Z Budapest Blog

Where are you sisterhood?
Was it so hard to hold on to each other?
Was it so hard to forgive each other our human flaws?
We disappointed each other because we didn’t turn out to be divine as planned?
Are you once again alone with the struggle?
Making a living while being a woman too difficult?

I know it can be. A woman body is a full time job. Just to be healthy, we need to mind our natural cycles, bleeding every month is not fun. Two weeks tied down with the menstruation, one week pre-tension, then the bloods, and then the waning of the bloods.

Whoever says otherwise is lying. While we balance on high heels, secretly we hope our bloody pad wont move up to our back, or aspire to become shoulder pads. Bleeding is hard work. And it’s expensive. The cost of tampons, pads, the teas, the pills, the loss of joy in life, comes out of our own pockets. We finance a nation’s fertility. Not fair.

The government doesn’t pay women for being fertile, but it pays men to have erections. Viagra is covered in health plans. Birth control for women is not.  Where is the outrage?

The other day I managed to get my hands on a precious old book called, “Handbook of Women’s Liberation” written by Joan Robins. This was the very first book I read when I arrived in Los Angeles written by a contemporary feminist sister. Back then it costs $2.95, today I got it for twenty dollars. But I was so happy it was avaible at all.

In order to hold on to your Goddess consciousness you have to build in your mind a place for her with feminism. This is how she sticks with you through thick and thin.

What’s in the book?

Ms. Robins gives us a quick background on the early feminists, the suffragists from the last century. It’s good to know whose shoulders we are standing on. It’s good to know what they have done right. They organized themselves, set reasonable goals, and were relentless in pursuit of their goals. Unfortunately the narrow goal of the vote was all they could get us in order to change the female social status from chattel to citizen with a vote. This took them 75 years. Only the youngest daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot Stanton Blatch, lived to see the vote won. Young Alice Paul drafted the Equal Rights Amendment, the very night the women celebrated their right to vote. That law has still not passed.

The short history of where the Second Wave comes from the Civil Rights Movement, and the Peace Movement where women have participated, only to be ordered back to make coffee for the male peaceniks and the black male revolutionaries.

There was a point when the women came to consciousness about how inconsistent that was with the goals they have supported. This is when the women left the movements of the males and created their own. There are wonderful pictures in the back of the book showing us these young faces, just like yours today, marching down on Fifth.

This is the Second Wave that invented the ingenious and effective C.R. Groups, consciousness raising groups, which I think we should reframe and reinvent for this huge wave of generation Z.

How is C.R. Groups different from study groups or discussion groups?

In the C.R. Group, the emphasis is on the personal experiences of each woman. We use what we learn first-hand from each other to politically analyze the status of women. “We wanted to build our own analysis of the conditions of women and from that derive a theory of action,” Robins writes.

I think our oppression certainly changed since 1970 when this book was written, but not so much in essence.

For example in the seventies, two-thirds of women were not employed. Instead we all labored privately; the unpaid labor of housewives’ and genital work (marriages).

Today the workforce is majority female workers, but the country is still run by old white males, who live in the fifties mentally.

Back then, women were not admitted to universities, or just not as many as men, today since admittance finally changed into merit based decisions, 75 percent of women comprise the student body in all collages and universities. Wahoo!

So we can pat ourselves on the shoulders, good work! Education is the key to liberation. Education is the key to independence. The key to human-hood for women. And we got it!

But here is a list what we have not dealt with yet, and these are huge problems.

Male supremacy:
This is the active behavior of men to hurt women. It starts in elementary school, and lasts a lifetime of anti-female propaganda. In our times, it’s very sophisticated, but hidden or not, its worse then ever before.

First we thought that only a few men, not capitalism was the culprit, who benefit from women’s unpaid labor. But male chauvinism is a cultural belief that males are superior to women. Most male god religions endorse this. Southern Baptists for example, President Carter just has written a letter of why he quit the church over their ingrained sexims.The Taliban teach the same thing, different male god … same oppression for us. Taliban kills us if we talk to a boy who’s not our relative; not long ago in Europe the church killed for six hundred years long women for witchcraft. Once accused, the women never came home again.

It’s a self-entitlement to feel superior to women, to make women serve and benefit males. Financially, in sex trades, children are the next target; born to poor mothers, men sell children to each other for sex and free labor. All men derive benefits from this enslavement of women, not just the pimps and johns, but the good men who do nothing culturally to control their brothers.

Back when Robins wrote her book, women could not foresee how to get out from under. But as herstory shows us, the collective female energies converged quite naturally and choose to go through the cracks of the doors that the Second Wave has opened for us.

