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from TILT

Index graphic
MoonLit Press is the creative collaboration of Terryl Warnock and Al Brown, longtime friends and business associates. Al is the computer sophisticate and art department, Terryl is the wordsmith. Our content is created by humans. We aspire to powerful creative nonfiction, beautifully presented. We aim to publish at new and full moons, but we flex with what inspires us.
New present for you

Here’s what's new

The latest post

abacus

The Exhausting Calculus of Harming None

Harm None is the commandment—the only ‘thou shalt’—contemporary pagans are required to keep. It seems a simple enough rule, but it’s not always easy to figure out what the path of least harm is in today’s vanishingly complex world.

  • A Plea for the Lives of Birds --- 2024-08-04
    The wild bird population in America today is half of what it was in the middle of the 21st century. Seventy-five percent of that tragic loss is directly attributable to domestic cats.
  • A Prayer for the Least Among Us --- 2024-07-21
    Ecosystems survive through the subtle interrelatedness between diverse species. Such relationships are better mediated by small players than by the blunt force trauma humans are wont to apply with our bulldozers. This is a prayer for those mistaken for unimportant.
  • Legacy of Waste --- 2024-06-05
    Our species is choking on its own waste. This essay asks people to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Our very survival depends on it.
  • Wolpe and the Pagans --- 2024-01-15
    The Atlantic magazine published a materially inaccurate and defamatory article by Rabbi David Wolpe in its December 2023 edition claiming that Donald Trump is pagan. This is one (real) pagan’s reply.
uncle wally

Saturday Morning Cartoons

A series of essays primarily for fun, some of which have a moral to the story.

stone hendge

The Sacred Circle: Building Community

Healthy and sustainable human communities are much like healthy, sustainable ecosystems. They are characterized by interrelatedness, a web of subtle relationships and mutual dependencies that are essential and far-reaching.

professor

Continuing Education

Not all of life’s teachers are to be found working in schools. Here at MoonLit we have noticed that life is an opportunity to learn and grow, start to finish, and that not all tuition is collected by a registrar’s office. The universe will obligingly continue to turn the volume up until the student either gets it and graduates, or fails and has to repeat the class.

  • Expensive Tuition --- 2024-11-01
    A visit by a kindly ghost allows a middle-aged woman to learn the value of listening to the wisdom offered by parents—at last.
  • Miscellaneous Treasures and Other Junk --- 2024-06-18
    What really matters in a human lifetime are relationships, and magical encounters with the beauty and majesty of the Sacred that take our breath away. Our author was slow to grasp this and burdened herself with miscellaneous treasures and other junk.
  • Stepping Stones on the Road to Barbarism --- 2024-08-18
    Aging, gracefully or otherwise, can involve an increase in the number of sick days which, in turn, can wear the civilized veneer off a person.
black cat

Familiars

Terryl is an animist pagan (a contemporary witch) living in a living world, cohabitating peacefully with people of all species, in a community of the human and nonhuman. Her familiars are her teachers, her allies, her sanctuary, her helpmeets, and her friends. The connections are deep and meaningful. Familiars abound in the whole of the nonhuman world. Landscapes, weather, seasons, zenith, nadir, and the cardinal directions. Ask of the wind and the sunflower, what is it like to be you? Listen carefully—feel deeply—for the answer. Ask winter what the spring feels like.

wheel of the year

A Pagan Celebration of the Spiral of the Year

Because we live our lives from beginning to middle to end we are tempted to think of time as linear. But time is a circle, a spiral of creation and destruction, of death and reincarnation, of birth and rebirth. These pieces celebrate that spiral and the renewal, the rejuvenation, to be found therein.

  • Blush --- 2024-05-01
    A celebration of life’s reawakening, its resurrection, in spring.
  • Lughnasadh --- 2024-08-04
seasonal cards

Holiday Greeting Cards

A collection of sentimental greeting cards from the spiral of the year, from our hearts to yours.

pen and quill

Words Matter

“Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.” The origin of this cautionary wisdom is lost to antiquity. These words have always been true and pertinent. Although the internet has placed an artificial degree of separation between the words we write or say and their consequences, words have tremendous power. They manifest reality. It is important to be careful and kind with them

shooting star

Guest Stars

**Open Call for Submissions** MoonLit Press was founded, in part, on a wish to be of service to the writing community. We know better than most how hard it is to get published, so we offer to share our space here with other writers here. Send us your best stuff and we will start the editorial review process. We will require a first serial copyright, but your work is yours to publish whenever and wherever else you choose to, with attribution to MoonLit Press.

