Building My Personal Traditions: Food & Prayer

Tags

animism, food, gods, polytheism, prayer, web

The building of personal tradition is one that every person does, regardless of religious or spiritual affiliations. We necessarily create rituals throughout our days and lives, and the body of these form our own personal traditions. While religious traditions as a whole give prescriptions and guidelines for rituals, from large to mundane, it is the decision of the practitioner to incorporate said rituals into their daily lives. As most of us who belong to smaller, marginalized and less established (or less recorded, as in fewer historical records left) spiritual and religious traditions can attest, incorporating rituals into daily life can be a challenge. Well, at least it is for me, and from this point forward, I’ll be speaking from personal experience.

I hear the phrase “every act in your life is spiritual/magical/for the gods/etc” fairly frequently. This concept is both simple and complex, because it’s easy to think this on paper. Yet, when you try to take the concept and apply it to your own life, particularly when you have a fairly complex and frequently evolving religious viewpoint, it’s actually really damn difficult. Thinking something is sacred is a far cry different than actually taking the time out of your day to acknowledge sacredness.

I’m in a stage in my life where I’m trying to consolidate a lot of things mentally, including my feelings and identification with polytheism, paganism, animism, witchcraft and my own spiritual notions, set against the backdrop of college, working, apartment life with a nonpagan roommate, pagan friends, nonpagan boyfriend and parents who won’t find out I’m pagan until I’m graduated from college and doing well enough in life that they can’t blame my spiritual beliefs for bad things in my life like they have done video games and other hobbies (I’m not bitter, not one bit). Being at this chaotic and critical time, I’ve decided to establish some stability and really think hard about how I want to incorporate my spiritual life into my every day life, because really, they aren’t separate things.

Part of this examination involves looking at the taken for granted statement that everything in your life is sacred, and seeing how it would actually apply. Now, I know a lot of people can argue that, in fact, nothing besides ritual actions are considered sacred (in at least what we as humans do) and I get that. I understand miasma and I know it’s a thing, but I’m at a point where, to understand the bad, I have to understand the not bad first. So, the way I’m applying sacred here is almost a separate notion of the word, where I consider that sacredness is that which involves the gods/spirits/us/etc interacting in a not offensive manner to said gods/spirits/etc, but not necessarily something that is done in a sacred space or in a sanctified manner (again, this is personal exploration, and if you have a problem with my exploration of variations of definitions, well, I don’t particularly care).

The first area of this that I want to look at is food, particularly prayer at mealtime. This may seem like a very silly place to start, but I think it’s a good one. We are surrounded by people praying at meals (well, at least when the family gets together for the holiday, and your mother asks you to pray every time and you are pretty sure she does it because she suspects you aren’t Christian, and you awkwardly shuffle the prayer to some other person hopefully younger or less around the family than you) regardless of specific religious traditions. What better way to cultivate mindfulness about where our food comes from than before we eat it, right?

So, when I first think of praying before a meal, where does my mind go? It wanders to thinking something along the lines of “since I’m a polytheist, what gods should I thank for this meal?”  While this isn’t an awful sentiment by any means, I think it shows a fair about of holdover from a monotheist/Christian upbringing.  I’m an animist, and so I should acknowledge the spirits that were/are in the food I’m about to consume.  I should think of the processes it takes to get such foods, whether it be from a farm or from a processing plant or from my own garden.  I should think about the hands said food crossed after it was harvested, and the respective energies of those who handled the food.  Of course, the gods should also be thanked as well.  Yet, it’s taken me a bit to get the idea through my fairly thick skull that, while the gods are, well, the gods, the food I eat comes from  much more than just their blessings upon the fields.  While oftentimes pagans and others who are environmentally conscious focus on the bad parts of the food production, many of us, particularly when we are first starting out, forget to do the whole ‘thankful’ bit.  As in, I’m quite thankful we have the technology to harvest, transport, roast and brew my coffee, regardless of whether or not it was fair trade.  In fact, the origin of said coffee doesn’t change the fact that it still passed through those hands, it still has the spirits in it, it still went through the manufacturing process, it was still shipped to my kroger, I still bought it, I still roasted it in my japanese coffee maker, and I still poured a ton of coffeemate creamer into it.  And it doesn’t change the fact that the gods definitely influenced all of it either.  I just am now realizing that there’s more to it than that.

Every little action we do, everything we consume, everything we use and interact with, whether it be living, dead or inorganic material, is the way it is by a massive web of interactions that radiates throughout the world.  Which means, of course, we are the way we are, I am the way I am, in the same manner.  And that’s pretty damn amazing, when you think about it.

Recent Adventures

Tags

Altar, beasts, crafting, deer, Incense, ritual, turkey, woodwork

(warning, lots of photos)

The past month or so has been fun of random bits of awesomeness, from the tracking of deer in one city to the finding of bones in another, to incense making and ritual preparation.

A while back, during my spring break, I headed out with my stepdad to explore the woods behind my mother’s home, a small house in the middle of the city that happens to border a wooded area. There, they get herds of 7-13 deer, some of which my mother can identify quite well. Since the area had seen so much deer traffic, the signs were everywhere.

Signs of bucks in the woods

Hoofprints in the mud

The air was rich with a dash of wild magic, as I slowly learn to try and see the world with new eyes. Perhaps the tunnels of thorns are faery glens and to walk under archways of old spiny growth would be to walk into another land, never to return. Mushrooms form ladders and scale the trees, and the signs of life are everywhere.

A gateway

Fungi ladder to the sky

Also, there was a LOT of deer poop. Just sayin.

I’ve been experimenting in different kinds of crafting, from clay (which I’ve used before) as well as beginning to wood burn.

A sculpy rose before baking.

