So Well Said, I Can Only Repeat It...

This statement is a Note on Facebook from my friend and colleague, Dominique Storni. I have nothing to add except my hearty endorsement of her remarks, and a wish that "I had said that..." So, now, I will....

Today at 11:17am
2-20-2009
10:05am
(feel free to post & repost)

I’d like to say a little something about Senator Chris Buttars, the President of the Utah State Senate, Michael Waddoups, and what took place at the Utah State Capitol at this morning’s press conference.

Many are upset with how Senator Waddoups responded; that he was maudlin, didn’t go far enough, or that he was complicit by not censuring Senator Buttars. By the tone of his voice and by the words he spoke, it is apparent that Senator Waddoups agrees with Senator Buttars’ comments and was upset he was forced to do anything at all.

Senator Waddoups was evasive in answering questions, and completely ignored the question from the Gay press. Did we really expect anything different? I didn’t.

The greatest good that has come from Senator Buttars speaking openly, honestly, and without filter, is that he has been exposed for who he is. Time and time again he proves how he feels about people who are not white and not Mormon. He has proven in words and in deed that he is a bigot.

That is not an ad hominem attack. It is simple truth. He has stated his disdain for people of color and for gay and transgender people emphatically many times. He has said that gay and transgender people are the greatest threat to America than anything else. He has declared that he will openly block any legislation that will give these minorities any civil rights.

When someone calls him on his behavior, he once again proves his true colors. In his own words, “I don’t care.”

This has not only created a stir in Salt Lake City. This has not only created a stir in Utah’s Gay community. This has not only created a distraction at the Utah State Capitol. This is now national and international news. Senator Buttars has single handedly brought more attention to backwards beliefs, bigoted thinking, false information, and stereotypical Utah attitudes than any gay or transgender activist could ever hope to bring.

The more he exercises his right to free speech, (which, by the way, I will defend to my death) the more he hurts himself, his constituents, and Utah. With every bigoted statement, he exposes himself. For me, the saddest reality is that Senator Buttars most likely does speak for his constituents.

By their failure to vote him out, by their silence, by their posts on ksl.com and other blogs, there are few among his supporters who disagree with him or who want him censured.

Hell’s bells, they re-elected him. They emboldened him. They empowered him to speak for them. And he does.

Two friends of mine stated it poignantly. The first said, “I think Waddops is an idiot - checking his watch every second - and then not addressing the GLBT community at all - grrrr!”.

The second said, “I think the outrageous part of Waddoups behavior isn't that he ignored us, it's that he actually said he and his colleagues agree with most of what Buttars said, but not ALL of it. Are you kidding me with this? Waddoups should be censured.”

I happen to agree with the Senate action. The harsh truth for those of us who are a bit more enlightened and a bit more progressive is that the voters should decide if this man serves or not. I don’t believe that he should be removed by the Senate until he breaks the law or violates the terms of his oath. It is up to the voters of West Jordan to decide if a bigot represents them.

Senator Buttars doesn’t care about anyone who’s not white and not Mormon. Senator Waddoups appears not to care, either. The people of West Jordan don’t appear to care. The people of Utah don’t appear to care. The elected officials on The Hill don’t care because they “agree with most of what Senator Buttars said.”

Some may speak less offensive words. Some may speak words of support. But their actions speak so loudly that I cannot hear what they say. By their deeds, their words are erased.

By their fruits ye shall know them. In my humble opinion, their fruits are rotten. I suggest everyone read chapter 5 of the book of Jacob in The Book of Mormon and meditate on how the vineyard of Utah is represented in the parable of the vineyard.

In my Mormon youth, I was taught, “Where much is given, much is required.”

There are so many Utahns and so many Mormons who support equal rights for gay and transgender people. Recent polls show that the Utah legislature is out of step with the majority of Utah.

It is time for them to listen to the silent majority and stop being frightened into submission by the very vocal minority represented by America Forever, The Sutherland Institute, and the Gayle Ruzicka’s Eagle Forum.

When political leaders claim moral superiority due to their religion, or religious leaders claim high moral ground because of their politics, I see a major problem. Indeed, I see the secret combinations of the Gadianton Robbers spoken of by Helaman in the Book of Mormon.

I expect higher morals and more ethical behavior from my Utah politicians because of their religion.

To them I repeat the words of the Savior, “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Peace Is Within You

Peace is within you.

