“Second, the Haitians are suffering because we are fallen people living on a fallen planet. In the Garden of Eden, this tragedy would not have occurred. In God’s perfect plan there would have been no Hurricane Katrina, no tsunami in Southeast Asia, no cancer or heart disease or
earthquakes. But when we fell into sin, the entire planet was affected. As a result, “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom. 8:22). The earthquake is not the Haitians’ fault. God cares for their pain as his own.“

(http://www.abpnews.com/content/view/4730/9/ – paragraph 7).

So, do I take it to mean that the batpuppies think humanity is the cause of plate tectonics?!

Tectonic Plates

(note that Haiti lies on the Caribbean plate margin)

Before I get too dismayed by their presumption, let me see if I can put it in terms that my simple mind can understand…

Eve wanted some fun and tempted Adam and they coupled, which caused “the Fall”, and plate tectonics resulted.

Whoa! Way to go Eve! Talk about making the earth shake…

A Pagan Converts

i poured a libation to The Mary today
honey mead to her robe, and her toes
she smiled to me when i added sweet grapes
from the land where the red wine flows

i asked the priests to show me her ass
so that I could properly praise her
but they cackled and squawked,
and called for the guards, and I had to leave her

i gave the priests gold to soften their ire
but none was left for The Mary
so, i looked till i found Her smile in a girl
cold and barefoot, filthy and hairy

and i took that girl home to my good mother
who washed her and taught her to weave
and i became to my Mary a husband to love her
better than gold on some jealous priest’s sleeve

now, to the priests and their soldiers
i can in truth say, that i worship the son and the lass
he’s a bright bonny boy and wiser than I
and she, She has such a fine ass.

Posted by permission of Photographer/Anthropologist, April Field.

We chose to create a Circle for the Dead, intersecting with the permanent Circle, to the West. We had a Samhain Altar in BlackBerry Circle, and an Altar to the Dead in the Circle for the Dead. We paid homage to our Honored Ancestors at the altar to the Dead. The atmosphere was amazing.

Topics

Name: Theme Music and Intro

Index: 00:00

Name: Earth & Bones

Index: 00:41.4

Name: Land and Sea and Sky by Damh the Bard

Index: 05:58

Name: Promo – Pagan Heart in Maine

Index: 12:25

Name: Stone Musings

Index: 13:04

Name: Sign Off

Index: 14:44

Name: Turlough O’Carolan – Sin Bheag, Sin Mor/Snowy Fall

Index: 15:23

Name: AfterThoughts

Index: 15:49

Musical Theme

Artist: Oona McOuat

Song: Drowsy Maggie (with permission)

Episode #3 – 18.8 Mb (or 19.74 depending upon who you ask…) -  20m 34s

Show Notes for Episode #3 – Earth & Bones

Welcome to Earth & Magick, where Earth Science and the Craft meet! I am your host, Meical abAwen.

Episode 3, Earth & Bones:

Welcome to Earth & Magick, where Earth Science and the Craft meet! I am your host, Meical ab Awen.

This is episode 3, Earth & Bones, a narrative episode in which I relate what can happen when you assume that this good earth is solid underfoot.  I also provide a brief glimpse into the social complexity of a simple fossil hunt with family; and then there’s the dogs.

So, sit back and listen, I hope you enjoy the show.Narrative – Bones of the EarthPodcast #3 – Earth & Bones

As I scramble down the hillside through the twisted brush and oaks, I can see that the valley is small and self-contained: neat in its simplicity, man-made?  It is shallow at first, and then descends for a few hundred yards until the valley ends at an abrupt wall of stone. It’s as though a Titan’s hand had thrust a scoop into the Arkansas hills, and lifted all the rock away.

Dogwoods lining the valley walls tell me this area was mined out decades ago, and that there is plenty of water here.  Good. This one area will provide all I need to complete my report. I’ll be able to map the layers that the great scoop cut through, and draw the cliff face in good detail. I have been searching all day for an exposure like this.

This morning I packed a light load, and I’m glad I did.  It isn’t hot, but there aren’t any roads in this worked-over land and I am worn out.  World War II’s great consuming hunger reached even here to northwest Arkansas, hungry for the coal hidden underground.  There is hardly a section of this county left that hasn’t been mined out. The surface is pocked with craters, and the streams and rivers have all run crazy.