Belladonna and death for my alraun, first experiment into woodburning.

A partially done box for my magpie smudge wing, 2nd attempt at woodburning

Amarth and I got together on a Friday night and began crafting some incense, first a batch of for the dark moon and then one for the full moon, while burning some lovely bee propolis resin from Sarah Lawless. We drank tea and nibbled apple butter toast after, while watching the awesome movie with SJ and Bekah Kelso, Ember Days. We set up a small altar on the table and called the presences as well as calling my house spirits, who I figured would like to get in on some of the goodness.

Our altar for crafting and offerings

Me grinding away. Excuse the tank top, I was in comfy clothes!

Amarth huffing and puffing away!

Our finished products are drying and curing right now, perhaps we’ll test the full moon one soon!

First time making incense pellets. Hopefully they smell good. Used honey to bind them.

The next day, Amarth and I, along with his boyfriend, headed out to the local lake. We ambled along the shoreline and found all kinds of goodies and dozens of holey stones, one of which I took home with me for my first! We also found some old red bricks we will scrape and turn into brick dust.

After, we journeyed into the woods. We had intended on harvesting some poplar buds (we were going to try to use eastern cottonwood instead of balsam, as we don’t have those pretties in the south) for balm of gilead, but we realized we couldn’t identify one in the midst of hundreds while just relying on bark alone. We’ll have to wait until next year after we identify more trees in the area. We romped around for a while and found a giant cedar. After some fun climbing, we found a small vertebrae at the bottom. We buried it, and when we returned a week later found flowers growing over it.

Later during the first visit, we found the most amazing thing- 2 deer skeletons! They were not intact, but we found a large portion of bones (no skulls, but jawbones), as well as some remains from a turkey. We gathered part and created a small shrine area of the rest, as we didn’t have room to take care of all the bones (we each live in apartments). We left hairs for an offering then and came back the next weekend, leaving corn and other foodstuffs as well as spending time cleaning up the woods around the bones. We are fairly sure coyotes were responsible. While I have no pictures of the bones (I will post after cleaning and whitening), I do have some of us being silly!

Climbing a deadwood tree overlooking the low shoreline of winter lake water

The shoreline and lakeside

Amarth and Nym in a tree. I’m not a natural climber, so my feet look really awkward

PBP: A is for Animism

Tags

animism, Pagan Blog Project, PBP

Second post for the Pagan Blog Project, only 3 months late! Whoo!

Lately, I’ve been considering my own personal views on the world.  How things relate, how I relate to them, etc etc. While thinking of what I hold to be ‘truth’, at least at the present moment, I’ve redefined mentally and related more to the ideas that have evolved within me. One of these is animism.

In our Trad, we are panentheistic (which I will probably do another post on later) as well as animists. It’s take a while for me to begin to move into the realm of animism, if part because I was not necessarily exposed to the feelings of reverence for things in every day life while I was growing up. I came from a background of loose Christians, the Easter/Christmas variety, although my mother did read to me from a picture bible every night when I was very young. My family never recycled and we rarely gardened, although mum has picked a bit up later in life, although she doesn’t always possess the greenest of thumbs (she has managed to keep the African violets from our great aunt alive though, if for anything because my great aunt, who has more sass than 3 old biddies put together, would heckle her roundly if she let them die!). I grew up learning to fish with my mom’s long term boyfriend/might as well be my step dad, and he also taught me archery and took me hunting. I never had a good shot, and so I didn’t take it. I was raised to never cause undo suffering- don’t hunt for sport but meat instead, know how to cleanly deal with fish, always take care of the animals in your life. Yet, like many modern Americans (perhaps in other places too, but I can only speak for general southern suburbia) this did not extend to the plant life, or the other objects around me. Of course, we never littered or left things behind at fishing sites (in fact, we’d pick up some things if we had room) but there was no feeling of being connected. We did a tiny bit of what should have been our part, although it was much more than many people I know. I often wish I listened to my grandmother more, for she was full of knowledge about the trees, the birds, the woods. She loved to hunt ginseng and mushrooms and could tell you what birds were singing and what trees were everywhere. She was a southern woman who could kill and prepare a chicken just as well as cut the head off a snake that was near where the children played. I dearly miss her.

All this background diatribe is mostly to show how I grew up, and how I bet many others grew up as well. When I moved to my path of Witchcraft, it took quite a while for my mindset to start to change. Last year was the first time I had a real garden, and I loved it, but I still messed things up. I still didn’t relate to the plants as well as I should have, still didn’t feel them as fellow spirits. I think I am finally starting to get to the point where I am understanding the sacredness of each thing in nature, the rocks to the tree canopy. This, however, still did not necessarily translate into full animism right away. I still faced one large question- how do we relate to things outside of nature?

While some definitions of animism explicitly state that it is the natural world that contains souls, and mentions nothing of things made from man, I don’t feel that this is adequate. I’m finally starting to look at how I relate to objects. My favorite coffee mugs, for instance, have a story of how they came into my life. The books I love and read have their own energies and lives, even if I only know part of them. Hell, even my computer has a life of its own, as I pour so much of my time into it, albeit sometimes more than I should.

Perhaps we can think of our relation to man made objects in more than just a semi disdain that they are ‘not natural’. Perhaps the key to placing them into the puzzle of the animism picture is realizing the relations we have to them. It is how we interact with another person that we begin to know their souls, and so it is how we interact with the objects around us that we start to understand theirs. It isn’t necessary to worship the coffee cup, but we can realize as we hold it tight with its steaming hot contents, that maybe it’s not just a feeling of familiarity when we hold it in the mornings, but a familiarity mixed with love.

Sorry if this isn’t the most academic of posts, but I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately, and sometimes I end up just running in the stream mode. Also about to leave for class.