My Books

Pagan Every Day: Finding the Extraordinary in Our Ordinary Lives

When my phone rang one day early in 2004, it was an acquisitions editor at RedWheel/Weiser. "We like the way you write," she said to me. "Would you write a book for us?" "Sure thing," I replied. "What would you like me to write?" "We want a daily calendar book," she said. "Call it 365 Pagan. And put lots of goddesses in it."

So I signed the contract and wrote the book. To meet their deadline, for six months I wrote every morning (which means I wrote thirty or thirty-one daily pages every two weeks), edited (so I could still pay the rent) every afternoon, and did research every evening.

What I found out when I sent them the completed manuscript, however, was that they'd wanted a frothy little gift book. What I'd sent them was a real book. It was too long. But when you're writing a calendar book, you can't just lop sixty pages off the end; you have to trim every single day. They wanted 300 words per page, max. I edited each page down to 301 words.

Here's part of the review from Publishers Weekly. I'm pleased by it and hope you'll be intrigued enough to buy my book.

Following are four days (one for each season) as I originally wrote them. They are now slightly shorter and the epigraphs are, alas, gone.

April 10
Harvey

I am that merry wanderer of the night.
—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

The March Hare is the Easter Bunny before we tamed him. In Teutonic myth, he's the emblem of the goddess Eostre, and the Chinese said the hare was an animal of augury who lived on the moon. Reader, have you ever taken a close look at the famous little statue of Ix Chel and the rabbit? There she stands, the Mayan goddess of water, the moon, weaving, and childbirth, arm in arm with the sacred spring hare.

In the late 1940s a play called Harvey by Mary Chase opened on Broadway. It won the Pulitzer Prize and in 1950 was made into a movie starring James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, who has wrestled with reality for thirty-five years and "won out over it," and Josephine Hull, who won an Academy Award, as Elwood's nervous sister, Vita. Harvey is a tall, white, invisible rabbit. He's a pooka. He's also Elwood's best friend. They hang out a lot in the local taverns talking to people. Plot complications arise when Vita tries to have Elwood committed to the local sanitarium, Chumley's Rest. At one point in the movie, we see a portrait of Elwood and Harvey. Look at Ix Chel and the hare again. It's the same pose!

Rent this movie tonight. Harvey is a funny movie, farcical and metaphysical at the same time. One of my favorite moments is when Wilson, the loutish sanitarium attendant, looks "pooka" up in the dictionary … and the dictionary talks to back him.

When Dr. Chumley learns that Harvey can stop watches, he asks Elwood if the pooka can spend some stopped time with him. Elwood asks where he'd go. Dr. Chumley says that he'd go to Akron with "a pretty woman, a strange woman, a quiet woman." He would send out for cold beer, and then, he says, he'd tell her things he's never told anyone else. And he'd want her to hold out her soft, white hand and say, "Poor thing, poor, poor thing." For two weeks.

Reader, if you met Harvey, where would you ask him to take you?

Is reality real for everyone?

July 30
Blue Moon

If they say the moon is blue,
We must believe that it is true.
—Anonymous saying (1528)

As I write this, we're having a blue moon. Lunar power is magnified tonight. An old definition is that a blue moon is the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. In order to set Easter properly, the medieval ecclesiastic calendar required a maximum of twelve full moons during the year; by calling the occasional thirteenth full moon a blue moon, they kept the calendar on track. If we follow this definition, we can have blue moons only in February, May, August, or November, about a month before a solstice or equinox.

A more modern definition is that the blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar month. Just so you know, there will be blue moons on June 30, 2007; December 31, 2009; and August 31, 2012. The last year to have two blue moons was 1999.

Saying the moon is blue, astronomers and other serious people tell us, is like saying the moon is made of green cheese. It's "an obvious absurdity." Well … with air pollution, clouds, and ice crystals in the atmosphere, the moon does occasionally appear to be blue. If we can believe in a blue moon, they also tell us, we're credulous enough to believe in any kind of nonsense. If something happens "once in a blue moon," they say, it just ain't gonna happen.

