The Sacred Path

While perusing the internet for things obscure I ended up at a poetry site reading Margaret Atwood’s poem, Siren Song, which I had not read in many years. I’ve included the poem, which you can find by clicking the “continue reading” tag below, but first a little review of mythology for those of you who may not be familiar with the Sirens.

In Greek mythology the Sirens were sea deities who lived on an island called Sirenum scopuli and were the daughters of Achelous. Some versions of the myth say that the Sirens were the playmates of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, and daughter of Zeus and Demeter. After Persephone was abducted the Sirens were given wings and it is said that their song is continually calling to Persephone. If a ship passed within hearing range of the island the sailors upon hearing the Sirens sing, would jump into the sea and to their fate at the hands of the Sirens. Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “The siren sings so sweetly that she lulls the mariners to sleep; then she climbs upon the ships and kills the sleeping mariners.” Source on Siren mythology: Wikipedia

One can claim that this is all just fantasy, flights of imagination, myth, but the sad fact is that history is full of examples of the Siren Song captivating and seducing mankind. There are almost endless verses to the Siren Song with many yet unsung, and with each successive generation new Sirens take up the lyre and begin to sing. Always the result is the same; people are seduced and jump into the sea.

When we leap into the sea at hearing a Siren Song, we give our personal power away to the Siren, and once given it is not easy to get back. It is vitally important that we each think calmly and clearly before giving our personal power to anyone. It is our responsibility to ourselves and to the entirety of existence, and we should not take this responsibility lightly.

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I have bitten the bullet and gotten my own domain name and have transferred most of my blog at wordpress.com (thesacredpath.wordpress.com) over to my new domain. I have other things going on and having my own web host will allow me much more flexibility including being able to get my photographic website up and running, and having a incredible array of themes to choose from (wordpress.com is a little limited on the themes they offer). I’m still for the moment existing in two places with The Sacred Path, and there are a couple posts I have yet to transfer over here.

When I officially make the change, I will put one last post on my wordpress.com blog letting everyone know of the change and give a link to this blog. I’ll delete everything off of that blog except for the “We’ve Moved” post and leave it up for about six months.

If you realized that the nurtured spiritual part of yourself would accompany you on your eternal journey and that everything that you have labored so hard to accumulate would vanish the instant you depart this world, would it alter your daily agenda? - Walter Cooper

I help out a little in the WordPress.com technical support forums answering questions and helping with problems where I can. It’s an interesting experience and I find joy in being able to help people out. A lot of it is simply answering the same questions over and over. The search functions in the frequently asked questions (FAQ) and forums leaves a little (OK, more like a lot) to be desired, but a good portion of people don’t even attempt to search, they just type in a (many times cryptic) question and hit the submit button. Some of us (volunteers all) that help out have files we keep on our desktop with answers to questions asked frequently and with links to FAQ’s and answers that already exist. With questions we have an answer for in our file, we just copy and paste. No sense describing (inventing) the wheel over and over again.

A small portion of the posts are frantic and thick with drama, in effect saying, “my blog is my life and if this problem or that isn’t solved this moment, my life is over.” Panic, fear, stress, doom! One such case lately has to do with a bug in the Akismet spam filter used at wordpress.com. The bug, according to WordPress staff is ellusive and they have not been able to track it down. Since 92% of the comments made on blogs are spam, disabling it is not really an option (some blogs get over 4,000 spams a day), and because the software used at WordPress.com is multiuser, it would be difficult to give us each the option to turn it off on our individual blogs. There are a number of us caught up in this bug (don’t really know how many) that are not able to review all the comments caught by Akismet so we cannot tell if it is catching legitimate comments or not (apparently for some it is). A problem to be sure, but is it really the end of your world?

I took care of this by putting an explanation of the problem on my “Contact/Comments” page, so if you make a comment and your comment doesn’t show up within a day or two at the most, use my contact page and I’ll manually add your comment for you until such time as WordPress solves the problem.

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