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          A visiting teacher who had come to a weekly yoga class I attended shared his personal mantra: "I know nothing, I want to learn." At the time this seemed a negative way to approach life. I now understand this to mean what the Buddhists intend by "beginner's mind." If I think or believe I know all about something, my mind will be closed to learning more. I have learned much from the many spiritual paths I have studied, and I appreciate what I have gained. I've stored up the most helpful teachings and incorporated them into my life, using them to live by.

Stephen and I were celebrating my birthday with my daughter and her fiancé. "Can you share some wisdom," she asked, "things you have learned over the years?" I thought about it, and nothing came to mind just then. Later that evening I realized she had given me a fine theme for my latest love note. I told her and she agreed. I began to think what I wanted to share with my readers. As I went to bed that night my mind continued to whirl with thoughts.

Back in high school, a non-pagan friend and I were discussing the winter holidays.

“But we have Solstice, too,” he contended, meaning non-pagans.

Well, in the sense that the Solstice happens whether or not you pay attention to it, I suppose that they do.

But here's my question. The Sun, the Earth: are these (so to speak) just people that you walk past in the street every day without really noticing, or are they People that you actually know and engage with?

As I write, we're nearing the end of the Samhain Thirtnight. Every morning—I'm awake then, I actually see it—the Sun rises a little later, a little farther South. Every day, he goes a little farther away, and we see that much less of him.

I don't know about you, and I don't know about non-pagans, but personally I feel that that fact somehow involves me.

My speech on the Heathen Visibility Project was a great success! A lot of people were in the group photo, including Selena Fox. (One does not have to be a heathen to be in a group photo with heathens for the Heathen Visibility Project.) She even got everyone to shout “Hail to the heathens” together for her Instagram.

Water fountains are good feng shui and can enhance your prosperity quotient.

Gather together:

This is the text of my speech on the Heathen Visibility Project which I gave on Nov. 9th, 2019 at Las Vegas Pagan Pride Day. Next up on my blog will be a report on PPD and on how the Project went.

We're Seal Clan on my mother's side, and we've got the toe-webbing to prove it.

You know the story. One full Moon night, a man sees the Seal Maidens dancing naked on the beach. He steals one of the laid-by skins, so that, when the dancing's done, the youngest (and most beautiful) of the Seal Maidens cannot follow her sisters back to the Sea.

She becomes the man's wife and bears him several fine children. But then one day she finds her old skin in the chest where it's lain hidden for years, and it's back to the Sea for her. That's how these things work.

It's an interesting story, and an old story. You have to think that among the truths that it tells is the trauma routinely experienced by young women in patrilocal societies when, at marriage, they're uprooted from everything that they know to go live with their husband's family.

But that's where Seal Clan comes from, and to this day some of us bear the signs of that ancestry on our bodies.

I didn't know any of this until my nephew was born. That's when I first heard about the toe-webbing from the aunts, the bearers of family memory. Not all of us have it, but my nephew does and, as it turns out, so do I. I'd never noticed it before because, well, that's just what feet look like, right?