Thanks for all the fish!

Being thankful is something I'm often thinking about. It started in college actually, when my friend Dylan and I were mopey gothity kids and the world was of course too much to bear as it often is when you're twenty. Somehow, in our correspondence, we decided we would list three things we were glad about in each email. At first there was much flailing and posturing, but we started to mean it. When I told my friend April (who was also a proper gothity child of the late 90's) she sarcastically said, What are you? Playing the Glad Game? And I said, yes.

Somehow, we went from Dylan and I playing the Glad Game to our whole circle of friends playing through email. Sometimes we'd play a lot and sometimes we'd add notes about bad things going on. When something bad was going on, people would reach out to each other, even if they were a friend of a friend of a friend. We were tied together by the Glad Game. There would be dormant periods of course, sometimes for a long time, even a year or two. But we started playing again on Facebook, though we were in a dormant phase again until like a minute ago when I restarted it. Usually I find when we are most stressed and least glad, we need it most. So I send inspiring little messages to my Pollyannas like, "Hey Pollyannas, give us a shout out! Something must be making your miserable asses happy!"

Jason's post about thankfulness of course made me think too. Before my divorce, in a lot of ways I was a very different person. I thought more, more, more would make me happy - I thought more shoes, more expensive purses, more jewelry, more thin, more achievements, more living space would all make me happy. And . . .it didn't. It just got me more debt. I wasn't happy, I was stressed and exhausted and miserable with trying to keep up the facade of being the girl with the most cake. When my divorce happened and my financial situation dramatically changed, I learned to be thankful for much simpler things. And here's the thing, I was genuinely thankful for those things. Really and truly. And I became so much happier and more appreciative for what I had.

When I feel stressed, I give thanks to my gods for all that I have, all my first world things. My list includes:
* Being a homeowner and for my Goldilocks space that's just right, more over a roof over my head
* Heat
* A car that works
* Enough writing opportunities for a career
* All my clothes
* Enough food in my mouth
* My phone and my laptop and tv (and dvr honestly) and internet access
* My couch, dining room table and bed
* My loved ones

Sometimes, it's hard to be grateful for getting what you asked for. I asked for money, ideally in the form of a severance (it's still up in the air, long story) and I got called back to my day job for a couple days. While I'm sick and it's a major headfuck and making me a complete and utter neurotic mess because I'm trying to adjust to my new life, it's money. And I need to be thankful for it. So I am.

Your own . . .personal . . .cosmogram

So, my PEH (platonic Euro husband) Gordon was recently talking about Cosmograms and I was super excited because lately my blagosphere has been v. v. theory heavy and . . . I have nothing of import to contribute there due to my lack of book learnin' and my complete inability to retain any of the information involving very theory heavy discourse in magic. So I've been feeling sort of uninspired and lackadaisical in posting, as my little piece of the egregor is basically out to lunch while the rest of the egregor is working like busy worker bees. Also, my sister pulled a triple word score (she's buying a house/getting married/having a baby) which has been distracting though happy making for all involved.

And like so many other things that he talks about, Gordon talked about something that I've had lazily slowly drifting through my habitrail brain for quite some time. In ADF/GoG, we talk about spirits of place. And I've gotten a pretty good handle on the spirit of New Brunswick, NJ but the rest of it for me . . .is sort of lip service (for me! Others seem quite sincere which is why I always feel like a bad pony there!). And I think that's because I haven't drawn a map. And OMG, I love maps like whoa.

New Hope, PA: My first exposure to magical stores, an lbgt/alterna friendly (though now more yuppie) boho place that has restored my faith in magic and the cosmos 75% of the time I've been there. In that 75% of the times I've been there, I've felt my heart open up in ways that I hadn't felt. I've fallen in love there numerous times. They made a New Orleans style restaurant out of an old church that still has the church fixtures in them, only now (gently and politely) saucy. Whatever clothes I wanted to wear, whatever person I wanted to be, I could be there. Also, a v. kink friendly area with the gorgeous Chateau Exotique. I would be remiss in not mentioning Wildflowers, which will always be *my* restaurant, not mine and another person. And the Wildflower Preserve, just big enough and woodsy enough for an indoor cat like me to feel outdoorsy.

