Shawn twisting into quadregenarianism

Timothy balloon monster

Kitteh snuggels

Spirituality Snippet

Excerpted from MySpace correspendence with Donia Lilly:

Regarding being Wiccan... I'm not exactly Wiccan, although I have been a member of a most excellent coven. I experienced a great deal of spiritual growth and exploration there. But that was over a decade ago.

I have difficulties with reductivist philosophies. In the same way that I resent the western "scientific" worldview for reducing all things to purely material terms, I am not at home with a religion that does the same thing -- reducing all that is real to Spirit.

Imagine that we sat down together and had a lovely, deep and engaging conversation over tea. What part of that experience is spiritual? Which part material? Which parts are psychological, social, real or unreal?

Just because we have the capacity to use language to divide our experience into little pieces, it does not make those divisions real. In fact I believe that this very divisiveness is at the core of most of what ails us on the planet right now.

Do you know that the word "science" comes from the same root as the words "scissors," "schism" and "schitzo" (as in phrenia). It means to divide. It refers to a kind of knowledge that comes from discriminating, dissecting and analyzing things.

This division is what disconnects us from each other, from ourselves, from nature, from the planet and from the consequenses of our actions. I do not choose "science" whether academic or christian. I prefer a more holistic approach which embraces wholeness and encompasses the whole of human experience.

Fundamentally, I still share much of the perspective that I learned in Christian Science. That we are perfect. That harmony is the natural way of things and disharmony merely evidence of our disconnection from that deeper harmony.

However, I understand these things in terms of energy. Both matter and spirit are energy. Some of the most powerful tools for humans to connect with and interact with energy are the symbols found in nature, art and magic. So... in that vein, I studied earth based religion, much as I studied all other religions. (One of my degrees is in Comparative Religion.)

To this day, I live inside a worldview that is more about the harmonous flow of energy than it is about Spirit's primacy and Matter's unreality. So, it's is pretty close to the cosmology of Wicca, but has a bit of my own twist.

I could go deeper with this, but I fear I may have already provided a longer answer than you anticipated.

Little snippets

I may not be reliable about blogging, but I realized that sometimes in correspondence with folks I type things that are worth keeping. So since this blog seems to be fairly random anyway, I'm going to start putting them in here.

In a facebook message with Jeff Grossberg:

Regarding community tools... I'm glad to see technology not being used solely for money-making but also for friend-making.

Fundamentally, community has changed. Most of us will never have the nostalgic small village existence that is imprinted in our deeper social patterns. We are too mobile, absorbing too much news from too many sources, and interacting with too many people flung too widely. Our social fabric has been stretched beyond its former limits, so it is high time that we learn new ways of weaving it.

Bliss kitty

"Juss 5 more minnits, I can win WoW."