The Heretic’s Beltane

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

A NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN: I am about to put forth some no-doubt unpopular opinions about the religion of my 20s, and I want to make it clear that this is based on MY experience. I should not be considered an authority on Wicca, especially since it’s been a decade since I called myself one and I am not involved in the Pagan Community at all. I am absolutely sure Wicca has evolved since my time; I am basing this on my life mostly in the 00s, starting in the period of 1990s Pop-Wicca when Silver RavenWolf’s “Teen Witch Kit” caused so much pearl-clutching. I am not trying to be an iconoclast. I’m just trying to be true to what I’ve lived, in the hope that if you’re in a similar place you won’t feel alone. That said:

This past weekend brought the Pagan festival of Beltane, and I kept thinking, “I should write something about this.” But then I kept thinking, “I don’t want to write about a holiday I don’t like!”

That’s right, folks, allow me to introduce myself, a Pagan who hates Beltane.

If you don’t already know, Beltane is considered one of the high holidays, or Sabbats, of many NeoPagan traditions, including Wicca, which I practiced for well over a decade. It is a “cross-quarter” day that falls midway between equinox and solstice; Samhain, aka Halloween, is another. In fact Samhain and Beltane are the two biggest festival dates, possibly because they fall during times of the year when big festivals outdoors are be doable without heat stroke or frostbite.

That was problem one, I found – in a lot of places, including Western Europe where Wiccan festivals were codified as such, May is still part of Spring. Most of the natural symbolism and iconography didn’t really apply here in Texas where it is already 90 on May 1 and Spring is basically in the rearview mirror. Before I even got to the mythology involved I had to change out the correspondences.

Really though, Beltane was a fertility festival. Pagan or not you’ve surely seen a Maypole in you time, but you might not have realized it is, essentially, a giant beribboned dick that everyone dances around – symbolic phallus worship.

Oddly enough I did not find this practice appealing.

Nor have I ever been into the hyperfocus on sex – specifically heterosexual coitus – as this grand sacred end-all-be-all in my religion. My experience was that Wicca in general was way too sexualized, and the guiding myth by which the Goddess gave birth to the God and then…I’m not sure how it worked but She basically waited until He was grown, shagged Him, then bore Him again the next year…I found intensely distasteful, particularly through the lens of my own personal history. I was told “it’s just a story,” but aren’t the stories we tell about Deity kind of important? Don’t those concepts and symbols work their way into the bedrock of our belief system? If it’s “just a story,” why not stay “Christian” but say it’s not important whether Jesus was crucified or not, let’s just say he wasn’t, and died at 80 surrounded by fat grandchildren.

The ideal put forth by Wiccans was that the religion is feminist, or at least non-masculinist, but if you looked at the specific traditions established by Gerald Gardner, and many traditional lines formed from his ideas, it’s a little difficult to find that in practice. The emphasis was on heteronormative coupling – lots of it – and since Gardner was a naturist there was a lot of ritual nudity as “a sign that you are truly free.” The figure of the High Priestess was almost always depicted as a traditionally beautiful thin white woman who really, really loved the Great Rite.

Now, I learned very quickly that a lot of what considered itself Wiccan (including myself most of those years) only partly adhered to its original rituals. A lot of what I encountered was really more of a blend of Wiccan concepts with more feminist ideals, sometimes to the extreme of cutting out the God altogether. People still clung to the Wiccan label because that was what was popularized, and it gave groups and solitaires an identity to hang on to when the rest of the world was hostile toward any NonChristian belief structure.

But even with the most Goddess-heavy groups, the emphasis on female biology as her defining characteristic (Maiden, Mother, Crone – these are all based on stereotypically “feminine” stages of biological development) still placed limits, still established a cishet focus that at heart excluded anyone who wasn’t born with female organs or whose life stages did not progress according to the timeline, so, in yet another religion, the idea that humans are made in God’s image (or She in ours) did not apply to all women.

As you can tell I am not a fan of trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I don’t want to hear from them, like ever, thanks.

In my mind, religion is what you do with other people, and spirituality is what you do with God; in a lot of ways hanging onto a Wiccan identity was for me a way to connect with others even though my own practice and connection with Deity and nature bore very little resemblance and used maybe 40% of the rituals “everyone else” did.

I wrote an entire book about, let’s be honest, practicing Wicca without necessarily practicing all of Wicca. I really got into the idea that the religion was evolving and could be what we made of it. (I still believe this and I hope it has continued to evolve in my absence.) I also tried creating my own tradition, you might remember, and the coven I belonged to definitely had its own way of doing things that was…sort of Wiccan? But even before my crisis of faith and the decade of nothing that followed, I was already realizing that there’s only so far you can stretch a label before it tears apart.

One of the few really fun things about jettisoning the label was that I could drop the pretense that I was at all interested in many of the Sabbats. To be honest the only ones I celebrated on my own were the Equinoxes, Mabon and Ostara; I’m not really sure why those two in particular appealed to me more than the others, but they remain my favorites. If I were to hazard a guess I’d say that the liminality of them attracted me – they are each a precipice, a transition moment between the light and dark halves of the year, and my relationship with Deity was always and still remains centered around the concept of a Light and Dark face to Her/Him, corresponding with those halves.

The interplay of light and darkness is kind of my jam. I’m a double Scorpio with lifelong cyclical depression. I guess I was predisposed.

