News and a newsletter

Hello, gentle readers. It’s been a while. I’m almost afraid to check on the date of my last post here. But I’m still alive, and quite well, although a number of things have changed.

First I’d like to remind you that I published a book! Loving the Beautiful Boy: Hymns and Prayers to Antinous is available in print from Lulu.

Second, I’d like to announce that Loving the Beautiful Boy is also available in Amazon Kindle format! Get your ebook copy today and for Antinous’ sake, write me a favorable review. *g*

I don’t think I have written here about my bird companion Sunny. In October 2021, my dear bird Rembrandt died at the age of about twenty-three, having been with me for twenty-one years. I was honestly devastated, even though it was not entirely a shock; I knew he was old, and he had been visibly slowing down. Months went by before I could even dispose of his empty cage.

I had been without any birds for a little over a year, for the first time in nearly thirty years, when a chance conversation with a co-worker led to her rehoming with me a little lutino cockatiel named Sunny, whom she had taken in five years earlier when his first owner died. In that time he had lived with five cats and at least one dog, not at all a comfortable situation. When I was introduced to him, I offered him my hand, and this bird who rarely came out of his cage immediately stepped onto my finger and began telling me his life story. I have now had him for about eighteen months and he is my spoiled only child. Right now he is snoozing in the afternoon sun.

Over the past few years I have engaged with blogging less and less, not only as a writer, but as a reader; most of my writing has been fanfiction, which you can find here at AO3. Due to the rise of so-called AI, I have locked most of my archive to registered users, but the most recent couple of stories will always be readable by guests as well, and there will never be any monetization of my fanfic.

I have, however, just recently started writing a newsletter through Buttondown, a fairly new service that I am so far pleased with: A Letter from Saskia. I have been writing about Sunny, about my reading, about what’s happening on the spiritual front, and whatever else crosses my mind. With this in mind, I am planning to delete this blog sometime this year. I will make a further announcement about that when I have set a date.

I wish a blessed Holy Week and Easter, Ramadan, Ostara, Purim, or whatever else one might be celebrating to all my readers, and hope to see you as subscribers to my newsletter. Love to all.

Notes and news

Hello, gentle readers! As we enter Leo season, here’s hoping you are not oppressed by record high temperatures, wildfires, or any other calamities, natural or artificial.

First I’d like to remind you that I published a book! Loving the Beautiful Boy: Hymns and Prayers to Antinous is available in print from Lulu.

Second, I’d like to announce that Loving the Beautiful Boy is also available in Amazon Kindle format! Get your ebook copy today and for Antinous’ sake, write me a favorable review. *g*

Third, I’ve come to realize that I really, really hate WordPress. I find the current post editor clumsy and counterintuitive, and worst of all, the very words I’m typing appear in *gray* on a white background. Look, I am middle-aged, I wear trifocals, and I need. Better. Contrast.

I’m going to try blogging through Substack, where I have a nifty niche called Nine of Pentacles. At the moment, I have no subscription plan in place; posts will be public and free to read as they have been here. If you want to support my writing and other work with financial gifts, I still have a Ko-Fi where you can subscribe as well as make one-time donations. However, I shut down my Patreon because I simply wasn’t posting enough to gain new subscribers or even feel I was giving value to my faithful few.

I think Patreon is more suited to almost any medium than to writing. Musicians, artists, filmmakers, people offering magical or divinatory services, all seem to have great success with it. I am hoping that Substack will work better for me, as it seems to be favored by a lot of writers already.

This blog and Antinous for Everybody will remain in place for the foreseeable future. I hope you’ll follow me at Substack for birds, Buddhism, polytheism, reviews, and more. Stay cool, friends, on all levels.

Publication announcement!

I am joyous and grateful to announce that Loving the Beautiful Boy, a collection of my devotional writing to the god Antinous, is now available from Lulu, and will soon be available through Amazon as well.

This is the culmination of many years of work, a thing of which I am very proud. My thanks to Michael Routery for writing the foreword, to Jay Logan for his kind blurb, and to Dver of A Forest Door for editing, and, of course, to Antinous Himself for his many blessings.

An announcement

Friends, I have decided to shut down my Patreon. I am simply not able to “create content” according to a schedule, and I’ve also come to think that Patreon is a much better platform for people who can offer art, music, or videos than for a text-only writer such as myself.

If you want to continue to support me, I still have a Ko-Fi! You can throw me a tip, subscribe for a monthly donation, *and* commission me to write a devotional poem. Thanks to all those who have supported me at Patreon, and I hope to see you at Ko-Fi.