 
Read more...

from TILT

Index graphic
MoonLit Press is the creative collaboration of Terryl Warnock and Al Brown, longtime friends and business associates. Al is the computer sophisticate and art department, Terryl is the wordsmith. Our content is created by humans. We aspire to powerful creative nonfiction, beautifully presented. We aim to publish at new and full moons, but we flex with what inspires us.
New present for you

Here’s what's new

The latest post

abacus

The Exhausting Calculus of Harming None

Harm None is the commandment—the only ‘thou shalt’—contemporary pagans are required to keep. It seems a simple enough rule, but it’s not always easy to figure out what the path of least harm is in today’s vanishingly complex world.

  • A Plea for the Lives of Birds --- 2024-08-04
    The wild bird population in America today is half of what it was in the middle of the 21st century. Seventy-five percent of that tragic loss is directly attributable to domestic cats.
  • A Prayer for the Least Among Us --- 2024-07-21
    Ecosystems survive through the subtle interrelatedness between diverse species. Such relationships are better mediated by small players than by the blunt force trauma humans are wont to apply with our bulldozers. This is a prayer for those mistaken for unimportant.
  • Legacy of Waste --- 2024-06-05
    Our species is choking on its own waste. This essay asks people to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Our very survival depends on it.
  • Wolpe and the Pagans --- 2024-01-15
    The Atlantic magazine published a materially inaccurate and defamatory article by Rabbi David Wolpe in its December 2023 edition claiming that Donald Trump is pagan. This is one (real) pagan’s reply.
uncle wally

Saturday Morning Cartoons

A series of essays primarily for fun, some of which have a moral to the story.

stone hendge

The Sacred Circle: Building Community

Healthy and sustainable human communities are much like healthy, sustainable ecosystems. They are characterized by interrelatedness, a web of subtle relationships and mutual dependencies that are essential and far-reaching.

professor

Continuing Education

Not all of life’s teachers are to be found working in schools. Here at MoonLit we have noticed that life is an opportunity to learn and grow, start to finish, and that not all tuition is collected by a registrar’s office. The universe will obligingly continue to turn the volume up until the student either gets it and graduates, or fails and has to repeat the class.

  • Expensive Tuition --- 2024-11-01
    A visit by a kindly ghost allows a middle-aged woman to learn the value of listening to the wisdom offered by parents—at last.
  • Miscellaneous Treasures and Other Junk --- 2024-06-18
    What really matters in a human lifetime are relationships, and magical encounters with the beauty and majesty of the Sacred that take our breath away. Our author was slow to grasp this and burdened herself with miscellaneous treasures and other junk.
  • Stepping Stones on the Road to Barbarism --- 2024-08-18
    Aging, gracefully or otherwise, can involve an increase in the number of sick days which, in turn, can wear the civilized veneer off a person.
black cat

Familiars

Terryl is an animist pagan (a contemporary witch) living in a living world, cohabitating peacefully with people of all species, in a community of the human and nonhuman. Her familiars are her teachers, her allies, her sanctuary, her helpmeets, and her friends. The connections are deep and meaningful. Familiars abound in the whole of the nonhuman world. Landscapes, weather, seasons, zenith, nadir, and the cardinal directions. Ask of the wind and the sunflower, what is it like to be you? Listen carefully—feel deeply—for the answer. Ask winter what the spring feels like.

wheel of the year

A Pagan Celebration of the Spiral of the Year

Because we live our lives from beginning to middle to end we are tempted to think of time as linear. But time is a circle, a spiral of creation and destruction, of death and reincarnation, of birth and rebirth. These pieces celebrate that spiral and the renewal, the rejuvenation, to be found therein.

  • Blush --- 2024-05-01
    A celebration of life’s reawakening, its resurrection, in spring.
  • Lughnasadh --- 2024-08-04
seasonal cards

Holiday Greeting Cards

A collection of sentimental greeting cards from the spiral of the year, from our hearts to yours.

pen and quill

Words Matter

“Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.” The origin of this cautionary wisdom is lost to antiquity. These words have always been true and pertinent. Although the internet has placed an artificial degree of separation between the words we write or say and their consequences, words have tremendous power. They manifest reality. It is important to be careful and kind with them

shooting star

Guest Stars

**Open Call for Submissions** MoonLit Press was founded, in part, on a wish to be of service to the writing community. We know better than most how hard it is to get published, so we offer to share our space here with other writers here. Send us your best stuff and we will start the editorial review process. We will require a first serial copyright, but your work is yours to publish whenever and wherever else you choose to, with attribution to MoonLit Press.

 
Read more...

from TILT

oldtime snowy city street

 

May your turkey be juicy and your pie crust flaky.

