Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
Walhydra admits rather sheepishly that she was very much in the closet until around 1973.
It was then, while she was in her first year in Lutheran seminary, that she finally realized she couldn’t lie to herself anymore—and, better still, that the Divine One did not in fact condemn her for her “difference,” regardless of what the Church and most of Western civilization had to say.
Finding her courage, she dropped out, moved back to her beloved college town
…When my mother went into skilled nursing care with Alzheimer’s dementia, my grouchy alter-ego Walhydra crawled under the bed, saying, “How can I writing sarcastic humor when real life is shutting me down with grief and depression? It isn’t funny!” Mom died in January 2011.
This post is the next to last one from my blog Walhydra’s Porch. It was written after a certain national catastrophe that may still have consequences a generation from now.
Occasionally people wonder where I got the totem name Bright Crow that I use in my email address. Here’s the story I wrote to explain it in the voice of Walhydra’s amanuensis in 2008.
Walhydra likes to tease her amanuensis about a typo he makes occasionally with his totem name, Bright Crow.
Since he’s been typing for forty years, often to earn a living, he just shrugs and laughs. Nonetheless, she thinks the question
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Walhydra likes to believe that her nostalgia is not as tacky and self-deceptive as some people’s.
*ahem*
She thinks back on her youth—sometime in another century—as a time when she and her peers were profoundly affected by the liberation movements and communal aspirations of their era. Not to mention their discovery of sex…and those other two things.
This present Calvinist age mixes sensationalizing with trivializing of that earlier time, in order to sneer at the heartfelt cries of its
…Introductions: Mom died with Alzheimer’s in 2011. In Fall of 2009, we had moved her from assisted living to skilled nursing due to fall risk and escape seeking. “Howling,” from my blog Walhydra’s Porch on 11/9/2009, tells of our last coherent conversation about death.
Walhydra is one of my storytelling alter-egos: a grouchy old witch unhappily reincarnated as a gay male would-be writer.
When things with Mom
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This story was originally published on Walhydra’s Porch in February of 2007. For those readers who don’t know her, Walhydra is my grouchy old crone storytelling persona. When faced with some petty or significant annoyance, Walhydra gives voice to my complaints.
The only rule for these stories is that she has to come to some even-older-but-wiser resolution by the end—either on her own or through the intervention of The Goddess. For more Walhydra, see here.
On Monday, January 29, 2007, I published this essay on my old Walhydra’s Porch blog. Coming out of the darkness of this particularly dark winter, I feel like it’s worth sharing again. (See Gather Victoria’s post, “Feast of Light: Reviving the Magical Foods of Imbolc,” for a new piece on the festival.)
By now the gentle reader knows what an unrepentant grouch Walhydra wants everyone to think she
Friends,
For those of you who don’t know him, let me introduce you to Crippled Wolf.
Crippled Wolf first came to me in a dream on Friday, October 29, 2004, one morning after a total lunar eclipse.
I first shared his story on Walhydra’s Porch four years later.
…In
Friends,
Here’s a blog post I wrote a decade ago about Yule.
To set the stage for this, you need to know that Walhydra is a writer’s alter-ego of mine, a grouchy old crone who is forever annoyed to have been reincarnated as a 60-something gay male would-be writer.
…Sunday, December 28, 2008
First sliver of New Wolf Moon, after Winter Solstice
The name “Jesus” scares people off, since our sound bite- and meme-driven culture automatically ties that name with what I call the “Christianists,” those abusive people who misuse the sacred tradition of Jesus’ friends as a political ideology, the way Islamists do the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (“Peace be upon him”).
I’ll say more about this in a future post, but meanwhile….
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