Bajas and the weather machine

Syd, Quel, Quel, Syd,

Outside the fog looks like the snow that congregates on the corner of roads, the dirt slushie that's formed when cars stubbornly drive despite the conditions (couldn't be me). Later today, it'll warm to slightly above freezing for a few hours before dipping back down for the night. The cat will spend maybe 20 minutes max reveling in his freedom outside before the reality of outside forces him to meow at the door and ask to be let back in. 

Yesterday, Glenn asked if I think the cat has deduced that we control the weather, too. As far as the cat knows, we have a kind of absolute power. I woke up this morning, saw his food bowl was empty, and gave him more. Even the power in scooping his food into that bowl is a bit too much for me. So the idea that he could, in some way, think that the 2+ feet of snow outside is our doing unnerved me. Surely he'd know that had it my way, it'd be sunny and 74 outside every day. He could frolic as much as he wanted and only come back in for food and cuddles. I'd be a merciful god. He knows that, surely.

I don't know why the assumption of absolute power paralyzes me like this. I mean, it's even egotistical to think he may reach that assumption, right? Assuming he thinks of things like higher powers in the obsessive way we do, the way I always have? Maybe it's because when I assumed absolute power of something, someone? else, they were anything but merciful. Like I had to be grateful of the very male god for giving me this life and body, but complicating it as he did, when all of the scripture tells me that he didn't have to. And in the realm of the house, I grew up with parent and stepparents who were more than happy to take on absolute power for as long as they could. They were furious when I moved out early. You know Dad even asked me to go to college nearby so I could still live at home?

Our conversation yesterday about our relation to god, religion, power, witchcraft, all of my reticence to bend that way can be tied up in my fear at Glenn's (benign, asinine, joking) question of whether of not the cat thinks we control the weather. I made some offhand comment about whether or not he thinks we have a weather machine, a concept introduced to me in 8th grade when Mr. Hoffman made us read a conspiracy theorist's argument on how the government controls the weather. Mr. Hoffman (who was a very male teacher) kind of brilliantly made us deconstruct the argument piece by piece. In the age of the internet, that assignment is one that's stuck with me. But now I'm thinking about the writer, and not in the same judgmental way as before. Now I'm thinking how sad for them to think, believe that the government has that kind of absolute power. 

The way you both were conceiving of your relation to the divine bypassed the very male, very absolute relation that was beaten into me as a child sent to Vacation Bible School in rural Mississippi and forced to confess to Father John ("Uh, I fight with my sister a lot, I guess." "Anything else?" Still one of my proudest moments that I responded, "Not really."). All of this to say that the cat receives lots of cuddles and will continue to. And I continue to wear my pendant of St. Ursula, who I'll write about next, because there's something there for me afterall, as long as it not at all resembles the way I was forced to worship as a child. 

I love you both. Send me photos of your altars.