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badgersoph

Sophia Kelly Shultz
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Oracle Decks!

2 min read
SCO deck

You may not realize this, but I'm also a published author! This is the Stone Circle Oracle, my first publication, which includes 50 GORGEOUS cards (with another nod to the graphics department at Schiffer Books!) and a book with journal space so that you can write down what you see in the images.


Many of the paintings in the "Major Paintings" Gallery are featured in this publication. It's a great way to own a whole lot of my art, even if you don't have room on your walls!


You can order directly from my publisher, Schiffer Publishing https://www.schifferbooks.com/the-stone-circle-oracle-transformation-through-meditation-5354.html


You can also find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Promethean Oracle Cover

My second publication, the Promethean Oracle, which is co-authored with my dear friend Mark Cogan, was nominated for ORACLE DECK OF THE YEAR two years ago. The artwork for this deck was done in colored pencil on black paper, and features male entities from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Biblical sources. The idea of the deck is to bring balance to the goddess-heavy oracle/tarot deck market.

You can order directly from my publisher:

https://www.schifferbooks.com/the-promethean-oracle-6311.html


You can also find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

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Today's Reality

7 min read

On October 11, I received a Letter of Censure from the Board of Directors.  All I had done was resign from the "church" and the Board:  they concocted a HELL of a reason for banning me.  Last week I read the letter out loud and OMG I may just post the audio. 

Notes:  Orren Whiddon is the guy who founded the place
        Carrie is the President
        Kailin is the other President
        Roger is another President (don't ask)
        Tubuan are body masks from New Ireland, which is part of Papua New Guinea
        Hemlock Hole is the family swimming hole, washed out, needed stairs, I raised the money
        Patricia is my good friend who was XO until they resigned her
        Mama So is my EDM festival name.  It is a name that I cherish
        I was on the Board of Directors for 8 years, serving the last two as "church" secretary.

This is my response, which I finally sent late last week:

To the Presidents of the Board of Directors, my Judge, Jury, and Executioners, Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary,


I have thought long and hard about how to respond to the Letter of Censure which I received from you.  I have considered how I was told to "keep my head down" and be silent.  I have considered how I have been prevented from posting even positive statements on the Facebook pages of Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary or the Big Dub Fam.  I have considered how you conducted your "investigation" and drew your conclusions without ever requesting my presence--and then, only after all was said and done, after you had ruled that I was guilty and had trotted your "dossier" out into the general population, did you request a meeting with me.  I have considered how you have threatened to make all the details of your "investigation" public if I went public with my Letter of Censure--when you had already taken your "dossier" and its contents to the Membership.  And when I had finished considering all of these things, I realized this:


I have committed egregious crimes against Four Quarters Farm members and members of the "church".  I have failed in my duty as a member of the Board of Directors, because I never stood up and said "NO, you can't do that" in a meeting.  I am guilty of saying "moo" like one of the cattle I was, dumbly following the guy with the feed bucket, straight to slaughter.  I am guilty of working hard to justify the decisions of the Board of Directors even when I wasn't quite so sure of them myself.


I am ashamed.


I am ashamed that I wasted my time and energy and creativity serving this "church".  I hope that you remember this whenever you pull out the Tubuan masks, whenever you look in the Ritual Shed for fabric, whenever you look at those steps to Hemlock Hole, or at my articles in back issues of The Wheel of the Year.  I never felt like I had to do these things--I wanted to do them, because I loved Four Quarters and wanted to contribute all that I could. 


I am ashamed that I promoted Four Quarters at outside events, and that I argued against the widespread perception that "Orren surrounds himself with a Board of Directors of brainwashed sycophants."  I am ashamed that I created and gave presentations, that I spoke to hundreds of people, and that I signed people up for the mailing list. 


I am ashamed to have served with each and every one of you.  I am particularly ashamed that I trusted you, Carrie and Kailin, as you went behind my back, and used my friendship with Patricia to collect intelligence that you could use against us.  I am deeply ashamed that I did not ask WHY Kailin was being given the Episcopal Veto.  I am ashamed that I called any of you my friends, because now, when your true colors show, including the evident yellow stripes down your backs--I can see the reason why you did not call me before you made your decision.  I see you for what you are:  cowards who could not look me in the eye and ask me, not "why did you do these things?" but "did you do these things?" . 


