On The Blessedness Of Life

Not my life or your life. Not the life of that puppy or that baby or that sheaf of wheat that will feed us, but all of those lives and all of life. Yes, the dangerous life like leeches and botflies and billionaires, too. All life that has been, all life that is, and all life that could be, across all worlds and all possible universes. And I wish to both celebrate and plead today, dear ones. Because unlike the virtues or concepts I often celebrate in my homilies, life on our world is under threat.

Life is under threat by greed.

Greed is a monster because greed is hunger never appeased. It is life warped and run amok, feeding and growing and feeding and growing until it is all that is left and then it dies, alone and confused at why it didn’t win the game.

Greed is cancer.

It always wants more and corrupts everything it touches with perverse incentives and broken commitments which all feel justified when we do them. We are tricked by greed into thinking that all of that pain, destruction, and loss is just “part of the cost of doing business”, and that any cost of doing business is worth its rewards. We are also taught that “externalizing the costs of doing business”—forcing them onto the environment or onto future generations—is just “good business”. Business schools teach their students that all they have to worry about is their own profits and that anything else is just irrelevant. That all environmental laws and safety requirements and labor unions really mean is paying fines, tiny losses to keep making massive gains. Greed is a little voice whispering in the ear that always urges for profits to go up and costs to go down, even if that includes atrocities like genocide and slavery.

But at its heart, greed is just desire that has become disordered, and desire is not evil or destructive. As a priestess of Aphrodite, a lot of what I celebrate and the magick that I work with is about desire. Desire—Eros, as I know Him—motivates our behaviors and draws us into all of the joys that life can give us, from the concrete pleasures of good food, good sex, and a good place to sleep to the abstract joys of beauty, love, and philosophy. Desire pulls us towards joy, and joy is a great motivator.

Oh, sure, we do a lot of things to avoid suffering. I eat when I am hungry, rest when I am tired, and have sex when I am horny. Those drives feel…well, not exactly like suffering in themselves, but definitely like a sort of dissatisfaction that can be extremely unpleasant. When we experience these drives, we want them satisfied so that they go away. But even then, there can be a sort of paradoxical joy in each of them. These types of distress provide the occasion for the pleasure of satisfaction. I often let myself get very hungry on purpose, not just because I tend to get hyper-focused and ignore my body, but also because hunger can add the best flavor to any meal. This is a joy I first discovered during my homeless teens and I have never forgotten it.

So I must respectfully disagree with the Buddha and his heirs that desire necessarily causes suffering. I do not believe that desire alone gives birth to greed any more than hunger alone gives birth to gluttony. There is another factor. A factor that takes us beyond desire into obsession.

A factor that promises to either destroy us or save us.

Someone with whom I was once very close recently told me that those like me are unwilling to accept our limits, to accept the inevitability of fate and time, and the fact that one day we will wane and end. They were exasperated with me at the time and I was being stubborn. I am sad to say I don’t speak with them very much anymore. We always seem to frustrate each other and there is little of the pleasure that was once in that friendship. We are mostly just colleagues now, and we speak when our jobs intersect.

But, upon reflection, I think that they were right. I do find it impossible to submit to the suffering and death and exploitation all around me that seems inevitable. Fated. Even necessary. While it often feels like the power of those who would warp, exploit, and finally destroy life is absolute and unavoidable, I just don’t give in. I keep looking for ways to fight. While my knowledge of physics and magick both show me that entropy is undeniable, that the center does not hold, and that things do, indeed, fall apart, I can’t help wanting to protect, heal, support, repair, and restore.

I can’t help wanting to fight for life.

We are now in the depths of Winter here in my home of the Northern Hemisphere, yet the new year has begun. The Sun has survived His yearly crisis and begun to return His warmth and light to us, day by day and minute by minute. The Sun, every year, is slowly drawn into darkness, more and more. It’s inevitable. Fated. Necessary. But the Sun never gives up. The Sun never stops fighting. The Sun never stops trying to live. The Sun always returns to ride His chariot anew, even as the ride gets shorter and shorter. And to be fair, Helios is a Titan, and that name means “striver”. He is that type of being of whom my colleague spoke…those of us who will not submit to fate. Who will not submit to necessity.

Yes, physics as we understand it assures us that the Sun will eventually grow and change, as all living things do, and that, like all living things, our Sun will also eventually die. But today is not that day and besides, there are other worlds than these, with new friends to meet and new families to build.

We just have to live long enough to meet them.

Tomorrow, the Sun will rise. I will pray and do magick and love and heal and grow and change. I will serve my beloved goddess and fight for the vision of my mighty mother. I will do my best to abide always in love and to joyfully fight for us all, dear ones. And I would ask you all to do much the same, in accordance with your own wills and abilities.

In life’s name and for life’s sake.

I got that phrase from a Diane Duane book I read when I was 11 years old called “So You Want To Be A Wizard”. I was a witch’s kid and the title caught my eye. I read a lot, so I forgot all about that book for most of my life, but magick is a funny thing. Stuff like that tends to fall back into our lives when it matters the most. I reread the book last Summer on a whim and the phrase stood out to me like it was written in letters of fire on the side of a mountain. Demeter spoke the words again in my head as if She was tasting them and liked the flavor. Since then they have become the watchwords of my life. The members of Magie Sans Frontières (Magick Without Borders) swear our membership oaths with that phrase, and I was the first to swear them.

Things are bad, dear ones, and they are going to get worse. I’m sorry to tell you all that, but it’s true. We have a Long Night to get through, and I believe that when we have to get through something really difficult, when we have to really hunker down and get the job done no matter what, then we have to know what we are fighting for. We have to have a mission, an actual reason we are going to do whatever it takes to get through all of the ordeals involved in accomplishing anything worthwhile. For those who are working to fill their pockets at the expense of the world, their mission is greed. Their hunger is endless, so their focus upon that mission is direct and diligent.

But our mission is life, dear ones. Life itself. And the mission comes first, always and forever.

Blessed Full Moon, dear ones. May the blessings of the gods be upon all of you in the coming two weeks.

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: Odilon Redon, “Woman With Pillar Of Flowers”, (1903)