I know there are about three of you out there who still read this blog. I feel for you.
I’m moving movie reviews over to Basket of Kisses. The first review in the new place is True Grit.
I am keeping Property of a Lady open for Pagan, spiritual, and personal musings, and event announcements (speaking engagements, etc.). I imagine that will remain infrequent.
Thanks for your patience.
Isaac sits with the Shining Ones and eats from Dagda’s Cauldron. The mortal world is a poorer place without him.
There will never be another Isaac. Those of us who knew him well could easily think of him as just Isaac: Character, goofball, ladies man, punster, life of the party, pain in the neck, singer, priest, friend and ex-husband (in my case). But Isaac was so much more than that.
The press release gives you an inkling of his importance to the world. One of my favorite memorial posts comes from The Wild Hunt:
[The] vision of the ADF, written by Bonewits nearly thirty years ago, captures what was so vibrant and vital about him. The audacity of expecting excellence and success from himself, his coreligionists, and his peers.
“Audacity of expecting excellence”—O, yes, that’s Isaac.
I cannot begin to say how much I loved and love Isaac. As a husband, he drove me crazy. I don’t regret ending our marriage, and I know he was very happy with Phaedra, whom he married in 2004. He loved her very much and I am so happy he had that. Still, Isaac and I were married for ten years (1988–1998), and I’d qualify nine of those years as happy ones; only at the end did things break down, and our unhappiness was short-lived; we quickly became good friends.
Isaac was a wonderful, loving, proud father. He had a perverse sense of what made a good lullaby. Certainly, the baby slept better for him than for me, despite being sung to sleep with “The Internationale.” As Arthur grew, Isaac always treated him as an intelligent being and spoke to him with a rich vocabulary even when he was a toddler. In the end, it was Arthur caring for Isaac. I am proud of my son, and I know that Isaac was and is as well.
He was an extraordinary High Priest in the Craft, as well as a Druid. He had a unique ability to move energy. When he called the Gods, They came. I was already a High Priestess of the Craft, albeit a young one, when we began dating in 1986, but I consider that only half my training was done. The rest I learned from him. He was a gifted teacher, exploring the nuances of every aspect of ritual and worship. Elements of Ritual could not exist without Isaac’s influence.
What Isaac loved the most was serving the Pagan community. He loved a good fight, he loved to get down and argue, to make trouble, to stir the pot. And he did it, always, on behalf of the community. He did it to make the world better, and more Pagan, and to serve the Gods. His love of the Gods was always at the forefront of who he was. His service to the community, to the Gods, and to his work as a priest was in every decision he ever made.
In the end, I look at Isaac, and I look at someone who was fundamentally good. He was not without his flaws, but he was without moral blemish. Isaac was honest, kind, charitable, generous, forgiving to a fault, open to new ideas, tolerant, attentive, amiable, and selfless. I assure you, I have thought over every one of those adjectives carefully, and every one applies to almost every moment of Isaac’s life. I could list negatives if I wanted to, but none of them are moral failings. I believe, truly, that the Gods will look upon this man and embrace him as one of their own.
It was a privilege, Isaac. I hope we get to do it again.
on Facebook, asking when Isaac Bonewits died.
Isaac is still alive, thankyouverymuch. He is dying, and we are giving love and care to the extent possible, and the family is gathering, and there is a lot of sorrow in my heart. We are doing what we can to prepare for the end. Phaedra and Arthur are exhausted and yet…I am so proud of my son, who is so good and kind to his father, even when he’s losing patience and his temper with this terrible situation.
And I got that message asking when he died.
I’m sorry if I’m not as kind and good as some people might be, but immediately after answering, I unfriended that person. I think people should pretty much stand up and applaud me for not also cursing her out.
Please continue to send light and peace and love to Isaac, Arthur, and Phae. Please pray that his siblings, who are on the road right now, arrive in time to say their final goodbyes.
Sometimes I wear my hair up in a clip. Sometimes when I’m driving with the sunroof open, my hair comes flying out of the clip. So I take the clip out, clip it to my shirt front, fix my hair, and put the clip back.
Except I was wearing a low-cut shirt. And clipped the hair-clip to my chest.
Not a good idea.
I got a kitten.
