Fear, Perceptions, Reality, and Seeking the Middle

“So I finally caught the Baptists yesterday who keep leaving all that literature in my doorway and told them to stop,” I tell my friend in passing. It's a big victory for me, they've been leaving this stuff for me at work at least once a day and at my house 2 or 3 times a week. There's nothing I can do about it at work, where the pressure to provide amazing service makes it too awkward to do anything, but there's no reason for these people to come up to my house. They aren't from within my neighborhood, but they van in and hustle from door to door dropping pamphlets with a train on it asking if I'm on the rails to hell and asking how can I be “sure” I'm on the right track. While amusing to view the first time with their Harry Potter-eque train stop asking what, to me, is the weakest argument to join a faith ever created, they become a nuisance fairly quickly. If nothing else, it's a waste of paper—and waste like that is against my religion.

“Wow, your balls. I'm always impressed how brave you are!” She jumps in. She's shaking her head, at me though and I wonder what's going through her mind. We might be best friends but she's in Massachusetts and I'm here in Alabama. The physical location distance makes guessing exactly her reaction and meaning harder than it used to be. I never thought that your physical place in the world would give so much context to my thoughts. Even being outside of modern culture as I strive to be, doesn't make me immune to it's projections or the subtle assumptions continually pushed on my thinking.

“Maybe it was too forward? Are you sure you're safe?” She continues.  My deep thought face usually give away when I need more context, and it seems my friend can see it just fine over skype. This is all for the best as her words prompt a visceral almost visual portal from her mind to mine.  I can practically smell what she's thinking and feeling.

She's seeing the deep south—the white cross burning Alabama. And of all the southern states, Alabama might as well be the poster child for the Bible Belt intolerance in the USA. The Alabama, that even in my liberal haven of Huntsville, just a few short months ago denied a Wiccan Priest the right to give the invocation at the town meeting (the situation has been rectified and it appears to be one man's prejudice as opposed to the community, but it doesn't mean we don't feel the blow less—after all it only took that one man to keep us away from our right to participate in the rotating invocation program). Even though I am white and my fiancee is white and we live in an upscale end of the state, she sees this simple religious difference and the attention I bring to it as threatening. She's imagining people stoning me and police joining in. She's seeing my home in flames and riots in the street. She's seeing someone grabbing me as I leave my job at night and taking me and doing terrible things to me because I told the Baptists “no” to any more literature at my home.

It's not her fault, it's part of our collective unconscious image of the South (an image that admittedly is fueled more strongly up north than here in the south, but southerner's are not ignorant of this portrait). Truth be told I have this same image in my own subconscious. It's why I knew exactly what she was worried about. She and I have seen discrimination of all kinds and people range from rude to scary. We think intolerant south and our mind jumps to violent-- an action that I'd be hard pressed to decide which of us fears most.

I weight every choice I make about announcing difference based off of this possible outcome. And it is totally crazy. I am not a prime target for any of these scary images. A young polite white girl in upper middle class suburban America, if a little rural, is perhaps as safe as you can be. My Hindu friends are in far more risk than I am. And yet I see their quiet guarded choice to share their food, their faith, and their culture, gently and carefully—and I think, if they can do it, the least I should manage is telling the Baptists to please stop leaving their literature at my door. I understand their mission but they need to understand a polite no thanks if they are ever going to be successful in their mission.

“You jump to the idea that I'd just tell people I'm Pagan too fast,” I tease my friend because again I can see what she's thinking. Up North, especially in college, I would just announce I was pagan when the topic turned to religion. I came out loudly and often. I never softened the blow and on a few occasions, I was intentionally inflammatory. I like to think I grew out of that before I moved, but what we would like and what is true is not always the same.

In any case, I did not tell the Baptists what faith I believe in, I didn't see how it was appropriate or their business.

“Here, you tell them you've found your faith already and they assume you're another kind of Christian. They don't tend to ask, usually telling them you are completely satisfied with your current faith practice and relationship with God/Divine sets them wrong footed,” I tell her.

“But you can't just tell these people no,” she begins.

“Why not? I'm sure they hear no all the time.” I ask, intentionally being dumb. I want her to either think about that fear or I want to actually hear her articulate that ugly horrible irrational fear we hold in our hearts of lynchings and brutalization because I won't accept an infinite number of pamphlets from a Baptist church.

“Don't joke,” she chides, “these are not rational sane people. These are not people you can reason with. These are not people whose next move you can predict. These are the kind of people who picket soldiers funerals, and who send their children out to preach the word of God as manipulative tools. These are people who attack OBGYN clinics because one of their services include abortion. These are people who preach abstinence only and would prefer people live in disease and poverty than offer out condoms and birth control. These are people who think they are warriors of God and are not afraid to inject violence into a situation to get what they think is right. These are not safe people to disagree with.”