I’m here to see what impact more surface mining would have on the natural environment.  That’s a laugh.  There’s hardly any natural terrain here: our hands never lay lightly upon this land.

I am walking along the base of the cliff and not paying attention to my footing, when I walk a step too far.  A crust of mixed ice and dirt, leaves and coal over running water gives way. As I fall I throw my arms wide and my field-pack and gear land behind me.  The suddenness of my fall and the shock of cold water leaves me gasping.  A moment earlier I was standing on a bench of weathered black coal that lay below the telltale sandstone.  Now I’m up to my chest in deadly cold water. A strong current tugs at my boots and only my out-thrown arms keep me from being dragged under the crust.  I can feel my legs going numb already in the cold, and I twist to look over my shoulder.  Where is that tree that was nearby? Are the roots within my reach?

They aren’t, and my turn has caused me to slip further down, and now the cold black water is tugging harder and my legs are swept up.  If I move much more I’ll go under for sure.  My god, any god, — help me now. Please.

I have one good try in me before the cold claims me: time is running out.  The strap on my field-bag is close enough to grab. I try to snag it on the nearest root, my lifeline.

I am able to pull myself up onto the bank, but not to stand. I weep, suddenly, from fear and the horror of almost dying like this.  If I hadn’t reached the strap, if I had gone under, the current would have dragged me beneath the cliff-face to die in the dark, cold water. No one knew where I was going to be today.  No one would ever have known what happened until they came back to this godforsaken area, and excavated the rest of the coal, and found — me. I would be a bonus, a curiosity in 5 paragraphs in the local paper.
After a while I start again.  My notebook is still dry and there is work to do. Best not to get behind, it is a long ways back to my car and it is already late afternoon.  There is still more work to do.
The last mile of my hike back lies before me. It is dark, and I cannot see my way clearly. Dogs have been following me for a while, at first just one or two, but now a pack.  They are wild.  Feral.  Town dogs who lost their warmth and security, or the descendants of pets the miners left behind, 40 years ago.  I should be afraid, I guess, but I’m not.  Just now I can’t feel anything but numbness and the ache of walking for miles in wet boots.  My feet are clumsy and I am exhausted.  From time to time I lean on the stick I cut, to rest.  The  dogs come a little closer every time I do.  So, let them come and I’ll deal with them.  I survived the sucking-dark water: the dogs are not so bad.
I never looked back at them. I never let go of my walking-stick, and never looked back and began to run, and they never came. They just quietly faded away to their hills.

In the old days the hand of man lay lightly upon this land, or so they say. I think there were just fewer of us then. Fewer to take from the land and fewer to fight over what others had. Now we’re like a pack of dogs, always on the move. We cast back and forth across the good earth, ripping up the coal to feed our wars. We forget that we are not the masters here. The stone has its own ways, and its own dark and hungry holes. We forget that at our peril.

Stone Musings

She looks closely at the ground as we move down the slot canyon, hoping to be first to find a fossil. Not just any fossil, she must find a better one than I will find. It will be special, because yet again my wife has beaten me at my own game.

Number two son scrambles from rock to rock, scuffs dirt and attempts to kill all the innocent wildlife within range of his throwing arm. He watches me, and should I bend down to look at some non-descript pebble, he’ll be there before I can lay claim.

He’s no faster, though, than number one son, who has learned both to dog momma’s footsteps and to keep an eagle eye on number two in jealous speculation. This son, this most jealous son, would do better by looking down. The layer he is following is strewn with fossil shells. There may be a real prize, just there.

They all watch me from the corner of their eyes.

And I? I watch them also. I step down through the ages of this landscape, and I wonder at their brief fascinations and frantic scurryings, back and forth as though the rock were made just for them: eons of uplift and downfall and brief violent wrenchings, stone death, despair and rebirth, made just for them and their hands.

No wonder they always win. I wonder why they think that I always lose?

Thoughts

We earth scientists often walk alone. Sometimes things happen that are hard to explain to others; hard to share.  Often we DO share our love of this good green earth with our families and our friends. But even then, sometimes especially then, we are distracted, we are torn between the world of men, and that of Land and Sea and Sky.