Okay, so the Gang of Two is now a Gang of One. Mingo has run off. I still hope he returns, but it’s been three bleak months of Mingolessness. Fanty is lonely. I’m lonely. Arthur has moved in with his dad, and a single woman with just one cat, who happens to be an annoying and no-fun cat, is just not working for me.
So on Saturday Fanty had her annual checkup, and there was a big crate o’ kittens. Six in total, four of whom were solid black. Solid black=very appealing to Witches, but I finally got smart and chose based on personality rather than looks. My little one-eye is funny looking but the only calm, sweet, social one in the bunch, the only one who wanted to cuddle. As Roberta said, “In a crate of kittens, the one-eyed kitten is king.”
Turns out bathing suits have a lifespan. Who knew? I took my favorite out of the drawer and the elastic made a crackling sound. So, off to the mall, which is the point of this story.
So, I’m walking in the mall with my new, highly overpriced bathing suit, and I see these two identically-dressed men. One of them appeared to be about 50, and white. The other appeared to be mid-30s, and Asian. The white guy had a child with him. The two men were just far enough apart that one could not tell for sure whether they were together or just walking down the same hall at the same time.
Except they were identical. Both short-ish (5’6″ I guess), they were wearing seafoam green polo shirts. White guy was wearing beige shorts. Asian guy was wearing washed-out desert camo shorts that gave the impression of being the same beige. Both were carrying Target bags.
It wasn’t the strangest thing I’ve seen at the mall. But it was odd.
A few days ago, I dreamed that someone I knew was an expectant father, and his wife was in labor. I was to be the labor coach and, while my friend waited nervously outside, I went in to attend to her.
When I entered, I discovered the “wife” was an elderly Native American; a shaman (I knew) in jeans, a red flannel shirt, and a headband. The shaman got up on the delivery table and spread his legs, and from between his legs a slit opened in his blue jeans and a head began to emerge.
Well.
Last night I dreamed that I was at a festival with friends Larry & Sabina. We were playing some sort of game or doing some sort of ritual, and they needed a drop of my blood to prove my good intentions. I knew they would prick a finger but then Sabina said that didn’t work and could I please turn around. It was, I think she said, for initiation, but I don’t know what she meant. I think it was still a sex game in my mind. She lifted my hair and took a slice from the top of my spine/base of my skull (exactly where my Kali eyes tattoo is, but I wasn’t aware of the tattoo in the dream). It was a plus-sign shaped cut and it hurt horribly. I felt like she was damaging my brain. I was terrified and angry. I cried out in pain but I was afraid to move. She cut my like that, with me holding still and crying out, for a long time. I was wondering, in the dream, if this was domestic violence.
Upon awaking, that dream plus the earlier one seem to add up to some kind of message about ritual or transformation, but I can’t put it all together.
This morning, I opened the top of the Mr. Coffee to put a clean filter in…
and Delirium was inside.
My first reaction, before I realized what it was, was AGH!
My second reaction was to eliminate the cats as suspects.
Apparently I live with a Merry Prankster. It is so unlike Arthur to play little tricks in the house that I’d almost suspect my friend Dave of stopping by to do it, but Dave would never have read my blog or Facebook.
….speaking of sentences you’ve never seen in print before.
A long time ago, Isaac gave me a set of mini-action figures of the Endless from Sandman, which I love and adore. They’re about 2 inches high, except for Delirium and Despair, who are each squatting. And when I opened the refrigerator this morning, Delirium fell out (not this one).
So, presumably, a cat got it and it got into the kitchen and then imagination fails me.
It’s going to be a weird day.
My new job is just much more demanding than my previous one. At the old job, I did have a lot of work, and it had its challenges, but there were slow days kind of built into the system and blogging was rarely problem (although, I’m sure it would have been for Management, had they known).
At the current job, I am more value (yay) and there’s always a stack of wriiting I can’t get to because other things have higher priority. Plus I’m working on a book kind of actively now, so I am not blogging much in the evenings.
Which is why you haven’t seen trivia.
I am suspending trivia indefinitely. I ask 7 questions a week most weeks, and I don’t SEE 7 movies a week. After approximately four years, I am drying up on interesting questions.
I haven’t been that successful introducing new features. I don’t want or need the blog to discipline me right now. I’d rather keep it here to write about movies, Paganism, language, and whatever else crosses my mind.