I am ashamed that I almost always excused Orren Whiddon's outright abusive behavior as "Orren being Orren." 


Worst of all, I am ashamed of being Mama So--of helping to brainwash attendees of our Cash Cow (for I see now that is all Big Dub is) into thinking that Four Quarters is a spiritual place.  I am ashamed that although I believe the EDM events are a good thing, I tried so very hard to convince the Members to agree with me, often working hard to silence their objections.  Orren Whiddon, by your own hand, you have cut off your best ally in this matter.


And you all should be ashamed--ashamed of turning the Membership against each other, of making Four Quarters the setting for an elaborate game of "Spy vs. Spy."  You should be ashamed of threatening me--or any of the others whom you have punished, cyber-stalked, falsely accused, falsely represented, censured, and/or banned . You should be ashamed of even considering bringing politics into your narrative.  You should be ashamed of pompously citing the "church" Constitution even as you ignored its words--the words some of you wrote and approved--so that you could fast-track my status to "censured and banned."  You all should be ashamed for allowing Orren to ignore the law when he, in the course of an illegal eviction, broke into and vandalized my campsite, and then removed my belongings--all prior to my receiving any notice of my status.


All of you should  be ashamed of the way you have governed this "church" into not being a true Church.  A Church is a sanctuary, a place of peaceful worship and of ministry in all its forms.  A "church" is an organization that masquerades as a sanctuary, as a place of peaceful worship--but in the place of ministry there is greed, there is hubris, there is deception.  A Church's governing body takes joy in its every member; the governing body of a "church" takes advantage of its every member.  It is the governing body of this "church" that has deceived its members into somehow thinking that all of the improvements to the property were made for them, and that has, at Members Meetings, promised to prioritize certain projects in the full knowledge that those priorities would change the moment the members went home.  It is the governing body of this "church" that even now, using its "dossier", disseminates lies about its members to its members.


However, and in conclusion, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the Board of Directors for helping me to understand how many true friends I have made during my time at Four Quarters.  They are the people who matter--and they are the people who will not believe whatever it is you have in your "dossier."  Up until now, I thought that I had to come and talk to all of you, so that I could see this "dossier".  I thought that I needed to set the record straight and learn the identities of the witnesses against me.  I now know that none of those things is necessary, and in this, above all of the other lessons you have taught me in the past two months, you have blessed me beyond measure.


Yours most sincerely,

Sophia Kelly Shultz


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Gone.

8 min read

I wrote this in 2011, about a place I loved.  Was it all a dream?

To quote Phil Collins:  "I gave it all, and it's gone, and I gave it all to you, now I'm living on borrowed time, but it's mine."

The original article ran in the 2012 Wheel of the Year, the annual publication of Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary.  It describes something that is...not there anymore:

Though we ourselves can never know in which direction someone’s development ought to go, that person’s dreams “know” it. Andreas Schweitzer,
The Sungod’s Journey Through the Netherworld

Twenty-five years ago, across the hours of an April night, my dream-self went on a journey across a mountain range with a dozen people whom I knew but didn’t know. Under changeable morning skies, we set out on foot, single-file, down a long arid valley running between steep ridges whose tilted rock beds protruded above slopes of sand and loose gravel. As I walked, I noticed crystals glittering through the brown desert earth: while everyone else walked on, I paused to fill my bag with what turned out to be pink and green watermelon tourmaline, deep purple amethyst and clear quartz.  

The sky had turned dusky dark blue by the time I reached our lodging: a cheerily-lit hilltop house which belonged to two sad, dark-haired women whom I knew but didn’t know. I found my companions rolling out their sleeping bags in the cozy living room. “So there she is,” they chorused, “It’s Sophia!”  

In the morning, instead of boarding the bus that was to transport us to our next stop, I hired a native guide--a man with a black hawk--put on my heavy cloak, strapped my pack to my back, and struck out across the wide snowy plain overlooked by the house. The road was long, the sky a clear, cold blue, and dark boulders stood out starkly against the snow.  

