Stahp.

No, seriously, stop it.

I count myself lucky that I go through periods where I live under a rock. Where I’m more focused on school,video games and getting ready for a move in a few weeks (at least this latest rock period). It seems I’ve missed a lot of controversy, and that suits me just fine.

Some time ago, I’d search it out to see what I missed. I mean, after all, who doesn’t like a bit of gossip? I thought too that it’d give me an opportunity to see who was a toxic member of the online pagan and polytheist community, so I could avoid them.

But what I’ve realized is that enough of my day is wasted. Enough of my time is wasted getting distracted by little things. From someone who is trying to finish college and suffers from a pretty severe case of high functioning ADHD, my time is taken up by any number of things, so it always feels like I get nothing done. And I realize that, when looking up stupid controversy bullshit, that really is getting nothing done.

I’m empathetic to a fault. I actually realize my extreme empathy will later play a more entwined place in my path, but for now I have to hide myself sometimes. I literally cannot take the extreme violence and belligerence that comes from some people, whether it be in person or online. It’s physically and mentally stressful to read those things. But like a glutton, I always would, because as much as it would make me tense up, we all love to read that gossip. It’s an unhealthy habit, especially for my place in life.

So this is me saying that controversy can go fuck itself. That the belligerent idiots who start flame wars can go fuck themselves. I’m committing myself to be a valuable, if not always an active participant, in the online community that I want to be a part of, and that means that the easiest way to stop the trolls is to not feed them. Ah, life lessons of the internet. Discourse and discussion are good, but frothing at the mouth anger never solves anything, and it just makes other people want to punch you in the mouth.

There are too many stressful things going on in the world for me to deal with the petty shit that other people drag in to the community. So before I go looking for that harmful gossip, those intriguing but diseased tumors of the trolls, I’m cutting them out of my life now.

And here’s a challenge for my readers, few you may be- when you see that juicy bit of controversy, that flame war going on, stop before you involve yourself and think- don’t I have something better to do with my day, and is my participation, if even observance of this, just giving more credit to the people I don’t want to be an active part of this community?

While this approach won’t work for all problems, it seems to be a good one for this type, because by starting a flame war, they are seeking validation. They are screaming for people to pay attention to them, and when you do, you validate that and give them more fuel for the fire. Passion and enthusiasm for a topic should not devolve into idiocy and rage. Those are very separate things that people confuse on a disappointingly regular basis.

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.

The Questions

For a while now I’ve struggled with questions like “Are you a soft or hard polytheist? What do you mean when you are panentheist, and isn’t that just a cop out for people who have monotheist sympathies? How can you be in both your tradition and also be as influenced as you claim with the Hellenic Gods? Isn’t feeling drawn to Gods from multiple cultures just appropriation and a bad habit? Isn’t eclectic just a synonym for appropriation? How can you be a witch and worship the Hellenic Gods?” Quite frankly, many of these questions aren’t ones that have been directly stated to me (hell, I’ve gotten very little direct badgering over my blog and, let’s be honest, who would come to this tiny corner to insult me, and if they did why would I give a shit?) and are in fact questions I’ve been anticipating before I involved myself into any sort of serious discussion with the broader Pagan/polytheistic community. Particularly with the way that the Neo-Pagan flavor of things has gotten a very bad rap and the way that many polytheists and Pagans now shut down any of the influences drawn from the Neo-Pagan movement, I’ve been quite hesitant to involve myself with the community at large.

In some ways, dealing with these both inner and outer questions has been a major roadblock in my path. They lead to much inner skepticism that has made it at times impossible to fully throw myself into my practice and devotion to the gods and spirits. Yet, over time I think I’m finally beginning to conquer these questions, at least in my internal monologue. Whether or not these would prove satisfactory in communicating with a skeptical polytheist, Neo-pagan or anyone else is still remained to be seen, but quite frankly at this point I don’t give a shit. I eventually do want to involve myself with the community at large. Although perhaps not at the moment (being barely able to function with school such a large part of my life) I think that I will be able to contribute to the Hellenic polytheist community. If all goes well I’ll be graduating with a bachelors in Classical Civilization within the next two years, with a year and a half each in Greek and Latin (with my own private goals to continue studying the languages until I can translate the Theogony and Marcus’s Meditations for myself, the latter a gift for my sweetheart) and then going on, I hope, to get my MLS and become a librarian. If anything, I have access to sources that many people can only dream of, being able to access a library of a top 20 (US rankings, not world) University with a Master’s Graduate Program in Classics and a fairly thriving Undergraduate department (not trying to sound snobbish, but I have a goal to saturate myself with the academic study of both Classical religion, comparative religious studies and modern social and religious movements so that I can specifically be a better member of the community and help develop it so that, maybe when I’m old and gray, I can point my maybe existing in the future children to this time and show them the vast amount of progress we’ve made, instead of showing them to the mass of petty squabbles and internet cat fights that have been going on lately).