I could, if I wanted, try to reclaim Beltane for myself. That’s certainly something I would recommend exploring to anyone who has fallen out of love with their religious practices – dig down into the meaning of the holiday, all the myths involved, all the usual symbols, and consider ways in which the holiday might apply to your own life and beliefs. Beltane is a day of rising action, of burgeoning energy as the Light part of the year really gets going. It’s about tending those seeds planted earlier in the year and helping them grow and grow. It’s a waxing quarter Moon, a time of getting your ass moving.

It’s also a good time to look at the things you wanted to do with your year and re-evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. If that habit you tried to start back around Ostara didn’t get anywhere (six weeks being a typical fatigue time for humans when it comes to change, and the Sabbats each being six weeks apart), see if there’s a different way to look at it, a different method. It’s a time to course-correct after a few moments of fiery honesty with yourself.

Now, Beltane in the time of COVID-19 is a bit different. If you’re like me all the plans you made for 2020 have kind of fallen to shit in the last couple of months, and you’re at loose ends, or coming unraveled entirely. This whole societal experience has shown a lot of people what’s important and what isn’t; it might be a good time to make that list for yourself, and make some decisions about what you really, truly want to invest yourself in going forward and what really wasn’t that important to begin with.

For me, remaking Beltane to suit myself is one of those unimportant things. There may come a year when I’m ready to take on that challenge, but for now, I’m content to celebrate the Sabbats I really love, and say “Happy Beltane” to those who observe it, “Happy May Day” to those who don’t, and “I hope you and those you love are safe and well” to everyone reading this, may all manner of things be well.

Stringing My Prayer Beads

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Part 2 in my series about the spiritual toys and tools that have remained a part of my practice (or are part of it again, or have become important to me since I’ve started getting my groove back).

I love prayer beads. I love the ritual, of course, and I love coming up with repetitive prayers and chants to use with them. I love how tactile they are, how smooth and cool stone beads feel in my fingers. I feel like using beads links me up to hundreds of years of seekers and the devoted from all over the world.

At last count I had two sets. One was specifically dedicated to Persephone, so I wasn’t using them much once Winter came to an end. I found them on Etsy and they feel amazing! There’s something solid and comforting about them that I find instantly anchoring. They’re made with carnelian and rose quartz beads.

The other set I actually had customized by another Etsy shop, and it didn’t have a particular dedication but was more all-purpose. It’s primarily moss agate with a silver oak leaf on one end and a Tree of Life on the other.

I love using both, but as I said, the first set has a particular energy to it that I don’t feel called to use the whole year. In addition, the version of the Goddess I am currently drawn to has two faces, and right now I’m working with the lighter half, who is a Lunar and stellar goddess not based on any specific tradition’s deity but to whom, for now, I refer to simply as Theia.

I’ll have more to say about Them later on. For now, suffice it to say I decided I wanted a set of prayer beads for Theia, but weeks of shopping online came up with nothing that really felt right.

While it may be lacking in the pre-made strand I wanted, one thing Etsy does have is a metric buttload of beads.

Careful shopping came up with the ingredients you see in the wee bowls: Blue kyanite and dumortierite as the main beads; tiny fluted silver spacers; silver leafy ovals as section beads (I believe in a Rosary each section of beads is called a decade), and for the end pieces, a flowered, stylized pentacle for one end and the Moon phases for the other. Add to that some monofilament procured from my roommate (who makes awesome jewelry), and I was ready to go.

I’d kind of forgotten what a pain making prayer beads can be – the first 99% of the strand took about 20 minutes, but getting that last knot on the Moon phase pendant took an hour! It’s still not perfect, but perfection is an illusion anyway, right? Better to have a thing made and use it than to stare at an imperfectly made thing and never get it finished!

Yeah, we’ll go with that.

The result is, if I do say myself, gorgeous. The blue kyanite beads are translucent, and the dumortierite have swirls of blue and blue-black. All the silver gleams.

I’m keeping them in a wooden bowl my mom gave me years ago, which won’t break when the cats inevitably knock it off my bedside shelf. My other two strands each have a container on my altar – the tree beads are in a fluorite bowl and the Persephone beads are in a pomegranate-shaped box. I wanted my new ones to be safe and within easy reach.

What do I do with my beads, you ask? Well, they function basically like any other of their ilk whether a Rosary, Mala, or Misbaha. I have a rotating selection of four-line (or so) chants and prayers that I mentally recite while holding each bead with my right fingers while the other end of the strand rests in my left hand. I start with an invocation at one end – with these beads, the beginning is the Moon phase pendant.

At each oval-shaped “decade” bead, I pause and say a different prayer, usually something that I make up on the spot. Then I go back to the original prayer until the next oval bead. At the end, I finish with an expression of gratitude of some sort.

Sometimes I stop there, and sometimes I go back along the strand until I’m where I started. Sometimes I just think the words, sometimes I murmur them, sometimes I sing quietly. I frequently change things up as I go depending on what feels right, and sometimes I will use the same set of words for a set period of time (say a Lunar cycle) or for a specific purpose (soothing anxiety).

Here’s an example, just to show you how I do it. A lot of this is borrowed from other sources and varied traditions, some of which I don’t even remember, but I use phrases like these in most of my prayers. You’re welcome to use it if you like but please don’t repost it as I didn’t create every line. The sources I can recall are listed at the end of the post. Enjoy!

MOON PHASE PENDANT:
I call upon the Mystery of the Starlit night,
The beauty of the green Earth,
Mother of all things;
I call upon the radiant Queen of the heavens,
Heart’s light and soul’s longing,
Whose hands weave the tapestry of constellations.