As evening approached, we crested a hill--and were transfixed. Before us lay a lake, icy mist rising from its surface. Frost sparkled on the grass bordering the lake, leading our eyes to the huge oak trees growing on its far shore, now silhouetted by the cirrus-shrouded westering sun. My guide and I stood for a long moment taking in this scene, committing to memory its colors, the cold pale green-blue of the sky, the frigid filtered sunlight, the umber-dark tree trunks. Then reluctantly we turned away and continued down, out of the heights. The next day, we reached a place that was somehow familiar, and as we walked it was I who instructed my guide to take the downhill path to the left and to take care not to fall into the swamp.  

As we descended, the light filtering through the trees grew much warmer. We turned away from the swamp and walked along a level road dappled by golden sunshine. After a little while, we reached the base of another hill, and I heard voices: I turned to my guide and smiled, “We must almost be there.”  

The road had been excavated back into the hillside, leaving a high, steep cut to our right: as we walked up the hill, the ridge above us became visible, and I could see a row of picnic tables—and, to my amazement, my companions just sitting down to dinner. As I hurried to join them a woman waved and exclaimed, “Here she is at last!”  


I have never again experienced the peace I felt when I awoke from that dream. But what did it mean?  

My attempts to understand what I had seen led me to consult dream interpretation resources of every type, with results that were at best dissatisfying and at worst just plain irritating. Traditionally, dream interpretation involves metaphor: a psychologist--a customer at the bookstore where I worked--told me I must be afraid of deep water and hawks; dream interpretation books assigned equally unhelpfully vague and mystical meanings to the vivid images imprinted in my memory. After a couple of weeks, I resigned myself to the idea that if dream images indeed served as metaphorical signals, I was just going to have to keep my eyes open for things that approximated both journey and destination.  

And I did--for twenty years. I had some false alarms--long periods that seemed like perhaps I really was on that journey; moments that seemed like I had finally reached the destination in my dreams. But somehow, I always ended up disappointed.

Maybe it had really had been just a dream.

Although I never forgot my dream, it was not foremost in my thoughts when, in 2005, I first came to Four Quarters. After holding out for more than a year, I finally capitualted and let my friend Ann drag me to the Farm to help her take down her campsite for the winter. “You need to come here!” she'd insisted, “You need to sell your art at the festivals!”

Although it was Samhain, the gods of late October weather smiled upon us: we started our drive in the mist and chill of dawn, by the time we reached Four Quarters the temperature had risen to the point that we’d had to shed our outer layers of flannel and fleece. We drove into camp, up the long hill lined with trees dressed in the last of their autumnal finery. I got the Grand Tour: the Labyrinth, the High Meadow, the Coffee Dragons’, the Vendors’ Meadow. Finally Ann parked the van and we got out. This was It, she enthused, because from time to time she spoke in capital letters, The Most Important Part, Why We Are Here, the Stone Circle. Standing there, in the golden morning light I felt an ancestral frisson rip through me. Here we are, the Stones said. Here you are.

I had to admit it: Ann was right. I needed to come to this place.  

I hate it when she’s right.

Ann’s campsite lay well back in the Members’ Camp, on a relatively level portion of an otherwise steep hillside just beyond Broken Gnome Road. When we drove past the sign warning SWAMP AHEAD, Ann explained to me how easily one could become mired in the mud-- a foreshadowing of vehicular entrapments to come.

We spent a pleasant day taking down the campsite, laughing and joking as we packed its components into Ann’s van. By the time we finished I felt more relaxed and at home than I had ever been at any other time or place. Finally, daylight began to fade and dinnertime approached: so Ann and I set out on foot, taking the road following the creek to the Starvin’ Artists’ Cafe.  

As we toiled up the hill towards the kitchen, I happened to glance up—and what I saw stopped me dead in my tracks. There, set near the ridge of the cut that had been made to accommodate the gravel road, sat a very familiar row of picnic tables, looking as if it had been waiting all these years for my arrival.

Here I was at last.  


I am not the same person I was when Ann dragged me here.  

Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary did not affect the changes I’ve undergone, but this place and its people provided the physical and spiritual medium which permitted the exponential growth I have experienced in the last five years.  

So what have I become?  

I have become someone who knows and respects practitioners of many religions, someone who realizes that sometimes spirituality doesn’t always have--or need--a name, and that it is not necessary to have--or need--a title like “witch” or “shaman” or “priestess” to be considered a spiritual person. More importantly, I also realize that not everyone thinks the way I do. I have learned patience; I have learned service; I have participated in ritual; I have led ritual. I have learned leadership and--hopefully--humility. After feeling like an outsider for most of my life, I feel like I belong somewhere, in a community of people whom I deeply respect and who respect me.  