Who cares what they say? Gather your circle or coven and have a blue moon ritual tonight. Prepare tokens that symbolize good fortune. If you plan far enough ahead, you can collect wishbones (one for everyone who comes to the ritual) and paint them with blue glitter. Ask your priestess du jour to dress up like the Blue Fairy in Disney's Pinocchio and lead everyone in a meditation to find out what wish their heart makes. At the end of the meditation, the Blue Fairy priestess can give everyone a glittery wishbone or a piece of blue lace agate or a magical verse written in blue ink on palest blue paper. After the ritual, feast and dance under the blue moon.

On this night when the moon is blue,
I hear your wish and make it true!
—XOXOX,
The Blue Fairy

September 27
Miss Piggy

I have always believed that moi had great natural gifts as a writeur, and so one day not long ago I decided to answer the call of my Muse. Well, that is a bit of what we in the word biz call poetic license. Actually, I answered an ad on the back of a matchbook that said "If You Can Write a Check, You Can Write a Book."
—Miss Piggy's Guide to Life, as told to Henry Beard

The Goddess Of Everything hurled herself into the world in the first episode of The Muppet Show, September 27, 1976. She had a supporting role at first, as an astronaut (pig-onaut?) in "Pigs in Space," but then … well … she and Kermit the Frog fell in love. She demanded more lines, bullied the famous guest stars, and soon we witnessed a satined, sequined theophany. Excuse me. Theaphany. As she starred in five seasons of The Muppet Show and five Muppet movies, she ascended in purple-gloved glory to the heavens of the Muppet pantheon. Who can forget the Busby Berkleyesque underwater ballet sequence in The Great Muppet Caper where The Pig rose to perfect balance atop the fountain of life? It was a porcine apotheosis.

And then she ventured into epigraphy: she wrote a book. We pray to our goddesses to help us live our lives more happily. Like the oracles and sibyls and volvas of old, The Pig has given words of wisdom to her children. Her Guide to Life tells us (in a style that warms the cockles of my heart) everything we will ever need to know about beauty, diet, exercise, fashion, finance, manners, romance, success, and other vital topics. Do we think we're ugly? "Not everyone can be a superstar," Miss Piggy informs us, "but anyone can be a semistar, a starette, or a teensyweensystar. The most important thing is to believe that you are beautiful."

Our goddesses attend to our emotional needs. Henson knows, life in the 21st century is not easy. There are challenges that can make us depressed. "Misery loves timpani," The Pig advises us:

If your depression is particularly acute, you may be able to deglumify things a bit with some upbeat music. But if you like classical music—as moi does—do be careful: even the most sprightly, toe-tapping symphonies have at least one grouchy movement filled with oboes, doldrums, and bassinets.

There's no one like The Pig. Aggressive and winsome at the same time, she loves her Kermie. Maybe she's the reason he says it's not easy being green….

Special Holy Goddess Of All Things,
let my soul arise and come unto you.

December 24
Modraniht

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
—Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

If we have Mother's Day in the springtime, it seems only fair and balanced that we should celebrate Mother's Night in the dark of winter.

We get the term Mothers' Night from the English monk, Bede. Writing in about 730, he said that the Angles began their year on the night of December 24–25. We don't know, however, if he was reporting on a custom that honored the three goddesses known as the Mothers or if he was referring to Christmas, newly arrived in Germanic lands. In 706, in the Council of Trullus the Church had forbidden believers to follow the old Roman ceremonies honoring the confinement of the Mother of God, which included the distribution of cakes called placentae (the Divine Mother's afterbirth). Christmas Eve became the night of the Virgin Mother. Remember singing Silent Night? "Round yon Virgin Mother and Child…."

Tonight is probably the night we go home to our own mothers and fathers. (If I were being cynical I'd add, "… at least if we want our Christmas presents, we go home.) Reader, I'm guessing that your birth family is not pagan. I'm also guessing that they don't quite understand what you're up to with your talk of solar gods and the solstice and heathen holidays. I'm further guessing that Mom and Dad still invite you to go to the midnight service with them.

Go to church with them. Your mother has cooked for you. She's shopped for you. We pagans are pantheists and panentheists and we see deity everywhere. Why not in a Christian church on the night their god was born? Go to church and enjoy the ritual and the singing. Don't argue theology with your parents. Don't tell them that Jesus may be mythological and if he was a real person, he was probably born in the spring or in the fall between 7 and 4 B.C.E. If we can agree that other pagans can celebrate their gods in their ways, why can't we extend that privilege to Mom and Dad? Keep peace in the family. Go to church with them.

This Is Your Mother Speaking.