I can’t tell you how many times I started this post over the past six months. I just couldn’t write anything substantial. March, April, May was preparation time for me. Summer held two spiritual retreats that helped recharge my energy which was very well needed because the end of summer kicked off a very busy Pagan Pride season. I vended, led rituals at, and/or led a workshop at every local PA Pagan Pride event and even drove out to Chicago to represent Heathens Against Hate at the Greater Chicagoland Pagan Pride! I then got to attend Delmarva Pagan Pride as an attendee. I got to enjoy browsing through the vendors and took as long as I wanted to explore their wares. I also got to attend other people’s workshops! I’m thankful for my kindred mates convincing me to go because I really had a fantastic time. I felt better, but I still hadn’t written anything.
Various happenings in that time did have me writing key thoughts down though; the original document I am now writing this in had “Words Matter” as the title and I found little notes to myself in various places on my desk with little snippets of inspiration, but I couldn’t remember the original spark behind most of them, the moment had been lost. I was still creating art though, and I buried myself in workshops learning new skills in between busy weekends and time off from travel.
Now, the busy Pagan Pride Day season is over, the last harvest rituals are done and just days after that, some big elections in the US happened. I started writing this the morning of November fifth after chatting with some kindred mates. I realized that there were a few key images that had popped into my head over the past six months that may actually have been connected and became a new vision. That realization included the fact that I had been calm the whole day before, and the whole day of the election. I live in New Jersey. We had a mayoral election and Pennsylvania had three judges up for reelection along with the nationally anticipated New York mayoral race. All of these races were close to home enough to matter very personally to me. I had called my doctor a week before the election last year for some xanax because I was already a mess. This time I felt markedly different.
I had remarked earlier in the year that the administration was looking quite like Hitler’s early German Nazi party, taking their moves from the literal Nazi how-to book. I remember saying that this time, things would go exponentially faster due to the instant access and availability culture of the internet. What took Hitler a few years to accomplish, POSOTUS managed to get done in just a few months. The precipice of complete dictatorship was underfoot and we balance precariously on the edge while we watch the atrocities committed in the name of our country yet not what our country’s majority truly wants to see.
Just now while chatting among friends, I saw a vision of a large pendulum with crowds of people pushing back on it. This pendulum swing, in my mind, was triggered by Obama’s election. The Right Wing Republicans lost their minds when our country voted a Black man president and launched that pendulum as hard as they could back at every advancement our country has made since the abolishment of slavery. Unchallenged, the pendulum will do more damage than imaginable. It already has done so much and there is more on the list to be destroyed, not the least of which are entire groups of people including immigrants, trans people, and BIPOC. We are already seeing people being okay with concentration camps and wildly unchecked corruption by our felon president. I mean, come on, our president is a 34 times over convicted felon. How can we take this administration at all seriously, and yet it is one of the most serious positions our identity as a country has been in since we abolished slavery.
Of course, those slave owners are just CEOs now and all of us are slaves to this new corporate oligarchy that was ushered in to do as much as damage as possible to the structure of our government and then pushed out just as fast. We are living on the edge of a complete breakdown, walking on eggshells while our leader commits crimes against humanity with no consequences at all, all the while raking in obscene amounts of money for the elite few lucky enough to have those inside connections.
Back to that pendulum though. The difference I saw, was that the pendulum stopped just past its point of equilibrium. Often, the pendulum gets to swing way past that before it gets pushed back, or it is just left to swing back the other way on its own. This time, many people were stopping it, all different people together for one purpose, the same purpose. While I reflected on this vision, it shifted into a different kind of pendulum, those table toys from the 80s, the Newton’s Cradle I used to love to play with as a kid. Instead of one ball against one ball with all of the other balls in the middle being crushed, or two balls against three balls with the middle ball shifting sides every swing, it was two then three balls pushing back against the two then one, making headway past the old equilibrium point and what represents the status quo of what was before this fever dream of an incompetent presidential administration took over, and creating a new equilibrium point, one far more equitable, ecologically aware, and more aligned with the global allies we once stood shoulder to shoulder with.
While writing this blog post, I realized that the little wins this past election day had brought, if not momentum, at least some breathing room. In my mind, that breathing room equates to building room. We are able to make the connections between communities that we need to strengthen ourselves for the next steps we will need to take. Every spiritual community I am in or adjacent to has put out the call for information on food banks and other food safety nets available in communities where we are all present. Heathen and pagan communities are coming together to educate others, offer services and support to each other, and show the general public how spiritually based community and hospitality should work.
So the focus becomes to provide for our spiritual communities and their needs, build bridges to other spiritual communities, whatever the denomination, in our similar position, and each do what we can to make our voices heard on a larger scale. Each of us will have a role in this movement, this movement of building bridges between communities. Some of us will keep the hearthfires of our own communities burning, providing food, counsel, and ritual. Some of us will run for local political office, work in impactful not profit organizations, or volunteer to help connect others to available services. Maybe some will be activists, while others provide pet sitting services for those out at the protests. Some people can give time, others money, others energy and still others provide guidance, each person giving to the whole what they can, even if that is just verbal support, every voice matters.
I never do divination for political outcomes, but for some reason, I decided to do it for this. I pulled three cards from The Fellowship of the Fool tarot deck along with one rune from my rune set, and I threw in a roll of my handy dandy rune die. The cards that came up were 21 Gaia, the 6 of cups and 6 the Lovers. The two runes were Yaahr (Jera) and Mann (Mannaz). The rune meanings popped out at me clearly. The Yaahr rune represents cycles. Like the pendulum, the cycles of life death and rebirth happen all around us, but this was about our cycle as humanity, it connected to Mann, the perfected human, the evolution of human consciousness. It made sense that this point in time in our history would mold human consciousness for generations to come. What also stood out, were the sixes. Numerology isn’t my strong suit, but I am a six myself; typical Libra energy, always looking for balance, harmony, and healing. A force of empathy , compassion, and love, the six of cups and the lovers sitting there next to Gaia or the World, showed humanity coming together and pushing back against this horrible rise of fascism and abject cruelty and striving for a more compassionate future humanity, not perfect, but always striving for better.
Always striving for better – the unofficial call of the Brauchrei/Herxerei guild I belong to. Macht’s immer besser roughly means “always make it better” in Deitsch. It is, at it’s core, the heart Zusaagpflicht, the sacred promise or duty we feel we have as humanity to steward the earth and all things on her. The headlines are coming fast these days. Over the last day has been fast moving, exponentially as I mentioned earlier. I build this hex as an evil eye protection/return to sender design. For those of you out there that are doing the work, inside and out, privately and publicly, take this hex and use it to protect yourself out there. Let’s ride this wave to wherever it’s going and build something better on the other side.
Macht’s immer besser!
Leave a Reply