Re-entry

Over 2 weeks now, since Meghan was born. I spent those first two weeks in a bubble with her and Patricia. Now I'm back to work with clients, classes and a workshop coming up this weekend. It's good to be "back" and at the same time, I'm not. 

Just as Patricia went through a process with labor that was both spiritual and organic, it seems that I've been going through one since delivery that is more spiritual and less organic. I don't have the clear, physical contractions, but instead I find myself reeling from time to time with the emotional, spiritual realization of this transformation. 

My brain feels like it has blown a gasket and can't seem to maintain adequate pressure for long. Thus it's quite difficult to do things like catch up on my blog. However, I have gotten email from an old, dear friend indicating that she has been reading these entries and I don't want to leave her without more to read, so. . . this is me trying my best to keep up. 

After two weeks of paternity leave, I went back to work, providing shamanic counseling and medical qigong to my clients. I had thought it would not be too bad. After all, I had been working pretty much around the clock for two weeks, so it was almost a break. It was good to be back among other people, but I missed the bubble that we have created at home. 

Strangely, I find that my fears are being realized. This morning one of my fears about being a parent surfaced strongly (again). "there will be no room for MEEE!" Suddenly it hit me. That's right. There will be no room for my old narcissistic ego. I will need to let go of that as well. Ah! Parenthood as a spiritual practice?!??

welcoming a new member of the clan

Okay. I can't seem to remove the blue underline. Perhaps there is some deep and mysterious reason for this. I don't know. 

I would like to announce the birth of our daughter, Meghan Quinn at 9:49 AM on May 27, 2009. She was 8 lbs, 1 oz and very alert. We welcome this blessing from the ancestors. 

Playing catch-up

As it occurs to me that it's been a couple MONTHS since my last entry, I thought it might be a good idea to spend a little time getting caught up. There is no way to record all the wonderful things that have happened over the past months, but I can hit some highlights. 

First off is the wonderful introduction to another of the great Mysteries of the human experience: My wife and I are pregnant with our first child carried to term. Pre-labor has begun and it is . . . not boring. It's hard to put into words how everything changes. It's not just Patricia who is seeing the world in a different way now. And it's amazing how many newborns you run into when you are expecting your own. It's like we are entering a Mystery cult. You don't know what the initiations are going to be like. People can describe them in great detail, but they remain beyond our understanding. We await the initiation with great anticipation.

the scent of the wierd

SO – here I am, in a whirlwind of endings and beginnings and I start smelling . . . cotton candy? It's maybe two weeks ago. Things are already on the verge of boiling over. I've had to postpone a workshop, we're juggling four separate baby showers, LumensGate is heading for the showers and the cat insists on pooping on my carpet. I'm getting into my car to head for the office and I smell. . . cotton candy. At least that's the closest I can come to identifying it. I get in to my car and drive to the office, the odor gradually fading. I let it go, thinking I must have picked up a whiff of something in the neighborhood. 

This smell comes up again, pretty much every day. Fleeting and elusive, it appears at the edges of my perception and then flits away. I begin to wonder if I have a tumor pressing on a sensitive part of my brain, causing olfactory hallucinations. 

Yesterday, I am searching for my good luck coin (a gift from my beloved wife) in my monk's bag. I begin to smell the cotton candy again, more strongly now. I wonder if it is somehow connected to spirits telling me where to look for the coin. I begin to dig things out of the bag, turn it upside-down and shake. A fountain of white powder pours out, followed by a fluttering packet. No – not heroin. It's a package of EmerganC®, and electrolyte mix that has come open in my bag. Is it connected to the coin? Well, yes, in a way. It was given to me by a woman who was at the conference where I last saw the coin. . . .

Ah well!

Catching up

It's been a busy month, and I've obviously not kept up with my blog. I'm hoping to get caught up a bit over the next few days. It looks like I'll have the weekend off as well, since the workshop I had planned on teaching is being cancelled due to low registration. Not a problem really. This will give at least two more people the chance to join us when we do make it happen. 

So – to catch up on a busy month: I'll begin with Pantheacon. Pantheacon is probably the largest Neo-Pagan gathering out on the West coast. It is held at a Hilton and has been going on for quite a few years. I first presented a workshop there a few years back, and had a pretty good experience. However, I decided to wait until I had my book published before I returned, so that I would be able to promote it there. 

