Blood, Whiskey, & History

What to do with passions with no narrative? When you are thrust back on belittled words like “feelings” or “emotions” to describe your fire or your ice, because the lack of a story to attach them to deprives you even of the use of metaphors — after all, those require something sturdy to anchor them to.   I once shared a piece of music I loved with a friend. She sat back and said, “you must have had a terribly sad past life.”  But I don’t believe in past lives. My life has not been perfect, but I’m nearly positive I’ve had it much better than most. And I’m not complaining.  And yet. And yet it does feel strange, to feel without rhyme or reason; and to long for those deep, murky places where mystery meets your skin, runs down your spine, trails down your cheek. This simply being human, plants you in the world with roots already plunged so deep: and so we all fear and dream of dragons, without ever knowing what for sure they reference.  They say ancient Easterners in...

On Aug 1st, my birth mother Lynne passed away. I did not know her well. Her life had been marked by trauma and addiction, and shortly after we met when I was 21, what had been the longest period of sobriety in her life came to an end. Although I gained good relationships with a younger and older half-sister – I share a different parent with each – and with my birth father, I never really got to know Lynne. As of today, we still do not know for sure what finally caused her heart to stop beating (the toxicology report is still pending), but years of serious health conditions and alcohol abuse meant that no one was surprised when she went. In addition to not knowing her well, I never felt the need or desire to have an emotional connection with her on the basis of being her bio daughter. So when I got the call from my sister (who I was raised with and was also Lynne’s bio daughter), I felt some gravity but I was not hurting. I went for a walk in an usually cloudly and cool morning, and rea...

I sometimes think about how theistic pagans must feel about me. Here is someone who builds altars to the gods, who celebrates the wheel of the year with elaborate rituals, and who makes an effort to learn about a particular pagan tradition of the past. And yet, I don’t believe the gods exist as fully autonomous, supernatural beings, nor do I readily accept various traditions that posit the independent reality of a spiritual realm filled with ghosts, spirits, and other mysterious forces. So, as far as they are concerned, I don’t believe at all.     I imagine (and know, from some firsthand experience), that some of them feel deeply offended by this. Because what I’m doing, from their point of view, is partaking in all of the outward actions and rituals of their belief and yet, not really believing. It must seem upsetting or even deeply disturbing, that I could pretend, as it were, to be a part of the faith when I’m really not. I would expect to hear accusations of dishonesty or ...

When I first began to feel drawn toward pagan practice, I was searching for an outlet and a vessel. A place –   a way   – to pour all those moments I encountered in contexts that seemed unsuited for them. Hearing a song during a party that transported me to a more somber, serious place; wanting to dash out of the coffee shop at the season’s first sign of rain to welcome it; attempting to convey to skeptical Skeptics the overwhelming feeling of ecstatic experience that made the term “spiritual” unavoidable for me.     Such moments had been with me as long as consciousness, but as I grew into my young adulthood they increasingly made for an awkward fit into the rest of my life. In college I discovered how much I loved to think – critically and purposefully – and that moreover, I was pretty good at it. After graduating I went straight into a PhD program for history, and as my intellectual confidence grew (an unusual dynamic in grad school but, I was lucky in many ways i...

“You'll see him in your nightmares You'll see him in your dreams He'll appear out of nowhere but He ain't what he seems You'll see him in your head On the TV screen Hey buddy, I'm warning You to turn it off He's a ghost, he's a god He's a man, he's a guru.” — Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Red Right Hand” Thomas Shelby is a god. Not just of mine, but of many. They might not know him by that name, might even resist the implication that their adoration comes from a religious place, but doubt it not – the man is a god.  "Past the square, past the bridge, past the mills, past the stacks." Like all gods, Tommy Shelby never existed – in that he was never a flesh and bone person with a home address and farts that smell and shits that stink. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t real. He is real, alright; in the minds, imaginations, subconscious and even hearts of countless people. Do not mistake this dynamic for one of ordinary fandom. For sures, t...

On Winter solstice I observed Yule. For the first time, I had to bring my   celebrations inside; it was raining all night.   But the adjustment worked out beautifully; using the detachable top of my outdoor fire pit, I made a diamond of candles and lit them all to serve as a small fire. It was lovely to sit next to the Christmas tree, that most celebrated of pagan traditions that managed to survive into the present despite centuries of doctrinaire Christians trying to eliminate it, and contemplate continuity with the past.   Flexibility, I've learned, is necessary when going about developing your own rituals. In my earliest pagan holidays, I came up with elaborate scripts and lists that planned out the order of events and observances down to the last detail. But I’ve found that that generated more stress -- and frankly more stuff to clean up the next morning -- than benefits. So while I have kept the best aspects of my initial constructions, I’ve been trying to simplify ...

Nothing lasts forever. It’s a common saying, but I wonder how many of us really sit with this truth or allow it to shape our worldview. When I got my PhD, I had a huge party. One of the friends in attendance was younger than most of us, an undergraduate involved in activism who took political and philosophical questions seriously, and strove to give them their due. Like everyone else, he had a lot to drink that night, and ended up sharing some existential quandaries with us by lamenting how as religious claims were obviously not true, and everything eventually passes away or ends, and the universe itself is expanding and so eventually will be no more as far as we can tell, therefore — and here was the key phrase he kept repeating in despair — everything is dust. And then he threw up in one of the bedrooms.  Which is a reminder of why one should generally avoid 1) over-drinking, 2) existential questions which cannot be resolved or do not have a satisfying answer and, especially, 3)...