Hello, subscribers! I don’t know about you, but I’m glad to be saying goodbye to the year 2022. It hasn’t been a terrible year, but I’ve definitely had better.
Changing of the Feline Guard
This December hit a sad note in the Wyrd-Worker home, as our old cat, Precious, passed away. It was not unexpected, as she was nineteen years old at the time. But as anyone who has lost a loved one — human or animal — knows, even expected losses can be quite painful. She will be remembered for a long time.
After a period of grieving, Joe and I agreed that we just had too much love to keep the house kitty-free for long. So the day after Christmas, we went to our local Humane Society shelter and picked up two lovely cats: Bella Rose (left) and Milo (right). They are four and three years old respectively and total sweethearts to boot. Bella (we decided Bella Rose was too much of a mouthful to say all the time) is a bit shy, but she warmed up to us in a matter of days.
You can see more pictures of the darlings on Twitter.
Pagan musings
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we celebrated Yule and the shortest day of the year this month. Yule is often celebrated as the return of the sun and the rebirth of the God in many traditions. However, I’d like to take a moment to consider a different aspect of this time of the year, focusing on the the way that the darkness actually promotes life and growth.
This time of the year is about things happening out of sight and in the quiet darkness. Darkness does not mean inactivity or non-life. It simply means a different kind of activity. Consider the Wild Hunt of Northern European traditions, where the spirits are said to spend the niights from sometime in October until the winter solstice roaming free. Our lives may often reflect this as well. While things on the surface seem to be quiet, new energies and new patters may be forming and germinating in the deep recesses of our psyches. This is a time of year to stop and consider this.
The Wyrd-Worker on Twitter
I continued to tweet while listening to episodes of the Thereafter podcast. You can find threads covering the shows featuring Paula Stone Williams and WyldViolet.
Hello subscribers! It’s been a few months, but I’ve decided to get back into writing my newsletter to let everyone know what’s been going on with your friendly online wyrd-worker. November has been quite a month for Twitter threads and starting new social media accounts. I’d also like to share a bit of news with those who may not have heard what’s been going on in my personal life for the past couple of months.
The saga of the little piggies
Content Note: This section contains discussion of a surgery and loss of extremities. It also contains some pictures, including a picture of a bandaged foot with a couple toes missing. If that’s something that may negatively impact you, please feel free and encouraged to skip to the section about Twitter.
As my Twitter followers know, I’m a type 2 diabetic. Well, over the past year, I let my blood sugar get out of control. Eventually, I developed an ulcer on my right foot which got infected. I didn’t notice this until the infection had gotten into the bone and I had developed sepsis. When I finally realized what was going on (I originally attributed the week-long low grade fever to a virus or something), I had Joe rush me to the emergency room. They admitted me to the hospital and put me on antibiotics after taking blood for blood cultures.
After some x-rays and a CAT scan, the doctors determined that there was no saving the two toes that were involved in the wound and infection. So an orthopedic surgeon skillfully removed the little piggies that had none and went “wee wee wee” all the way home. I then spent about another week in the hospital so they could pump me full of intravenous antibiotics before they were confident that oral meds would finish off the infection at home.
The cool thing is that we learned that I am no longer allergic to penicillin. I hadn’t been tested since my initial reaction to penicillin back when I was in diapers. Since that was over four decades ago and the blood cultures indicated that the specific little creepy crawlies infecting me would respond best to an amoxicillin-based antibiotic, they decided to have me do an amoxicillin challenge. That’s where they give you a dose and watch to see what happens. Fortunately, nothing happened other than Joe had a couple hours where his anxiety was cranked up beyond where it already was, which I’d estimate was already at the eleven thousand mark.
Let me just say that recovery from an amputation sucks. I was effectively couch-bound and reliant on a wheelchair to get around at all for over a month. For those of you who have never experienced it, not being able to get around and do even the simplest thing is exasperating. On top of this, I spent the first few weeks seeing the orthopedic surgeon or his physician’s assistant every week. They had put me in a pretty pink cast, which they had to remove and reapply each week in order to check out the healing progress.
Eventually, the surgeon had me start dressing the wound with gauze padding and wrapping the foot in an ace bandage. He also gave (well, I had to pay for it) me a (boringly black) surgical boot to wear when I’m up and about in order to protect the foot while it’s still healing. Yes, that means I’m actually walking again. With the aid of a walker. I’m not sure I actually need the walker, but I need to face the wrath of Joe even less. He’s far more comfortable with me using it.
