Outofambit - Out Of Ambit

It gave Kit an annoyed look. “All right, so I’m ambivalent,” the Lone One said. “But isn’t ambivalence preferable to pure evil?” Kit considered that one for a moment. “See? You’re buying it already,” the Lone One said. “I was getting bored with absolute evil, anyway. I find that you can do lots more damage with ambivalence. … "People are eager to excuse it, though. Ambivalence is seen as a sign of maturity, wheras actually taking a stance on one side or another is easy to describe as simplistic. Or unsophisticated. Or juvenile."

-Wizard’s Holiday by Diane Duane

[yells to the heavens] THIS IS WHY I LOVE YA LIIIIIT

(via trailofdesire)

last night i dreamed i was an orca, and my pod needed me to find out why there were no more fish in our part of the ocean, so i dove down really deep, to where i could draw spell circles on the ocean floor, and performed whale magic to find out.

i don’t remember why there weren’t any fish, but i think the whole point of this dream is that i was a whale wizard, and that’s basically awesome.

the trees you grew up with have not forgotten you. their branches still whisper your name in the breeze and their roots remember the paths your feet once traced through their shade.

Chapter Titles: A Wizard Abroad

Thing I’ve been mulling over for a while: some really good YA fantasy novels of my childhood (Young Wizards - no one who knows me is surprised by this) really emphatically gave me tools to understand and dismantle my own “white supremacist delusion,” as Sonya Renee Taylor puts it. The construction of the cosmos in these books formed my worldview at a really early age. They have helped me, decades later, to believe deeply and truly in both my own ability to support and uphold Evil in all of its guises, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘nice’ I may inherently see myself to be - and my own power to dismantle Evil in all its guises, within myself, as well as in the world beyond myself.

I was watching this IG live video where Taylor powerfully explains how important it is to shift from seeing whiteness as something intrinsically ours to possess rather than as the result of a dehumanizing system that we can - and in fact are ethically called upon to - uproot. I understand Taylor to be saying that I, as a person assigned power by whiteness, have a duty to continually identify and reject the delusions of whiteness starting with myself. 

There’s an image Taylor uses, in this video, of searching inside of yourself for the spaces where this toxic ideology of whiteness has taken hold - and to find and uproot it. And immediately I saw a climactic moment from High Wizardry, one where Dairine has a realization about how intimately entropy has its hold upon her:

She stopped, as the answer rushed into her mind from the manual. Where entropy is, it said, there its creator also is, either directly or indirectly…

I’m a product of this universe, after all, she had said to the mobiles. It’s in me too…

Her heart turned over inside her as she came to know her enemy. Not a Darth Vader, striding in with a blood-burning light-sabre, not something outside to battle and cast down, but inside. Inside herself. Where it had always been, hiding, growing, waiting until the darkness was complete and its own darkness not noticeable any more. Her Enemy was wearing her clothes, and her heart, and there was only one way to get rid of It…

She was terrified. Yet this was the great thing, the thing that mattered […]

I’d hazard a guess that many of us have a primary conditioning to see evil precisely as “something outside to battle and cast down.” I say this about evil in general; I think it’s probably extra true for the ways that white people approach the evil of white supremacist delusion. I see it a lot with the teenagers that I now teach: the actively anti-racist white kids who really want to march, to have hard conversations with other people, to change laws, to show up at city hall meetings…and who don’t understand that, while those are all good and important things to be doing, if they are all you are doing, they will not be enough. They are all ways of seeing the problem as “something outside to battle and cast down” instead of as something that is LITERALLY “wearing [your] clothes, and [your] heart.”

The good news - also from High Wizardry - is the possibility of full and complete liberation on the other side of the recognition, and the reckoning that follows. The snatches of it glimpsed within this life, the work of widening the ground… The belief (which Duane’s world offered me, and which my Christianity never did) that even the one who dreamed Evil into being can be liberated and redeemed from it…and that that, and no less, is the scope of the work. 

(YW also taught me, perhaps most importantly of all, that this work is collective and done best when part of an ever-widening family / network / team.)

Fuck personality tests. Who comes to your mind when I say "Michael"

So I recently got ebooks of the new revised versions of the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane because I loved the originals so much growing up and I wanted to reread them and see the changes (especially A Wizard Alone) and I was terribly unhappy to discover that the revised editions aren’t available in print in the US probably won’t be for years. But I’ve always wanted to learn book binding, so I’m just going to print out the ebook and attempt to make my own print copy. To that end I spent all day today rapturously fantasizing about end papers and book jackets. This started as an attempt at designing my own endpapers, but it may be a bit much for that actually…

8tracks is Radio, rediscovered - blood in the water i sing; (38min) by maerad| music tags: young wizards, deep wizardry, and the song of twelve | a mix for the song of twelve.

awesome playlist for deep wizardry. listen, cousins!

For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble.This is not your destruction. This is your birth.

n.t. (via northwolves)

Happy Earth Day: Earthrise

One of the most famous aspects of the Apollo 8 flight was the Earthrise picture that was taken as they came around for their fourth orbit of the Moon. This was the first time that humans had taken such a picture whilst actually behind the camera, and it has been credited with a role in inspiring the first Earth Day in 1970. It was selected as the first of Life magazine’s ‘hundred photos that changed the world’.

Taken by Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders on December 24, 1968, showing the Earth seemingly rising above the lunar surface. Note that this phenomenon is only visible from someone in orbit around the Moon. Because of the Moon’s synchronous rotation about the Earth (i.e., the same side of the Moon is always facing the Earth), no Earthrise can be observed by a stationary observer on the surface of the Moon.