Here I am at last.




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Snowed In

4 min read
21 March 2018

Mood:  Optimism with a feeling of Doom

Listening to:  my dogs snoring

Better get to the Doom first...

Well, it's snowing...again.  And sleeting.  They're calling for 5-8".  Joy.

Now on with the Optimism:

I heard from my editor a scant 24 hours after sending the proposal.  She was *really* excited!!  She gave me a word count (50,000 or thereabouts) and asked for some sample art, so I am working on that now! 

Art in the To Be Framed category has been piling up.  Yesterday I matted and framed three things--here are two of them:


This is a watercolor my Aunt Joyce did, probably in the 70s.  She went through a whole rabbit phase--truly she had Rabbit for a totem--she was soft spoken most of the time, but heaven help you if you threatened her or her family!  (Hint:  don't ever corner a bunny--they will come out fighting!

In any case, my Dad had framed the bunny in the frame below, which now holds my husband's chart of Masonic divisions.  It looked for crap on the bunny.  I went fishing in my frame collection--mostly frames procured at the Salvation Army--and found this one with the $2.99 price tag still on it.  I am thrilled with the result!

David's Masonic chart posed some special problems:  the gold border you see is printed on the paper--there really is no way to mat something with a margin that small.  I ended up mounting the whole paper on a piece of really nice mat board--you tell me, but that's a heck of an optical illusion that gold border gives!!


So I've started black and white illustrations for the book proposal:  I'm also working on commissioned sewing and paintings...Spring must be close!



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The Monday Burn

10 min read
19 March 2018     5:14 AM

Mood:  Meh.  Headache looming on the horizon.  Tired from a busy weekend.  Went to bed too early last night and didn't go to bed happy.  Had to write a Letter of Concern to a loved one.

Listening to:  the furnace trying to make the 64 degree living room into a 68 degree living room.  Clunk clunk clunk as the water moves through the old iron radiators.  I am thankful we have a house and oil to heat it.

One of the things I busted my ass on this weekend was a proposal for a new book.  I'm excited about this, but I really pushed to get it done (because it was pushing me).  Here's an excerpt from the Introduction:


Tata Rodriguez was a tall, heavy set Cuban, and his desk—a gigantic and ornate mahogany dinner table, cluttered with papers and books and sprinkled with ash (cigarette combined with cigar, if my nose was to be believed)--was perfectly proportionate to him—and his enormous spiritual presence. The hot westering sun streamed through the window behind him, an impromptu halo for a man I would learn was well-versed in the habits of his saints. In the corner, a window air conditioner labored to keep his halo from giving us all heat exhaustion.

Eileen introduced us. Tata's sonorous voice accented his Cuban Spanish-accented softened English. Sometimes he positively rumbled. And his laugh— the round, hearty “Heh heh heh heh heh” I would come to associate with him—came so easily to him: there was no sign of pretense in his mannerisms. No, he could not be anything but the Real Thing.

Tata (even though that title implies that one is a godchild in a spiritual “house”, I found myself using it almost immediately) gratefully accepted my gift. While we seated ourselves in the two chairs across from him, he examined it closely. “Wow,” he said; his voice was reverent. He looked up at Eileen. “You said she was an earth spirit?” He pointed at the images on the portrait. “Look at these spirals and horses: she's air!”

I was dumbfounded. This was not really the direction I had expected we'd be taking on first meeting. Why? Because the people out at the camp talked about elements. This was a totally different spiritual mindset. Shouldn't we be talking about the spell Louise had cast? And since when was I an air spirit? Me? The girl who'd collected rocks and minerals since she was four years old, who loves mud and hikes in the woods and digging in the dirt? Air? Me? How could he know that? He hardly knew me! And what did it have to do with anything anyway?

Tata set my portrait aside and pulled out a long thin paperback volume about the size of a legal pad. It had a black cover and its pages were filled with some sort of sigils—lines and curves, arrows and spirals, plus and minus signs. As he flipped through the book, he told me they were called firmas and that they were associated with the different spirits, or Nkisi. Finally stopped and set the open book in front of me. “What do you think?”

