Show Overview
Ahoy me lads and lassies! Did ye think I was lost at sea? Well I was, kind of. My youngest daughter got married last Saturday, and for those of you who’ve been involved with a wedding, you know how that can keep a person busy. But I’m back with a bunch of new shows that I think you are going to really like, starting with this one with Kat the Wiccan Mortician.
I hinted in my last show that a witch would be making an appearance, and poof! There she was! I didn’t even have to wiggle my nose, I just, you know, picked up the phone (rather than picking my nose) and called her, like regular people. But you will find Kat anything but regular. Brilliant, insightful, friendly, caring, and plenty knowledgeable about both her Wiccan religion and the inner workings of the funeral industry, please join me for Part One of my two part interview with Kat the Wiccan Mortician.
What you will learn from Kat the Wiccan Mortician:
- About Homer, Alaska, which may have been the model for the quirky TV show “Northern Exposure”
- How I cut the cheese and almost brought down a small aircraft
- The writings of Eckhart Tolle and Thomas Merton. From farts to fantastic in 30 seconds!
- What makes up a Wiccan coven
- About kinky sex and blood sacrifices. Well not really, but we do touch on it.
- The Wiccan “Rede” (e.g. advice), which says “An it harm none, do what ye will.”
- About “The Morrígan,” a death deity and Kat’s personal goddess. “Quiet strength and thundering will.”
- How Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, compares (or not) to The Morrígan
- Why death goddesses are goddesses (female) and not gods (male), and other ruminations on why women are leading the death positivity movement
- That the funeral industry is, at its core, patriarchal
- How the 1st Law of Thermodynamics will make you live forever (i.e. never be destroyed)
- How the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is driving me crazy
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Presto and grazie!
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.