What has become the norm are the personal solutions. We used to scuff at personal solutions versus the collective solutions, but in retrospect I think the female principle was right to fix our status with education first.

We are just not ready to attack the rest of the problems.

We tasted little of the return of the collective solution when we have voted for Hillary Clinton. She did get 180 million votes. That’s a good chunk of approval from women with jobs. Now if we just contemplate the Pro-Woman line, the bearers of the new society.

Blame. If we just stopped blaming each other and victims of violence, and see all women … the talented and the slow, the beautiful and the homely, the fat and the skinny, the PhD and the high school drop outs, the pregnant and the barren. We are all connected in the web of life. When you walk down the street, men don’t look at you and say, there goes a PhD. educated women. They still just see a female, any female, vulnerable.

Wake up and stay awake! Speak up wherever you are. Form the new C.R. Groups. So much work still needs to be done.

Linking up, networking, speaking back to power.

Here we are in 010, entering the second decade of the 21^st century. It is still the sub-age of Aquarius. It is still the favorable times for humans to wake up to a new self understanding. This is happening in big quantum leaps, fueled by technology and science. Congratulations to all fellow planetary travelers! We have arrived in the future.

But now what?

We have more and more women come to us searching for a LOCAL group, contact where they can join, study and grow. This used to be rather easy in the last century. You went to your local bookstore; you hung out around the bulletin board, read the stuff on it, then added your own request, “Goddess study group forming” and the phone number. Pretty soon the first woman would call, who knew another, and in a couple of weeks you had a good little eager group; armed with Goddess books, healthy tea collections, and time set aside to be just a student of your own culture.

Women’s studies at Universities is not what it used to be, its still great we have them at all, alas under the name of Gender Studies, but who cares let’s just be grateful. These are still places where women can gather and plan actions.

Once you have created yourself an account with us, the Dianic University, we will let you use our Global Goddess Dianic Groups virtual bulletin board, look it through for women in your neighborhoods, add you name to the particular state and region you are at. Then we will have a central board  to post on for just this. Local connections.

Because we only let people we checked out on the board, you are safer to post and call whoever you find. I recommend exchanging email addresses first and get to know each other. Once you decide to meet up, do it in a public place first … maybe for coffee or tea. Check each other out and then exchange contact information.

But more than beginners, first timers, seekers of all kinds, we also need volunteers who help us battle the cultural anti-woman forces. You don’t think that the battle field is any less than before computers. Each time I go on the radio, or write something very pro-woman, anti-establishment, anti-male god material, I get attacked on the internet from men who hate that we have advanced as much as we have. They would like to see the Goddess Movement fade with my lifetime; me destroyed on the visibility field, my ideas and philosophies relegated to the trash bin.

Bobbie, my mighty Amazon, is the only one on the field battling this, so far successfully. But we could not have been defending ourselves without the help of women working in those technology citadels of power, the Goggles, wikis, who knew about the Goddess Movement. Imagine that! We are everywhere.

We need new allies with some time and skills. Not just hey I want to try to help, but rather … hey, I can battle on the techie field with the best of them and I don’t mind a little work out against the invisible forces.

This is what l’d like to put out to you. Please techie women with writing skills, step forward and make contact with me and Bobbie. The cultural war consists often in creating material, but also tracking down where the trouble comes from, correction information when it’s wrong.

Our visibility on the cultural field is crucial in the elevation of our sex.

When women don’t know how to link up, network, and publish … we can easily be marginalized again.

Don’t forget women are the majority of all humans. We create everybody from our own bodies. We raise citizens, consumers, and all the tax payers.

Women deserve their own culture. This is the part of the battle field that needs boosting. Individuals can do a lot, but we need the help, the link-up with the successful women, the higher end income women, the university program directors, and the leadership who organizes workshops, conferences, and gathering of all kinds.

For example, link us up with organizations where the women already formed groups, where we can cast a wider net when we disseminate information.

When we tighten our skills around the new technology and form a cultural staff around our own interests, then we can serve women on all level much better.

What I don’t want to end up is alone, battling the evil forces of cultural marginalization, and witness the new century pushing women’s issues, women’s needs and women’s spirituality aside.

What we have is a lucky opportunity to flood with our skillful energy into the collective consciousness, making room there for the love and respect for women; create a world where women don’t have to go to collage to learn about their past, our own  dianics, and whose shoulders we are standing on.

Information about our spiritual heritage will create a proud generation of women, talented, blooming, and confident.

