Things I Learned Today
An Adventure Memoir of Living Abroad and Letting Go of Life’s Trappings: Material Possessions, Cultural Blinders, and a Patriarchal Christian Worldview. By Mary Coday Edwards
A book review by Terryl Warnock.
“Christian Feminist” had long been a perplexing term for this non-Christian feminist, rather like a mathematical equation in which complex terms on bot
A pagan contemplation of equilbrium at the Vernal Equinox.
By Terryl Warnock
Balance is fluid.
Energetic,
adventurous,
and dynamic.
Balance descends,
like a skier playing with gravity.
Element of Earth.
Balance soars,
like a musician ascending octaves.
Element of Air.
Balance shimmers,
like a sunbeam toying with leaves.
Element of Fire.
Balance ripples,
like a dolphin frolicking with waves.
Element of Water.
I played, and soared, and frolicked, and shimmered.
And, at that fleeting moment of equality that is Ostara,
prayed for balance I could be still in.
A balance that was not my nature.
Ancient wisdom cautions that we take care what we pray for.
Now I am dragged behind long years.
My prayers have been answered,
the stillness I once prayed for
is imposed upon me now.
From the wreckage of this wake I look back
and yearn for the playful, the musical, the ascending,the shimmering, and the frolicking.
The balance of stillness may be peaceful,
it can also ossify and become brittle.
Element of Earth.
The balance of stillness may be quiet,
it can also blow away on a breeze like dust.
Element of Air.
The balance of stillness may be warm,
it can also burn down and smolder to ash.
Element of Fire.
The balance of stillness may be smooth, like a glassy pool,
it can also stagnate and choke with decay.
Element of Water.
Balance is a meditation,
Solid, unmoving, and static.
May take itself too seriously,
stuck reflecting on what has been lost.
Ostara is the pagan celebration of the Vernal (Spring) Equinox, one of only two days out of the three hundred and sixty-five when daylight and night are perfectly equal. As spring marches on, days will become longer and nights shorter until the cycle turns around at the Summer Solstice and starts back.
We wish you all the blessings of the season, and pray that you are gaining in strength as well. May you find your way to a happy, healthy balance.
Follow Terryl's work and give her feedback on:
| Mastodon | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@wordsbyterryl |
| mailto:moonlitpress@proton.me |
| Graphic design by AJ Brown | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@mral |
| Phptography by AJ Brown | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@mral |
Terryl is grateful always to the Life in Pieces writing circle for their invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this piece. She is also grateful beyond words to the spiral of time and the long, wonderful years she has lived. She has been taught at last what true balance is in her own life and on her own journey.
AL(not AI) and Terryl are both very grateful, always, to the people who read our work. You are what makes all this worthwhile.
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press.
The serious face in the mirror of the employee bathroom didn’t look all that bad, I decided, except for the red, puffy eyes. My hope was that this com
The patriarchal smackdown of women who dared might have been a tired old story for other women, even then, but it was new to me. The story of women wh
MoonLit welcomes you back from a nice, long holiday break with the first of what we hope will be many Guest Stars. One of the principles MoonLit Press was founded on is service to the writing community. We are very happy to welcome the poet Jurell Cloward to the MoonLit family,
updated: 2025-01-20 pro-tips for general users
Graphviz is a package for drawing diagrams. Its big claim to fame is the automatic layout of nodes and edges. Graphviz main tool is dot;Dot is a language for describing graphs. The “dot” compiler will process the graph description into many different image formats (.svg, .pdf, .png, etc). Graphviz is not a WYSIWYG graphic editor. For that see “inkscape” or “dia”.
The dot language documentation is at https://graphviz.org/documentation/
{
node [shape=note, fillcolor=green, style=filled]
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Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press.
Resistance to authority can manifest in many ways. I have a friend, for example, who has the need for speed and insists that the speed limit is merely a suggestion. He's angry when he inevitably gets pulled over for speeding and is mean-mouthed with the police officer about it. This, of course, only gets him in deeper trouble.
My own resistance to authority manifests much differently. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of taking good advice or learning from the mistakes of others. I listen to the good advice and observe others making their mistakes, but have a streak of stubborn hubris that deludes me into thinking I can do better. “It won't happen that way for me,” are my famous last words. It always happens that way for me too because, well, it happens that way for everyone (duh).
Until I got big enough to work my own chainsaw, my job was loader. I was to keep the cut firewood out from under Dad's feet and turn big logs over with the cant hook, so he didn't have to saw dirt to get all the way through. The only thing that will dull your chain faster than dirt is a rock and I kept those out of his way as well. I chucked the cut pieces of wood in the back of the truck and then climbed in to stack it neatly. He wanted me to pick it up and carry it, walk with it. Place it gently on the tailgate. Please. I don't know how many thousands of times he said “You shouldn't throw the wood in the bed of the truck like that, you'll break the window.”
Smug in my finely honed sidekick skills, I'd roll my eyes at him and toss the wood anyway.
