In the morning, was the SweetWood Temenos meeting and CAW town hall. Jack talked about what SweetWood was and how it was doing financially as well as otherwise. We have about 1/3 of the money necessary to bring in electricity in the bank. It was determined that electricity was the first major project as without electricity we couldn't pump a well so there wasn't a lot of point in doing the well first. There was also a brief discussion about why we were not looking at using a windmill for water (on the ridge the wells have to be quite deep and require a stable source of sufficient electricity to work. The windmill would then need to be large and that is costly, more than we can hope to afford at this time.) Members had the opportunity to express their ideas and hear about future plans. We only need about 5-6 new CAW members to have the necessary numbers to begin elections for the BoD. Currently there is an interim BoD until there are sufficient numbers to warrant an election.
At the CAW portion we talked about how the Scion Council had been more or less disbanded at the last meeting, the one I didn't go to. I was pretty unhappy about it and feel that it is a mistake. Part of the reason for it was that I was occupied as a student and so not always able to put energy into it; Tamara moved away, Mary is in the process of moving away, Kim didn't want to put much energy into it, and with two of our previous members moving to Clergy that didn't leave many active scions. However, our region just got two new scions and I felt that this would be a good opportunity to get revitalized. We talked about a few options but nothing really got decided or changed. And we also talked about politics again and the current crisis in CAW.
Following that was a workshop called the "Invisible Minority" by DJ but I don't really know much about what it was about. I left at the beginning as I had gotten full up with politics and just needed to get away.
After that was the Scionization ritual for our two new scions. These rituals are also a kind of renewal rite for the community as it includes people from each RING, whom speak about what brought them here, or what the work of that stage is, or something along those lines. And it uses the metaphor of a tree with the seekers as the roots, the scions as the trunk, and the clergy as the leaves. Maerian once told me though that she thinks that is backward. It should be the seekers who are the leaves bringing in new energy to the church with the clergy as the roots that supply energy to the tree through their vision of what the church has been and could be. In any case, the tree is a nice metaphor and speaks to me in particular.
One of the "secret" parts is the mystery box, which each scion gets to look into. Rather than get the box sent out from CA this time, Jack and Kim made one for our region. It is very nice. And this is the first time it was used in ritual.
Tom and I went to eat dinner and give me some time to get ready for the main ritual that evening as I was priestessing it with Jack. I am going to try and get it up at the SweetWood page of the Midwest CAW website when I get this entry up. And we also packed everything up and put it in the car except for the tent and clothes bag so that we could leave right after the ritual.
The ritual went well, I thought, and the feedback that we have had suggested that people liked it. One woman said that this was the first ritual that she had been in that moved her. That was nice to hear though she had been at BelSummer and my 7 Souls Ritual too but I guess you can't please everyone. Ah well.
Copyright © 2001 Kyril Oakwind