It is not a gift that can be given by another person,
or a place, or a set of circumstances.
It is your birthright. It is your natural state of being.
It is your inalienable natural right to harmony
as you take your organic place in the world.

Peace is within you.

It can never be reft from you by circumstances.
It cannot be destroyed by war, or quarrelling,
or any disharmony that is sourced outside the Self.
It is the place Within where the Self finds refuge,
and that Place is unreachable by outside circumstances.

Peace is within you.

It is a deliberate, intentional choice of serenity
amidst a sea of chaos.
It is a conscious decision
to remain whole in the face of disintegration.
It is an affirmation of the Rightness of your Being.
It is the state at which your being finds equilibrium.
It is your Center.

Peace is within you.

It is not subject to the viccisitudes of living.
It cannot be broken, nor stolen,
nor in any way can that jewel of quietude
be removed from the inner core of your Self.

Peace is within you.

Even if you choose to ignore it,
it waits there at your Center,
peace essential, awaiting your rediscovery
of this undeniable Truth of human existence.

Peace is within you.

You are made of Beauty.
Your inheritance is Harmony.
You are a Gift of Life to the Universe.
You are essential to existence.
You cannot be beaten or bent or broken
by anything outside yourself.

Peace is within you.

There is a reason we use the term "Be AT Peace."
It is a place. It is a destination.
It is immediately, immanently, numinously,
within your reach. Right here. Right now.

Peace is within you.

Be....AT....Peace.


Aisling the Bard, 2004

In The Belly

She quivers behind my lips all winter,
Never speaking, but filling my mind
With words unuttered,
Thoughts of poesy in silence,
Postponed for warmer days.

She dances in my old limbs,
Never moving, but filling my veins
With warm blood,
Making me wish for days long gone
When I was the night-dancer.

She lives inside my thoughts,
Never acting, but filling my head
With bard's fire,
Sparks of Imbas, stored up,
To burst forth in springtime.

She flows in my stilled hands,
Never crafting, but filling my fingers
With stored skill,
Plans for drawing, painting, writing
All for later execution.

And then it comes...
La Fheile Brid, filling my Being
With Herself, Her Inspiration,
Her Creative Spark,
Her Healing Waters,
Her Ringing Song...

Brighid is coming!
Brighid is coming!
Brighid is here!
And I am no longer
In the belly....

Welcome Brighid....
All this you have given me,
All this which comes forth,
All this is Yours...
As am I.



For the Lady
Imbolc, 2008
Aisling the Bard

Winter Chill

The silence is threatening,
Evoking the hollow menace of the Bates Motel....
I watch snow falling, incessant,
Splattering over starving chickadees
Fruitlessly rooting in the disrepair of my back yard.

The facade of Christmas intrudes,
Far too much jolly holiday
Looking like a cheap whorehouse in my Mormon neighbor's yard.

I feel vulnerable.
I used to love winter,
Night, chill, solitude....

Now resentments choke my laughter,
The body that no longer stays warm,
The voice whose high notes quaver and whose breath gives out.

The zombie of my youth staggers aimlessly down ice-covered sidewalks,
Where tinsel and flickering lights sabotage my resistance....

And after the holly-daze,
When the world descends again into the pit of icebound silence,
When the chaos subsides and once again there is
Silent snow, secret snow…

When once again I am alone in the chill, the darkness,
With no voices slithering by on the bitter wind,

Then what?

I will not be frightened of winter.
I will not fear the changes brought by age.
I will not be too tired to decorate.
I will not be Scrooge.

I am old, yes.
But I still gain joy in silence, darkness, solitude.
There are still thoughts in my head, words in my mouth.

Silent, private, hoarded up like the nuts under the stump
Waiting under the snow for the journey to resume.

I find solace in the silence, dreams within the darkness, warmth within the chill.
I remember my oft-chanted paean on "darkness, distance, silence"
And realize that the full measure of each
May only be measured against the yearly death of light and proximity and cacophony.

Winter fills me.
Winter rests me.
Winter refreshes and sustains me.

I suppose it is my Season, after all.


© Aisling the Bard
Winter 2008-2009

Song Of The Self

I have a friend who is currently experiencing the "Dark Night Of The Soul", rather profoundly. And I just, not, I think, by coincidence, found this. I think it might help my friend, and I need to hear it again. Maybe you do too. It's a sermon I gave at South Valley some years ago. I hope it will make you think.