INDIVIDUAL BEADS:
Hail, Star of the Sea;
Enfoldment of all enfoldments
whose love is poured out upon the Earth,
Be with me.

OVAL BEADS:
Goddess, tonight I am (however I’m feeling),
(reason for how I’m feeling if I know it);
I pray You will help me find (something I need) to sustain/guide/strengthen/etc me
And keep watch on your wandering child.

PENTACLE PENDANT:
Mother of all things, I give thanks
For the beauty of the Earth,
For the glory of the skies
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies; [yes I absolutely stole that]
I thank You for Your blessings
And for Your presence here tonight.
Blessed be.

Sources/Influences:
Doreen Valiente, “The Charge of the Goddess”
Gael Baudino, Strands of Starlight
Folliott S. Pierpoint, “For the Beauty of the Earth”

Altar-ation

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Part 1 in my series about the spiritual toys and tools that have remained a part of my practice (or are part of it again, or have become important to me since I’ve started getting my groove back).

For most of the last decade my principal altar has been a sawed-off and refinished organ bench that was once my grandmother’s. I love the piece, and have had it in my all the incarnations of my bedroom since my last apartment, situated within view of the bed so I would see it upon waking in the morning.

It’s been a touchstone for me all that time, even when my spiritual life had dried up and fallen off the vine. I still kept an altar even if all it did was gather dust. Having that space dedicated to what I felt was important in my life was essential to me even if I only ever touched it to clean off all the cat hair.

Over the last few years however I’ve realized something that, while distressing, wasn’t really something I could keep denying: Getting up and down off the floor in front of my altar was very difficult. I have bad knees, a bad back, and my general state of decrepitude has increased as I’ve aged. I had to finally admit that no meditation cushion or mat was going to change the fact that I needed to do something different.

I had already started doing my meditations on my bed anyway; my knees were far better supported there, and I was a lot more likely to meditate if I didn’t have to worry about injuring my rickety self. What I needed was a working space for readings, magic, and whatnot, as well as a shrine for all my Goddess figures, tiny deities, crystals, and natural objects I’ve gathered over the years.

Then I was watching a YouTube video by one of my favorite Witches, Molly Roberts, in which she was repainting her altar table…which basically was a kitchen table. A lightbulb went on! I could sit at an altar in a chair!

Well, online shopping, Target.com, and my COVID hush money pooled their resources to point me toward a lovely little Campaign-style folding desk about the same width as my bench but deeper. I eventually found it in a dark walnut finish that would look nice in my little sacred corner, and behold:

Pardon the white bits, I had just unpacked it and there was styrofoam everywhere.

I was hoping the drawer would be big enough for a dragon (those long-necked lighters for barbecue and camping) but alas, it was pretty tiny, but sized beautifully to hold my Light Seer’s Tarot deck and probably some other things.

One of my favorite spiritual activities is removing everything from my altar, cleaning and cleansing the surface, then placing things back one by one and seeing if anything needs moved, replaced, or stored away for a while.

This took that practice to a whole new level, as I first had to decide which items were most important. I don’t have a whole lot of tools, in the magico-ritual sense; I stopped using most of the traditional Wiccan tools long ago. What I do have are objects imbued with meaning and a few important things that get regular use.

In fact, this will be the start of a new blog series discussing my most valued tools and toys, both because I like talking about them and because they are an excellent measure of just how much my beliefs and practice have changed since I last wrote much about either.

Here is what my new altar looks like at the moment, all decked out with her sacred tchotchkes. It’s still evolving as I decide how to use the different spaces. I also ordered a pretty vintage knob to replace the boring wood one.

Pardon the cat hair. Cats live here. Oh so many cats.

Just a quick look at some of the items, starting on the left lower shelf. If there’s something you see you want to know about that I don’t cover on the list below, drop me a comment and I’ll try to explain myself. I’d like to eventually do a video tour where I can talk about each item.

  1. Inside the cubby is a bowl that is holding the pieces of a project I’m working on – making my own set of prayer beads. I’ll be talking about those in depth once I have all the parts.
  2. Also you can see the pin a friend gave me showing Carrie Fisher (in glitter) with a quote about mental health.
  3. The set of beads in the front left is my current go-to, and I bought them from an Etsy shop.
  4. Up on the shelf on the left is of course my newest candle, one for the second facet of my sort-of-homemade Patroness. You can also see a tiny tiny Ganesh that is actually a French Fève, or, one of the tiny trinkets found inside a King Cake in France.
  5. The fluorite bowl is where my beads are supposed to live, but when this was taken the bowl was still setting up after I glued it back together. It fell the heck apart when I picked it up a while back.
  6. My practice involves pop culture to an extent, and any Pagan who saw Moana and didn’t go all gooey-souled when they saw TeFiti, well, there’s just something wrong with you.
  7. There are also redwood cones I found on my last trip to the Pacific Northwest, and some needles of the same tree that I keep in a jar (over on the lower right).
  8. In the center top is a newer Goddess that used to belong to my roommate; she’ll be getting a bit of a makeover as her paint is all chipped. In front of her is my Flaming Chalice from Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church, a new member gift that I light at the start of religious endeavors (including at the beginning of our virtual services these days).
  9. The pomegranate-shaped trinket box, meant to be a wedding favor, came from Turkey, and I keep my set of prayer beads for the darker half of the year inside it.
  10. On the lower right you can see the one shrine I made that I never sold, Artemis. I’m not devoted to Artemis but I loved how that piece turned out so much that, when nobody bought her, I decided she should live on my altar.
  11. There are little frogs doing yoga because…frogs doing yoga.
  12. And of course in the front center is my Book of Moonlight and Shadows, where I keep important info, magical records, and diagrams of important readings for future reference.
  13. Oh! And on the wall is a ceramic pig, a gift from a dear friend who got it for me on a trip to the UK. I use it as a sort of charm to help me recenter my vegan practice, and a while back, it broke. HAHAHA thanks Universe. I repaired it, then painted in the cracks with gold paint, in an echo of the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi.