We have to change the dressing regularly. Ideally, that’s once a day, but well…Basically the goal is to get the dead tissue cleaned out of the wound so that good tissue can continue to grow in its place.
Overall, I’m in good spirits. I’m not too upset over losing the toes other than the struggle not to beat myself up over the fact that the whole thing is self-inflicted in a sense. I mean, I could have prevented the whole ordeal if I had just taken better care of myself. But what’s done is done and the only thing I can do now is do better moving forward. So I’m getting my diabetes under control and have committed to inspecting my feet regularly from now on.
One thing I’ve been noticing lately is some professional tarot readers announcing that they are certified as part of their self-promotion efforts. They typically don’t seem to give any details, such as who certified them or what the certification process entailed. I shared a few thoughts about that.
Some Pagans and witches like to paint historical witches as part of the “love and light brigade,” claiming that all negative talk about witches originated with the Christians. And while I certainly agree that Christians have historically badmouthed witches (just like they did and do everyone), I also felt obliged to point out that the pre-Christian feelings toward witches wasn’t unmitigated adoration either.
Despite the fact that it pays my bills, I don’t talk about software development very often. However, the things that have been happening since Elon Musk (who I have taken to calling Evil Big Bird) gave me an opportunity to dispel the notion that software developers are interchangeable parts.
I fell in (non-romantic!) love with Mandy Capehart the first time I heard her talk about grief. She and I got talking about it again the other day and it inspired me to share my own story of how I came to see grief as precious.
I’ve decided to start offering occasional reflections on the various runes of the Elder Futhark. This month, I ended up reflecting on Sowilo, Raidho, Ansuz, and Wunjo.
I’ve also started listening to episodes of the Thereafter podcast again and livetweeting them. But can you really call it “livetweeting” if you’re listening to a pre-recorded show? At any rate, I have threads covering the episodes with Jo Luehmann and Mike Harvey, Tim Whitaker, the Heathen Queen, and Robert Monson.
A lot of conservative Christians like to claim that their Christian siblings who say truly horrific things about LGBTQIA+ people are “fringe” and “not very powerful.” That’s why I felt it important to draw everyone’s attention to a certain amount of chumminess between Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler and certified hate group president Tony Perkins.
There’s been a decent amount of talk in certain circles about Thomas Achord, a former schoolmaster (he was let go due to the news) for a small but well known conservative Christian school. It came out that he expressed some pro-segregationist, white supremacist, and antisemitic views. This has some evangelicals wringing their hands, including Rod Dreher, who has written at least two opinion pieces on the topic. There may be more, but I only read and offered my thoughts on two of them. You can find my comments here, here, and here.
Expanding my social media presence
Since most of us are expecting Twitter to disappear at some point — either due to technical issues caused by the massive reductions in staff or simply because Evil Big Bird’s decisions cause its financial collapse — I’ve been working on expanding my social media presence. To that end, I have created an account on Mastodon and resurrected my accounts on Tumblr and Instagram. I’ve really been enjoying creating the text images I’ve been posting to Instagram. I also encourage my readers to check out the thread about my spiritual journey over on Mastodon.
That’s a wrap for November
I hope your November has gone well and you have an excellent December. I’m hoping I’ll get back into YouTube videos, though that may still be challenging while my recovery continues. Either way, I’ll see you right around the new year!
Hello, dear readers! It’s the end of July and that means time for another newsletter. I spent a significant amount of time being quiet online again as I was more focused on family. I do have a few things to round up and share with you, though. But first, as always, a few thoughts.
Enjoying the Bounty While we Labor
Tomorrow (for those reading this newsletter on release day), many witches and Pagans will be celebrating Lammas or Loaf Mass. often observed as a festival of the grain harvest. Many cultures have this idea of a festival of first harvest. In agricultural societies, it marks that point in time where the labor is no longer focused solely on tending the fields to get crops to grow, but partly shifts to pulling in the fruits of that labor. It’s only natural to enjoy those fruits and celebrate the results of the labors of the growing season, even as people continue to labor so that other crops (or the fruits of the orchards) continue to grow.
I think that on a metaphorical level, many of us tend to think of the “harvest” and the “growing seasons” as distinct, mutually exclusive events. We work hard to make things grow, then we enjoy them. As we consider the first harvest festival, I think it’s good to consider that there are other harvest festivals yet to come, which serves as a reminder that our idea of “work, then get rewarded” is a falsehood.