May your happiness be boundless and your gratitude list long.

May you be valiant when faced with danger and tender when faced with love.

May your nobler self prevail when faced with contention.

May your home shimmer warm and fragrant.

May your planet know you as a light touch.

May you have enough and may you be enough.

May you wander in wonder.

May your cheeks be rosy and may your heart beat fast.

May your corners be perfect and may your bows never go flat.

May you breathe deeply and rejoice in living.

May you deserve the love of animals and little children.

May you earn the respect and support of your community.

May you play as hard as you work during the coming year.

May your stockings be well-stuffed, your generosity expansive, and your heart full of joy.

May you know passion and peace.

May your soul sparkle like the stars in the cosmos.

May you stand close, always, to that which you hold sacred.

May the Elf that roams winter's longest nights be generous.

And may you find your heart's true desire gathered around your hearth.

fireplace
moonlit press logo, crescent moon with a star below

MoonLit Press wishes you all the best of the holidays this Yuletide. We thank you for your kind attention over the course of this past year as we have embarked on our experimental blog. We do so hope you’ve enjoyed it. We’ll be taking some time off in December to spend the holidays with our families and to revel in the season. We’ll see you again at the end of the year during the December New Moon.

Look for us on Mastodon, a free, open-source, distributed, independent chat service where there are no big corporations (or their agendas) between us.

Follow Terryl's work and give her feedback on:

Mastodon https://mastodon.sdf.org/@wordsbyterryl
email mailto:moonlitpress@proton.me


Gratitude list:

Graphic design by AJ Brown https://mastodon.sdf.org/@mral
Images by Weihnachten Kamin
Images by W. C. Bauer

Some images are through Creative Commons License and we would thank all of those creators if we could find their names.

Terryl is grateful to have the time and space to write, and will be using her Christmas break to develop some new inventory. She is grateful for the people who give of their time and attention to read her work. It is a gift beyond measure.

Terryl is also grateful to Al, whose skills compliment hers so well. There would be little point in doing the heavy lifting of writing without him, because without him nobody would ever read it.

Terryl and Al are both deeply thankful to the people who read our work. You’re why we do it. We love hearing back from you, and are ever so grateful to you for sharing our efforts with your friends and family.

 
Read more...

from TILT

Word Nerd 2: Elusive Fluency

To be concluded

English isn't just my first language, it's my only language. I grieve the profundity of this ignorance because cultural and linguistic diversity is humanity's strength. It's what adds hue and texture to the beauty of the human tapestry we weave together. I have tried to reach out beyond my linguistic limitation, but with minimal success.

To be concultedI got pretty good with German in high school, but that was only under the fierceness of Frau Janetzky's tutelage. She was a tall, bony Austrian woman with bulging blue eyes, and a sharp, jutting jaw. Einstein hair even she, the Teutonic Terror, couldn't tame. She had escaped the Nazis as a child to emigrate to America and said things like “Ve vill haff a focabulary kviz tomorgan und you vill do vell or heads vill rrrroll.” And you know I studied hard for those vocabulary quizzes too, because I believed her. That was a long time ago though and I couldn't tell you the time of day in German now.

To be concultedSpanish charades are a matter of survival working the auto parts counter for us, the unilingual. I got through it with “enseña me,” and “mira.” I have tried very hard to learn how to say thank you in all the rainbow languages I have encountered, to be polite. The only one that still eludes me completely, although I still struggle with the Diné pronunciation, is Katarina's Slovakian thank you, which I can't remember at all even though she's given it to me a half dozen times or more.

To be conculted


The last two learners I worked with as a volunteer with the literacy program were two young Thai sisters. Pom and Pem. Their real first names are long and musical, as is their Thai last name. Pom and Pem are either abbreviations or nicknames for their linguistically impaired American friends and teachers, near as I can tell. Pom was 12 and Pem was 15 when I started working with them, beautiful girls who had been rescued from a bad family situation in Thailand by a kind distant relative living in Williams Arizona, of all places. They must have thought they'd fallen off the edge of the earth. This is a guess though, we never had enough language in common to explore that topic.

The sisters didn't have one word of English between them when they got here. I'm not exaggerating. Not a single one. I had to teach them money, and each of our learning sessions started with a recitation of their names, their address, their parent's names, and their parent's phone numbers, in clear English. I was terrified they'd get lost and disappear like so many beautiful young women do. They had cell phones so we also rehearsed calling 911 and what to say when the dispatcher answered. Much as I loved it, we had to abandon their long, musical Thai last name. It was too complicated for the American ear and they referred to themselves and Pom and Pem Smith—their foster father's surname.