A More Literal Sort of Lunacy

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

This week of shelter-in-place has been harder for me than those previous, I suppose because we’ve officially passed one month here in Austin since the order was given and at bare minimum there are two more coming, though who knows? At this rate the tiny army of depressingly privileged idiot white people protesting against saving the lives of people who do labor for them might get their way, and they’ll have regained the freedom to force poorer people to cut their hair and paint their nails and bring them the Red Blooded ‘Murcan Platter at TGIFriday’s or whatever so stock prices can go up-up-up and human beings can be cut down-down-down.

Anyway.

As you can probably tell, the whole situation is taking a toll on me, as I’m sure it is on you too. The world has already worn out my Last Good Nerve and I’m down to basically the Bottom of the Dollar Store Bin Nerve. Thank god for meditation, medication, and masturbation, am I right?

(I may cut that line, or I may just bask in its ridiculous glory for all the internet to see.)

At any rate, I didn’t come here to rant and rave like a lunatic, I actually came to talk like a Lunatic about the Dark Moon, the New Moon, and the early Waxing phase in the lunar cycle.

In my experience a lot of people of a mystical/magical bent lump the Dark and New Moons together in terms of their spiritual and magical significance. You certainly could do that; after a time of waning energy, of divesting Herself of her glowing raiment one shoulder at a time, the Moon vanishes from the sky for a moment and we’re left in a period of vast, star-flecked potential.

Over time however I’ve come to recognize a subtle but important difference in the energy of the Dark Moon (where there is no Moon visible at all) and the New Moon (when a sliver of light appears, the leading edge of Diana’s bow), as well as how those two periods relate to the rest of the waxing phase.

When the Moon is completely dark I feel more of an urge to go inward than to cast magic or energy outward. I want to curl up in the roots of a tree and stare up through her leaves at the stars. It’s a moment of pause, like the actual event of death, the breath ceasing, the brain stilling. The month to be hasn’t drawn in its breath quite yet. Everything is balanced, waiting, empty. It’s the kind of darkness that can hold your dreams as well as your nightmares; it’s all in which shadows you peer into.

The Dark Moon is the time to dream. To plan. To make your lists, or just to take your desires and hopes to the Source and figure out where you’ll go next. Deep contemplation is needed here; the time for banishing work and decrease is done but it’s not quite time to get a move on.

As soon as that fingernail of light appears, the energy shifts. Time begins to move forward again with a relieved inhalation. That is the time to begin. Gather your jars, your candles; gather up your desires and toss them in big glittery handfuls to the wind, cast them into water, set them alight. As the Moon’s light waxes, the energy builds, starting with a few baby steps and, by the time the Moon is full, running full tilt, bare naked over the hills.

I think a lot of people gloss over the need to observe the Dark Moon. Going within, as many people are being forced to do right now, is hard for most of us. We’re afraid of the quiet, the dark – but nighttime holds up half the sky, and to jump from dusk to dawn is to miss a huge opportunity to explore our own interior landscape and just…sit still and shut up for a minute.

Sitting there in the dark (which is never fully dark, even on a cloudy night some light remains, just as in the brightest day something is casting a shadow) we can pick out our seeds and make sure we have the soil to plant them in. When the New Moon rises we can stick our fingers in the dirt and get those babies growing. Water will come; it always comes to the Moon.

If we try to think of our quarantime as its own sort of Dark Moon, the potential for change becomes clearer. I’m talking on a micro scale, on an individual basis, for those of us who have the time and privilege to tap into that potential rather than, say, spending 16 hour days on our feet in a hospital or working ourselves into tatters to keep house, teach children, police children, feed our families, work an 8 hour day in a chaotic house, and hopefully sleep in there somewhere. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing how to spend these weeks, but if you do, I highly recommend meditating on the spaces inside that mirror the spaces overhead.

Let’s see where this next cycle takes us.

10 Things I Love – Quarantine Edition

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I haven’t done a 10 Things I Love list in forever, but there are a lot of things I’ve discovered, or gotten to enjoy, because of shelter-at-home that I might never have gotten to otherwise so I thought I’d highlight a few of them.

Not everything on this list is COVID-19 adjacent; in some cases the timing is a total coincidence, but these are 10 things that have made plague life a bit more bearable.

1- Melissa Etheridge’s Daily At-Home Concerts

Usually about 20-30 minutes long, the shows feature a mix of her older songs (“Ruins,” OMG) and newer work as well as a lot of covers. Today’s was Piano Day, and she and her daughter Bailey did a cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You.” In my early 20s I was a huge ME fan, and it’s been a long time since I really listened to her, so her little concerts are really taking me back, in a lovely way, to my late 90s feminist rocker and singer-songwriter days.

Day 35!

Posted by Melissa Etheridge on Sunday, April 19, 2020

2 – Patrick Stewart’s Sonnet a Day

Patrick Stewart reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnets every day. That’s it. What more do you need?

