Indigo Incarnates

I worked my Spring Rite as this month’s moon service at Turning Circle. It’s a pleasant, life-affirming ritual in which the spellcrafting involves empowering a plant with our intentions of things we want to grow or improve in our lives. We’ve got two new regular visitors who are considering becoming full members. Whoo-hoo!

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My friend Mav’s child is finally old enough to be able to sit through a 60-minute service without bouncing around like a Mexican jumping bean, so that was pretty good. Vera is about the most pleasant and good-natured 4-year-old anyone is likely to encounter.

Having attended a few Unitarian church services, I can understand why they are so willing to reach out to the Wiccan/Pagan community. Both faiths affirm life, human dignity, and the preservation of the ecosystem. The Unitarians simply don’t work magic into their services and we do. By contrast, the fundamentalist Christian services invariably affirm death, shame, and the concept of a “throwaway” ecology (they claim the Rapture’s coming, so they can rape the Earth any way they want to.)

I really can understand why paganism is making a comeback in this country. It’s a religious ideology that believes that life is sacred, that males and females are equally loved and valued by deity, and that benchmark for behavior is “do not harm” instead of “do not sin”. After all, “sin” is arbitrary and comes from a book, while “harm” is innate and comes from the heart. We all know when we’ve hurt someone, and Christians use the “sin” benchmark as a way of them justifying hurting others.

Indigo Incarnates

This was a pretty cool weekend. On Friday night, Doug and I met up with his friend Melissa for some karioke. I was unaware that Metalica ever recorded a heavy metal version "Whiskey in the Jar". But I muddled through, heh heh.

On Saturday, I did an 8-mile power walk on the NCR trail. Some shrubs are getting a little green and some of the grass is growing back. It was sunny and warm. It was just about a perfect spring day.

On Sunday, I went to an Ostara service. It was an outdoor ritual held at the Patapsco State Park. We also picked up litter for an hours since it's sort of a Wiccan thing to leave a place in better shape than when we arrived.

Today, I did the taxes. I'm getting $600 back! Yay! I can get the winter electric bill caught up!

Indigo Incarnates

There are times like this (awake for no good reason very early in the morning) when it really sinks in as to what a freak I am. It's really no wonder that I have so few friends. I'm a freak. I really do know this. The result, of course, of my unnatural existence is that there are very few people who can abide my physical presence. It really depresses me sometimes. I sometimes wish that I didn't feel the need to connect with human beings.

I know I am a freak. I am reminded of it every day. This is especially reinforced by the constantly recurring feeling that the life-essence that powers this body doesn't really match this body. My body doesn't "fit" right. It's part of my clumsiness. It often feels lke the body is about 2" too tall and my reach is off by an inch. I run into walls and break things a lot by accident.

But aside from the physical mismatch, there is the problem that I am a non-human that is animating a human body. I think that, on some level, other people can sense this discord. People fear that which they don't understand. And that's part of why people do not stay friends with me. On a subconcious level, people can sense my inhumanity.

Indigo Incarnates

Unlike the dreadful weekend, it was sunny and mid-60s today. Now that the clocks have changed to the spring/summer mode, I was able to do a three-mile power-walk over at the NCR trail. It was nice. 

One of the aspects of being a changeling and not a human is the ability to sense life energy. Regular folk don't really notice that trees and plants are more than decorative. I can sense their life and it is a wonderful thing (Willow has more of this ability, but I do have some). 

While the trees and shrubs still look dormant to the naked eye, I can feel the rapidly increasing life-energy that will soon manifest in new blooms and blossoms. 

The little stream that runs by the trail is filled to the brim. The runoff from 5' of snow and three days of rain sure makes a difference in the water level. 

I heard about a zillion frogs somewhere along the riverside. They were blurping and chirping madly. I think some of the birds are coming back too. 

The Spring Equinox (Ostara) is next weekend. It'll be nice to be back into the "light" half of the year. 

