Not quite ‘meeting the Buddha on the road,’ but this was quite the trip. I’d been working to awaken the spirits of the land, particularly the spirits of forest I’ve lived near for the last 8 months. And just before I leave, I find this guy, placed atop one of the mounds built over the gasoline pipeline running through Seattle (and just over the fault line).
He’s not The Dagda, of course, nor any of the gods I worship, but someone else in the neighborhood (many Asian folks who were moved here after the internment camps closed) (remember America had internment camps?) (remember we still do?), responding to some beckoning of the sacred, placed this here.
And at the foot of the mound I found a gift from the crows.
More on that here: The Burning Heart of the Forest (A Sense of Place)
Also, more forest stuff!
John Beckett reviewed Your Face is a Forest! I’m enchanted by the idea that my writing should be read like one reads scripture–not as sacred certainty, but with the mystic’s mind.
And speaking of the mystic’s mind, I’ve been reading Lorna Smither’s Enchanting the Shadowlands. I’ll be reviewing it soon, but I don’t think you should wait for my review to buy it. Each section’s like a Miyazaki film, bits that make your heart soar so high you cry in exuberance, bits so sorrowful you don’t think you’ll ever survive to read the next line.
And another review of Your Face is A Forest–actually, a poem! No one’s ever written me poetry before.
And oh! Speaking of forests and ferocity and beauty and mystics and also amazing people, a new site’s coming oh-so-soon. It’s called Gods and Radicals, a collection of Pagan anti-capitalist writing from some of the most fascinating (and enchanting) people around. More information soon.
Be fucking amazingly damn well, all of you!
Rhyd Wildermuth 
How sweet–meeting your poetry with poetry in response.
Oh my gosh that website sounds amazing. I love following your blog, I always learn so much. You’ve given me faith that there ARE anti-capitalist punk pagans out there!
Would you describe yourself as feminist, a feminist advocate or ally, or none?
Rhyd’s definitely a nun. 😉
To the extent it’s appropriate (and non-appropriative) for me to take on that identity, absolutely. Queer politics and anarchist critique should both start with feminism as a foundation. The only feminism I reject is gender essentialism (men are men, women are women, innately and biologically), as seen sometimes in second-wave writers, but I suspect essentialism has merely been a ploy to divorce feminism from it’s anti-capitalist critique.
Sylvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch probably best describes my understanding.
My eyes are not very good these days; I’d love to hear (when you have a moment!) what we are seeing in the photo here.
So sorry you have to leave your forest. Best wishes for finding a new home, hopefully somewhere that makes it possible to visit.
Today I found the huge group of teenagers who were hanging out in my local valley had clearly eaten dinner and tea there and ditched every single wrapper in the brook 😦