3 – Niall Horan’s new album Heartbreak Weather

Not COVID related. I just love the album. My favorite songs on it are “Bend the Rules” and “Put a Little Love on Me,” but this is another one I adore, and the video features an adorable old couple who are…well, deeply weird.

4 – Having a Buzzcut

I already wrote an entire post about this, but just to keep you updated, I still LOVE IT. In fact I might ask my roommate to buzz it off even shorter.

5 – Blogging Again

Who’da thunk it – after a couple of years (maybe longer) of having no desire to blog suddenly I’m a 3x a week updater. What’s next, finishing that werewolf novel?

6 – An Amazon FireStick

For a long time I’ve wanted an Apple TV, the better to bring all my streaming together in one place; our Blu-Ray player runs several apps including Netflix and Prime, but I also wanted to be able to watch Disney+ on the big TV instead of just on my Macbook. It turned out that while Apple TVs start at like $129, I could get a FireStick for $50, and the day I was looking at them there was a coupon for half off that! It’s a much better interface than the one on the Blu-Ray as well, and much faster.

7 – Disney+

Speaking of which, I’m SO enjoying Disney+. Having almost their entire animated feature catalog at my fingertips is amazing (I am a longtime Disney lover, so much so that I very strongly considered trying to become an animator; my hand tremors and general insecurity about my artwork as well as the enormous price tag of CalArts changed my mind). Not only that but all the Star Wars movies, all the Marvel, and a load of Nat Geo documentaries to watch? We just watched a 3 parter on new discoveries made about the tomb of King Tut, and it was so fascinating! Not to mention Frozen 2 is currently my Self-Care Movie, so, being able to watch it over and over whenever I like is delightful.

8 – The mass effort by society to do something good

We’re in the middle of an unprecedented-in-our-time movement by millions of people to help protect not just their own families, but others they don’t even know. Certain authorities and perhaps 0.5% of the population (who will die for their god given right to TGIFridays, I guess) are trying to curtail that effort, but I sincerely doubt the Tangerine Twatwaffle is going to succeed while so many local governments are using actual facts and science instead of egomania and share prices to base decisions upon. Millions of us are staying home, at the risk of our livelihoods and social lives, to reduce the danger to others. We’re seeing a social movement I would not have given us credit for here in America to take care of each other, to reach out virtually and make sure people are getting supplies, and to continue having community even at a distance. We want, en masse, to do the right thing. How often does that happen anymore?

9 – Alton Brown’s Pantry Raid and Quarantine Quitchen videos

My favorite food nerd has taken to YouTube with a series of videos about pantry items and ways to get the most out of your stores; he and his wife (and their dog Scabigail) are also doing a cooking series together. A lot of them involve foods I wouldn’t eat, but they’re still fun.

10 – ChilledCow and ChilloutDeer on YouTube

Turns out I really love chillout, chillstep, and various lofi hiphop grooves. I find them weirdly both motivating for work and relaxing for evenings. ChilloutDeer‘s hourlong mixes in particular please me, but I can put on one of ChilledCow’s streams and just have it on all day while I work. Who doesn’t love finding new kinds of music to enjoy?

A COVID Confession

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I feel I need to admit something:

I’m scared.

Now, you are probably thinking to yourself, “No shit, Sherlock,” given the state of *waves frantically at the world* and the possibility of a) horrible illness and possible death, b) horrible illness and possible death for people I know and love, c) economic collapse that ensures people I care about will be in dire straits or already are, d) do I really need a fourth?

The odd thing is, the fear I’m experiencing is not focused on those things. It’s something much harder to define. I figured I would talk about it here because chances are I’m not the only one having this particular variety of fear and if you are too, I don’t want you to think you’re alone.

I’m afraid of life after COVID-19. I’m afraid of the world opening back up again. I’m afraid of going back to the office. Of eating at restaurants. Of things being “normal,” or whatever “normal” is at that point.

Part of me wants nothing in this world more than the chance to go to the Alamo Drafthouse again – to eat giant soft pretzels and drink booze in a darkened theater packed with people, where everyone is laughing and gasping at the same thing. Shared experiences! Parties! Dinners out with friends! Church services! My Thursday coffee date! Sitting in Starbucks pretending to write!

Another part of me never wants to leave the house again. Wants to stay in a circumscribed little life in here and let the world keep falling to shit out there.

Out there everything is awful. It’s been awful for a long time now. In here isn’t really that much better to be honest – I can still see news, still hear about the awfulness, still read Twitter for five minutes and want to commit five felonies.

But in here my life is tiny and manageable. It’s days and days of sameness. Work, sleep, eat, watch a thing, read a thing, shower, sleep more. Do all of that again. I go shopping at most once a week. I know a lot of people are finding that utterly maddening, but I’ve been…fine.

I mentioned in a previous post that before all this began I was expanding my world. I’d started making friends at church, was joining groups and attending events. After years of smallness I was reaching out…and now I’m not, and part of me is SO RELIEVED.

It’s almost like time has stopped for a while and as soon as the world starts turning again so will time. The utter catastrofuckery of the coming election will loom even larger. I’ll feel like I have to address the goals I set for 2020 that I haven’t made a whit of progress on so far. I’ll have to deal with…everything. Right now I’m hidden away in my tower watching the world through a screen. I don’t have to touch it. I feel worry and sadness for people risking their lives on the front lines, and I feel the weight of so much death, but it’s not about me personally. It’s a tragedy I try to help with when and how I can, but I feel insulated in a way, cloistered.