For some, this may be a reminder to keep working rather than resting on their laurels as if what they have accomplished is all there is to accomplish. What is more needed, I think, is the reminder that it’s okay to enjoy the fruits of our labor as they come to us. Those moments of enjoyment will sustain us for the further work we have ahead. So let’s be sure to enjoy our successes when we can and allow them to energize us for doing the work we still need to complete.
I also tweeted a few thoughts on a B-rated movie I watched on Amazon called “Bad Witch.” It was gloriously bad, but interesting in that it’s one of the few movies I’ve seen male witches portrayed. And they weren’t called warlocks!
An Orthodox Christian tweeted about reasons people leave Christianity and I decided to deconstruct his alleged reasons. The account has since been suspended, but my thread going through his “reasons” point by point is still available.
Someone humorously tweeted a color diagram of the AWANAgame square and called it an occult symbol. I humorously noted that it’s even the right colors (i.e. those often used to represent the four elements) arranged in the (commonly considered) correct order. It increased my amusement. (Hey, not all my tweets have to be serious!)
I had a few thoughts on the doctrine of hell and the morality of any deity who sends people to eternal torment for any reason. (Spoiler: such a deity has no morals)
I have health conditions that would make getting COVID particular dangerous for me. Getting COVID would likely kill my husband. As such, I’m astounded by people who don’t understand why some of us want both vaccines and masks and shared a word or two about that on Twitter as well.
I’m grateful that witchcraft and Pagan communities seem to be widely inclusive and forward-thinking when it comes to issues of equality and social justice. Sadly, that’s not universal and you’ll sometimes see someone say something bigoted and harmful. Recently, a group of Gardnerian Wiccans decided to provide an example of this by being transphobic. Fortunately, other Gardnerians chose to speak up for trans-inclusivity. I decided to take that opportunity to publicly embrace and support my trans and non-binary sibling witches as well.
My blog has mostly laid dormant for years now. However, earlier this month, I ended up writing a post. A group of online friends got talking about the idea of children professing religious faith and getting baptized and I decide I wanted to share my thoughts on the topic. I had originally planned to do it as a Twitter thread, but eventually decided the topi was much more suited for a blog post.
Wrapping It Up
And that covers the things I’ve been up to during the month of July. I hope everyone has a great August and I’ll see you at the end of next month. Blessed be.
Another month has come and gone and it’s time to send out another update of what’s been going on. This newsletter is probably going to be more personal than the previous ones because June was quite a month for me. Let’s get into it.
My Mother’s Health
I was distracted for most of the first half of the month by my mother going through a health crisis. I won’t go into much detail out of respect for her privacy, but let’s just say she spent about twelve days in the hospital. No, not for COVID. For something equally serious, though.
The good news is that she’s now out of the hospital and is currently at home with my father. Also, my sister came up to spend some time with her and help take care of her. The hope now is that my mother’s health will continue to improve through occupational and physical therapy over the next several weeks to few months. So with this distraction over, I hope to get more active again.
I’m Forty-Eight Years Old
This month also saw my forty-eighth birthday. I tend not to make a huge deal about my birthday, but the fact that I’m not getting any younger does seem to occur to me more often when my birthday rolls around. In two more years, I’ll be half a century old and that just boggles my mind. As I said on Twitter at one point, when did I become an adult? It seems like such a raw deal.
Pride Month
June is Pride Month, which is semi-important to LGBTQIA+ people like me. I didn’t do a lot for it, as my local Pride isn’t actually into mid-to-late July. This does not mean that pride is not an important aspect of my life and identity. I’d say it’s even an important part of my religious and magical practice. After all, to me at least, central to Freyja’s nature is the call to be true to oneself and unapologetically so. As I wrote in my invocation to her:
Oh queen who gained the powerful Brisingamen through your own sexual power and means, teach us to be unapologetically ourselves, true to our own ideals above all else.
And who knows, maybe someday I’ll actually go ahead and establish the Bifrost Brigade. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve joked about doing so.
Another Podcast Interview
James Prescott over at the Poema podcast released my interview with him on the 20th. This was actually the second interview I’ve given. James interviewed me before Meghan Crozier and Cortland Coffey interviewed me for the Thereafter podcast, but they had a shorter backlog of episodes and got that interview out before James. Either way it was an enjoyable experience.
As an aside, for those curious, the first interview I ever gave was with Wormhole Matt on the Wormhole Manifest podcast. I don’t know if there will be any more after this. I guess it depends on whether other podcast hosts hear about me and think I’d bring something to their show.