Let us all go into the depth of the sub-age of Aquarius in this certainty, when women lead the planet thrives.

Blessed be,
Z Budapest

I’m on the radio this Sunday with the good folks from Salem’s Hex Education. Should be a good chat as the witches of the east meet up with the witch of the west. Who knows where this conversation will go?!!

Christian and Lori are honored and excited to welcome Z. Budapest to Hex Education! Dianic Feminist Wicca Founder and Women’s Spirituality Movement Foremother, Z. Budapest is at the top of any Who’s Who list in the Craft. Her first book was The Feminist Book Of Light and Shadows, later retitled The Holy Book Of Women’s Mysteries. This was followed by The Grandmother of Time, Godmother Moon, and Goddess In The Office; at least one of these books is probably in your library! In 1974, she was arrested for fortune telling as a result of reading tarot cards, and that lead to her being the last person to be tried for witchcraft in the United States. This is a rare opportunity to hear from one of the true pioneers of the Craft!

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/HexEducation/2009/08/17/Special-Guest-Z-Budapest

What an addictive tool the Internet! I can’t wait in the morning to run to my online school and see what my students have written! They have homework, they have destiny work, they have Tree work, and they chitchat with each other forming/nurturing an international women’s community.

I am very impressed. I started teaching in the days of the mimeograph machine (early seventies). Yes, Virginia, we cranked the pages out one by one by hand, and got a lot of ink on ourselves in turn. The ink didn’t come off for weeks.

Then we advanced to Xerox machines, expensive but faster. Printing the first women’s liberation newsletter SISTER was a later development, after we mastered the art of asking for money and taking on regular subscribers. History just went fast forward from then on.

In the early eighties we still didn’t have computers; the machine we had was big and not much more than a glorified typing machine. But the times went into warp space, and suddenly we had computers, and email, and the works. Internet came as the topping on the cake. It has leveled the field all around the globe. Suddenly we are one not just in theory but as a tangible global community. I know what my friend in Budapest is cooking in her pot, and what my other friend in Brazil is reading. They know if I have some troubles with my IMAC, or the email is acting up. I bought me a pair of boots online and they fit! This must be the ultimate victory, saving time for fine things like nature walks. Smelling the roses.

I am an Aquarian with Libra Moon, Sagittarius rising. As a teacher I am best when I get to talk to my students in person, but I had to learn new tricks.

How to establish a school, online, where the students won’t get bored, won’t feel abandoned, and how do I urge them on to actually invest the time and finish the homework I have assigned to them?

How do I reward them? Do I need to give out grades? How often do I need to comment on their work? What about the peer review?
Isn’t that more exciting?

Life has stepped in and I had to go away to Europe to get some surgery done. I had double hip replacements and in that time I had a crappy computer to work on with not the American keyboard available, but a European one, with the letters and Y all mixed up. It was a nightmare.

But never mind. The Information Age has not let me down. My students have endured valiantly my misspelled words. They were kind about the long pauses when I was post-op and unable to sit without pain at the computer. I managed to hold on to my website. New students have come, and in fact my business doubled while I was laid off getting better.

Now we are nearing the 3rd year anniversary for the Dianic University. We have amassed a lot of homework in our resources; students and I started seeing that some reward IS in order, like a certificate that they had completed my curriculum. I am working on that now.

What are we learning?

My idea was to create a place where women can come and study as they have time. These women are new moms, some are students at Universities, some are professional women, some are kids. The Goddess is a family-friendly study. The Wisdom Track is a journey around the sun, taken together and taken consciously.

Each month has a Goddess monolog, and seasonal information about the sacred trees, birds, stones, and inner life. We share these with each other. Yes, its based on my book Grandmother of Time, but my books are to be lived, not just read. Reading about nature helps, but living it makes the journey visceral, makes it personal, something to share with each other.

What I found most exciting all my life is getting to know the trees. Sacred trees, every one of them. Some of them are more famous than others, but I think all trees are the very lungs of the beloved blue planet. Lungs and breath, spirit.

To make acquaintance with a local tree is to spend time with her: Hang out around her; Make some contact; Touch her; Kiss her bark. Tree-huggers dream assignments! The tree is not fast in responding, but when we take them seriously, the trees are direct phone lines to LIFE. A couple of heartfelt visits, maybe asking for a wand. These visits can become prayers.
I am very close to two trees in the cemetery park where I walk my dogs in Oakland. Here the trees are allowed to grow big and stay alive.
My beloved FRIEND, a yellow poplar, greets me as I start my walk. She sees me from afar, waits until I too can see her. Then, like a person, she begins to dance with her leaves. First just a few on the outside. Closer I come, more and more. This is independent from the wind conditions. When the wind is blowing of course she is more active. She can express excitement, she can express love, she can say yes and no depending on how she moves. I have learned her leafy language, I know what she is saying most of the time.