Now the thing about it is, there’s not much I can do about that. Staying home and being isolated is kind of how you help right now. It’s literally the thing to do. Or not do. It’s not like I can just up and decide to be a nurse! And remembering the last few days at the office before I was sent home, the stress and worry all around me was giving me panic attacks and making me physically ill. Getting back out into that does not seem like a good use of my strengths.

I’m not judging myself for any emotion that I do or don’t feel – there’s no road map for any of this and everyone has their own way of dealing. Instead I’m trying to just observe them, let them do their thing without trying to squelch or magnify any particular feeling. I’m just trying to hold my own space and learn from all of this.

It is however distressing to feel this way. I don’t want to live small, but I also don’t want to go insane.

The societal fallout of the pandemic is going to be studied for decades. Psychologists, sociologists, every kind of -ogist out there will have things to say about the strange tangle of contradictory feelings that seems to be afflicting all of us right now. I imagine that prescriptions for antidepressants and anxiety meds will skyrocket (they probably have already) and the mental health needs of people working in health care and other essential industries will be paramount. (Well, okay, this being the US there will probably be fuck-all resources made available given how little this country cares about mental health, but in OTHER countries where the governments give a damn about the well being of their citizens that care will be paramount.)

It’s hard to say what long-term effects all this will have on me as an individual or society as a whole. Chances are a lot of effort will be spent to try and sweep it all under the rug and just get back to the deeply problematic world we knew.

I don’t want that.

Do you?

Recipe: “Joy of” Banana Nut Bread

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

This is an odd quick bread recipe because it uses the creaming method instead of the muffin method, but I doubt you care about that; what you care about is that it’s delicious, easy, and doesn’t take a lot of weird ingredients. Pretty much every megamart has vegan yogurt and butter, even during this weird COVID era; I use Earth Balance, and the store had Silk soy yogurt this time round but almond, oat, or coconut would work. (I tend to stay away from coconut milk based things in baking because to me the coconut flavor is far too bossy.)

The recipe originally came from the 1997 edition of Joy of Cooking, which as you can see in the picture is a battered, splattered old friend of mine. I veganized the recipe and altered a few things to suit my own particular style of baking which requires vanilla and spice in everything. It’s especially tasty served warm and slathered with butter.

"Joy of" Banana Nut Bread
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“Joy of” Banana Nut Bread

Recipe by Dianne Sylvan
Servings

8

servings
Prep time

20

minutes
Cooking time

45

minutes

A cakey and soft loaf studded with nuts, this recipe made me realize I love banana bread after years of firmly believing I hated it.

Ingredients

  • The Dry:

  • 1 1/3 c flour

  • 1/2 tsp salt

  • 1/2 tsp baking soda

  • 1/4 tsp baking powder

  • 1/2 tsp cinnamon or 1/4 tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp cardamom

  • The Creamy:

  • 5 1/2 tablespoons vegan butter

  • 2/3 c sugar

  • 1 container nondairy vanilla yogurt (whatever sort you like)

  • 2 mashed very ripe bananas

  • 1 tsp vanilla

  • 1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans or walnuts

Directions

  • Preheat your oven to 350F and spray a 9″ loaf pan with no-stick.
  • Whisk together all of The Dry in a bowl.
  • With an electric mixer cream the butter and sugar for 2 minutes or until fluffy and lightened in color. Beat in the dry ingredients until the mixture looks kind of sandy.
  • Add in the yogurt and beat again until combined; then add the bananas and vanilla and beat briefly to distribute the banana. If you like chunky banana bread, and why on EARTH would you do that, fold the banana in instead of beating it.
  • Add the nuts and fold in gently. You can up the nuts if you like, I just eyeball the amount.
  • Scrape into a loaf pan and bake 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick stuck in the center comes out clean. Cool sitting on a rack in the pan for 5 minutes, then turn out onto the rack and cool the rest of the way.

3 Quarantasty Meals for Vegans

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I’ve been asked by more than one person if it’s harder to be vegan while sheltering-in-place.

The question kind of made me pause, because I forget that a lot of people think vegan food is esoteric or hard to find; one person however was specifically asking if I was having a hard time finding fresh produce. I also paused at that because I don’t eat nearly as much fresh produce as I should.

To further understanding of my people and to give everyone more food ideas, allow me to share some of the easy meals I have been eating during this intense and uncertain time that you might also enjoy. These aren’t meant to be precise recipes.

Bountiful Quinoa

Cook up 1 cup of quinoa per the package directions, but instead of water use vegetable broth (or add a couple tablespoons of veg broth powder to the water).

Meanwhile cook a diced onion and 2-3 cloves of garlic (you could also use garlic powder if that’s what you have) until soft in, eh, let’s say 3 tablespoons of oil. Add in two medium diced zucchini, two medium diced yellow squash, and cook until all soft and nice. If you can’t find these particular veggies use whatever your store has in stock.

I add a good shaking of this wonderful garlic herb seasoning blend to the veg while it cooks (all FreshJax products I’ve tried so far are *chef’s kiss* and they come in nice big jars). Then add a can of drained and rinsed black beans. Stir in the cooked quinoa and sprinkle chopped nuts (whatever you have or can get; I keep pecans around for my oatmeal). This makes a TON of food; I was able to eat it for five meals, and it kept quite nicely in the fridge.

BBQ Tofu Business

Tofu has been hard to find around here so when I get it, I buy two or three and freeze them. Fu that’s been frozen and thawed actually has a meatier texture! I take a block and press it for 20 minutes (I have a press but you could just as easily wrap it in a kitchen towel and press under some heavy cans), then dice up.