Pem, like many fifteen year-olds, was only interested in language as far as it would help her navigate the social minefield of high school, which she negotiated just fine with the brilliance of her smile. Pom, however, was sweet and shy and curious. She was scholarly in nature. She was keen to learn the language of her new country and wanted to read and write it correctly. She had the best WTF face I've ever seen, and I saw it a lot.

To be concultedAlmost a year in, we had progressed to the point we were making nouns plural. “Well,” I told Pommy, “this one is easy. You just add an 's' at the end. One tree, many trees.”

“So, one leaf, many leafs.”

“Uh, dang, no. That one is 'leaves.'” As I wrote it out for her she looked at me with that oh-so-eloquent WTF face. “A person leafs through a book. I guess it's probably because a page used to be called a leaf.”

WTF face. “I thought 'leaves' meant go away.”

“Yes, well, it does.”

“How can you tell the difference?”

“By the context.”

WTF face. “What is context?”

“How it's used. Whether the person is talking about a tree or departing. Okay, you're right. I see it now. There are no rules, This is not easy and it makes no sense at all. I'm sorry. I guess we just have to memorize this stuff.”

To be concultedShe was far too polite to roll her eyes at me, but she didn't need to. Her expression said it all. My admiration for my language as beautiful and coherent was crashing down around me. If I'd have had a knife, I'd have stabbed myself in the heart with it.

She came to our meeting one day and asked me what a gag was. My heart sank. “A gag can be a joke, or it can make you barf, or it can be something they stick in your mouth so you can't speak.”

WTF face. “But they at least sound different, don't they?”

“No, dearest, they don't.”

WTF face.


I was born with a defective gene. It compels me to write. I strive to create things in writing that might inspire and entertain readers, open their minds to a different point of view, maybe change their consciousness a little. Perhaps even contribute to saving the world in some small, as yet undiscovered way.

To be concultedOne of my professors, fluent in seven languages by his own definition, said fluency is the ability to write passable poetry. By that definition, I'm not even fluent in my only language. The language I've ruined my eyes apprehending. The one to which I have been such a loyal servant my whole life. The one I suffer so to try and communicate in writing with. I know from my own struggles with German that Pommy, while desperate to understand, could not tiptoe around the vagaries of English she encountered in real time. She had to stop and process. Think it through. Translate and puzzle. The sentence, and the gag that prompted her question that day (which I hope had been of the joke variety) had eluded her completely. Immersion in a foreign language is brutal. An exchange student's first dream in English is often taken as a first, fleeting glimpse of fluency. To be concultedA breakthrough moment. Sadly, I didn't get to work with Pom long enough to experience that magical threshold with her. For myself, the closest I ever got to it was the occasional nightmare, in English, about Frau Janetzky with a hatchet.

To be concluded


moonlit press logo, crescent moon with a star below

MoonLit’s Word Nerd (WRDNRD) series explores the pain and pleasure of one woman’s ambivalent relationship with language. She writes, but not well enough to suit her, nor can she let go of the compulsion to try. She easily identifies this compulsion as a kind of mental illness, but she is so far gone she’s no longer satisfied with being dissatisfied with her use of just one language. Now she yearns to be dissatisfied and inarticulate in multiple languages. What was that definition of insanity again?

Look for us on Mastodon, a free, open-source, distributed, independent chat service where there are no big corporations (or their agendas) between us.

Follow Terryl's work and give her feedback on:

Mastodon https://mastodon.sdf.org/@wordsbyterryl
email mailto:moonlitpress@proton.me


Gratitude list:

Graphic design by AJ Brown https://mastodon.sdf.org/@mral
images by Adam Lapuník
images by Brian Goff

Some images are through Creative Commons License and we would thank all of those creators if we could find their names.

For all that she gripes about it constantly, Terryl is grateful to have the time and space to write, here in her dotage. She is grateful to all the teachers who have helped her (or tried to) learn to use language along the way. Not all of those teachers spoke or wrote English (Terryl’s only language), neither did they work in schools. Terryl is deeply grateful to all the learners she worked with through the literacy program. She can only hope she taught them a fraction of what she, in turn, learned from them.

Terryl is eternally grateful to the Life in Pieces writing circle. The deadlines SUCK! They’re also the only reason Terryl ever gets anything written so she’s thankful for them.

Terryl is also grateful to Al, whose skills compliment hers so well. There would be little point in doing the heavy lifting of writing without him, because without him nobody would ever read it.

Terryl and Al are both deeply thankful to the people who read our work. You’re why we do it. We love hearing back from you, and are ever so grateful to you for sharing our efforts with your friends and family.

 
Read more...