I left at 7:00 am to drive up to Dayton, where I caught the flight out to San Francisco – via Detroit and Atlanta, I believe. I arrived at 7:30 pm and was met at the airport by my good friend Amy who was kind enough to let me crash at her house before heading down to San Jose the next morning. Even on the flight out I was wondering how I was going to manage to make it back to the airport for my 5:40 am flight on monday, especially after the workshop they had scheduled my to give at 11:00 pm on Sunday night. After a lot of consideration, I decided to take the BART back to the airport from Amy's the next morning, as she hurried off to work. There I picked up the car I had rented the night before via the internet. I got a great deal on it, considering that I wouldn't have really needed a car where it not for the inconvenient timing of workshop and flight. 

Let me interject here that I had – very responsibly – mailed a full case of my books out to my friend Keter's address the week before, in plenty of time so that Keter could bring them with her to the conference. I checked with her from the airport and they still had not arrived. So it looked like I was going to be going through all of this and I wouldn't even have any books to sell beyond the two copies I had crammed into my suitcase as an afterthought. 

So there I am in the airport, lugging my bags to the rent-a-car and then driving down highway 101 to San Jose. That part went quite smoothly. I had brought my Nuvi (GPS) just in case and it came in handy. But I had forgotten to bring along the car charger, so I had to keep turning it off to save it's batteries. I arrive at the hotel and go to register only to find that they have me in a room in a different hotel a few blocks away. This turned out to be a very nice room, all to myself. But it was cold and rainy the whole weekend, so the five minute walk was a bit uncomfortable at times.

By now you have a feel for how the weekend was going for me. It was friday. I was at the conference, with no books, with no workshops to teach until sunday night. My potential book signing on saturday came and went with no books. I was beginning to wonder if I hadn't inadvertently irritated one of my ancestor spirits who had chosen to return the favor many time over. 

Strangely, in spite of all the little mishaps and timing issues, I was having a good time. I was in a light and open mood. I remained engaged and open to the folks I knew there; got a chance to hang out with my best friend and long time mentor, Elisheva and to help out with one of the things she was offering – so I wasn't completely wasting my time. I began to wonder what was going on though. This was feeling kind of . . . spooky. 

Sometime saturday afternoon I found out that the books had arrived – in San Francisco – and that the place that was holding them would be closing by 6:00, so Keter and I jumped in my car and drove back to San Francisco, got lost, got found again, and managed to pick up the books minutes before they closed. I got the case into the back seat of the car and thought, "I could have sworn that box was a lot heavier." When we got back to the hotel, I opened the box to find that only half of them were there. Somewhere in transit the box had been opened and 23 books had gone missing. This was getting a bit ridiculous. 

That afternoon I was cruising around the hotel looking for a familiar face and came across Don Kraig sitting with a couple of women in the bar. I joined them for awhile, which was a nice break from wondering around on my own. We sat and chatted for awhile. I tried to order a drink but they were out of Jamesons. Finally settled on a G&T, then wandered off without paying my bill. The two women were both very interesting. One was a Gardnerian High Priestess, Lady Raw, who seemed quite down to earth. The other was apparently a coven mate of hers, a very charismatic woman who insisted that people were having a problem with her threatening to take her clothes off. 

Sunday was a bit of a blur. I managed to do a short book signing at noon, while most everyone was off eating lunch. I think I sold 2 or 3 books, but had a few nice chats. Then I started thinking about what I would do for my workshop. There had been other things on my mind up to then. Somewhere in there, the two ladies from the night before invited me to dinner and as I was heading out to join them I noticed my car was missing. I went to the desk and asked if a car had been towed away recently. Then I called the police, but refused to file a report right then, because I had to meet my new friends for dinner. I rushed back to the other hotel and up to Lady Rae and Paula's room. They suggested I go back and check in the lot again. Now, mind you, it was raining and dark. When they drove me into the lot, I saw my car right were I left it, sitting beneath the harsh yellow light that magically turns red cars into brown cars. One mystery solved to my ecstatic relief. 