Toss yer fu in a combination of 2T olive oil, 2T soy sauce, 1T nutritional yeast, and 1T “poultry” seasoning or the aforementioned garlic-herb mix. If you don’t have nooch just go with the oil, soy, and whatever seasonings you like. Then lay it all out on a foil-lined, rimmed baking pan. Add to the pan a head of cauliflower that’s been separated into bite-sized florets and tossed in olive oil and salt/pepper. Bake the whole thing at 425F for 30-35 minutes, turning once.

Dump the whole thing into a bowl and squirt in as much barbecue sauce as pleases you. Consume in mass quantities. You can also leave off the sauce and just eat it like it is; it’s delicious. But the BBQ sauce makes it dynamite for me, southern gal that I am. (Make sure you read your sauce label to be sure it doesn’t have honey in it.) I can eat the entire recipe in one sitting if I’m not careful. If you can’t find cauliflower use broccoli – the pic to the left is actually green cauliflower, which was the only thing the store had that day.

Heckin’ Easy Curry

Of course I could tell you about how in India curry powder isn’t a thing and people make their own spice blends, and how the mass-marketed yellow sadness called “curry powder” is a relic of British imperialism, but if that’s what you have in your pantry, by all means, go for it. I have a couple of different curry blends from various spice purveyors, and honestly, as much as I’d like to say I blend and toast my own spices that would be a huge lie. I do that for special dishes where a more delicate touch is required. For a good old weeknight curry just use something in a jar. I recommend this, or this.

So start with an onion, diced up, and cook it in a couple tablespoons of oil along with 3-4 cloves of minced garlic and, if you have it, a 1″ knob or so of grated fresh ginger. This is awesome but if you don’t have ginger, no biggie. Add about 2 tablespoons of whatever curry spices you’re using and cook until your house smells like paradise. If you want this mess spicier add in a minced Serrano or other chile.

Now add some veg – whatever you’ve got is awesome, but my favorites are potatoes, cauliflower, and carrots, maybe a nice zucchini. You can also use bags of frozen mixed vegetables of whatever kind you’ve got. I almost always have a bag of frozen Broccoli Normandy, which is brocc, cauliflower, and carrots. If you only have one kind of veg, just use that! There’s no Curry Police outside. They’re in quarantine.

Throw that into the pot with the onion-spice mixture and add some wet stuff, say a 14oz can of crushed tomatoes and 2 cups of veg broth, or a bigger can of tomatoes and less broth, or tomatoes and water, whatever is on hand. Cook the whole mess together for 30-45 minutes or until the taters are cooked, which will depend on the size of the dice. Frozen veg cooks faster because it’s not 100% raw, so you could put the potato in for 10 minutes before adding the frozen stuff. Keep an eye on things because tomatoes cooking tend to explode all over.

When everything seems done stir in a can of coconut milk. (Or don’t, if you don’t have it, it’ll be tasty either way.) Heat it all through, serve with rice, or some manner of flat bread – roti is usually hard to find in megamarts but I won’t tell if you use tortillas. The whole wheat ones are strikingly similar. Just saying.

Hair Today…

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I’ve always wanted to shave my head.

I should preface this by saying I’m not overly precious about my hair. It’s been every length and configuration I’ve ever felt like trying. It’s been dyed and permed and bits of it bleached, pixie-short, or down the middle of my back. Bangs, no bangs, layers, bob, everything but dreadlocks or blonde. I’ll have it short for a long while and then something in me will think, “It would be sexier/Witchier/younger looking long,” and I start growing it out.

Once I passed forty, however, I began to understand why my mother always said women over 35 should not have long hair. It’s not a question of “should,” to me, it’s a question of “Dear god, WHY?”

I spent the last year or so letting my hair grow out, and it was shoulder-length and making me insane. My hair is extremely thick; when it’s long it’s heavy, hot, and won’t really do anything. It eats shampoo. It takes a full day to dry.

To quote an age-old meme, ain’t nobody got time for that.

Every time I cut it off I revel in the freedom I feel. A part of me always mourns, I think, because that weird idea I have that youth and attractiveness are long-hair qualities persists, even though I gave up on the whole idea of attracting male attention back in my 30s when I realized a) I don’t really like cishet men as a social class, and although there are plenty of really great individual guys, I just don’t have the energy and b) given how I look the kind of male attention I tend to attract is not the kind I want. Still, part of me feels like I’m “giving up” on myself every time I cut my hair off, a lot like how giving the finger to the weight-cycling industry was “letting myself go.”

Then I take that first shower with a new pixie cut and I remember fuck all that.

Periodically throughout the years when it’s gotten too long I’ve said, “I should just shave it all off.”

As I said in a previous post, enter COVID-19.

I had recently gotten a regrettable haircut. I was hating it. There was no way I could get it taken care of within at least a month, and my hair grows very quickly. The thought of spending weeks of shelter-in-place loathing my hair was dismaying.

Then I remembered my roommate has clippers for the dog.

(They’re human hair clippers, she just uses them on her dogs from time to time. I think she used to use them on her ex-husband too, which, let’s not go down that path.)

You know where this is going.

I now have less than half an inch of hair all over my head, and I have to say, I love it. It’s fun to rub my hands over. It dries almost instantly. It uses less than a dime-sized sploot of shampoo. It’s going to be difficult for me to let it start growing when I go back out in to the working world…and I may not bother. I am fuzzy and round like a hedgehog. I find this utterly delightful in a time when delight is much trickier to come by.

Don’t mind the ears. They’re detachable.