YouTube Videos
On June 1, I released a video where I discussed exploring the thinking behind “bad” or “silly” questions and how there’s often a legitimate need hiding behind them. Or maybe it’s just an assumption that’s worth exploring. At any rate, I shared how I used to be much more dismissive of certain questions in the past, but would rather explore them and the reason they’re being asked (assuming they’re not just plain being asked in bad faith) these days.
I partly did that video to encourage people to ask questions they worried wouldn’t be “good enough” for my first ever live “Ask the Wyrd-Worker” event on June 8. Despite the technical difficulties (like the fact that I was “on air” for twelve minutes before I found out my sound wasn't working), I felt it went pretty well. All the questions actually came from my husband Joe, so I hope the next such event will be more widely attended and include questions from other people. I haven’t decided whether the next one will bein July or August though. Provided I can come up with a different idea for a live event in July, I’m thinking I’ll wait until August.
The edited version of the event can be found here, by the way.
Tweets and Threads of Note
Because it’s pride month, a lot of Southern Baptists felt it necessary to comment on the “morality” of same sex relationships and LGBTQIA+ people. I occasionallyreminded them that, given recent revelations about their denomination, they really should shut up about other people’s alleged “sexual immorality.” I mean, I also had strong feelings about the SBC leader that complained all the talk about the abuse in the denomination was “interfering with its mission.” And these are the people who think they have any business criticizing queer people’s ethics?
I also expressed some complicated feelings about affirming churches using Pride month as a recruitment opportunity. And I had commentary about Owen Strachan’s weird use of the term “neo-paganism.” Good old Owen: redefining words like he’s Humpty Dumpty.
That’s All for June
It’s been a hectic month. Here’s hoping for a more regular July. See you on or around the 31st! Or feel free to find me on YouTube, TikTok, or Twitter before then!
Happy Memorial Day and happy start of the summer season! Imagine me writing this newsletter as I lounge poolside or even on a tropic beach somewhere. That mental image isn’t at all accurate, but doesn’t it just seem so wonderful?
At any rate, the month of May has been busy and this newsletter is full of links to tweet and videos. But before we get into that, let’s share a few thoughts.
Summer Thoughts
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the brighter half of the year has begun. May Day has come and gone, and we have celebrated the start of the fertile season. We may begin new endeavors as the summer solstice approaches and work hard to encourage new growth and renewed strength.
But let’s not forget the lessons we have learned over the dark, colder months either. During those months, we gained the rest we need to sustain this new burst of activity. And hopefully, we’ve considered carefully how to best guide our endeavors. After all, effort without a plan leads to inconsistent outcomes at best. So be sure to remember the lessons of counsel of our time of quiet contemplation from which we developed our will that we now seek to exercise.
Thoughts on Mike Harvey, Nazis, and Cowardly Progressive Christians
To make things easier, I work on this newsletter throughout the month, then send it out at the end. No part of this month’s newsletter has been rewritten more than my thoughts about the terrible way in which Mike Harvey was tweeted. It started out as me simply mentioning his thread and my follow-up thread where I defended his original statements. Now, nearly four weeks later, it deserves its own section.
For those of you who are not aware, Mike Harvey is a Jewish man and a trained and licensed rabbi, though he has walked away from the title of rabbi because of the events of late April and May. It all started when he tweeted briefly that he was tired of Christians asking him and other Jews what they thought about Jesus. Jews don’t think about Jesus much, and Harvey refered to Jesus as a “dead and false messiah.” This created a great deal of outrage among many Christians, which made sense to me. In my own thread, I pointed out that this is a pretty standard belief among Jews. After all, the criteria for a messiah are very clear in Judaism and Jesus did not those criteria. So from a Jewish perspective, this absolutely makes Jesus a failed or false messiah. As for the belief that Jesus is dead, do Christians really expect non-Christians to accept the Resurrection as literal truth? We have no reason too, no matter what Christian apologists insist.
But the outrage continued. Eventually literal Nazis began to find Mike’s account. They began to harass him and even make death threats. They contacted both his employer and the original publisher of his book, Fortress Press. Mike eventually ended up leaving social media (his Twitter account exists, but he has taken it private and has mostly gone quiet) and quitting his job. After that, Fortress Press decided that they didn’t want to deal with the “controversy” and terminated his book contract. Let me say that I find Fortress’s decision to be cowardly and unjust. This is just another example why non-Christians — especially Jews — are and should be wary of even “progressive” Christians.