The thing is: she's not wrong. I've never physically been to a soldier’s funeral, let alone one that was picketed but I've met people who proudly announce they've picketed funerals. I've met folks who will look you dead in the eye and wish violence and harm on homosexuals. I've know people who don't believe in vaccines or medicine or whatever for “religious reasons”. It's so common, the pharmacist who was offering me a free flu vaccine took my hesitation as a religious objection, she was quick to apologize if she'd offended me. I had to explain to her that I was not morally opposed to vaccines, simply afraid of shots. We laughed, but part of me thought it was more disturbing than funny that it's so common here to refuse medicine a pharmacist is prepped and apologetic if she stumbles into that territory.

Alabama only has two abortion clinics in the state. While there is a legal battle to rectify the situation, there is a law on the books that says all clinics which offer abortions have to have Dr.s that work out of the hospital (hence why we only have two in the state now). The one here in Huntsville is under 24hr surveillance by a church group that photographs everyone who goes in or out of the clinic and posts their picture online to alert people to who is “pro abortion” or “had and abortion” or “helps people get an abortion”. I don't know a thing about the Tuscaloosa clinic, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't have a similar group photographing everyone.

I've been approached by children with ages from 8-14 who want to let me know “God loves me” or want to “invite me to bible study” or want to ask if “I've accepted Jesus as my lord and savior”. Sometimes their parents are around and other times I've been alone with a wandering child. I wonder about these parents. How could they believe their children are prepared for contrary answers from strangers or do they assume that no one in their community holds a contrary belief or do they believe so completely in the persuasive power of a child to over ride contrary feelings? Oh, the stories of my “daring” with some of these children would terrify my friend. I don't want to scare her anymore.

But how do I let her know it's ok? Really, I'm going to be fine.

“These Baptists could be Those Christians but that's not the vibe I got from them. I think they just wanted to share the word,” I finally settle on, because there are Those Christians, and they are all around me. There is one of Those Christians at my work and she is technically my superior. The careful dance I have to do to not lie to her but also not reveal how scary, crazy, and inappropriate she is for work (to me for all settings) is something I'm making a mental note never to bring up to this friend as we speak.

“Well they shouldn't be going door to door like that,” she huffs, “it's crazy. It's intrusive. It's pushy.”

“I know and it's weird to go up to a stranger's house, knock on the door and share your most personal religious belief with a stranger and insist that your soul's truth is their truth. Not that these Baptists were sharing anything personal in their brochures. Do you think people really convert to avoid the potential of Hell?” I ask.

I already know what my friend's answer is. We are pretty much on the same page about fear conversion, but I want to hear the tangent again or any other if it helps move her from her own fear for me. She lets me change the subject and we go on.

Weeks later this conversation lingers with me. I don't think about it often, but I'm a Northerner living in the South. I don't think of myself as a Southerner, while I've adjusted to how things are here, they can still stir me up in a way only a Northerner could take affront. Door to door conversion happens up north. People handle it differently. Sometimes they are rude. Sometimes they are cold. Sometimes they are polite but not open to the message even when they agree to pray or listen to the bible. I assume sometimes they are open to the message and convert or churches would invest in a different method of conversion.

The point is that up North, people might scold you for being too mean to doorstep witnesses, but most people would think since it's your house it's your right to respond to the disturbance as you saw fit. Very few people would be afraid for your safety for rejecting the message or the visitor. Heck there are a lot of people I know who were Christian of some sort and claimed to be Satanists or Pagans just to shock the witnesses. People saw these antics as funny or mean or too much work, but no one came back and said, “was that safe?”

Northerner's don't look at door to door witnessing in the south the same way they do in the North. There is fear injected into rejecting the visitors. There is all this old news reel footage in the back of our heads from the 60s from the fight for racial equality—not even related really except that there is violence and Christian religious symbols overlapped. If the South reacted that way to racial equality, how would it react to religious—I guess that's the leap we make. What can I say to my southern friends, it makes sense in my head. I think the basis is that we've seen the south use religion as a weapon and we've seen the south be violently afraid of difference. Hence all Christian people may use their religion as a weapon and be particularly afraid of difference. Forget that this footage is from the 60s and never mind that the same can be said for people everywhere. We've seen it happen in the South and we're not about to forget it.

Southerner's do not look at door to door witnessing the same way. In my fiancee's work area along probably about a third of the people there have gone door to door or have programs in their church that does this work which they heavily support. This is a done thing that we are supposed to allow. When I talk with them about how unwelcome these pamphlets are, how wasteful all the paper is, how awkward the meetings are, I got blank stares at first. Sometimes I get a “who cares” question. I mean obviously I care and I would hope the people going door to door care too.