Cafe du Monde, New Orleans - I love New Orleans, all of it. The glamour, the rundown, the ecstasy, the sadness. Loved it so much I volunteered with the Red Cross to go and help after Katrina, even though I was scared shitless to. Cafe du Monde is where the whole world meets over beignets and everyone goes, no matter how fancy or plain or rich or poor you are.

Avebury, UK - I thought my mind was blown at Stonehenge, but Avebury is way better. You can touch all the stones and see all the covert offerings left, sheep run through all foot loose and fancy free, tourist dowsing just for the hell of it, teenagers were doing a ritual in another language when I was there and they sounded like fairies singing.

The Maze in the Garden of Versaille, France - In my first big European adventure after college, we managed to have a picnic there inside it. Bottle of wine and cheese and meats and pastries, it felt so glamorous and grown up and the world felt so impossibly big and wonderful.

Palmyra's Teahouse Boundbrook, NJ (now defunct) - So glam and goth with a whole library of books and new bands for us to listen to with wall scones and damask everywhere and an art gallery always full of outsider art. All my teenaged dramas happened there over pots of oolong. My friends that I still have from that time still day dream about it.

New Paltz, NY/The Hudson Valley Wine Trail - J. and I love to pretend to be posh and go wine tasting. It's a boho town with lots of local and organic food and beautiful beautiful scenery.

The Sea Gypsy, The William Morris Loft, Wildwood, NJ - It was such an amazingly romantic suite in the attic with lots of cozy window seats and romantic but not fussy furniture. Though we were already in love, the Loft sealed it for Jow and I.

The Rutgers Gardens - A place for wine tasting, cutting class, rolling down hills, and falling in love.

Mahogany on Walnut - An old boys' style club that enjoys it when girls go to smoke a stogie and toss back some kind of port or whiskey. L. and I liked going there.

Little Italy in NYC - Because we all need to eat until we die and light some candles at the church and go to a seperate restaurant to be stuffed full of desserts sometimes.

My nodes all seem connected to: eating, drinking, falling in love, glam'rous (as my tiny charge used to say when I was a nanny), boho, and breaking the rules. That seems about right for me.

Catholicism, Hinduism, and my Inner Ferengi

111) Never sleep with the boss' wife unless you pay him first.
112) Never sleep with the boss' sister.
113) Always sleep with the boss. - The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition

Jow thinks I'm secretly a Ferengi. Dark secret, I'm closet geek. The Star Trek thing, I have my mother to blame. Jow likes to sometimes try to coax out how deep I am into the dork forest by making seemingly innocuous statements about various parts of the various series which *always* forces my hand in my frothing retorts to show what a complete geek I am.

Now, okay, granted it took a while for women's right to really kick in there, but it happened. The Ferengi never got involved in slavery or other imperialistic bullshit which does suit my Damn the Man sensibilities but they were always there to make a profit regardless of whatever crap everyone else was fighting about, which I also appreciate. The Ferengi are totes the corner coffeehouse to the Alliance's Starbucks (and that's all you're getting!).

I'm an industrious little squirrel. I always have been. I like busting my ass towards a goal, I like getting shit done, and I like making money.

Now, bear with me. Flashback! I was Catholic, dutifully praying constantly for whatever it was I wanted in the moment, a pony, the love of Scott Reiner. I rosary'ed like a champ, I went to confession on the regular without playing the how long can I make the priest take to listen to me before he's forced to take out the Bible game my sister favored, I went to church, I did what I was supposed to do like a good worker bee. I liked the ritual, the structure of how prayer worked in Catholicism, but I disliked that the output was so capricious, at least in my experience. Constant prayer + the desperate desire for the love of S.R. = canoli afterwards? That can't be right!