This has been Episode #3 of Earth & Magick.  Many thanks to:

• Oona McOuat for the use of her arrangement of Drowsy Maggie as the theme music
• Damh the Bard for Land and Sea and Sky
• Turlough O’Carolan for just having existed and for Si Bheag, Si Mor/Snowy Fall

Bright Blessings to you all.

Meical abAwen

Earth & Magick by Meical abAwen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Topics

Name: Theme Music and Intro

Index: 00:00

Name: Shout-Out – Media Astra ac Terra

Index: 01:40

Name: SJ Tucker – We Are Shangr-La

Index: 02:17

Name: Media Astra ac Terra – Promo

Index: 07:21

Name: Meical ab Awen – Deep Time

Index: 07:54

Name: Drop Black Sky – CtrlZ

Index: 15:33

Name: DruidCast Promo

Index: 21:13

Name: Inkubus Sukkubus – The Endless Night

Index: 21:52

Name: SpiritsCast Promo

Index: 25:33

Name: BlackBerry Grove Parable

Index: 26:23

Name: Damh the Bard- Willow

Index: 34:35

Name: GrandMa Blackberry

Index: 39:09

Name: Gaia Consort – The Old Ones with Attributions and Farewell

Index: 42:44 – 48:28

Musical Theme

Artist: Oona McOuat

Song: Drowsy Maggie (with permission)

Episode #2 – 43.5 Mb – 48m 28s

Show Notes for Episode #2 – Deep Time

Welcome to Earth & Magick, where Earth Science and the Craft meet! I am your host, Meical abAwen.

Episode 2, Lost in Time aka Deep Time :sigh:

Although this is the second episode in this series, it is the first in what I call “investigative style”. In this episode I will introduce the geologic concept of “deep time” and talk a bit about how that idea has impacted us.

It won’t be all science, though. To break things up I’ll play some music from some great pagan and non-pagan musicians, and some promos of other podcasts that I listen to and enjoy. And I’ll include a parable from Blackberry Circle, the teaching circle of which I am a student.

So, sit back and listen. I hope you enjoy the show.

Let’s look into Deep Time.

Firstly, what is Deep Time? According to various sources, Deep Time can best be described as Geologic Time. Hmm. That didn’t mean very much to me the first time I heard it, and I am not going to fall into the trap of defining a term just by calling it something else. So, I’m going to define Deep Time as “time enough that what may now appear improbable, becomes possible, likely or even expected.”

Think about it this way, if you give enough monkeys typewriters and if they type for long enough, eventually one of them will write something significant. Sure, that sounds improbable, but given enough time, anything’s possible!

Enough time, that’s what Deep Time is. Time enough to see change occur and to realize that change does not stop when we do. Time enough to let all the myriad impossibilities of this life and every other become true. Time enough to set aside the blinders of revealed truth and look into the face of the universe and recognize what is there.

Humankind has inferred the existence of Deep Time for millennia.

Wikipedia tells us that the ancient Greek Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) wrote in his Meteorology of how the earth had the potential for physical change, including the belief that all rivers and seas at one time did not exist where they were, and were dry. The Greek writer Xenophanes (570 BC–480 BC) wrote of how inland marine fossils were evidence that massive periodic flooding had wiped out mankind several times in the past, but never wrote of land formation or shifting seashores.

Du Yu (222–285) a Chinese Jin Dynasty officer, believed that the land of hills would eventually be leveled into valleys and valleys would gradually rise to form hills. The Daoist alchemist Ge Hong (284–364) wrote of the legendary immortal Ma Gu; in a written dialogue by Ge, Ma Gu described how what was once the Eastern Sea (i.e. East China Sea) had transformed into solid land where mulberry trees grew, and would one day be filled with mountains and dry, dusty lands.

The later Persian Muslim scholar Abū Rayhān al- Bīrūnī (973–1048) hypothesized that India was once covered by the Indian Ocean while observing rock formations at the mouths of rivers.

Ibn Sīnā (973–1037) (you may know him as Avicenna) wrote on Earth sciences in his Book of Healing, in which he developed the concept of uniformitarianism and law of superposition in geology. While discussing the formation of mountains, he explained: “Either they are the effects of upheavals of the crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or they are the effect of water, which, cutting itself a new route, has denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft, some hard… It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat diminished in size.”