Dad and I had put far too much effort into that stack of firewood for me to leave it behind at the house I was moving out of. The only time I could go out to Parks and get it was after my workday was done. I was working furiously against the approaching night, throwing wood into the bed of the truck as fast as I could. I didn't look up more than about one piece in ten to see where or how it landed. The spirit of my recently deceased father settled on my shoulder and said, You should stop for a minute and get up there and stack your load. You're going to break that window. I paused long enough to brush him off my shoulder, gently, like a moth, and bent down to lob the next piece. I glanced up to see it bounce off of another piece of wood in the bed of the truck and catapult squarely through the back window of the truck. It hit the window end on and smack in the middle.
A catapult, as you know, magnifies energy. I doubt I could have thrown a piece of wood that big hard enough to make that distance at that height. I couldn't have hit the window any more squarely if I'd been aiming for it. I learned in that very same moment just how small and numerous smithereens are. If you, say, hit a softball that accidentally goes through someone's living room window, the glass breaks, sure, but it breaks into big pieces. Pieces you can pick up. But this truck window, oh. Who knew one piece of glass could shatter into so many tiny pieces? No one smithereen was bigger than a grain of rice.
It was very dark and very cold before I had swept as many smithereens out of the truck as I could with a flashlight, whisk broom, and dustpan. Not wanting to leave broken glass in the yard for the sake of the dogs and everybody else, I was careful to get all the broken glass I could in a garbage bag and left the rest in the cab. I drove home with late October's icy fingers stroking the back of my neck through the gaping hole behind my head, and with glass shards poking my butt. And with less than half of my wood pile.
The spirit of my father, dead these many months, settled back on my shoulder and we rode on together to Williams in companionable silence. I was raised by a kind man. He would never be so mean as to laugh at me about it or tell me I told you so. But he didn't need to, I could hear his eye roll clearly from the other side of the veil between this world and the next.
Expensive Tuition is an excerpt from Terryl’s forthcoming collection Saturday Morning Cartoons, a collage of painless vignettes with a moral to the story. Terryl had every opportunity to learn this lesson the easy way, but she was having none of it.
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 |
| mailto:moonlitpress@proton.me |
| Graphic design by AJ Brown | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@mral |
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, and for, her wonderful father. He was a smart, gentle, and loving parent, the likes of which few are lucky enough to get. She never fully appreciated him until he was gone.
Terryl is also grateful to Al, for the excellence of his work. She has always been particularly enchanted with the Stonehenge picture featured in the last post.
Terryl and Al are both deeply thankful to the people who read our work. There would be little point in any of this without you You make it worth doing. We love hearing back from you, and are ever so grateful to you for sharing our efforts with your friends and family.
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press.
The word hallow means to sanctify, to make holy. Halloween (Samhain, pronounced sow-en, for pagan folk) in America is a caricature of something that might be, perhaps once was, much more meaningful: a night to honor the dead in recognition of their significance to the living, to celebrate their contribution to immortality.
MoonLit sends you heartfelt Samhain greetings at this October Full Moon. The sun descends into dark during the coming turn and pulls all of us along with it. It is a time for introspection, and a time to remember and honor the dead. It’s also time to dress up and have fun. Happy Halloween to one and all.
Follow Terryl's work and give her feedback on:
| Mastodon | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@wordsbyterryl |
| mailto:moonlitpress@proton.me |
| Graphic design by AJ Brown | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@mral |
| Photography by Terryl Warnock | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@wordsbyterryl |
Some images are through Creative Commons License and we would thank all of those creators if we could find their names.
On Shadows was previously published in The Miracle du jour and is reposted here with the permission of MoonLit Press.
On Shadows was inspired by, and is dedicated to, Kari Ann Allrich, Goddess of the Hearth.
Terryl is grateful to the people who gifted her with this beautiful lifetime: her parents, and their parents, and their parents, and so on and so forth, back into the dimness of time immemorial. Samhain celebrates the kinship of human connection so ancient it transcends both human ken and human memory. It is the natural way of things for a community of the beloved on the other side to grow with the years as a human being ages. Halloween offers an opportunity to tell them we miss them and love them still.
Terryl is also grateful to be the batty old witch of her family at last. It took three generations to earn the title, The Bat, and it’s one Terryl wears with pride.
Al is grateful to his little brother Lloyd, he was a good example to us all. He lived a life of service to others and was dedicated to his wife, family, and community. He died way too young.
Terryl and Al are both deeply thankful to the people who read our work. There would be little point in any of this without you. You make it worth doing. We love hearing back from you, and are ever so grateful to you for sharing our efforts with your friends and family.
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press.
Recap: Our storyteller has shared her four most crazymaking encounters (Reports from Hell) with bureaucracy in Parts 1 and 2 of this series. In Part 1 she shared how a summer job with the Federal government turned her into a thief, and how in order to survive a stint with the State government she became a liar. In Part 2 of this series, she wrote of the bureaucracies she has encountered later in life, how the Hysterical Commission turned her into a cheat, and how the Fire District has left her cynical.
This is the third and last installment in this series. Her takeaway. MoonLit has shared the backstory as context so that you may draw your own conclusions.