So blahblahblah why can't I be a female deacon/personal general liberal agenda/general unsuccessfulness of personal prayer/need to irritate my mother, and here I am Pagan.

Except. . . I totes need structure personally. I wasn't too successful in coming up with my own structure, and man, the idea of doing a full ADF ritual or Wiccan circle just to get some prayer done is enough to make me want to give up all my shoes.

Which eventually brought me to the Hindu pantheon in a pagan context. The way I was taught it was as follows:

1. There are mantra you need to be given by teachers, but the basic "seed" mantra is for everyone. I know not everyone agrees with this, but my general feeling is the seed mantra is like calling your deity on the phone, there's only so much you can screw up unless you're actively trying to. Learn the pronunciation of the seed mala, learn the general protocol associated with the deity, and hey don't "call" a deity who is either easily offended or likely to be offended by you particularly if you don't entirely know what you're doing. I don't "call" Lakshmi because she would take one look at my house and look at me and say, "Ugh. Seriously?"

2. How to do puja. I dig puja, it's an (often) mini ritual that can be as simple or as elaborate as you would like and it involves a bell.

3. The stories, of Shiva's family especially. They just really resonate with me, they seemed a lot more like something I could relate to. Joseph and Mary according to Catholicism just had baby Jesus . . .immaculately and . . .fin. There's nothing wrong with that, and celibacy is sacred too but it's not my path. Shiva and Parvati's story of a blended family, fighting and making love is a lot closer to what I can relate to.

4. How to mala. This is where things *really* started to click for me. Mala was explained to me as a banking account, which appealed to my inner Ferengi and the rosary and mala are very similar which made the transition easy for me.

So, mala as a bank account made a lot of sense to me. Every time you complete a mala, you get to put a few pennies into your bank account. If you do enough malas, every boy, every boy in the whole world can be yours! Okay, that would take a lot of time, effort, energy, and austerities. But! Parvati totally got her man that way. Shiva didn't want to pay her no mind and she was all, that's cool. I WILL JUST MAKE YOU LOVE ME WITH THE STRENGTH OF MY DEVOTIONS TO YOU. And I appreciate that level of drive and motivation.

After reading Eat, Love, Pray, I realized my life was missing a nightly devotion. I had hesitated about any kind of nightly practice doing anything because I generally don't remember to even water house plants, but it felt like it was time. Except . . .I was in the hole to Durga for quite a few malas I never said to her that I said I would say for bringing B. back home safe from Iraq. So like a proper Ferengi, I decided to do the math to figure out *how* many I owed her and when I would be finished being indebted to her. While indebted, I would endevour not to ask Her for anything, past being grateful that she held up her side of the bargan even if I was lazy/sketchy at best at following up in a timely fashion with my side.

So after Christmas, but before New Years, I started my practice with a rotation between Durga, Shiva, and eventually Parvati when I finally found her seed ohm, heavy on the Durga side. Right before Beltane, I finished my debt to her and it felt really good. Even though I've said a total of around 140 malas, I haven't yet asked for very much, at least not for myself. Shiva is known especially for granting requests as long as the work has been done, which is handy. But it feels a lot more cause and effect than saying rosaries did for me. And should I ever decide that I *really* want that pony (which Jow would probably prefer to live with instead of SR who moved away when I was thirteen, so who knows what he became. Meth lab head? Stock broker? Househusband? Doctor?), I feel like I could get one which appeals to my squirrel Ferengi brain.

So far, I've gotten help with a tooth ache, a blister, a v. nice Beltane, got my friend G. knocked up (by her request! She and her husband were trying for their second), and so far M.'s husband E. has been doing okay with chemo. It's powerful stuff!

Thank you.

To my first two benefactors who decided (independently?) to make the first contributions to my further education fund.

I am often snarky and snarly, but I say with all sincerity, thank you from the bottom of my heart, your kindness means the world to me. That two people would decide to donate money to someone they've just "met" who blogs irreverently and with a lot of four letter words to further her education, is more than a kindness.

Alright, enough of that. Back to being a bitch.