Hey, we're still here, somehow. This place is forgiving.

Well, we've swung around the great wheel again and find ourselves back in good old October, which is a very colorful time around these parts, what with the leaves draining their chlorophyll and revealing their secret hues to us. Thanks, you guys! Beautiful.

Any day I can I go out back, smudge, and meditate in seven directions (helps build strong bodies twelve ways!) and it helps with the balancing. My  neighbors likely think I'm poking smot, but I'm not. I try to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible about it. Aint nobody's business but my own, and I don't know why I'm telling you about it, but I'm not ashamed of it, so why not? Anyone who knows me knows I've always been eccentric, anyway. No news there. So hopefully no news is good news.

Speaking of no news, I haven't heard from Doc Paradox in a while, and I'm worried about him. Anyone know? I'm probably using the wrong celestial plane or something. You can never tell where the Doc will be next.

Anyway, if you happen to see a hawk any time soon, just wave. It might be me.

Love,
Woab

Ayo! I did warn you that pookas come and go, didn't I? Well, I apologize for being gone to Pookaville (it's down the road from Palookaville) for so long. A belated thank you for your birthday message, Moby mon. And thank you, doctor paradox for summoning me back into this tiny roost. It's cozy.

Remember all that stuff I said about Spiritual Void in the last post? No? Neither do I. Well, guess what? It was a spiritual vortex. I just didn't know how hard I was spinning. And you thought I was dizzy before? Pfah! You should see me now.

The thing of it is (just what the heck does that mean, anyway?) I have always felt the effects of the Wheel on which we spin, I just didn't know what it was that was making me dizzy. I didn't know that trying to resist it was the problem. It's not the kid who gleefully pushes and rides the merry-go-round around that gets nauseated, it's the kid who clings on for dear life, gaping off into the blur.

I am an odd person. Attempts I have made at trying to be regular have failed. My oddness always shows through, kinda like a goiter under a turtleneck shirt. I find all kinds of things hilarious, and my laughter is classified as a noxious weed in some extension service handbooks. I love people but they simultaneously spook me out. Yes, I think spook is the word I was looking for. Sometimes I can see right through them and they don't seem to notice, and other times they change shape before my eyes. Sometimes they are Casper and other times Marley's Ghost. I want to play with them and learn from them one minute and the next minute I want to hide from their terrible wounds and burdens. It's not that I don't care about their pain, it's that I feel it. I see live people and when I get too close I start dying for them, and it hurts. So lots of times I just hunker down with just one or two, which is about all I can bear at once. The only reason I've never told anyone this is that I just now figured it out. Told you I was odd.

But  I have found some jolly good comfort in some of the Medicine Wheel philosophies developed by the Indigenous Americans. The Meromorph, a good friend of mine at the Toadfish Monastery pointed me in the direction of the wheel a few years ago. After some resistance I finally gave into learning about it after a book I bought, thinking it was about medicinal herbs turned out to be about Medicine in the Native American sense and bit me in the bunny tail. Turns out I was mighty close back when i studied the Wiccan way, but it wasn't the European version of paganism that was yelling in my deaf ears, it was All-American paganism. USA! USA! So now all that twirling I've been doing makes more sense. And I don't so much mind being dizzy now that I have a better idea of why.

Here's a thing that bugs me, though, and maybe you can help out. A couple of the sources I have studied say that Medicine folk are not supposed to mix with magic-types. Anyone else heard that? I am now wondering if that message is antiquated. It seems to me that since we are all on the same wheel,  we ought to be able to see eachother as such and at least be respectful of one another, and at best be friends. C'mon, it's 2012 almost- isn't it about time to allow for a convergence of sorts?

Oye, my chakras are aching and I can't get anyone to call me back... Hellooo? Ah well. Let's try some venting. But where to begin? Beats me. Everywhere, I guess.

I really want to discuss the spiritual, as it fills me to the brim every second of my life, but it's hard to find people who truly want to talk about it (or even know where to begin. Obviously, I don't!) rather than just state their views as absolutes and block me off until such time (fat chance) as I agree to swallow their truths on the halfshell without peeking to see if they might make me puke or not.

My freakin' Christian right brother is battling with me right now because I won't accept his way as my way or the highway (to Hell, naturally). He keeps calling me an agnostic. I think he thinks I'm an atheist, but that's only because he doesn't read my emails back to him, but continues to hurl long paragraphs of spiritual insults and republican righteousness gobbledygook at me (which, I admit, I only scan for tidbits of anything I can make sense of, hypocrite that I am). I thought an agnostic was someone who argues, in which case, he is one too, for arguing with me, isn't he? Say amen, somebody!

My brother seems to react to whatever I say, no matter how simply and gently put, with heaps of defensiveness. He seems to think I am anti-Christian. I am not. As a matter of fact, I have a strange habit of making friends and then later on discovering that they are, by the way, Catholic, or grew up in that faith. I have had many good discussions about Catholicism and find most of it to be lovely. The only thing, the ONLY thing and the ONLY THING I really cannot swallow is that business about accepting that Jesus is God or going to Hell, take your pick. Sadly, that seems to be more important than anything else. I had this conversation with a very dear friend about a month ago. I posed to her that if God was all-seeing and all-knowing and all-forgiving that He really shouldn't have to resort to threats to get people to follow Him and with that in mind, I could never accept such a proposition. She smiled sweetly and told me that she was sorry, but I was going to go to Hell. Though we remain good friends, things have been slightly cooler between her and myself since then, I am sorry to say. Perhaps she figures that if I won't be around for eternity the friendship is not worth cultivating.