So here I am, a Northerner, who believes I should have a right to reject religious intervention at my home but paralyzed by a the monster of Violent South that the North has a love affair with and further hindered by the carte blanche acceptance of the practice in the South. I can't just shake off my perceptions or the perceptions of others but I have to find an truth within the tangle that will suit.

The more I think on it, the more certain I am that I've done the right thing for the Baptists and for myself. I hope one day I can think of my mingling identities as a more unified compilation. I hope that one day all this baggage of prejudice and judgment will wash away, and that there won't be fear as a first or second consideration in my own personal decisions. Until then, I hope to continue to have a discerning glance that can review my own perception for prejudice and can pick at where there may be truth and where there just may be rampant unreasonable fear.   

Sacred Moving?

Not counting moving in and out of college dorms in the last decade I have moved six times. The first four weren't easy per say, but I could feel the Divine calling me and encouraging me. My whole drive across the country, even on my own, filled with everyone else's fears about a woman alone on the road, I felt looked after. The three day drive felt like a meditative trance. I had completely surrendered to the rightness of this move and that there was nothing beyond this drive in this moment that I was meant to do. It was like coming into my birth right with all the pomp and privilege that the term implies.

I was in awe with the country's different landscape. It was late August and hauling through the Midwest was a sight for my suburban eyes.

I felt like I was chasing the sun and with each time zone I crossed, I gained on him. I was coming more to center. Now being in Wyoming was a totally different story. The land and elements spoke to me, but the people there often made me feel in danger for being who I was. Paganism aside, I am progressive, poetic, and just a bit odd in that harmless sometimes endearing but more eye rolling kind of way. Folks there were seriously threatened by different and that's something I had in spades before we ever mentions Gods.

Moving out of Wyoming was a sad farewell, but necessary. If going was a meditation, leaving was a dark dream, the kind that you wish you'd wake up, but know there's no way out but to play through the surreal landscape your mind has you roving. I packed in less than 24hrs, hit the road in literal darkness and never looked back after crossing the first state line. If the Sun had taken me in for the first move, the stars were guiding me back and keeping silent vigil over my tears. My heart was broken, and my aura colors were permanently changed.

Alabama was a family affair. I fought it as long as could, chased all the options there were to stay in Massachusetts, fretted over my Wyoming experience, and prayed. If the other two journeys had been self journeys, this was one of family and hearth. I'd never so fully surrendered myself to the needs of the family and the strong ties of hearth and home. Moving it all and cleaning it was beautiful and painful. There was meditation and there was sorrow. It was too blended a sensation to be reminiscent of either of my other moves. Traffic and construction played a serious role in our travel this time. There was a forest fire that stopped all travel on the highway for hours and eventually forced us to turn around and go a long backwards way.

Being in a family unit there was a lot of consideration for other people's feelings. Who was the worst off, what we could do to help, whether what you needed vs what the whole needed was more important. Gone were my 12hrs of driving straight.

Getting here, there's very little question that I had an experience with a local God welcoming me, guiding me in how to decorate, what to unpack, where to look for work. That feeling that I knew what I was doing and where I was going and someone else was traveling with me was back.

My other three moves have been nothing like these first three religious experiences. The first on was easy because I had so little stuff. But there's no sense of plan or guidance. There's no sense of this was meant to be or this is a building block in my life path. I was just flying blind.

Sure I tried to make it religiously meaningful. I cleansed and blessed my new dwellings. I set up shrines and said prayers and devotions. I worked tarot and tried to pick good days to move. The thing is, you can't (or at least I can't) force paganism. Divine in some form either comes and interacts with you, or it doesn't.

In the absence of the divine interacting with me in the move, I've come to realize that I don't like moving. It's stressful, physically demanding, and scattered work. I've been way less involved than the mate, and still, it's disrupted every aspect of my life. When I get home, I don't want to write or draw or story board, I just want to plop and zone out. It's been so hard to whittle the boxes down and carve living spaces out. It's still not done, and honestly, it won't be done anytime soon. I need to buy book cases and shelves, which just isn't happening on our current budget.

All of which is to say that my own personal internal stand alone strength has been on trial, and I haven't enjoyed it in the least. I have been surprised some. Turns out that quite a bit of my funky design idea and bright color coordination are my own. Even without the divine holding my hand, I have a recognizable distinctive style that gives me personal satisfaction. It's been so long since I've cut the personal me from the religious me that before this experience I couldn't tell you what is me and what is the divine that chooses to present through me. There's a different state of wonder to seeing one's personal depths, granted it doesn't tingle, hum, and resonate the way the divine does. It doesn't both sharpen and blur the world around me, but there is pride to knowing I have subtly, depth and insight that is entirely my own. I don't know, it's one thing to know the forces you work with chose you for your insight, and another to be left alone to see it in action. How much have I attributed to the presence of the divine because the resonate feeling was there, but was actually more my own contribution that I knew?