I remember when my children were very young, I was substituting for my four-year-old son’s Sunday School class. The lesson the teacher had prepared was on The Golden Rule, suitably scaled-down to child size. We were talking about the kindness one shows to others, and in the teacher’s notes was the statement “we are here to live for others” which I dutifully read. There was a small pause, and then one tiny girl looked up at me curiously and in a disquietingly clear voice said, “What are the others here for?”

I have given much thought to that statement, over the years, and to the Golden Rule itself, and to many other ways of seeing, ways of living. And I have come to a precarious conclusion. I have concluded that over centuries of so-called enlightened living, we have somehow gotten it wrong, That core ethic, “Do unto others,” which is, in various forms, at the heart of nearly all of the world’s religions, which is the baseline of morality, and even to an extent of civil law, has been grossly misinterpreted, and therefore misapplied, by centuries of well-meaning adherents.

Could this be true? I asked. Could we all have missed it? So… I went looking. And in doing so I realized that we had indeed, all of us as a culture, made errors of emphasis, and therefore errors of interpretation, in this passage.

It is not difficult. It is not arcane. The passage, repeated many many times in many many religious writings, says, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

AS thyself. Not INSTEAD OF thyself. Not BEFORE, or BETTER THAN, thyself. The passage is further clarified in the 5^th chapter of Ephesians, where it is said, “For what man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth it and cherisheth it.?”

And I thought about that. It was a revelation. God wanted me to love myself. His standard for how much I owed to my neighbor was based on how much I loved myself, no more, no less. And so I began to think. Did I love myself? And how was I to know?

You all realize, of course, that the word “Selfish” has been made one of the most profound insults in our culture. It is bred out of us from the time we are infants, that natural desire to be good to the self. We tell our very small children to give the truck to Johnny, even if they want to play with it themselves. We teach our preschoolers to wait to be served last, even if they come to the table hungry. Our grade-school children are taught that it is rude to ask for something, and that they must wait until it is offered to them by their hostess. We go so far as to teach high-schoolers that when they write an essay they are to write it in the third person, not using the word “I”. And when we reach the age of dating and thinking about making life decisions about partnering, we evaluate potential mates partly on their ability to be unselfish. The most scathing thing we can call someone is “self-centered” or “self-focused,” and a girl will easily dismiss a boy with the offhand comment, “It’s all about him.” When we look at parenting, one of our highest terms of praise for another is, “S/he is selfless.” There is an oft-repeated aphorism, “A mother is the person at the table who, on seeing that there are three pieces of pie for four people, asserts confidently that she never did have much use for pie.” We apologize for reading a book just because we want to when there is laundry to be done, for taking a day off work if we are not ill. We defer to others to such a degree that often when asked what WE want, our response is “I don’t know.” Our culture has effectively eradicated the concept of love of the Self, or marginalized it to the point of sinfulness. We have pretty much retranslated the Golden Rule, in practice, so that it now reads, “Love thy neighbor INSTEAD OF thyself.” And if we looked within, frankly and steadily, many of us would realize that we do NOT love ourselves, not at all. Many of us don’t even LIKE that person in the mirror.

And with all this emphasis on denying the Self, what have we achieved? We live in a culture of materialism and mindlessness, looking ever for the next instant reward or sensory stimulus. We have teenagers who do not think there is any purpose to their lives. We have rampant divorce and an ever-increasing number of people on Prozac and other such drugs. And most chilling of all, we have many people in our culture who have no sense whatsoever of who they really are or what they are supposed to be doing here.

And so I have become a missionary. I have a standard to bear and a flag to wave. And it goes like this: Take back your right to love yourself. Nourish yourself. Cherish yourself. Love of the self is the basis upon which all other love rests. True love of the self is the one tool which gives us the power to be whole, to sustain others, to be independent and self-reliant, to give meaning and purpose to our own lives, and to model healthy love for our children. It is imperative that we begin once again to remember how to Minister to ourSelves, to Care for ourSelves, so that we might, one person by one person, heal the fabric of our society by creating healthier humans within it. So, how do we do that? To minister to the Self is to care for the Self, to love the Self. Over centuries of conditioning, we have absorbed the idea that the Self is not only unimportant, but that it is wrong to concentrate on the Self. How do we heal that? With love. Self-love. So…what is that?

Self-love is the recognition of your own uniqueness. It is the acknowledgement that you are indeed irreplaceable to the Universe, which, the last time I checked, had not yet begun mass-production of the human soul. Self love is based on taking time to listen to your own thoughts, to become aware of your own needs and desires, to enlarge your own soul and your own capacity to learn, to appreciate life, to grow.