Indigo Incarnates

This weekend has been a typical Maryland weekend. It started raining Friday night. It’s rained all day Saturday. It’s raining all day today. It’s likely to clear up just in time for me to have to drag my tired rear-end into work on Monday. It just doesn’t seem fair. To add insult to injury, I have one leaky window in the house. It doesn’t always leak, but when it does, it leaks badly. So yesterday morning, I cam downstairs to find the whole kitchen flooded. So I had to clean that up and put a bucket under the ceiling where the leaky window in the second floor dribbles into the first floor. So I hear “drop… drop… drop…” for 36 hours straight.

Of course, the sudden shift from 60/sunny to 40/rainy was pretty much crippling for me. It seems unfair that, under certain weather conditions, I can feel ever major injury that I’ve ever had. So, I basically hurt all day yesterday. It’s not as bad this morning, but it’s not great.

This weekend has really sucked.

Indigo Incarnates

While government jobs are hardly the most lucrative endeavor on the planet, they do have the advantage of offering a reasonable amount of vacation time. So this week I have been visiting my friend Doris in South Carolina. It’s a very pleasant “do nothing” vacation (as opposed to the other vacation that I take with Doug which is a “do everything” vacation). It’s nice to just hang out with friends and watch movies.

Yesterday, Doris and I did a road trip to visit two of her children that are in college. I’m pretty impressed that they are both art school students. I think her son is in graphic design and her daughter is into ceramics. We were driving the Insight-II so we drove from Spartansburg to Greenwood (52 miles) on a single gallon of gasoline! Whoooo-hooo! On the way up to college, I was driving Doris nuts by keeping the car in battery mode too much and thus driving the car really slowly (I’m not a speed demon anyway, and owning this car encourages slow-pokeness).

Today, we visited Emerald Farm. It’s a sort of combination farm and petting zoo. This is Willow’s favorite place to visit when we come to Greenwood. Emerald Farm has goats, rabbits, roosters, hens, ducks, llamas, alpacas, peacocks, and one very old (28-year-old) horse. It’s also got a lake stocked full of huge catfish. It also has an adult-sized swing set. Very cool.

I have to drive home tomorrow. The 606-mile drive is about as long a drive as I can withstand. I can do it, but just barely. I have Thursday off so that I can recover from the Wednesday drive. On Friday, I go back to work, but all I will have to do is write court reports since Friday is not a reporting day for the junkie/flunkies. So, overall, this is a pretty cool week.

Indigo Incarnates

Yay! Doug and I are headed to New York today to see a musical on Broadway today. We're seeing "A Little Nght Music". It's got Angela Lansbury in the play. 

Doug scrounged some really cheap bus tickets to get up there. For $26/each, we got round-trip tickets on a doble-decker bus. It's also got power outlets, which means I can bring my notebook computer  next time. 

It's mostly sunny today. It's been a long, hard winter and i have missed the sun. 

Thanks to the five feet of snow we had last week, I think I have fallen on the sidewalk at least a dozen times. My hip really hurts today. Hopefully it will stop hurting if I can go a few days without falling on my rear end. 

So... The people on this bus are pretty annoying. One person is listening to rap music so loudly on her headphones that I'm surprised it hasn't split her skull open. I can actually hear the lyrics three seats away. Another couple are talking so loudly that you'd think they were the only ones here. ::sigh:: It's going to be a long ride. 

We were running late this morning so I used the Insight's "sports car" mode instead of "ecological" mode. If you don't mind getting crummy gas mileage, the "sports car" mode lives up to the description. It accelerated to 85 MPH very quickly and the throttle/braking response was a lot tighter. The ecology gauge switched from green to an angry shade of electric blue. It was like driving a completely different car! When we got near the bus stop, I put the car back into "ecology" mode and the power levels seemed to drop by more than half and the ecology gauge went back to green. It's really neat. 

