I don’t know what Mingo is doing here. He was desperately trying to climb up that closet door, and was staring at a spot near the ceiling, but there was nothing there, not even a bug.
Whatever it was, it kept him busy for quite a long time, and it was pretty noisy, too.
I dreamt I was at an event and this woman leaned over and started tattooing me. Okay I get that’s weird, but, dream.
So anyway, the tattoo was amazing. It was these long hanging branches with tiny dark red flowers or perhaps leaves at the end, and she interwove it with all my existing tattoos. Very Japanese.
Does anyone out there know of a site where I can look up flowers by appearance? Because I feel like some of the message in the dream had to do with the flowers.
I got an interesting letter last night, and I asked for permission to publish it.
Hello. I have your “Elements of Ritual” book and I love it. The thing is, you talk about candles and incense as being key essentials to ritual. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I possibly can before I do a whole ritual by myself. My problem is that I’m a college student who lives on campus, where candles and any sort of smoke or fire-related anything is strictly prohibited. I was just wondering if you have any substitution ideas or know where I can find any. I can’t always get the exact tools and things I need for my altar or rituals, which is another reason I haven’t attempted a solitary ritual yet. If you can help, that would be great. Thank you so much and I really love your work.
Blessed be
Good question! I default frequently to candles because they are inexpensive (see, students? I have your needs at heart!) and easy to get a hold of. But dorm rules are something I didn’t consider; especially when I wrote my first book. Here’s what I wrote back (edited a little):
Candles and incense are very helpful, but if you have to substitute, you can. For incense, try using an essential oil or a natural herb. For example, a sprig of fresh rosemary or lavender can be used create scent, or open an essential oil and inhale when Air is needed.
For Fire, substitute a Fire symbol; an unlit candle, a piece of ambera painting of the alchemical symbol for Fire, or perhaps a minature lion; be creative.
When candles are being used for things other than Fire, it depends upon their use. For example, if you used a candle to represent the God, instead, use another God symbol. If you used candles
to mark quarters, use a different sort of boundary marker.Blessed be,
So, those are my thoughts. I’d be interested if you have any additional ideas.
Wow, solved in record time. This was kind of hard to put together, and you all wiped it out in no time. Next week I’ll try to be more challenging.
All solved in record time!
Name the actor or actress by identifying spouses they’ve had in the movies.
1. Peter O’Toole, Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda
Solved by Melville (comment #1).
2. Carla Gugino, Tamlyn Tomita, Angelina Jolie
Solved by TehipiteTom (comment #5).
3. John Lithgow, Alan Arkin, Chris Cooper
Solved by TehipiteTom (comment #9).
4. Lauren Bacall, Ann Todd, Polly Bergen
Solved by Melville (comment #4).
5. Anthony Hopkins, Ian Richardson, Jim Broadbent
Solved by George (comment #10).
6. Téa Leoni, Laura Linney, Maura Tierney
Solved by maurinsky (comment #6).
7. Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Costner, Christopher Walken
Solved by TehipiteTom (comment #7).
Alberto Gonzales has resigned.
It doesn’t solve anything. His successor (probably Skeletor Chertoff, according to rumor) will certainly be as bad, as corrupt, as mendacious. The Justice Department is still in ruins.
And yet, and yet…I did a little happy dance when I heard the news.
The Lookout (2007) 9/10
Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was a high school golden boy until a devastating car accident left him with Traumatic Brain Injury and two friends dead. Now he lives with a blind friend (Jeff Daniels) he met in rehab, and tries to learn how to remember what he did today. When a guy in a bar (Matthew Goode) remembers him from high school and befriends him, Chris finds himself caught up in a bank robbery scheme.
There’s several different movies going on here. There’s a film noir; an innocent guy getting pulled into crime that heads towards a frightening and dark end. There’s a character study; a fairly extraordinary one, cementing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s position as probably the most interesting young actor to watch these days. His Chris is never a caricature, he never blubbers or twitches his way through the role of a brain-injured young man struggling to find a self he recognizes inside a set of limitations he never imagined. Chris simply becomes more interesting every moment he’s on-screen (which is most of the movie). He is revealed in small things and large, in Thanksgiving with his family and in conversations with co-workers, and most especially in trying to find friendship with the set of hoodlums who manipulate him.
