Things I’ve read and wanted to share.
community
Notable and quotable 6
Ethical plant use, an animist perspective on evil, an overview of the LV-426 Tradition, asking for inclusion, sonnets for Mary on Lady Day, and complex societies, gods and morality.
Notable and quotable 5
This week I have been mostly reading The Guardian with great sadness over the horrific murder of 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, and growing incredulity at the self-inflicted wound of Brexit. So I have not been keeping up with what’s going on in the blogosphere.
However, I just spotted this excellent post about queer magic by Julian Vayne.
Notable and quotable 3
Noteworthy posts for this week, on unpicking internalized oppression; how to respond to the Anthropocene, mass extinction, and climate change; the hidden life of things.
The Deep Blue Sea
I see oppressive systems as being like water pressure in the ocean. The deeper you go in the ocean, the greater the pressure.
Notable and quotable 1
Inspired by Ryan Cronin’s Friday Foraging, I decided to create a roundup of posts that I found interesting, inspiring, or important over the last week.
Photography, embodiment, and memory
It’s a curious thing, but when you’re behind a camera, especially one where you have to put your eye close to the viewfinder to see the field of view, you sometimes forget to really look at things and take them in properly. It starts to feel like the camera will do the remembering for you.
The Overton Window
I’m finding the concept of the Overton Window increasingly useful right now, as various sociopolitical ideas gain or lose ground, and debates change and morph.
The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, describes the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who, in his description of his window, claimed that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window, rather than on politicians’ individual preferences.
The inclusive Wicca symbol
How the inclusive Wicca logo happened.
I was making a poster for a LGBT+ ritual in 2014, and trying to think of a symbol that expresses LGBT+ Wicca. So I took the standard Wiccan triple Moon symbol and added a heart.
🌛🌝🌜 + ❤️
I didn’t really think about it — the symbol sort of came down my arm, bypassing my brain, and manifested on the paper.
The heart could be seen as an hommage to the Sufi winged heart or Tughra Inayati symbol (and there is a connection between Sufism and Wicca, via the friendship between Gardner and Idries Shah).
The Sufi winged heart image (public domain version)
The heart mainly represents the idea that love (in all its glorious diversity) is the central mystery of Wicca. Also that Love is love, or “All acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals” — hence also the title of my 2014 book on inclusive Wicca.
If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my books, Dark Mirror: the inner work of witchcraft and The Night Journey: witchcraft as transformation.
Dark Mirror: the inner work of witchcraft
The night journey: witchcraft as transformation
Coming Out: An Act of Truth
In 1983, when I was in my teens, my best friend came out to me as gay. The world was very different back then: no same-sex marriage, no civil partnerships, no Internet, no mobile phones, no sat-nav, and obviously no social media either; not even digital cameras.