I realize that I want to share the strides I’ve made, mentally, about these questions-in part, because I usually do better with discussion than with purely internal monologue, and in part because I hope that they can stand up to base scrutiny and that, just maybe, they can help inspire others to critically examine their own cosmological views so that they can at least try to understand the notion of internal consistency (again, not to sound condescending, but I do notice a tendency towards inconsistency within individuals that I find to be a weak point in the state of both the larger Pagan/Neo-Pagan movement as a whole and in the respective smaller movements). I’ll probably do this in a set of posts, since it is difficult to address all of what I want to mentally in a concise format. Already I’m over 700 words in this post alone, and I’d rather not create TL;DR monsters that make people skim over my blog like old milk- these are supposed to be serious examinations that could possibly provoke serious conversation, and even if it doesn’t (considering the small scope of my blog thus far) I’d like to at least delude myself into thinking that they will have that potential. I’m off to campus soon, but I hope to post something later today with more specific substance.

Until then, enjoy this little fantastic bundle of awesome and let it make you have the most enormous smile today (even if people look at you like you are crazy!) (no seriously, I’m not kidding. Watch this and you will be skipping afterwards)-

Summer Updates

Tags

goals, personal growth, plans, projects

Hello everyone! So, since finals are over and the summer is stretching its head, I figured I’d update to what my seasonal plans are.

May itself will be work and getting all the loose ends of my life in order, which hopefully will finally happen. I’ll be honest, it’s really difficult for me some days, being in the mental state I was last semester. I’ve cut out some things that caused excess stress though, and am working on reshaping my life, if I can stick with it. I’d love to finally have some self confidence again. That would be lovely. I could use the ‘getting real tired of your shit’ meme on myself for myself far too often!

June will be work and summer school, and July may or may not include summer school, depending on the results of June. Of course, August will involve prepping and then the beginning of the new semester, which quite possibly may kick my ass up and down the block unless I’m ready for it. Gods damned it, I’m going to be!

For my plans involving the blog and my personal path, I’ve set up some….ambitious goals. Truthfully, they seem a bit steep even for me, but I’m kind of curious on whether or not I can tackle them. Ordinarily, I’ll make excessive plans but think they are reasonable and then forget and not follow a single one. If these seem a lot even for me, maybe I’ll do at least some. Granted, goals are good but I can’t allow myself to become depressed if something takes longer, but at the same time I can’t be happy if I don’t get any of them done. I’m still working on the ‘appreciate the little things’ mentality and allowing myself to be happy when I get something done, but also working not allowing said happiness to become complacency, which is never good (at least not for me).

I want to start my Orphic hymn devotional project again. Technically, I’ve already messed it up- I should have started yesterday. Instead of trying to backtrack, I’ll just start where it begins tonight. Some time ago, I found a lovely list that takes you through hymns when waking and when sleeping. Besides honoring the gods, if I can do this it will force me to start establishing routine, which is desperately needed in my life. I want to also start up the beginning of the meditations on the Gods I had mentioned a while back. It’s a 13 month start, but in reality longer, since the idea is to never start learning. As she is so close in my life, this month (lunar month) will be dedicated to thinking about, researching and exploring Hekate, in both historical terms and in my own personal life. Then the plan is to move on to Hestia, then the rest of the Olympians (ok, so actually 14 months once that is done, with the inclusion of Dionysos). After this first set, I’d like to go into the other major members of the Greek pantheon, then either move to minor or add other divinities that smack me upside the head.

My classes with the trad are back on. Technically, I’m quite close to finishing my time as a student, but I’m personally dissatisfied with my progress, so I’ve plotted out a review of those classes, assuming the one upcoming is my last. I may very well be able to meet with my teachers more, but even if I’m done as a ‘student’, per se, I’m nowhere close to where I need to be for initiation, so I have my work cut out there for me anyway.

