Greetings to all Full Circle members and friends.
In this February ’03 edition of our newsletter we have:
Announcing the new Northern California Community Events Calendar from Full Circle * PantheaCon * It's Not Fair
I
am very happy to announce the public launch of our new Interactive Community
Calendar here at Full Circle.
We
have two types of events listed on this calendar:
Dated Events: (Example:
June 12 - 16th or July 17, 18, 23 & 24th.)
On-going Events: (Example:
Every 3rd Tuesday of the month throughout the year).
You
can sort these listings by Type of Event, Date and
City, simply by clicking on the headings of each column. Our calendar can be found at http://www.fullcircleevents.org/calendar/.
It is easy to read and we believe that you will find it most useful.
Do
you offer an event to our community? To include
your own event, simply click on the link titled Submit Event and fill
out our simple form. Organizers will
control and modify their own listings.
Final approval for any listing belongs to the Networking Coordinator,
who acts for Full Circle. If you a have
any questions about how to use this part of the website, please feel free to
contact our Networking Coordinator, Scoutghost at ScoutGhst@aol.com.
Please
Note:
Scoutghost is our Networking Coordinator, not the community typist. You now have the power and the responsibility
to list your own event. Please do
not send her a note about your event and ask her to fill in the form for
you. The magick here, as elsewhere, is
in your own hands. (If you are
prevented by reasons of illness or disability from typing in your own event,
then please ask a student or a friend to do it for you).
So
far, the calendar is proving to be very popular, with 105 events currently
listed.
This
calendar will remain permanently on our website. We will also post links to it
in every newsletter, beginning this month.
The newsletter goes out to over 1,000 Pagan families in the Bay Area and
the website is read by thousands more on a weekly basis.
The
area of California covered by this calendar is as follows: Northern
California from Monterey to Santa Rosa and from Santa Cruz inland to
Sacramento.
Subjects covered include Public
Rituals & Circles, Pagan Social Events, Classes & Workshops, Festivals,
Bardics, Music & Dance, Gatherings and more. Events of interest to our community which are non-Pagan in
origin, such as art exhibits or nature walks will be listed as “other”. I will continue to list these cultural
events of interest, when and as I find them.
This
service is offered for free to the Northern California EarthWise
Community. It is done as part of our
non-profit mandate to “Organize, host and promote events in the
EarthWise Community.” We encourage all
those who care to, to add links from their web pages to this calendar.
This
project has been in the works for several months now. The calendar was designed and developed specifically for Full
Circle by Captain Lightning at Waverider Systems. This is not a software package, but a unique
design, made from scratch. It took over
25 hours of coding time to produce. The
copyright belongs to Waverider Systems.
We
would also like to thank Scoutghost, who helped us design the calendar
and who worked with Captain Lightning to test this software. Scoutghost has spent countless hours
networking with Pagan Event Organizers for this project. We would also like to thank Howard,
Kristil and our other Full Circle friends who helped us to debug the
system. We’ve had a lot of fun this
last month posting “bogus events” in order to test the listings. My personal favorite remains the “Dianic Wet
T-shirt Contest”, which, alas, does not truly exist. It’s possible that some of these bogus listings may again appear
on April 1st – who knows?
We
would also like to thank Fritz & Wren over at the Witches’ Voice for
their kindness, advice and encouragement as we built our FCE calendar. The Full Circle Community Calendar is
intended to serve our specific area and is in no way intended to replace the
wonderful calendars and listings available over at The Witches Voice. If you want your event to have national as
well as international exposure, you can’t do better then a listing at Witch
Vox. Experienced Organizers tend to
list their events at as many websites as possible in order to get word out
about their events.
This
project is on going. A listing of
Groups & Contacts in our area will be added to this calendar in March/April
of this year.
The
calendar is intended as both a celebration and a manifestation of the
EarthWise Community in Northern California.
We would like to thank the many hardworking organizers in our area for
the wide diversity of events that they offer to our community and for their
enthusiastic support of this project.
Their work keeps our community vital and engaged. Such work has never been more important than
it is now. We hope this calendar serves
the organizers and our members well in the coming years.
Full Circle is only responsible for those events that we directly
organize and host. We do not support or
sponsor any of these events or contacts unless specifically stated. Please use
your own discretion when attending these events or connecting with people you
do not already know. This list is intended as an information resource only, and
is non-promotional.
We
wish you the best of luck on all of your events, both public and private in
this coming year.
Sia
& the folks at Full Circle
PANTHEACON:
I
will occasionally continue to list those Events of Special Interest to our
community here in this newsletter. One
such event is the annual Goddess Conference known as PantheaCon.
PantheaCon
takes place in San Jose from February 14-17th.
It is hosted by Ancient Ways bookstore.
PantheaCon is a Pagan gathering of workshops, lectures, rituals and
vendors. All traditions are
welcome. This event will be held at the
Double Tree Hotel in San Jose over President’s Day weekend. For more information call 510-653-3244,
write to store@ancientways.com, or go to the website at www.ancientways.com.
As
of this writing, the convention schedule is not up on the website. We have regularly asked the Organizers of
this event to list their Programming Schedule on their website as soon as
possible in order that our community can decide which days and times they wish
to attend. This is a matter more easily
requested then accomplished, as Programming is a complex art form, subject to
many last minute changes. We wish
those responsible for Programming at PantheaCon the best of luck in this
endeavor.
Many
of the Full Circle volunteer staff attend, vend, present classes &
workshops, dance in ritual or volunteer in some way at PantheaCon. We all enjoy this annual conference and the
chance it gives us to meet and spend time with our community. This is a fascinating conference. We hope
to see you there.