It was Shen Kuo (around the year 1080) who formulated a hypothesis about the process of land formation (geomorphology) based upon several observations as evidence. This included his observation of fossil shells in a geological stratum of a mountain hundreds of miles from the ocean. He inferred that the land was reshaped and formed by erosion of the mountains, uplift, and the deposition of silt, after observing strange natural erosions of the Taihang Mountains and the Yandang Mountain near Wenzhou. He hypothesized that, with the inundation of silt, the land of the continent must have been formed over an enormous span of time.

In Europe, the modern scientific concept was developed in the 1700s by Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797).

Hutton’s words, “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end,” were in stark contrast to the prevailing interpretation of the Genesis creation story, which held that the Earth has existed for only a few thousand years.

An understanding of geologic history and the concomitant history of life requires a comprehension of time which initially may be more than disconcerting. As mathematician John Playfair, one of Hutton’s friends and colleagues in the Scottish Enlightenment, later remarked upon seeing the strata of the angular unconformity at Siccar Point with Hutton and James Hall in June 1788, “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”

So, what IS that abyss of time? John McPhee, (one of my most favorite authors) explained it using the following metaphor, “Consider the earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”

That is fine, as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

Deep Time is that understanding of time that allows the mind to escape our social constraints and more clearly see the workings of this and other worlds as they are or may be. Without the concept of Deep Time as Hutton understood it, Darwin could not have understood that small changes could accumulate over time, resulting in divergence within life and ongoing change.

And “the Times They Are A Changing”. Without our understanding of Deep Time and the resulting freedom from dogma, our modern world simply would not exist. We would not run franticly in place, often despairing of keeping up. Nor would we have access to the brilliant imaginings of women and men freed from dogmatic decay.

I am ‘minded of Robert Heinlein’s perception of time in his Lazarus Long novels. Heinlein tells us for those of us with the ability to love that which is outside our own skins, Deep Time is “Time Enough For Love”.

We are brought full circle. It was the observation of change coupled with the understanding that change continues even when we do not, that allows us to understand that the Wheel rolls on and ever on, and where it goes, we do not know.

This has been Episode #2 of Earth & Magick.  Many thanks to:

• Oona McOuat for the use of her arrangement of Drowsy Maggie as the theme music
• Sooj Tucker for We Are Shangri-La
• Drop Black Sky for CtrlZ
• Inkubus Sukkubus for The Endless Night
• ShadowCrow for narrating the BlackBerry Parable and Shdow for permission to podcast it
• Meichelle McLaughlin for Across the Burren and Carrowkeel
• Damh the Bard for Willow’s Song
• Janis for bringing GrandMa Blackberry to life
• Gaia Consort (now Bone Poets Orchestra) for The Old Ones.

Drop Black Sky donated a CD to pass along to one of you.  Please comment on this show  at www.daear.net to be eligible for the drawing. I’ll pick a comment at random and will announce the winner on the blog, to Twitter and my Facebook page.

Bright Blessings to you all.

Meical abAwen

Earth & Magick by Meical abAwen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

While I’m researching the subjects of the ‘casts on the web, I use Evernote to clip the information I think I’ll use later. Then, once I’m ready to start brainstorming the essays, I use MindManager to play with the ideas and create a logical order to the ideas and information floating around my all-too-chaotic mind.

Hope you enjoy it!

there’s a snake in the house

there’s a snake in the house
a slithery scaly other
i didn’t invite him in,
did you?

there’s a snake in the house
he’s eating all the vermin
i wonder what will happen
when he’s through?

there’s a snake in the house
i can hear him sliding, and
when i’m walking, slowly
he’s moving too

there’s a snake in the house
he’s sleeping in the walls
after feasting on the rats
the whole day through…

there’s a snake in the house
i’m afraid to go to bed
i’m afraid i will wake up
and find him in my shoe

there’s a snake in the house
he shimmied through my dreams
and licked me on the face
the whole night through

there’s a snake in the house
he shed his skin last night
i pulled it up and over
it fits me, too

there’s a snake in the house
and he’s getting awful hungry
it’s been a long long while
since he ate my shoe…

there’s a snake in the house
he’s been watching you very closely
he’s looking over your shoulder
and he says, BOOOOO!