The merry merry month of May

The month of May is a strange time of year for me. On the one hand, it’s Beltane, and I fully endorse the old European standard that the seasons begin at the cross-quarters. I can feel the new energies coming in at those times, the shifts in the stars, the weather, the land. May means flowers, increasing warmth (and sometimes actual heat), outdoor festivals like our local Flower Mart. On the first of the month I found myself hearing Julie Andrews sing “The Lusty Month of May” inside my head as I showered to get ready for work.

It’s also a month of birthdays, as many people I’ve loved are Taurus folks born in this month, including the beloved grandmother who was my primary caretaker, my father, the priest who mentored me when I was a teen, and my ex-husband, too. But on the other hand, it’s a month of deaths: My father, my ex, and a dear friend, for starters; Jim Henson, who died in 1990 on the same day that my ex-husband died in 2017; a mutual friend of my ex and mine, an older man who was both a member of my church and a Kemetic pagan, who also died on that day. My ex-husband managed the neat trick of living to his birthday and then dying the following day, right in the middle of the month.

Festivals I observe in May begin with Floralia, a week-long celebration of the Roman goddess Flora. Flora is not just a pretty maiden frolicking to the sound of madrigals; without the season of flowering, what would grow? She blesses our our herbs, our fruits and vegetables, as well as the flowers that provide us beauty and fragrance to nourish the soul. In the Naos Antinoou, we also honor her as the goddess who raises slain heroes from the soil as flowers, like Hyacinth in ancient Greece and Michael Brown of Ferguson.

The middle of the month, besides being occupied by the birth and death of the man I was married to for twenty years, is dedicated to Mercury and his mother Maia in both Greek and Roman practice. As a writer and library worker, I certainly want to give Mercury his due, but Mothers Day is fraught with all kinds of negative emotions for me. Suffice to say I am not one of those lucky people who has or had a good relationship with their mother, and I seem to have failed as a stepmother as well.

Buddhism talks a lot about impermanence, and for that matter, paganism does, too. Blood and dirt and layers of decay lie under all those pretty flowers, the lustrous fruits and vegetables, the leafy herbs. Every blossom has a season and then it dies; many of the juvenile birds I see won’t make it to adulthood, won’t even feed another creature’s hunger. Why does it have to be this way? Neither Buddhism nor pagan traditions offer an explanation; Christianity would blame the Fall and human sinfulness, but I look to Julian of Norwich, whose feast the Anglican churches celebrate today, who says that God told her, “Sin is behovely, but all shall be well.”

There might not be a good translation of “behovely” into modern English. Different versions of Julian’s Revelations have used “inevitable”, “opportune”, “fitting”; it is part of the picture, it fits into the story. The blood and the flowers, the births and the deaths, Flora and Mercury and Julian of Norwich and Brendan the Navigator, the Irish saint who sailed off across the Atlantic and into Paradise. It is all here, it is all behovely.

Religion-shaming and other nuisances

I’ve been a very committed Episcopalian. I’ve been a student in a ceremonial magic tradition. I’ve been an urban, American druid. I’ve taken refuge and bodhisattva vows as a Tibetan Buddhist. I’ve identified as a devotional polytheist. I’ve been an interested bystander to Wicca, Feri, Reclaiming, and other traditions of the Craft.

I can still go to the church where my late ex-husband was the organist and feel at home, welcomed by family. Last year I discovered the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and their queer sangha that meets online once a month. Meditating with those folks, talking about Dharma and queer life, I know I am with my own people. The Ancient Order of Druids in America welcomed me back after a long hiatus, and while I first got interested in learning Welsh because druidry, I’m finding that learning Welsh for its own sake points me back toward the druid way.

But when I look back on the heyday of the polytheist movement in the mid-2010s, when I look back on a lot of my involvement with “pagan community” online, I just remember a lot of people telling me I was doing it wrong. That I was still too Christian and not pagan enough. That I wasn’t a good Buddhist if I wanted to practice druidry, too, or not a good enough druid, really, if I was interested in Buddhism. That whatever I was doing for or giving to the gods, however important they were in my life, it wasn’t enough.

For so much of my life, I have felt I wasn’t enough, even while I was exceeding expectations, or excelling in something creative.

Now, I’m ten years distant from an ex-spouse who owed his livelihood, which was also supporting me for most of our marriage, to the institutional Church. And I have a diagnosis of ADHD, which I didn’t have until three years ago. A former friend once told me I kept changing my religion as a way to cope with my depression. She was not, I guess, entirely wrong. But I was also using my religion to cope with my increasingly hollow marriage and my undiagnosed ADHD and my overall unhappiness with life.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I felt like an oddball for being interested in a pagan monasticism, or interweaving polytheistic devotion with the Dharma. Now as I look at pagans, polytheists, Buddhists, and Christians online, those ideas are everywhere. Polytheist monastics are thick on the ground. Buddhist lamas talk about ancestor veneration, deities, touching the earth. Syncretism is no longer a slur with an academic tone; it’s just what people do as they try to relate the gods and the wisdom teachings to the challenges of daily life.