IT’S
NOT FAIR
I
had a very different newsletter planned for February. I was going to talk about the many festivals that take place all
over the world this month. It is a
rich, multi-cultural and diverse list and I’d had fun doing the research. This is also a wonderful month for
lovers. Birds and beasts of every
variety feel the earth’s energy rising, which is why many festivals and
holidays celebrate the mating impulse this time of year. I had compiled a list of cynical, witty and
romantic love poems for those of you who appreciate that sort of thing. And, of course, there was the usual list of
website, books, Pagan & EarthWise lore and other tidbits, which I enjoying
sharing with you all. The reference
materials and all the links are there in my email files where they are going to
stay. I don’t have the heart to write
it now.
I
first heard the news in the car, on the way to pick up my friend Maggi for our
annual trip to the Dog Show. I’m an
NPR junkie. The first thing I do when I get in the car is put my coffee cup in
the cup holder, back out of the driveway and turn on the radio. At 9:30 that morning, I heard Scott Simon
talking to engineers at NASA. I knew
immediately from the tone in their voices that something was wrong. I had turned on the radio in the middle of
the report, so I had a few minutes of driving time to hope that this was simply
a bad landing and that some of the astronauts had been spared. I was quickly divested of that hope.
The Space Program is a big deal in our house.
My husband, in particular, can tell you a great deal about NASA missions past
and present. His grandfather worked on
Apollo, and his mother has worked on nearly every planetary space probe
mission. We have a number of friends
who work at NASA Ames in Mountain View.
All astronauts come to Ames for part of their training, so they knew
many of Columbia’s Crew (http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/crew/index.html). Kalpana Chawla, in particular, was well
known to them as she had worked there before entering the program.
Engineers
and scientists are heroes in my house.
We have family members on both sides who have been intimately connected
with the space program since the 60’s.
My father helped to build and design several of the rockets and various
instruments that have gone into space.
Both of us were brought out of bed at a young age so that we could watch
the moon landing with our families.
Both of us take inspiration from brilliant programs like “From the Earth
to the Moon”, which is as wonderful a blend of art, storytelling and science as
one could hope to find.
So
grief spirals into other griefs and memories cause us to laugh and cry by
turns.
I
got up with the sun this morning to celebrate Imbolc and to meditate on
Bridget. Engineering is both smithcraft
and art and Bridget smiles on these. That
done, I walked our dog Ody around the neighborhood. I was tired from crying and
watching CNN and talking to friends and tired from my morning meditations about
the crew. As I walked the dog around
the neighborhood I found myself thinking, “It’s not fair”.
Now
if you had ever studied the Craft with me, you would soon find out that I don’t
support that kind of thinking. The
phrase ‘It’s not fair” is not one used by adults. It belongs in the realm of teenager, who uses it like a battle
cry, a woeful complaint and a shield.
Teenagers want the world to be a fair place, for them at least. They aren’t too concerned with being fair to
others (thus the shark-like behavior we see amongst their age group) but they
feel wronged easily and often. They
know how deeply vulnerable they are and they want the world to be a fair place
for them to live in. When they realize
the truth of it, they get angry.
To
be an adult is to understand that the world is not a fair place. It never was
and it never will be. We accept that
fact and we work to make the best of it.
To be a person of honor is to act with fairness and balance in all our
dealings, even when we know that the odds are stacked against us. To be a spiritual adult is to have the
courage to grab life with both hands.
Such people do not whine. They
set goals, build towards achievements, accept their power, take on
responsibility, and work for the good of all.
Such people cherish their lives and accept risk.
This is what it means
to light a candle in the darkness. It
is an act of hope and courage, and these are qualities worth honoring. This is partly what makes the crew and their
families heroes.
And
their lives were cut short. What of
it? Their lives are still bright, still
worthwhile, still worth honoring. They
lived well and deeply. They made the
world a better place, they loved their families and they died well. Who among us would not be glad of that
epitaph? Who among us will be worthy of
such an epitaph when our time comes?
So,
I will forgive my inner teenager for that moment of anger and weakness. I know why she feels that way. She feels that young girls today can ill
afford to lose role models like Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Blair. I know why she will mourn the loss of the
good men like the ones on board that ship.
She’s downhearted and tired of the world she lives in. What’s the point of striving and learning
and doing if it can all be taken away so suddenly? Like all teenagers, she’s prone to despair, which is why she
needs me here for the bigger picture.
We are never so world weary as when we are young and know too little of
the world. It is only the wise and
those with great hearts that love the world too much to despair. To choose compassion and love over despair
is to be an adult. Right now, she’s
not big on compassion. Like all
teenagers, she is apt to make unfair comparisons. If she had her way, she would have traded any number of other
people for the lives of those on board the Columbia. So it’s probably just as well that it’s not her decision to
make.
So,
I finished walking Ody and made breakfast and did the things you do when life
goes on. Through it all, I carried on a
mental dialog with my inner teenager.
I think she understands things a bit better now. She’s not real pleased with my answers to
her questions, but then, they aren’t easy answers.
Maya
Angelou’s son was once asked if had been hard to live in her shadow. He gently said, “No, I have never lived in
her shadow. For all of my life, I have
lived in her light”.
And
that is our choice. We can choose to
use our lives to spread light or not.
The crew of the Columbia made that choice and we are better for it. Their lives were not wasted but full and
deep and worthy. Our ancestors knew
when a life would make a good song, and these did. They do.
Later
on today I will do what I’ve been dreading, which is to call my friend’s young
daughter. She is nine, space minded and
starry eyed and this has hit her very hard.
I hadn’t wanted to call her before today, but now I can. Now, I think I know what to say.
Wishing
you courage and hope,
Sia
http://www.fullcircleevents.org
Full
Circle Events
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the Past, Celebrate the Present, Create the Future”