Onions and New Digs

Well! Here we are in the new digs. Nice paint job, I think. Things seem at least at first glance to be more or less in order. Of course, all this potential can be refreshing…and intimidating. Where to start? What to say?

I suppose I could begin with what this place is about. The very beginning, as Fraulein Maria might say…a very good place to start. So…

Greetings, friends, from the liminal space between, somewhere not quite the fiercely wild urban midwest, nor yet the smoky and assuredly wild southeast! Ah, moving. Let us abandon gilding and the crafting of verbal illusion for a moment and just say: moving sucks. In so many ways. Yet, I can’t help but be thrilled at the same time. I was made for roads, y’all. I love new places. And even though the transfer of our physical persons and all the trinkets and curios and whatnots that come with us has yet to be fulfilled, the heralding of such a venture by this virtual blog move makes for that same feeling of freshness and delight in the discovery of how one’s soul fits in with a place, with its color and its architecture, its name and its geography.

So and sew. This is Onion Work.

In a post on my former blog, I once said that winter was “a perfect season for onion work…peeling layers, removing inedible parts.” And so it is – a season of bareness and fallow fields with room in it for deep snow thoughts. Yet the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the whole great Work of being in the world on many levels and in many seasons could be considered Onion Work. The work of layers and tears. Of darkness and dirt. Of getting one’s hands dirty. Medicine and protection and love…roots, potential, strength. And well, if it fails as a metaphor for the human condition, at least I can say it feels right speaking to mine…the layers part surely, and the tears part definitely. So and sew again. Onion Work it is.

Of course, it helps that I think onions are kind of the awesomest thing ever. Now, so are moths, and garden spiders, and cottonwood trees. Bluegrass music is also the awesomest. As is the mighty blueberry, rain, dandelions, lavender infused wine, key lime pie…and the whole good and abundant Earth. I don’t really have a problem seeing all these things as individually and collectively the awesomest thing ever. It’s kind of like addressing gods (in fact, for an animist, it’s exactly like that)…I mean, no one says to Athena, “You’re amazing! ALMOST as amazing as [insert other deity or mortal person here]!” Well, no one with any sense anyway…it would, to put it mildly considering the literature, be an unwise thing to do. No, rather, one addresses each shattering Immensity in that moment as the most incredible and most important, because in that moment, they are. So it is that in this moment, onions are, indeed, the most awesome thing ever. Onion of Immense Magnitudinal Amazingness! Keeper of Tasty Good-For-You-Ness! Tear-Bringer! Knower of Secrets Beneath the Ground! Friend to Humankind! The People Say Hail!

And so it is in the name of this stunning and powerful vegetable that I choose to attempt to go about the work of this being, this messy and delicious life, in a time of newness and movement, of shifting ground and the exploration of heart and mouth and spirit.

Not unlike its predecessor, Onion Work aspires to mark the ebb and flow of my spiritual meanderings as a woman heart-wedded to the Beloved who dies and lives again, and, ever and always, to the Mama, that glorious mossy stone upon which we rock and roll. My journey along the river of spiritual WTF over the last few years has thrown me up against not a few banks, and I have finally found myself again and again eddying around at least three anchored places…Hellenic polytheism, folk practice/traditions, and anarchist Christianity…and I look forward to exploring more about what all that means (if anything). Since this new blogadventure coincides with my new studies, it will no doubt reflect more of my musings regarding storytelling and the spiritual culture of story, as well as more on the subject of speculative fiction and poetry. Really though when it comes down to it, it’s just a place where I ramble – thinking out loud and grateful for those who may come along with me to agree or disagree with my thinkings as they see fit.

Whether you have just arrived from some internet lands unknown, or if you have followed me over from my previous blog-home (blome? hlog?), Pagan Godspell, welcome welcome! I am excited to see what comes of this new space, whether it is more of the same or something entirely new. My posts will no doubt be few these first couple of months as I and the intrepid spouse labor under the burden of books and the flotsam of our lives together across several states and settle into our new hobbity homes and I set out nervously as a student of stories and tales and the art of telling them.

So welcome again, friends and neighbors. I am grateful for your presence here, and I look forward to seeing what comes in over the hill with the coming dawn. In the meantime, all the blessings of summer be upon you – may the roses and the wild wind be your friends and allies in the swelter and the sunlight. May the morning birds sing you awake, on fire with the new day.

Grok Earth, y’all. Pray without ceasing.

• June 30, 2011
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