cool”, especially with those on the other side of the political map (like those neighbors, relatives, co-workers, etc. who are enough to “get our goats”).

   Again, I don’t know about anybody else, but this is especially good for someone like me—who sometimes gives as good as he gets (and then even more) in the way of verbal abuse: yes, don’t forget to ask “did you know?” and “keep your cool”! (The only trouble is—I can warn you—you shouldn’t include “Did you know … what I really think of you and your whole fascist crowd?” Well, unless, maybe you could say it in a witty and “cool” way—a trickster-coyote/akido way! Which might include pissing on all their political thought-traps!)

   So, that said, forgive me if I also say that even though I would have preferred to hear this talk just before the Spring day it was honoring, it’s probably good that it was sometime after (11 days, as Venus plunges into the Underworld and returns)—the very mention of the diabolical shenanigans (that “old black magic”) of the “Dementors of Doom” (in Alt-Right form) would have been enough to ruin the reverent and spicy neopagan mood which was “animated” during the Celtic-neopagan celebration I attended that Sunday! (And yet I could theoretically see that it would be okay and not bring me down. I mean, maybe the fact that the wedding of the magic of spiritual animism to the activism of political transformation would mean that you couldn’t tell if the coming together event you were attending was a neopagan “Re-birth Equinox” celebration of cosmological-sexual orgy, or an Entheo-Enthusiastic political rally! Well, that is, in the spirit of “the most serious and dedicated fun”, you could—if you determined it by the amount of clothes you had on after!) I remember how G.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq—“Operation Iraqi Freedom”—on the Spring Equinox of March 19, 2013 put a real damper of that year’s festivities! (And, talk about the “back magic” of these Dementors of Doom, was it just a coincidence that they pulled this off on the traditional big celebration of the Spring Equinox, which is the Persian New Year, Nowruz, March 21, 2013? And, speaking of the old Leftist adage of the “personal is the political”, “spiritual activism” gets really personal to democratic neo-animists when the “Dementors of Doom” operate under the banner of a traditional neopagan-hating Christian Right politics, like the current Bannon Alt-Right! Then the entire “political struggle” is seen in a different light.)

   But seriously (the days of Sixties “carnivalesque”-style rallies and demonstrations gone by), these days of the experimental wedding of “spiritual animism” and “political activism” is easier said than done—at least for me (especially when everything seems to conspire to keep these two existential domains worlds apart when you’re trying your best to bridge the cultural/epistemological gap)! I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve not yet achieved a heartfelt toast to all the players in the Political Theater (of “the razzle-dazzle bamboozling swindle”, produced by the movie company of Breitbart-Bannon), even to the poisoner-henchmen of the Dementors of Doom. (The allure of blowing the poisonous froth back in their “Alt-Reich” faces is too much for me! Ah, don’t want to “animate that metaphor”! But I’m trying nonetheless—“aspiring-blowing it-aspiring—, and there may be hope for me yet! I’m ordering some coyote hair tomorrow!) Again, good to be reminded that we don’t want to “fall into polarity” by “taking sides”! (Actually, this political positioning gets more complex, I’ve always thought that there was a third side: the side of the “Loyal Opposition”.)

   So don’t know what I’d do without the VA’s guiding, “curvey” wisdom (e.g., “magic[k] is a willingness to cooperate with everything”) keeping me on spiritual track (and helping “to consider how [in the fuck] we got here”)!

   “And so it is for all of us” (about new-age “spiritual paths”), here’s my blessing: May we all (as mystico-activists) re-member the akido/apophatic days when we had to first learn how to “fall”! As the VA likes to quote:

   “When you’re kicked off the edge of a precipice, it’s no help to cling to the rocks falling with you.” (Alan Watts)

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