I’m wearing my orange shirt from the Woodland Cultural Centre today, Orange Shirt Day, in honour of residential school survivors and all those who didn’t make it home.
Continue readingsocial justice
Bryson Syliboy interview
For the ones who did not come home
Thread a bead for me,
Not a rosary:
A bright bubble of blood
From that river in flood
Between the worlds.
Carve a flute for me,
To breathe a memory,
Thread a song from the air,
Where the land is bare
On that distant shore.
Hold a hand for me,
Dream a dream for me,
Of summer days I cannot see,
Woven beneath the oldest tree,
Beyond the door.
Light a fire for me,
Down by that inland sea
Where the stars drink the night
And a bright scarf of light
Dances in the sky.
By Yvonne Aburrow
©️Yvonne Aburrow, 2021. Repost only with clear written credit to me. Please include this copyleft notice and all the information below as well.
The imagery in this poem is Pagan imagery (the World Tree, the river between the worlds in The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, the land of the dead being over the ocean). The poem is dedicated to the children who did not come home from residential schools. I woke up this morning with the fragment of a dream in my head with beads being threaded on a string as some sort of remembrance ritual. The poem is an attempt to capture the dream.
Happy Pride
Happy Pride everyone.
❤️ Here are three of my favourite LGBTQ+ movies: Pride, about Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Torch Song Trilogy, which I saw in my first few weeks at university because the Gay Society did a screening (yes folks, in the 1980s the Lesbian and Gay societies at uni were two separate things). And The Birdcage (which I prefer over the French film it was based on) in which gayness eventually wins over the stiff straights.
More reflections on queerness and intersectionality after the cut. 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
Continue readingEarth Day 2021
Orange Shirt Day 2020
Every child matters. Today is Orange Shirt Day, the day of remembrance for Indigenous victims of the residential schools (which ran from the 1870s to 1996). Many children in them died of tuberculosis, hunger, abuse, and neglect. Sexual and physical abuse was rife.
Continue readingBIPOC Pagan Reading List
A reading list of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) authors covering Paganism, the occult, astrology, Tarot, and Indigenous spirituality.
Note that the deities of African diaspora religions can only be contacted through those religions and not via other religions. And that Indigenous life ways and spiritual practices are specific to their cultures and should not be culturally appropriated.
I’ve put out a call on Twitter and Instagram for more books to add to this list, and I will post updates (as I do with the Queer Pagan Reading List).
Notable and quotable: Earth Day
It’s Earth Day today, and the significance of it being in the middle of a pandemic, when Nature is getting a brief respite from the depredations of industry and big oil, has not been lost on people, I hope.
What we have in common
I dreamed that I was in an Anglican or Episcopalian Church in North America and had been invited by the vicar to introduce a hymn. She handed me the order of service which already had a hymn picked out, and it had been annotated to change “him” to “her”, so I introduced it and encouraged people to sing “her” where appropriate if they wanted to. One of the congregation said they didn’t really know the tune for that hymn. So then I suggested we sang Morning has broken and changed “him” to “her” in the second verse, and “God’s” to “Her” in the third verse. Then I woke up.
