Hip Replacement

It has been almost a year since I left Oakland, California, in a wheelchair. Before I left, I had been misdiagnosed by three orthopedic doctors. Not one of them could find what was wrong with me, except that I couldn't walk anymore. A little thing like that didn't bother any of the doctors. They gave me a handful of awful bitter pills, which made me dizzy and upset my digestion.This was all the help they offered. The pills were supposed to take my pain away, but they didn't. I was crying from pain and sometimes my teeth chattered like in an electric shock.

What upset me most was how come the daughter of an orthopedic surgeon couldn't find competent doctors to diagnose me in the old USA. I started praying to my dead step-father who spent more time with me than my biological one.

Dear Doki! Please help me get medical help. Please lead me to the solution.

As I cried and cried, a little voice started up in my heart. It said "No problem. Just come home to Budapest to my Clinic, We fix these things there all the time."

Doki's recognition filled me with peace.

Z Generation

At long last you have arrived! At long last you made it to the center stage, You crawling little grandchild, you're now in suits demonstrating for peace. Peace! After 30 years finally a new generation takes on the mantle of history makers. Not an easy job. The spells it took. The love of history and taking responsibility for one's times is brave. And very American.

We can be proud again.

Do not ever doubt that you don't matter. Smaller groups of souls cultivating community are even better, Undisturbed for a long time you germinate new ways to live on earth. Ways of peace. Bake a lot of breads.

Inaugurate Generation Z's presence with big public sharing of bread. Bake bread, There is wisdom in that activity. You have to knead the dough, You have to hurt your knuckles to get it right. And then you have to be patient. The bread needs to rise in a quiet cool place. It’s the bread aborning.

Such it is with Peace. You need to just bake the bread or buy it baked, and eat it as in worship.

Bread is the symbol of peace. Sharing bread together is communion. Communion makes you strong, puts you in touch with spirit.

Gather together, Hold peace in your hearts and make bread or buy and eat it. Wash it down with something red.

Members of Generation Z have already absorbed all that we have learned since the seventies. and we've grown up in the culture of multi media awareness. WW2 is fought on the educational channels over and over again, and you can catch up with any war on video. 9/11 played for months. War is already a video game format. But until war becomes a regulated sport it will not be safe, like fencing today.

The war model exists as a leftover from our reptilian brain. This brain enjoys war in images just as well. So we don't need war in real life. War games works fine. That’s ok.

Advice to the Newly Old

If you thought you will be young forever ... and you no longer think so ... Welcome to the newly old.

If you get up, in the morning and take your first look in the mirror and you wonder for a moment whose is that face, yep, you are one of the newly old. Congratulations, you are not dead.

What happened to your face at night? Did some gnome sit around on it dislocating your jawbone? Pulling it down? Making your cheeks flatten out like pancakes? Yep, you have stepped into the worlds of the newly old. Do you have a double chin? Oh you just noticed it today? Yep. Newly old. But most of all do you have to sit down when you are dressing in the morning? Yep, you got it.

In the Goddess community we have made a great deal about “old is good”. Old is wise. Hail to all crones! We read books about the juicy crones, the nimble and fast footed dancing crones. Well that’s fantasy. Hopeful thinking. And all out fibbing. Aging sucks big time and everybody knows it.

The Goddess/Wiccan Movement: Interview with Z Budapest

Gayle Kimball

GK: You mentioned your life work was "Priestessing a feminist /womanist community." How has that developed and changed over the last two decades?

ZB: I am no longer a dimple-cheeked agile young women with an attitude. I am a new Crone groping confidently for the third destiny. While I was having other plans, like becoming a great Hungarian novelist, LIFE has directed the essence of what I was to bring back the ancient Goddess into women’s lives. LIFE is the final editor. What she writes is often better than what I have thought up. She writes bolder herstories.

For the past 30 years I acted as priestess, as well as a writer, initiator, conceptualizer. Priestess is the oldest profession by the way, not prostitution. What does it mean? I facilitated hundreds of circles of women with a spiritual content and experience. I taught women how to pray to the Goddess from the heart. I was the closest to this information. I had all the stars, the Aquarian sun, the Libra moon, humanitarian and equality minded; it all hung together imperceptibly. Plus, I had a psychic mother who prayed on the winds to our ancestors. I inherited the witchy genes that manifested early in my life.