Self love asks of yourself, “Who are You?” instead of “What do you do?” Ministry to the Self means taking time and space and silence in order to feel the breath in your own body and listen to the rush of thoughts in your own head. It means not apologizing for caring enough about your own needs and desires to voice your real thoughts and opinions where it matters. It means not silencing your preferences or muting your feelings when it is significant. And it is always significant.

Ministering to the Self is treating oneself like a cherished friend. It is seeing the beauty in one’s own face and body, and caring enough about that not to apologize for one’s looks or body type or age or other physical states of being. It is honoring one’s physical existence with a healthy diet, a lifestyle that allows time for sufficient sleep and exercise, and scheduled-in quiet time and self-time that is free from agendae.

Ministering to the Self means encouraging one’s own progress, even if the things on which one wishes to expend time and energy have no material value. It means never apologizing for taking time to take a quiet walk under the stars or sit reading a book that has nothing to do with work, just because you want to. It means there is, too, money in the budget for music lessons, even if you are beginning at forty. It means it is not a waste of time and money to go back to school even if you do not get a degree. It means giving yourself permission to pursue what you care about and become whom you wish to be.

Are there benefits to this healthy self-love beyond the Self? Definitely. People who understand self-love are not co-dependent. They do not seek outside affirmation of the rightness of their being, because they KNOW within themselves that they are right, just as they are, just because they are. It must have become obvious to you all that when you are overstressed and overstrained you have nothing left to give. People who have a healthy self-love are capable of replenishing themselves, and therefore have an overflow to give to others. But most significantly, people who understand how to love themselves have the deepest and most profound respect for the uniqueness of their own being, one that sheds happiness and wholeness on the lives of everyone with whom they interact. You might go out from here today with a renewed consciousness that you are intrinsically holy, intrinsically whole, and that you are irreplaceable to the Universe. Listen to this:

D E S I D E R A T A

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, And remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly & clearly; and listen to others, even the dull & ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud & aggressive persons, they are a vexation to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain & bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing future of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity & disenchantment it is perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with vain imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue & loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees & the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours & aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery & broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

There is no one like you. There never will be again and there never was before. So….never apologize for ministering to yourself, for loving yourself first and your neighbor as yourself. You are unique. You are irreplaceable. You are one of a kind. What’s not to love?

Lorica...Brigit's Arrow...A Paean For The First Morning Of The New Year

I arise today

Through the strength of heaven:

Light of sun,

Radiance of moon,

Splendor of fire,

Speed of lightning,

Swiftness of wind,

Depth of sea,

Stability of earth,

Firmness of rock.

        I, Mairin Aisling, in this fateful hour

       Place all Nature with Her power;

       The Sun with its brightness,

       The Moon with its whiteness,

       The Fire with all the strength it hath,

       The Lightning with its rapid wrath,

       The Winds with their swiftness along their path,

       The Sea with its deepness,

       The Rocks with their steepness,

       The Earth with its starkness;

       All these I place

       With Brighid's almighty help and grace

       Between myself and the powers of darkness.

        Every day and every night

       That I say the genealogy of Brighid

       I shall not be killed,

       I shall not be wounded;

       I shall not be harried;

       I shall not be put into a cell;

       No fire, no sun, no moon will burn me;

       No water, no lake, no sea will drown me:

       For I am child of Poetry;

       Poetry, child of Reflection;

       Reflection, child of Meditation;

       Meditation, child of Lore;

       Lore, child of Research;

       Research, child of Great Knowledge;

       Great Knowledge, child of Intelligence;

       Intelligence, child of Comprehension;

       Comprehension, child of Wisdom;

       Wisdom, child of Brighid.

Solstice at Newgrange

Due to last year's bandwidth-breaking popularity, the Irish Office of Public Works is once again webcasting the Winter Solstice sunrise from inside Newgrange, this time with considerably more bandwidth allocated.

You can watch it live online from inside the chamber here, from 8:30 a.m. until 9:30 a.m. December 21, Irish time. That is to say, 1:30 a.m. Sunday December 21, 2008 for us MST folks, if you want to see it whilst it is still happening. It will most likely be available after the event, as well. And no guarantees about whether the sun will actually shine...but if it does, we should all be able to see it. Hail our ancient forbears...I will feel connected to all of you if I can see this as you did.