The good news is that the independent Jewish publisher Ben Yehuda Press has announced that they are in the process of picking up Mike’s book and they plan to start taking pre-orders in the next week, assuming they have not started to do so before this newsletter goes out. (I’m currently rewriting this on 28 May, so who knows what will happen in the three days remaining in this month.)
I’m grateful that Ben Yehuda Press has picked up Mike’s book because I’ve been looking forward to reading it for at least a month now. However, I’m disappointed that no Christian publishers stepped forward to do so. Mike’s book was written for Christian readers with the intent of engaging in interfaith dialogue and I feel that a Christian publisher brave enough to face down the fascist elements of their own religion would have been a strong endorsement of the book. It also would have likely gotten more Christians aware of the book.
To help offset this, I’m encouraging all of my friends and acquaintances to read and promote this book. Especially those of you who are Christian. Your fellow Christians are sadly more likely to take your recommendation over that of Ben Yehuda Press or even my own. So please, use your Christian privilege to support an incredible man who has faced far too much injustice and terribleness.Heard on the Air
The second week of May saw me as a guest on the Thereafter podcast, hosted by Meghan Crozier and Cortland Coffey. We had recorded the interview at the end of April for release in May. Meghan and Cortland were delightful hosts and thoughtful interviewers. I enjoyed the chance to share my thoughts with their listeners. You can check out the interview here. I also tweeted a few thoughts while listening to the episode today.
YouTube Videos Released in May
I started out May with a brief video tackling the idea that witchcraft isn’t “political.” I felt that this was a necessity, given the leaked draft of the SCOTUS ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. I used to believe in “apolitical witchcraft,” but I’ve since realized that there’s no such thing as being apolitical in general. So of course witchcraft is political.
May also saw my second live YouTube event. This time, I took to a live stream to talk about witchcraft, religion, and the intersection between the two. As always, the recording is available on my YouTube channel.
After the live event, I decided to do a video on constructing a bindrune. It was one of my most involved videos, as I decided to include animations to show different ways to combine the individual runes. It was fun to do and I hope to try similar things in the future, but I will definitely have to look into setting aside enough time for such endeavors.
Tweets and Twitter Threads Posted in May
My friend Meghan Crozier tweeted a thread about her struggles with whether and how to engage with people with harmful views. I had a few thoughts on the topic and shared them in a thread of my own.
Christian preacher Owen Strachan decided to defend Young Earth Creationism, and I decided to respond. I stand by my stance: of all the things that Owen Strachan has said, I find his support for a literal six day creation story to be the least morally reprehensible. But even that is not without criticism. After all, a literal interpretation of the creation story is how many non-affirming Christains justify their anti-LGBT positions. Which just makes it much more delcious to learn that some streams of Jewish thought suggest that the accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 actually suggest the first human was intersex.
A report about sex abuse and cover-ups within the Southern Baptist denomination came out this month. I didn’t have a lot to say about it, but I made a few different observations.
I wrote a thread about Christian supremacy and how hard — possibly even impossible — I think it is for Christians to divest themselves of it.
TikTok Videos Released in May
I have to say that I’m really enjoying posting videos on TikTok. They also seem to be getting much more traction than my YouTube channel, which I have complex feelings about. TikTok is nice for a “quick thought,” but YouTube is where I can really take the time and space to explore an idea more thoroughly. The fact that the former seems far more popular than the later is a bit concerning to me. At any rate, here’s a list of my TikTok videos organized by week. Or click on the link embedded in each week and watch a compilation of that week’s videos on YouTube. (Note: the videos from May 29 through May 31 won’t be uploaded to YouTube until the end of the week, which is June 4.)
Thanks to a recommendation by a Twitter user (I’d link their account, but they’re on private), i have created an event calendar on Google. I will post YouTube live events, planned releases of this newsletter, and any other noteworthy activities there. It’s just another way for you to keep track of what’s going on in the world of this wyrd-worker.
Upcoming: Ask the Wyrd-Worker Live Event
Don’t forget that I have a live YouTube event coming up on June 8 where I will be answering viewers questions! I am accepting questions ahead of time via email and direct messages on Twitter. I look forward to receiving your questions and hope to see you on the eighth.
Thanks for Reading!
That covers the month of May! If you haven’t done so, please consider using the buttons below to subscribe to this newsletter and share it with your friends. See you at the end of June!