I’ve plotted out a schedule to catch myself back up with the Pagan Blog Project. Should shit hit the fan, the schedule will be one of the first things to go. I’ve got to prioritize things, and while working on firm establishment of my spiritual self is important, writing for the project has to sit lower on the tier list taking in account my other commitments (which reminds me, I actually need to write down all of those anyway and then actually make a list of importance so if I feel overwhelmed I can reorganize things in a beneficial way instead of just throwing caution to the wind and derping about like a moron, which tends to be my natural reaction when I get overly stressed).

I’ve also decided that I’d really like to do some meditation/contemplation on individual things that are part of my path, and the first physical thing that would require a regularly established schedule of sorts is tarot. I’ve got 3 different decks that I’d really like to reflect upon their symbolism and meanings both personal and defined. I’m going to try to tackle 1 card from each deck once a week (so 3 a week total) but if it proves to be too much I’ll cut back to one.

Of course, goals for regular holiday observances and the monthly lunar celebrations are of course a given. I’d also like to specifically research some particulars for the Hellenic and Greek holidays, but that may have to sit on the back burner. I also have an impressive reading list I’d like to tackle that will actually grow as I add more and more of my own current library in addition to classics that I’d like to read. This reading list was originally going to be primarily,although not exclusively, pagan related, but I may include general religious studies and philosophy along with it. Hell, it may just end up being my master reading list in general, excluding fiction of course.

Those are the main ‘spiritual’ plans over the summer, but I have other goals that would definitely affect me on a more than physical level, with weight loss and fitness being in high priority. I’ve also got to review my greek material so I have a shot to pass next semester. Alas, it may be a few years before I can start trying to relearn French, since Greek and Latin together will probably be too much language anyway.

Of course, I have other personal goals as well. I’m working on a drawing project for a present, I want to run a D&D campaign but haven’t gotten around to planning it yet, I still technically play WoW but I haven’t done much with it lately, and of course there is LOL. At least I can’t really try to micromanage that, since I only play with my friends and not on my own, where games like WoW I can turn into silly time syncs and legitimately make myself feel guilty for not doing dailies or whatever.

As an update, my garden is doing quite well right now. Tons of seedlings! The more sundry darlings will be started in the coming weeks, and I’ll get some photos soon, just haven’t had time to clear up my patio yet and I didn’t want to take ridiculously messy photos, haha.

As always, I aspire to make this blog more well-researched on topics I find interesting, but I’m restricted with time currently. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to make that transition, but for now you guys get to listen to me prattle on and on about random ramblings in my mind. Lucky you!

PBP: B is for Breath

Tags

Breath, Meditation, Mindfulness, Pagan Blog Project, PBP

I’m not an easy going person n the sense of living or even thinking in simple terms. I’m high stress and high anxiety and riddled with bad memories, all fueled behind a constant whirring of thoughts in an extremely ADHD fashion (even taking medication doesn’t make these things go away, it has to work in conjunction with a routine and an improvement with life changes that I’ve been lacking thus far and so I’m still stuck in this state of mind). I’ve been particularly struggling lately with finals coming and that causing a huge spike in my negative emotion pit, particularly because I’ve missed so much class and that crashes…right about now.

Anyway, last night I had some really awesome thoughts under the light of the moon, and also in the shower. I paused…and breathed. For someone such as myself, even doing this simple task can help. I’m not even saying trying any intentional methods, any alignment of the souls or anything. Just breathe. I did that, in the shower, for a good bit (at least in respect for myself) and let all the random thoughts and images flow through my head. Finally, I started trying to be aware of myself, my body. I began at my feet and felt, at least a bit, the movement and awareness of myself and my energy, all the way up my body, moving with each breath. I moved all the way to my crown and out, and was quite pleased, considering I always have this block around my 3rd eye area/temples that causes headaches sometimes when I try to force things to happen.

I truly think breath is the key to beginning to mend the disconnects of my life. I’m challenging myself, and you, the readers, to take at least 5 minutes a day to breathe. Take just a minute to feel yourself and connect to what is around you, after letting all your worries float away. This is my first step in cultivating a more mindful attitude, which I will probably post later on.