I liked the feel of this book. A lot. The drawings guided my fingers around their lines, spirals and arrows. I turned the page, tried out the symbols there, and didn't like them nearly as much. Finally I pointed to one on the page he had first shown me and said, “I like this one.”

He chuckled and nodded. “I thought you would.” A moment passed as he searched under his papers until he extracted a handful of large cowrie shells. These he threw several times. I wondered if he was getting the answers he needed, and had just come to the conclusion that they had told him to kick me out of the house when he concluded with a decisive nod and set the shells aside. He got up and walked over to a sideboard as impressive as his desk, and started rooting in one of the drawers. “That's Centella,” he said as he extracted a necklace of brownish beads with white and black stripes. “Put this on. Centella is the Nkisi of the marketplace and the whirlwind and she guards the gates of the cemetery. She is a powerful protector. “Now,” he continued, pulling out a pad of legal sized yellow paper, “If you make this--” he sketched a skirt with panels, and labeled each one a different color, “You will be very happy to dance in it.”

I took the paper from him, folded it neatly, and stuck it in my purse.

“Okay,” he continued. “Go on over there and clean yourself off by the water altar.”

“Um,” I said.

Now he laughed, not mockingly, and pointed. “Pour some of that Agua Florida on your hands, then pretend like you're washing all over. It's just to clear your head, that's all. Eileen, you show her.”

The water altar was set up on another monumental piece of furniture—this time a bureau with a mirror. The altar itself was comprised of seven glasses of water set in two lines of three, with the seventh located in the middle. A nice looking quartz crystal lay at the bottom of each glass. Across the central glass was a large crucifix.

“What's it like over there?” he asked as I followed Eileen's directions for “cleaning off”.

The Agua Florida powerful scent had sent my head spinning, but I nodded. “Peaceful.”

“Good,” he remarked. “That's how it's supposed to be. Did cleaning off help?”

“I think so,” I said. My whole being was humming. Was that what it meant, to be “cleaned off”?

“Good,” he said. I'll be right back.”

Eileen looked like she was about to burst. “Isn't this amazing?” she enthused.

I looked around the room, at the shelves of papers and books, the statues—particularly the huge statue of the Virgin Mary presiding over three men in a boat that occupied a side table near the desk—and the odd assortment of materials that filled the shelves and the mantle of the old Victorian fireplace. It wasn't what I had expected—but what had I expected? An Important Man dressed in a leopard skin wearing a necklace of human teeth and holding a spear? A darkened room hung with herbs and rooster feet?

Then I remembered: in Jorge Amado's books, the priests are regular people.

Tata reappeared in the doorway. Let's go downstairs.”

As I followed him towards the basement, I glanced out a window and saw street lights. When had night fallen? We'd just arrived!



If it's accepted, this will be a non-fiction book about Palo, an Afro-Caribbean religion that is a cousin to Santeria.


Meanwhile, The Promethean Oracle was not chosen as Oracle Deck of the Year 2017, but it was still really cool to be nominated!!


Projects:  Finishing up a costume for a friend of mine, a Sith.  I love making Sith costumes!  Jedi are so...brown.



Up and Coming:  


 The festival season begins in earnest really soon!  I have a new credit card processing company:  www.nationalmerchants.com/  They are FANTASTIC.  

I have been contributing to Fanlore, a website devoted, you might have already deduced, to All Things Fannish.  Scrapbooking has many advantages, as long as you don't let it run your life--if  spending money at Michael's becomes a daily thing, seek psychiatric help.  For one thing, in my search for the stuff I wanted to go into the book, I recycled SEVEN  document boxes stacked high with paper.  Many things were thrown out or went to recycling or the Salvation Army.  But I digress:  here are some of the Fanlore links:

fanlore.org/wiki/Colonial_Con     (I wrote this one)


To the others I contributed commentary and images.  

Scrapbooking also has me working in Photoshop Elements.  





The photo is from 1987 and yes believe it or not that's me.  In the background used to be my best friend's apartment door, but with much patience and learning-on-the-fly, I even got the letters at the top to look like they were carved in the background!


I like that the bottom looks like a painting!


Speaking of paintings I have a few of those on the horizon too.  More on that later!











 
 

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Featured

Oracle Decks! by badgersoph, journal

Today's Reality by badgersoph, journal

Gone. by badgersoph, journal

Snowed In by badgersoph, journal

The Monday Burn by badgersoph, journal