I can't say what God is. I don't know. Personally, I think it would be foolish of me to say I do know when truly I do not. But I believe in God all the same, feel the presence of God, ask for God's help and protection. I talk to God all the time. Maybe Jesus IS God, but maybe so is Erta and Brahma and everyone else. I wouldn't think that God would be so picky about what name is used, or even what mental image. Those are just details, tags we put on the feeling of God inside us, because we are human and feel the need to do so. We name the things we love. That's simply a habit of the human emotional process. I wouldn't think it would bother God in the least what we called Him/Her, as long as our spiritual beings were leaning closer towards Her/Him for a better listen, for a better understanding.

I was raised an Unitarian Universalist (http://www.uua.org/aboutuua/principles.html) and as such, grew up trying to sort out what spiritual ideas made the most sense to me. I studied different religions and found things to like (and to dislike) in many of them. I liked the theoretical humanity of the Christians and Jews, but not the exclusivity. I just cannot accept that there is only one way to heaven and that God, having made so many people in so many different styles, would reject anyone who did not come through some particular channel. I liked Hinduism a lot too, but it is perhaps a shade too concrete for me. I tend to think that a prayer is any thought which opens to a divine presence and it can happen anywhere, not just on knees, with candles. The appreciation of a really good fart issued before the television is a prayer. I truly feel that any God of mine would have a sense of humor enough to see this.

A few years back, I found myself tracking the pagan pathways and found many things there to like, as well. I really liked the connections with nature and how grounded it made me feel. A pagan friend of mine suggested that I "make a circle" and see how it felt. She seemed to think it would be a powerful experience. I didn't feel like actually drawing a circle on the floor, but I was out in the yard one day appreciating the lovely weather and I mentally made one where I stood. I didn't know any formal words, but having studied the gist of it, I made up my own happy prayers to the four directions of the earth and that was that. Nice. Exhilarating, even. Powerful? Hmmm... But that night I was awakened by the sound of owls, a pair of them hooting to one another right outside my window, which was where I had made my circle. We had been living in the house for nine years and had never heard an owl before, let alone two of them. For a couple of hours they hooted back and forth. "Hoo-HOO, hoo...hoo...". I listened to the pattern and got up to look in my Peterson's Field Guide to see what sort of owl they might be. And there it was: great horned owls. The horned ones! I felt like they'd heard me, somehow. Now, that was powerful. In fact, it pretty much freaked me out and I backed away slowly from my studies, thinking that maybe it was all a Bit Too Much for me. I felt I had no business making owls come to my house. My neighbors had a shotgun and could have KILLED them, for gosh sakes! And it would have been all my fault.

Over the ensuing years, I have had many thoughts about the natural way of spirituality. I don't know really where I fit into it, but it's there, somewhere. I tend not to be a follower and feel like heavy rituals are superfluous for me. I think I'm basically Unitarian Universalist, but with a slant toward the paganistic. I see the good in any religion all the way up until I'm faced with the "my way or the highway" choice. I will always opt out of that one. Oddly enough, many of my good friends are Catholic, or were raised Catholic. I listen to them talk about their church and it sounds so lovely, all the way up until I hear that Jesus is the One and Only Way. That just doesn't ring true to my heart. It sounds like coercion, and that would be contrary to the rest of his teachings, so I'm not buying it.

Yesterday I was thinking about the nature-based religions again. I wondered to myself if I went out and made another circle, would the owls come again? Would I even remember how? I thought about how complicated it is to seek for wisdom in this dreadfully complicated place, yet still I am compelled to do so. A pagan-oriented friend emailed me and I sent back a greeting. I talked with my Catholic bud. I looked at the autumn trees flashing their warm colors in the bright breeze. I did my chores. I went to bed. I woke up at 1:39 a.m. to the sound of great horned owls in my tree, again. They hadn't forgotten, and neither had I.

Gracious. I'm typing and little letters are appearing on the page, like harmlessly insane little fairies hopping out from a closet of frilly little frocks. Or maybe they are more like Zen dust bunnies poufing out from under my spiritual sofa. Pouf, little bunnies, pouf! There you go, gliding silently across my journal's floorboards.

It is I, your Weird Old Auntie, here at last. Typing away when there are more practical things to do, like the laundry. But being your Weird Old Auntie, part-fairy, part-belching wench, part-eccentric, part world-weary... I suppose I really have too many parts and none of them are under warranty any more. So, foo. But that's the way it is. Let me make a pot of tea and you can tell me all about your troubles and even though I can't make them all better, I can usually say something usefully off the wall enough to be of some strange comfort. That is my art, such as it is. If only it paid.

I am of the Pooka race. I disappear and reappear. If I'm not here, it's only that I've been summoned elsewhere in reality or thereabouts. By and by I return, just as normally as any solar reflection appearing on the dining room wall in October. I am not supernatural. Just a harmlessly insane fairy-Aunt in a flesh-colored Beanie waving to you silently from the clock across the hall.

"Hullo Dearie!" -with a toothy grin.