I tell her about my life. I ask her to send me more friends. (I have actually met two women later in the park after I asked her to help my social life). I asked her to send me more students. Most of the time I bless her and she in turn blesses me.

I have introduced her to friends of mine who do not walk this park, she approved on one, she wasn’t quite as enthused about another. Just like a person.

I urge my students to find this kind of deep personal relationship with a good tree. Many have managed to find their Tree Sisters, but some are more in tune with flowers. Some love stones better, have personal relationships with rose quartz, opals, amethysts, moonstones, and even diamonds. These human-to-planet experiences are prayers. We realign our souls with the natural world. No longer orphans, us women. We belong here. This is our time and our space. This is our planet.

Spell casting is expected from us witches, so there is a good amount of suggestions towards successful practice. But we don’t consider spell casting a daily chore. We use prayers, and abundant blessings on everything, mostly the water from which all things emerged. Than you water! Thanks and blessings change the molecular picture of water; it changes when receiving gratitude. It’s magic on a daily basis.

I have another Tree Friend. I call her Cork Mama Oak. She is magnificent. Her strong limbs reach out in a effortless stretch, her arms are thicker than my trunk. She has the sexiest groove between her main branches, and I bury my face in there and whisper sweet nothings to LIFE. She is also my Altar. Here I cast my most urgent spells just with words into her cork skin. I can hear my voice echoed back. (How does she do that?) When I finish, I leave with a much lightened heart. I kiss her several times before I leave. The feel of her cork skin feels dry but wonderful. I know I am the only one who has ever kissed her with deep love; maybe the only one to kiss her at all.

As part of our learning, we come together and talk about what has happened. How our prayers were answered by the trees. How our connection to nature created for us a family. How our love for the planet is growing. This love often gets translated into action for the environment. For peace. For each other.

I am back!

Oh what a feeling! I have come home from the hospital about two weeks ago. It takes that much time to reconnect with yourself. In the hospital I was just a patient. I made some good connections with a couple of nurses and cleaning ladies. They saw my small grotto of the Lady of the Guadalupe, commented on it, ‘Oh she is my saint too” said one of the Rns.

Little-by-little the staff became aware that I am a Goddess worshipper. It takes one to know one. My six weeks in room 4492 crawled first, then suddenly it was almost done, and then it was.

I came away with very high opinions on some drugs, others I didn’t take, none of the so called narcotics. I tried them, but felt lobotomized next day.

The hip was fine. I could easily walk on my crutches. And late at night when things were quiet, I would walk the halls doing my laps before bed.

I started a new way to pray; now I just hum and sing, a tune comes in, then I make up words to fit it in. It soothes me better then the repetitious prayers I learned in my childhood.

My Bobbie grew a huge zucchini in the time I was away. We had it for supper twice.  I eat a lot of berries and cantaloupes, the cherry season has come and almost gone, but the huge Bing cherries from Washington are coming to the stores. My inner flora is restored almost. The six weeks twice a day antibiotic drip wiped out my apatite, and every living organism that wasn’t nailed down in my system.

The goddess answered my prayers about finding a private water place to strengthen my muscles.  Patricia was in the same room at the first hospital, where the surgeries are done. She offered me her ever-swim pool. I have never seen one in real life. I visited her last week, and wow! The ever-swim is huge, you swim against a current, and she had a hot tub right next to the pool. So I have somewhere to go, after I come home from my trip to Madison.

All-in-all the summer is here, I am working feverishly on three projects, thankful for the chance to walk again.

Have you seen the GODDESS magazine yet? It’s getting to be a real powerful teaching tool. Make sure you send it to all your friends. We are webbing the sacred web.

[podcast]http://wicca.dianic-wicca.com/mp3/bobbie.intro2du.mp3[/podcast]Getting started in the Dianic University

The Dianic Wicca University Online is a place for women of all ages to hone their skills and craft as witches- solitaries, circle priestesses, priestesses -in- training, maidens, mothers, crones, and amazons alike will find spiritual food for thought, activities, lessons, and a world of enchantment. Won’t you join us in sisterhood and self-discovery?

We’ve also made a video to show you how to use the Dianic Wicca Unviersity, making studying online with Z Budapest more vigina friendly.