Jeff Daniels is also rich as Lewis, Chris’s friend and roommate. I love Daniels every time I see him; I’m always surprised by his depth and solidity. Which, why am I still surprised? Good question; more like I’m taken with his presence, he seems so real and true to himself I find myself catching my breath. This is Gordon-Levitt’s show without question, but Daniels is vital; the rest of the cast—Goode, Isla Fiscer, Carla Gugino, et al—are just serviceable, so without a second excellent actor I don’t think the movie would have really worked.
The third movie is the story about sequencing. “I wake up. I take a shower. With soap.” Throughout the film, Chris works on the narrative of a day, tries to remember how to put things in order. At the same time, he’s trying to put his life in order. Lewis (Daniels) tells him to do it like a story, instead of a list: Try “Once upon a time, I woke up,” he suggests. And Chris needs to do that, he needs to find the story of his life, to figure out his own narrative. In the middle of Chris’s narrative is a break, an accident, a change, a loss, and enormous guilt. The movie opens with this accident, and we see Chris’s culpability, not just because he caused an accident, but how he caused it. Chris was a spoiled and cocky boy doing the sort of things with cars that spoiled and cocky boys do. So in asking himself what his story is, he has to struggle with who he was, and what he did, as well as who he is now.
We don’t know all the pieces, not right away, and some not until the very end. Chris doesn’t know all the pieces either, and so it feels right that we should be confused in the way that Chris is confused. Not in a Memento sort of way, but gently, organically. There’s no Big Reveal, but there are revelations.
For all the crime drama, the guns and the really scary stuff, The Lookout is basically a quiet and subtle movie. It’s about waking up, and taking a shower. With soap. And it works.
Wow, I never finished the diary, and almost a month has passed. Well, when last we left, it was …
Thursday night. There was a big dance party, “The Rumble in the Jungle.” I went down but I wasn’t feeling it, so I wandered over to the Roundhouse and as I approached, the drumming slowed, which hardly ever happens, and just as I reached the gate, it stopped completely, which really hardly ever happens. So I sort of took it as a sign and visited at Dalton camp for a bit and went to bed early. I kind of had an epiphany: Hey, Deb, you’re not a night owl. It’s rough not being a night owl at Starwood, because there’s so much night life, but there you are.
Friday: I’ve got my rhythm, now, and can make a big pot o’ coffee, brush my teeth, and get myself ready for the day with some facility, but the thing I like least about camping is mornings. Wander across half the campsite in a state of dishevelment in order to get to the shower, or pretty up just to take it all off and redo it? Or shower in the afternoon and hope no one is displeased by the aroma? But anyway, I make coffee without fail, although by the last couple of days, I’m thinking I could just bag this French press racket and run down to the cafe and buy coffee.
At 11:30 I taught Part Three of Spellcraft. This is my workshop class, in which I ask people to bring spell ideas and we brainstorm them. It’s always incredibly rewarding, because people share pretty deeply about what concerns them, and we can be intuitive in finding their needs, goals, and spells that will work for them. One gentleman in particular stuck out. He was a documentary filmmaker and was feeling stuck and overwhelmed by the way in which you didn’t really know, with a documentary, what film you were making until after you filmed it, because you didn’t know what would happen, and then you had this enormous amount of material you had to edit into a movie. But it was all empty space, filming without knowing exactly why, and he was just stuck. This was fascinating because I’m such a film buff, and I’ve wondered exactly those things, but I never had the chance to look at it magically. (Plus the guy was charming, with deep, evocative eyes.)
So I talked about creating a Water spell, and talked about To Dare, and we worked on using Water to empower “going with the flow” and letting the creativity just happen.
There was also a woman whose bird had flown away. Should she do a spell to bring it home, or a spell to have it be safe where it was? We talked for a bit, and I asked what kind of bird it was. A cockatoo, she answered. Well, that changed everything! Cockatoos can’t live safely in the wild in Massachusetts, where she’s from! So obviously the spell has to be to bring it home. And it was a great lesson for everyone in making sure you have enough information and ask enough questions. So we talked about constructing these and other, more complex, spells, and it was a very productive class.
After lunch, I attended a “Pagan Speed Dating” session, which didn’t hook me up with the love of my life, but I had fun meeting new people.