When I was four years old I could frighten away Russian soldiers from our bunker during the WW2 in Budapest. Even as a toddler I had certainty that I could pray aloud to the heavens for a protection with my skinny little arms outstretched. The soldiers were undone by this picture. They knew I was in contact with God. I have always prayed the Big Prayer to the Goddess Boldogasszony. (She was a fairy queen for the Hungarians who birthed a girl, not a boy. We renamed her for political reasons. Mary got assimilated into the local tradition, all the churches were finally to Mary, or her mother Anna, or her friends St. Katherine, or our homegrown saints St. Elisabeth and St. Teresa. There are no churches built in my country to Jesus Christ that I have ever seen.

This prayer is older than Hungarian Christianity. Boldogasszony (Glad Woman) was the power over everything and it saved us many times during the war. I still do this prayer in Hungarian when I do healing work. It goes like this in mirror translation: “Now is the time to help me, oh Maria! You merciful Virgin Mother! The deep prayers of your children you never, never deny. Where humans cannot help, you alone have the power to deliver. Where the need is keen and hopeless, your power alone can turn the tides. Show us that you are our mother! Now help us oh Maria! You merciful Virgin Mother!”

GK: The archetype of the great mother, to use Jungian terminology, always surfaces, despite patriarchy's efforts to suppress her. What do you think about the appearances of Virgin Mary in Mexico, the US, and various parts of Europe?

ZB: All healing sites are connected with the Mother of God. All springs, healing baths and rivers are the Goddess. She is everywhere and pervades the entire culture. I think humanity noticed that the Mother of all Gods actually does good things for us, heals the sick, gives hope to the hopeless, and warns of pending disasters. She is a working God, a God who never deserted us. A true Good God. Eventually it will be normal to love nature, to love peace.

GK: What is the evolution of your personal relationship and understanding of the Goddess?

ZB: I am still a work in progress. Nothing can be more powerful; nothing is more exuberant in the evening, nothing more worthy to dress up for than a ritual circle with a sacred fire and a few hundred women ready to dance and pray. Nothing compares to the oneness we feel when imagining the Goddess together. When women imagine the world, the world actually gets better. When blending action to our inner life, we are shapers of the new mythology that has bigger power then any President. Imagination and humor has toppled the powerful before.

The spiritual revolution is imperceptible, a stealth revolution. The Goddess is coming in little pieces, a woman at a time. The great awakening is in its almost maturity, we're almost all getting it. LIFE doesn't mind discord or unpleasantness, or even death. LIFE doesn't mind because she made more of us yesterday. It's a huge continuum. LIFE runs the show.

Our Zeitgeist ( Right now Pluto in Sagittarius) is the humanistic coming to consciousness as the human race. Women always stand for all of humanity, since we have created everybody from scratch; there are only two kinds of people on Earth, the mothers and her children. This is why the Madonna with child is essentially the symbol of our human race. This is the image that occurs in every culture over and over again.

GK: What do you see as the focus of young women today?

ZB: They want to make everyone feel included, not hate each other. They enjoy a gender continuum; the whole arch from extreme masculine and feminine to androgyny they see as “cool.” They don't hate each other for sexual orientation. They're kick ass wonderful, they know more than we did. My sons' girlfriends were feminists; I used to be girlfriend bait. Young women like we had before them, looking for their mission in life.

A young woman like Julia Luna Hill loves nature and acts on her beliefs; that's is what I hope they all find, a noble mission. More women are graduating from universities with degrees, streaming into white-collar jobs. Women will run this country in ten years. They still need women’s study groups, women's centers and bars, as existed in the 60s and 70s, although women's centers do exist in the universities and you don't have to pay rent for Internet chat rooms.

GK: Is the Sisterhood of the Wicce still an organization? What about other wiccean organizations around the US and other countries? Are there still goddess and wiccean conferences, newsletters and magazines?

ZB: Oh yes there are! The organizations and their public visibility have moved to the Internet. You type in Witchcraft, or Goddess, and hundreds of things will pop up, including my own website, and the Dianic University. The space where the Aquarian Age can grow up is the Internet.

In the 80s I started the Women's Spirituality Forum, our own San Francisco Bay Area non-profit, and lead it still. We organize women's festivals and celebrations. We come together in a special place--the redwood forest; we circle to celebrate the seasons eight times a year. For example, Halloween is the New Year when the new calendar begins. We mourn people we lost, lament, speak out, then play music to come back to the present. We use the spiral dance, the most ancient symbol, the Milky Way, spiral down to the center to the house of death, commune with ancestors, and bring them offerings. We spiral back out, purified; the soul comes out as we hold hands with the women and spiral in and out. We dance for health, for peace, what ever the high priestess puts out. She sends a kiss around, a group hug, and then we do final chanting and release it into the universe. (For more details see The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries available only on my website).