In the full force of a Californian winter, in the thickest of the rainfalls, PantheaCon convened.

This is the largest witches gathering on Earth. More then two thousand pagan folks, from many traditions come together to share workshops, rituals and just visiting. Lots of young women and men, spilled out from San Jose airport, faces saying, let me get to my room, and change and hope I am not missing any hot parties or rituals.

The elevators worked full blast until one of them got “possessed” and would take people only to two floors, the bottom one and the highest one on the tenth floor. And, that’s where the private parties were held.

Granny rehab had herself a brand new wheelchair. A nice one from Craig’s list. The chrome shined, the brakes worked, the leather seat was comfortable. We used its back to hang on more things we needed to carry. Granny Rehab went in style.

Granny Rehab was presiding over two major rituals. One was well worn in, for five years, the Self-Blessing ritual, for women only.

The purpose of this one is to confront our reality, our bodies and change the paradigm with which we as women look at ourselves.

It’s possible you know to bamboozle even the smartest of us with constant barrage of negative female body messages. They show us the magazines in which even the thin models who had no other food for years but a leaf of lettuce, even those are air brushed to make them look ethereal, slimmer, or just dead. Women in those low-weight mass don’t even bleed every month. Mother Nature thinks fertility is wasted on them since they don’t nourish themselves. You’ve got to have a little fat for being able to nourish a baby.

So who is the good woman? Or the good enough woman? It’s a dead woman.

We have asked the women to step in front of a tall mirror, naked, and bless themselves with holy water, a mix of water and wine. Both are symbols of transformation.

Then dipping their fingers into the holy water, touch five points on themselves, while we all sing the Blessings song.

First the head.

Bless me mother for I am your child.

This one is received with arms stretched out, hugging the invisible.

This is momentous. We declared ourselves the child of the Great Mother, not a father. A potent heresy. This is when the magic begins. The self-transformation.

Bless my eyes to see your ways!

The women touch their eyes, lingering behind the darkness of their palms.

How often do we not see? Do we see the planet in her beauty, in our senses, and without? Do we KNOW who she is, this invisible omnipresent entity, this planet whose origins are our origins? How mind blowing is this? We are the same stuff, as the stars. Lunar primates, arrived at the historical geological scene just last few minutes, and already over ran the Earth with our kind.

We need to SEE her Ways.

Respect, adjust, flourish.

Bless my nose to smell your essence!

Here we are talking about smelling the Life around us. Smells have the most brain cells assigned, smelling gives deep knowing. Her essence smells good to us. It’s exciting and pleasurable.

Bless my lips to speak of your name.

Touching the lips, wetting them with wine and water. Joy and life juice.

Here the women take a deep breath. All our fears about cancer rises up in our throats as we sing.

Bless my breasts, formed in Strength and Beauty.

Indeed bless our breasts. Mammalian breasts. Species maintaining breasts. Much maligned and criticized tits. To big, to small, to old to young. Never good enough, poor tits. They need work. They need lifting. They need correcting; they are just not good enough.

If women spent the money they spend to “correct” their tits for the current fashion fascists, on KNOWLEDGE, we could have found the cure for cancer by now.

Bless our tits with health. For strength, and beauty.

Bless my belly for Pleasure and Life.

Ohh, ohhh the BELLY! Poor belly has a war waged on her daily. Belly which is the center of transformation, we put in our food there and we get energy to live and love, and make money. Food equals life, equals a happy tummy.

Millions of dollars are spent on tummy tucks, diets, workout gyms. We think we have to use less room in the universe. We believe that having a flat tummy will bring us love. This has been like this ever since I came to this country. At one point I lived on metrical for a month, lost all the second baby fat, got flat tummy. NO matter. Nothing has changed. You can be slim and very unhappy. Very lonely.

Bless my feet to walk in your path.

Here it is. The mission. Find your mission, and pursue happiness, walk the path of Peace. But wars follow us, and now the climate change is coming. Older folks hope they won’t see it, Granny Rehab worries that

She will see it, and perish. Like those skeletons from Pompeii, who didn’t flee as the rest of the citizens.

Women want to walk in the path of peace. Often we don’t know how. We attack each other, we accept the lie that women need men to survive emotionally, and hence we can never be friends with each other but only contestants. If you are gay, at least this part is not a pressure, since lesbians learned how to hang together one ex-lover at a time. A family of women. One clique at a time.

Finally the ritual ends as it has started. Arms to the sky, singing …

Bless me Mother for I am your child!

Embracing the transformation, feeling the connection to the divine.