The night rolled on – culminating in the workshop entitled "the Shaman's Dance with the Divine." I had planned on using some of the techniques from my workshops to offer an experiential introduction to animism. Now I wasn't sure that there was going to be anyone showing up for it, but there were. Ten people showed up and it was a good group. Rather intimate for such a large room, but great people. We did some shamanic trance work, evocation of spirits and such. A good time was had by all. 

Then it was back to the (other) hotel. Mad packing; a short nap; a 3:00 am alarm; quick shower and another drive back up the 101 to the San Francisco airport for my morning flight. I made that with no problem.

With all that, you would think I had already had enough – and you would be right. But, after flying from San Francisco to Cincinnati (where I couldn't get off because they had my luggage and my car was parked in Dayton) to Detroit and then taking off for Dayton, we turned back after we were over halfway there, because of a "maintenance issue." We were on the ground for another three hours in Detroit before flying out again at 8:40 pm, arriving in Dayton around 9:45 where I finally picked up my car from the economy parking lot and wearily drove home. 

More catching up to come.

The Invisibles – Things we Take For Granted

A few years ago I was visiting some friends in Germany and we were going for a walk along a nearby nature trail after lunch. There were five of us trooping along; my wife, our host, his two adult daughters and myself. On the whole, I don't think we looked too disreputable. You need to understand that walking after lunch – or dinner – is a very common activity in Germany, and there were various other people on the trail as well. I noticed a middle-aged couple walking towards us on the trail, with their pet Dachel (Dachshund) tagging along at their heels. I was looking forward to meeting the dog and getting a quick pet fix. I've been partial to these sleek little dogs since owning one as a youngster. However, as we came closer I realized that this was not going to happen. The couple kept their gaze stolidly a head and completely ignored us as we passed each other. To be fair, the members of our party kept up their own conversation with no indication that they noticed the other people on the path. Only the Dog seemed to give us a quick sideways glance before hurrying after his humans. 

Glancing at my wife, I wondered if she had found anything curious about the lack of polite exchange, and she returned my look with a shrug. As I waited for a break in the conversation to ask why no-one had responded to the other people, a younger couple came towards us on the path. They were in an animated conversation of their own, but they also offered no acknowledgement as we passed one another. Curiouser and curiouser. Just as I was going to break in on the discussion of what was and was not appropriate to decorate a Christmas tree with, yet another person came walking towards us. This was a middle-aged man, who immediately hailed Detlev – our host – and proceeded to introduce himself to us and exchange pleasantries with Suzanna and Lisa. "Ah!" I thought. "I see! It is only people they already know that they greet." 

Finally, when we arrived back at the house, and Detlev had told his wife about them running into Herr what-ever-his-name-was, I asked them why they didn't greet the other people we passed. Detlev's only response was an almost offended "But that would have been rude!" I didn't pursue it, but it did teach me a valuable lesson. It really hadn't occurred to me that something as simple and seemingly obvious as nodding "hello" to a stranger could be perceived in such different ways by different cultures – especially ones that seem, at least superficially – to have so much in common. 

This of course can be taken much further. There are so many things that are embedded deeply in our minds, so that we don't question them. For instance, we take for granted that "grass is green" and "sky is blue". It doesn't occur to us to questions something that is so "obvious"; something we learned so long ago that we no longer remember learning it, and yet there is grass that is not green and there are skies that are not blue.

We humans have a great capacity to screen out what would otherwise overwhelm us. Our limbic system takes in the huge amount of data from our senses and then passes onto our conscious awareness a small part of that data which we experience as information about our surroundings. If we had to deal consciously with the fullness of all our sensory input, we would probably not be able to function very well. It seems that we have a means of doing something similar with other data as well. 

I think that's about far enough on this train of thought for now. There's a big snow storm blowing in tonight, and I may have lots of time for deep thoughts tomorrow.

Intoxicated by Life

Driving my beloved wife to the airport last week, to fly down to Florida for a silent retreat, we were talking about her expectations for the retreat when she said something like "I don't like poetry because poets are just drunks expressing their intoxication." To which I replied, "well, at least some of us hold our liquor better than others." 

Apparently I've been keeping my intoxication to myself too well over the past few weeks. I will try to remedy that and provide more for the blog readers to scan.

A very Happy New Year to you all!

namaste,

Kenn