Right now, I’m interested in exploring a Druid Dharma or a Buddhist druidry. That may change, although I suspect the Dharma connection won’t. I have a body of work that I’m getting into shape for publication, and I’m ready to explore new territory in fiction, in poetry, and in blogging. Here’s to the Full Moon of Beltane, to Vesak, to new beginnings!

POEM: Hommage a Mary Oliver

You do not have to get over it.

You do not have to saddle up and hit the trail

and light out leaving behind everything you once loved.

You are allowed to let the wounded bird of your heart

sing silently in the dark for as long as it wants.

Tell me about hurt, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile there is a hot cup of tea, or coffee.

Meanwhile the birds at the feeder, cardinal, bluejay,

goldfinch, are waiting to be fed.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear air,

can still catch your attention as you cross the street

as the cars wait for your passing

as you look out the window from your desk.

Whatever your wound, no matter how long it takes to heal,

the real things of life will wait for you to catch up

with them, will call to you to refill the feeder

and drink your tea before it gets cold.

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

(Originally written in response to her death in January 2019; reposted today in honor of her birthday.)

When I became a Buddhist

I became a Buddhist according to the rules back in April 2008. “The rules” in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage I signed onto say that you take refuge, in the presence of a lama (an accredited teacher, doesn’t have to be a monk), in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. The authority, his example and teaching, and the community of practitioners. 

I was involved with my local TB community for about five years after that, if memory serves. Then my husband and I separated and we gave most of our meditation paraphernalia to the community, a move I now deeply regret. (I especially wish I still had the incense burner, a beautifully decorated wooden box, and the gilt statues of Tara and Chenrezig, aka Avalokiteshvara. I don’t regret the separation.)

I think I really became a Buddhist, though, just a few weeks ago, one morning in the shower when I was stretching to wash my back and thought, “Everything hurts”.

I meant that literally; it seemed like every muscle in my body was aching at the simple, normal exertion of taking a shower. But I realized in that moment that I also meant it metaphorically, or universally: Everything hurt. I had realized for myself the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. 

The First Noble Truth is usually translated in English as, “Life is suffering”. That sounds pretty grim, but the word for “suffering”, dukkha, can be translated in a lot of other ways. Western Buddhist authors right now tend to use words like “unsatisfactory” rather than “suffering”. We are perpetually, inevitably dissatisfied with life. We may not be “suffering” like a starving child in Africa, like a family trying to get out of Ukraine, like a homeless addict, but we are unsatisfied, unsettled, never at ease, no matter how much material success or social satisfaction we achieve. Something is wrong with life, or with us.

Everything hurts. 

Over the past few months, I’ve rediscovered Buddhism through author Tara Brach, who is a psychologist as well as a meditation teacher trained in the Insight tradition. I’ve been reading and listening to her books, doing my best to do a bit of yoga and meditation every day (believe me, a little movement first makes meditation easier), and using the prayers I learned from my Tibetan sangha. And while it hasn’t made everything magically better (and under “everything” I include my physical and mental health, the ongoing pandemic, the political madness here in the U.S., and just everyday stress), these practices have demonstrated that they are exactly the tools I need to engage with the mess I’m in. And yes, things are better, just not “magically” better.

POEM: For JRR Tolkien

I would like to think, professor, that at your death

You found yourself in the woods: Not a dark wood 

Like Dante’s, but a deep wood, a green wood, 

Like Fangorn, like Mirkwood before the shadow.

And in this wood shone a light that passed in long beams 

Like kindly fingers between the slim and the girthy trunks, 

Parting the shadows and leading you forward 

On the path to the heart of the wood; and 

You followed this light with quickening footsteps 

And quickened heart, seeing it grow brighter 

And brighter until at last you saw, in a fair clearing, 

Those Trees of silver and gold that had grown 

In your imagination, that undying land, and beneath 

Their fragrant boughs awaited your own Luthien, 

And the true Varda, daughter of earth and Queen of Heaven, 

To show you the One who had created you to be a creator.

(On the anniversary of his death)

POEM: Solstice

If only for one day 

If only for one moment

Like the tombs and 

Monuments of Neolithic Europe

Stone places with mysterious names

Brugh na Boinne, Bryn Celli Ddu

That on the summer or winter 

Solstice allow one ray of light 

To illuminate the interior

Passing through a distance 

Of stone and darkness

That has to be walked, or crawled, 

Like an unbirthing, 

Returning to the Earth 

Mother’s womb—

If only for one day, one moment

Go into the darkness 

Of your heart and let it 

Penetrate, the light 

Of knowing and feeling

That you are loved.

