May 2009 archive

There’s an outdoor Scandinavian Day festival that takes place around this time of year in a park close to where I was born. We’ve been attending the festival as re-enactors for close to a decade. My husband does double duty as a live steel performer with one group and a fencer with the other, while I perform the role of seidhkona and do rune readings for three bucks.

It’s a small fair, and the only one where I feel comfortable doing psychic readings for several reasons. What I do adds color to the nature of the festival and fits it’s paradigm, so I don’t feel like “being myself” here is pushing anything onto the community that it doesn’t want. It is also held in what I consider to be one of my “odal” or “sacred lands”. The hospital where I was born, the house where my grandparents lived for seventy years and the room where I took my oath of enlistment are all mere blocks from the site.

We generally have good success with the weather, but when it becomes more important to the stupid, the arrogant and the hateful to make the local shamanic practitioner look and feel like a powerless fool, well, there’s going to be rain when rain isn’t really wanted by ANYONE else. It never fails to amaze me how these cointelpro-like cretins claim “victory” and “success” for throwing a monkey wrench into the shamanic work done with the intent to benefit all, but the world is full of paranoid control freaks who would gladly convince the rest of the world that if they can’t do it themselves or exclusively on their terms, it can’t and should never be done. So last year was a day where I had difficulty keeping the rain up and finally ended up losing that battle at around 3:30pm.

This year the morning started out with mist and light rain, but the husband and I packed up anyway and wended our way to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. There was a lighter attendance than usual, and I despaired of making any money this year (I usually average around $85) but stubbornly set up my double-headed eagle viking chair.

Photo: Miguel Paz

The weather steadily improved to the degree that I ended up coming home with a well-sunburned face and $99. I immediately converted $60 of that to a case of honey that a friend got for me at cost from an upstate apiary. There’s gonna be some mead making this summer at Chez Coles. Several people from last year were only remarkable by their absence, and they were also not missed. “Goodbye Earl”, as the song says…

I think Obama summed up the reason why so many in the progressive blogosphere are having trouble with his administration in his Saturday video address this week.

I have always believed that it is better to talk than not to talk; that it is far more productive to reach over a divide than to shake your fist across it. This has been an alien notion in Washington for far too long, but we are seeing that the ways of Washington are beginning to change. For the calling of this moment is too loud and too urgent to ignore. Our success as a nation – the future of our children and grandchildren – depends upon our willingness to cast aside old arguments, overcome stubborn divisions, and march forward as one people and one nation.

Since its inception a few years ago, the role of the progressive blogosphere has been to “shake our fist across the divide.” That was certainly what initially drew me to these kinds of conversations back in 2003/04. First of all, it helped us not feel so alone in our rage. And secondly, that’s about all we could do. It was clear that Bush and Cheney weren’t interested in anything we had to say. And Congress, even after the 2006 elections, wasn’t paying much attention either.

Obama is right that shaking fists across the divide is what those in Washington have also done. Its been interesting to watch the Republicans as they sometimes have to work to position the divide so that they can continue to shout across it.

But one of the things I have questions about these days is “where exactly is the divide we should be shouting across?”