I'll upload some New York photos soon :)

Indigo Incarnates

The ritual service at Turning Circle was pretty nice last night. Pheonix led the ritual and she put a lot of work into it. We didn't have as many members as we usually do since the secondary roads are still partially buried, thanks to two snow storms back to back. 

The person I call "fake friend" was in attendance. This person still isn't talking to me (my offense, two weeks ago, was making a disparaging remark about Obama). Well, life has it's irritations. So be it. I don't give "fake friend" so much power over me that I can't have an enjoyable worship service. 

I'm excited that Doug is leading a service in April. I'm also glad that he's found spiritual fulfullment in Wicca. He had previously tried Buddhism and Christianity and found those religions to not be spiritually fulfilling for him. I'm glad Wicca works for him. 

Indigo Incarnates

Lemme tell ya… this has got to be one of the most boring weeks that I have ever encountered. The courthouse has been closed the entire week, so I was unable to actually do any actual work. I am bored out of my skull.

I’m trying really hard to not get on Doug’s nerves. He has the patience of a saint. It’s hard to spend quality time with someone with a dissociative disorder on a good day. He has actually somehow put up with me 24/7 for six days straight. I am really lucky to have Doug.

Of course, one of the side effects of being totally snowed in is that I got a whole lot of exercise this week. For me to go anywhere, I’ve had to walk. This is good, since without the 4 miles per day I’ve been getting, I’d have gone stark, raving mad. I also shoveled a whole lot of snow. A huge amount of snow. Egads.

I hope the roads clear soon so things will go back to normal. I’m feeling kinda cranky. I find a lot of comfort in a daily routine, and this blizzard has totally derailed my routine for a week.

Indigo Incarnates

So… it snowed about 3’ in Baltimore. Some of the snow drifts are 6’ high. I can’t find the Accord. Seriously! The street in which I parked is mostly buried in a 4’ drift and all the cars on the street look like amorphous white dunes. I literally cannot tell which car is mine. Fortunately, Doug parked his Scion behind the house. Now, a Scion is a “B” size car, meaning that it belongs to the smallest category of vehicle that isn’t a Smart Car (which is an “A” size car). “B” cars aren’t known for being good off-road vehicles, har har. So that means that I’ve had to shovel a trench behind the car that extends down an alleyway so that we can drive to work tomorrow – a 100’ alleyway! The snow behind the house was waist-high. I feel like I have had sufficient exercise today.

For better or worse, I was only able to shovel the first 70’ of alley. The last 30’ isn’t snow, but rather slush. It was pretty heavy and my feet were on the verge of frostbite. Fortunately, the slushy part is only 6” high instead of 40” high, so even a tiny car like the Scion has enough ground clearance to roll over it tomorrow. It might be less than 6” by the end of the day, since we have full sunlight today.

Of course, the direct sunlight helped us out today too. A regular human would not have been able to shovel a 7’x70’ trench through 4’ snow continuously. But, being a changeling, I have superhuman endurance so long as Thistle and I have access to sunlight. We did today, so the high endurance was possible. It’s also how I’m able to do those 40-mile bike rides in the summer.

Hopefully the city authority will get a move on the plowing. A few of the main streets have been cleared, but most of the side streets have not. I wouldn’t mind getting my Accord back someday, har har.

Oh, speaking of the Accord… I went to the Kelley Blue Book website and got a ballpark estimate of the trade-in value of the Accord. It’s been in six accidents, has serious cosmetic damage, moderate mechanical problems (it needs bout $2,500 worth of repairs than I cannot afford), and 105,000 miles. The response from KBB was “Your car has no trade-in value”. Ha ha ha ha! That also tells me that I’m not going to sink $2,500 into the car either. Thanks to the utterly depressed economy, the Honda website has a whole lot of recently repossessed cars with under 30,000 miles for less than $15,000. Whenever the Accord dies, I will probably get one of those.