In the evening I attended Don Kraig‘s talk on Sex Magic. It was a good class, Don’s a consummate speaker, using the right amount of information, humor, and interaction. I was a little disappointed because I had somehow gotten the impression that this was a new lecture, not his usual sex magic lecture. Now, I have no objection to speakers re-using lectures, we’d all collapse if we didn’t, but I simply hadn’t expected it.
At nine o’clock was the healing ritual for Frank Barney that I’d been asked to High Priestess. (Yes, High Priestess is a verb. Deal with it.) There was a lot of chaos in putting together ritual materials and an altar, a lot of rapid meaningless motion the last hour, a lot of holy shit we forgot to have water on the altar sort of thing, but we pulled it off. Just as the procession into the ritual was assembling, Dave had to go to the bathroom! So we kept them there, chanting and drumming, at the gate, and when he came back, we let them in. About 50 people, which was quite a lot for something that wasn’t on the schedule.
We explained what we were going to do, and cast a circle. I kept quarter callers who were well known to me at their quarters so I had a sense of being held by magical adepts. I got people saying yes by asking “Who here has loved this land?” “Who here has built a fire on this land?” And so on, until I finally asked “Who here will heal Frank Barney?” “I will!” they all shouted.
Now I had ’em.
We brought Cate Dalton into the center of the circle, and she invoked the energy of Frank Barney. We made sure she was good and connected to Frank, so that giving power to her was giving it to Frank. The key to addressing his Parkinson’s was connection, we’d decided; neural connections, connection to life and love and the will to live. Love and connection. We raised this power and sent it into her.
Then we brought Elspeth in to speak about the Barney family, and their commitment to the land, and to one another. We talked about the healing needed for all of them, to sustain them as a family and keep them loving one another and caring for one another during this difficult illness. By the end of this second power raising everyone was in a giant puppy pile, a huge group hug, in the middle of the circle, holding Elspeth and one another and sending love, love, love.
Next we just talked about healing. I asked people for stories. Orien talked about Orien Rose and the healing we’d been doing and what it meant to be a part of the healing circle that sustains his family as his daughter miraculously recovers from a devastating accident. Oberon talked about the enormous healing given to Morning Glory, such that healing networks were springing up on the web, because it was too big for just one person. Frank Dalton’s stroke. Hell, my knee! (And how connected was that, because Oberon and Frank Dalton were two of the three people who picked me up, got me out of the circle, and put me on a stretcher when my knee snapped at Starwood, and here we all were, at Starwood, healing together.) It became a circle of sharing the miracles of healing we could achieve, and I closed by saying, “Look around you. If you want to know who the healers are, you’re standing with them. And if you need healing, know that. And if you didn’t count yourself among them, know now that you can.”
Then we closed the circle. It was beautiful.
Continuing my observations of my own mind.
I was channel-surfing and I came across Anna and the King. It was near the end, and Jodie Foster as Anna, very upset, picked up and threw a tea tray. Which struck me as implausible behavior for a Victorian lady. And I recalled a review I’d read, of In the Bedroom, in which the reviewer said that Sissy Spacek’s one false note in an otherwise stellar performance was when she broke a plate. Why, the reviewer asked, do people in movies think that emotional moments require broken crockery? In real life, we can experience very intense emotions while leaving all our plates and cups intact.
This one moment brought back the memory of that review, and indeed, I could see Spacek breaking the plate (I saw the movie in the theater, and that moment was also in the trailers).
But the rest of the movie? IMDb tells me it’s over two hours long, and I saw it only six years ago. I can remember maybe fifteen minutes of it, total.
Where did it go? I sat there, saw it, had an experience, wrote about it (I always write at least a paragraph on every movie I see). I remember the review. With perfect clarity, I remember a bit of text that I thought showed a bit of insight. But an entire movie is gone.
(Not gone. Since I started thinking about this, more images have come, but not a lot.)
This isn’t just CRS ha ha look how I don’t remember. Because I do remember. I remember the review, I remember sounds, images, colors. But whole other chunks just walk off the page. That bothers me, but not so much. Mostly it interests me. What am I doing in there?
Kill the toy! Kill the toy! Kill! Kill!