POEM: Pulse

POEM: Pulse

49 pulses

49 rhythms of sorrow and joy

49 dancers

their bodies pulsing with life

their bodies pulsing with ecstasy

their bodies pulsing with joy

49 people

brown people, black people, white people

49 dancers, 49 victims

49 lovers and beloveds

49 humans capable of all the human emotions

And 53 wounded

53 who have to live 

with the deaths of 49 others

with the scars of bullet wounds

with the entry and the exit or maybe 

where the fragment is lodged in their flesh

and can never be removed or fully healed

49 and 53

memory for their names

roses for their graves

a feast for the survivors

silence and shame for their killer

Pulse Nightclub, Orlando, FL, 2016

For Christians who love to quote Leviticus

In times of spiritual doubt (which is a lot of times), I often go back to reading the Daily Office from the Book of Common Prayer. Right now it is still Easter season, and the lectionary has readings from the Gospel of Matthew, Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians (the New Testament text that is the source of “the Rapture”), and the book of Leviticus.

Certain kinds of Christians love to quote Leviticus, despite Paul’s frequent insistence that the Law of Moses is not binding on Christians. They don’t quote the parts about not eating shellfish, or not wearing clothes made of linen (a plant product) and wool (an animal product) interwoven, or how to make the sacrifices in the Tent of Meeting (or Tabernacle in older translations). They love to quote bits that can be used against LGBTQ people when taken out of context, as I’m sure my readers know.

But they also don’t quote the parts of Leviticus that are like this, from this morning’s Daily Office readings:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God.

You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the LORD.

You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD.

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

I see Christians of a certain type, usually the type who quote Leviticus to justify their hatred for queer people like me, doing stuff like this every day. Or not doing it. Leaving crops incompletely harvested so that poorer people can glean? How can you make a profit doing that? Swearing falsely by the name of the LORD? I think that translates to committing perjury with one hand on the Bible. Not holding back a worker’s wages? Hm, sounds like wage theft to me. Reviling the deaf and putting obstacles in front of the blind? Reminds me of Trump making fun of that disabled journalist.

The Old Testament, or the Tanakh, to use its proper Hebrew name, is chock-full of texts like this, condemning the exploitation of workers and of the land, calling for impartial justice in the courts instead of favoring the wealthy, insisting that “strangers” or “aliens”, i.e., immigrants, be treated with compassion, and telling people not to slander others or lie under oath. Yet Christians who claim to love THE BIBLE above all things somehow have never read those parts… or just decided to ignore them.

I wonder if they’ve read that parable about the sheep and the goats….

Absence instead of presence

We are in the Sacred Nights of Antinous, remembering the Beautiful Boy’s death and deification and honoring the powers that made it possible–Osiris, the goddesses Isis and Nephthys and Persephone, and the serpent power of transformation. Today, the 29th of October, we honor Antinous in the underworld. He passes through the gates of the realm of the dead, defeats the arkhons who would deny liberation to mortals, and becomes the ruler of his own underworld realm, Antinoos Bakkheios.

I think today of my initiation into this mystery, the anniversary of which is about three weeks ago. I have followed in his footsteps and passed the gates to confront the god of the dead on his throne, to die and be reborn as the god.

Today his shrine is stripped, the triptych of his aspects reversed so that I see only its blank white back. But it is not the only thing empty today. There is also an empty bird cage covered with a cloth. On Monday I lost my best friend, my bird companion of 21 years, my cockatiel Rembrandt. He was old, and he had been failing slowly this year, and he died in my hands. To say I was devastated is the bare minimum. He was not merely a pet; he was a pillar of my cosmos, particularly after my separation and divorce. We had two birds then, Rembrandt and Sandro (after Sandro Botticelli); Sandro went to live with my ex and the woman he left me for, but there was never any question that Rembrandt would remain with me.

Blank shrine. Empty cage. On the 27th, the fourth of the Sacred Nights, we reflect on the Ananke Antinoou. “Ananke” can mean necessity, fate, or destiny. Death is the fate of every mortal creature, human, animal, plant, or whatever else. Rembrandt had his ananke just as Antinous had his and I have mine. Even if a mortal becomes a god, they must undergo death to do so.

Tomorrow we will observe Foundation Day, when the body of Antinous is found, his deity proclaimed by the Egyptian priests, and Hadrian vows to build a city in his memory. Antinous is divine, immortal, able to die and revive again and again. Rembrandt will not come back. He will never again perch on my hand and lower his head, asking me to pet him. He will never lift his wings in the shape of a heart and make soft clucks and whistles with his face pressed to mine. He will never sit on my shoulder and fall asleep as I watch a video on my laptop.

I lift my grief, my loss, and toss it into the Nile, into the underworld, in the hands of my god. Rembrandt flies free in the otherworldly realm of the Forest Lord. And it is raining.