Who will judge us, and by what measure?

We closed our eyes upon the living world and awoke to find ourselves standing in the presence of a powerful being, being both jackal and man. We do not fear him, but rather the great set of scales besides which he stands.

In one hand he carries a single feather, plucked from the wings of the goddess of truth.

He places that feather upon the scales, and then reaches out toward us, into us, and though we are not harmed, we see that he carries our heart in his easy grip.

This two he places upon the scales.

A heart weighed down with a lifetime of regrets, and a feather infused with the weight of justice.

The scales tip, one way or the other, and we are judged.

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The taste of the coin lingers as the small boat finally comes to ground.

Love the earth

As I write this, a brave group of Native Americans are standing in support of the earth and protesting yet another oil pipeline that threatens water supplies, health, and home. Here, we see the clash between those defending their mother in care and compassion, and those representing profit and pillage. It is in the care for our lands the tribes take a stand; it the understanding of sacred connection of all things, all life, that helps them brave the dogs, pepper spray, the intimidation and much worse abuses. In some ways, the situation unfolding in North Dakota is a representation of similar circumstances that peoples and communities find themselves all over the world facing: fighting giant corporations who seek to pillage and profit while paying little attention to the human and environmental costs involved in their actions. I believe that many of today’s problems stem from a…

                     Painting by Brian Froud

I’ve been looking into old faery lore lately. Not the sanitised Victorian version of miniature winged  beauties, but at the old tales of strange encounters, customs that go back beyond memory, time lost in the faery realm and the darker aspects of the hidden folk. At the instigation of my writing partner, I watched a documentary and, amongst a few other ideas, one in particular got me thinking. The suggestion was that if faeries do not have a concrete and objective reality of their own in our world, but do exist for us in the realms of imagination, perhaps imagination itself is a state of being we do not fully understand, bridging the gap between our usual vision of reality and unreality  in a way that has a validity of its own. As a concept, and after years of working with magical systems, that…