Even so, I stare at it in the mirror and I have a lot of complicated feelings. I see all the patchy grey mixed into my natural mouse-brown, whole swaths of razed landscape that look like they’ve been burned to ash and are waiting to fly away in the wind. I consider dyeing it, but I feel like leaving it natural for a bit, to look at myself in a rawer form. I am acutely aware of how round my face is and how small my head looks compared to my body. My eyes somehow look brighter. Occasional moments of “what the hell have I DONE?” fade into an odd sort of affection toward myself, as if with a buzzcut everything I’ve been through in life is visible, if only to me, and every prickly patch of grey is a battle scar. There is a fierce femininity in having so little hair, which I was not expecting, and also the feeling that I’ve shed some sort of armor that wasn’t protecting so much as concealing me.

The fact that I’m having this sort of experience while everything is in this lurching state of turmoil and transition is both too much and exactly enough. I feel like for a lot of us this whole strange era has stripped away a lot of the artifice and distraction that made our lives what they were. Americans in particular are dreadful at silence and stillness. The minute we have to face the sort of emotions that are coming up for us all right now, we dive into distractions – only nowadays there are fewer of those, and after you’ve baked bread and done a silly dance video for TikTok and watched all the seasons of Parks and Rec again, in the end you literally can’t get away from yourself. A lot of the funny stuff online is people trying desperately not to be still. What happens when all of that noise and busy-ness and “productivity” is unavailable?

I imagine for a lot of people it feels very similar to shaving their heads.

My suggestion? Learn to love the fuzz. It’s going to take a while for it all to grow back…assuming, by then, you still want it to.

Things I’m Doing/Not Doing

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

There are a lot of lists like this running around at the moment, but as I’m a single person without kids or a partner (I live with a roommate but we are not a couple) my list might look quite different from that of a mom of two or a health worker’s right now, so, everyone’s mileage will vary.

I find I’m relying on a lot of cheap psychological tricks these days, like making the bed, to keep up my sense of normalcy (even though nothing about any of this is normal). Here are some of the things I’ve made it a point to keep doing (or not doing) as the madness unfolds:

Meditation and Prayer

I group these together because they’re two parts of the same practice for me. I actually really enjoy meditation when I get into it, and I’ve bumped up the length of my daily sits to compensate for how much longer it takes me to settle my mind these days. I start out doing a toes-to-head body relaxation, silently asking a blessing on each part of my body (including a number of key organs, like my lungs, which remain stalwart and healthy); then I sit and talk to Deity in whatever way feels right. Usually this ends up being a round with my prayer beads, repeating four or five lines of a prayer. When I finish that I just sit, and try to rest in the Source for as long as I can.

Even if I can’t concentrate for crap, I try to stay with the whole session, and not lose patience with myself. It might seem like we all have tons of quiet space these days, but even if we don’t have a lot of outward activity, finding quiet on the inside is a whole different pile of puppies.

My Day Job

It’s funny – I was so burnt out on my day job before all this, because the first quarter of the year is utterly bananaballs in that particular industry. I had scheduled two days off way back in early March when things still made sense. I argued with myself on whether to take them or not – on the one hand it’s not like I could go anywhere on “vacation,” but on the other, burnt out is burnt out and work from home is still WORK.

Well, I took the two days, and they sucked. I had emotional lows and was bored and listless for most of the time I was awake, which wasn’t a lot. It turns out I need that structure and routine even more now. I like my day job okay, and my company is doing pretty well by us right now; I don’t think I’ll be taking another day off until we’re out of shelter-in-place unless I actually feel ill.

Avoiding the Ever-Living Shit out of the News

I swear if I have to see that goddamn smug orange clown face one more time I’ll wind up on the news myself! The weaponized soullessness of Republican “leadership” has left me so viscerally angry…and I can’t live like that, not when I have fewer constructive outlets. I try to stick to local news, as it affects me most immediately. Washington isn’t doing shit for us, our local governments are. Maybe making themselves perniciously useless is how they plan to have “small government,” whatever. If I want to poison myself I’ll just drink. At least that starts out fun.

“Making” the Bed

I don’t make my bed as a general rule, and I haven’t started per se so much as I try to pull the blankets up and at least cover up the sheets when I get up for work. It’s an interior signal that I’m “at the office” now. It also keeps the near-microscopic cat litter bits that always end up in the bed at bay for a while longer.

Using My Planner

I’ve always said that planning for me is less about productivity and more about sanity. I use my lists and calendars to anchor myself in time and space, to remind myself I was here and I did things. Coupled with the creativity I apply to my bullet journal, I rely on my planner to help me remember every day is not the same, time hasn’t evaporated completely, and this is not forever. I don’t look farther ahead than this month but I try to keep at least a page per week of things I’d like to do and things I’ve done. I don’t worry too much about actually checking everything off. Again, it’s a grounding exercise more than anything else.

Drinking Cold Brew, Literally, By the Gallon

It’s not much, but I try to order things from local places when I can, and one that I’ve been really enjoying is the cold brew from Epoch Coffee, a place a dear friend and I always went to on Thursday nights for a writerdate. They’re delivering cold brew by the gallon as well as some baked goods and packaged coffees, and using the proceeds to help maintain health insurance for their employees. Not only do I get to caffeinate with abandon, I can contribute a tiny bit to alleviating the strain of all this on a few people. I also try to shop frequently at Rabbit Food, our local vegan grocery store which thank God is still open for all my vegan junk food and specialty item needs. Buy local! Do it a lot if you can!