Perhaps this silence is a gift of it's own kind. I love my gods and my religion. I want and in someways need that otherworldly feeling. But when we work there is no ME just WE. I like to be the second in command, securely backing up a good general. To have that kind of mentality means that you're not just willing but find it comforting to share the credit. No one bit is yours but rather the sum total that is awesome and amazing was created together and so well fused that there's no telling what bit was yours personally, and as you are not the leader, it all falls to his or her capable crafting skills to move each player (of which you were the best one) in place to make it happen. It would be pure hubris to claim credit or any one park or skill. Yes you might have helped but the sum could never have been created on your own.

Yet I'm finding that I can a least decide what rooms will have what in it, where I will do what activities, and what directions I want to go in on my own. Part of me wants to pull a tarot spread right now just to see what will happen. But I think I'll leave divination as a collaborative work.

Anyhow, I'm about 75% moved and soon I'll be in a place to welcome the gods back to begin our work again, but as conflicted as the silence as been for me, I think it was as needed as any divine intervention.

Short Note On Rituals, Calendars, Technology and Whatnot

Good Day to all.  I've been off the grid for a long time, but I had a quick set of thoughts that I wanted to share. 

This past month, I've been trying to pull together a pagan calendar for my personal reference and use.  Since I'm trying to record lunar phases, Neo-pagan holiday, and the traditional holidays in the Roman, Greek, Norse and Celtic calendar, I'm having a crazy time of it.  Every second I get a bit of air I feel like suddenly a new holiday or bit of information I should consider pops up and I'm further down the rabbit hole than when I started.  My ipad calendar app enjoys at least one note on it every day of the year, whether it's just marking different faiths methods to tell time like the 1st Nation's set of months or the Celtic tree months, or it has festival days on it. 

I haven't even gotten to when Mercury goes retrograde.  I haven't decided if I want to track any other planetary motions. 

And I haven't gotten to adding the other holidays outside my pagan bubble!  Why add these holidays you ask, because I want to be that person who knows when Diwali and wish my friends a Happy Festival of Light and I want to acknowledge when Hannukkah and Passover start for my Jewish peeps.  Part of making he world less Christian and more multi-faith, is about more than showing solidarity with other pagans.  It's also about the simple courtesy of knowing when other groups holy days are and knowing just a little information so I can show appropriate support/acknowledgement.

This brings me to a major calendar application's failing.  I would love a master calendar that already marked the phases of the moon.  Short if that, I'd like a calendar that would let me repeat an event every x amount of days instead of limiting my repetition options to weekly, monthly, and yearly.  The timing means that each month I have to hand write in lunar notations.  Each year I'll have to write in the closes approximation to the Greek reference calendar I can find with each holiday.

Going farther than that,  I would love for that calendar to have an option where it would joint mark the Gregorian calendar with the Jewish, Hindu, First Nations, Celtic, Chinese, Lunar, Greek, and other calendars I don't know of.  Heck I'd love to be able to swap from one dominate form to another but have all my appointments be understood no matter which format I swapped to.  And I'd love a calendar that gave me an option to create my own wheel of the year and over lay it with the Gregorian Calendar.  I do follow my own completely unique schedule tailored both to my belief and to the weather here in the Alabama, as opposed to a calendar I used to follow in MA. 

The mate told me if I was willing to pay money for such an app (which I am, for one with the right layout and sophistication, I'd drop big dollars like as much as $30 cause it is something I can and do use every year) I should learn to make it.  Part of the problem here it that it would take me literally years to part time gather all the information with good sourcing which I would need to create calendar dates and do a quick explanation write up of the holiday/different calendar cycles.  Forget how long it would take me to learn the coding and build an attractive friendly layout.  Plus I'm torn about whether this whole need to schedule, mark time, and be aware of how others are marking time is something that a lot of people feel as a gaping hole in their lives, or if it's just me.  I'm kind of an A type personality when it comes to scheduling and considering other's schedules.

Of course beyond researching holidays dates and meanings, that has me diving into other general research information of what is on the world wide web that may be of interest to me.  I always start out so curious and glowing with hope and thirst for more.  I keep thinking there is real collective power and deep innovative new thought I'll stumble across.  And some of the information I'm reading is certainly valid.  Some of the crafts and recipes offered are fantastic. 

Something I wish I wasn't seeing so much of is all these seasonal rituals which are riddled with assumptions about the practitioner.  My seasons do not run correctly for me to use these rituals on a lot of major Sabbat days. 

And I wish the rituals didn't make so many presumptions about what kind of tools I use and so on.  I don't have an altar.  By this I mean both that I don't have a singular place of worship as these suggested practices imply but also that I have no altar in my practice.  I have shrines.  Plural here is very important because I focus my energies on multiple things and in multiple places in ritual.  Occasionally, I will focus on just one shrine and one aspect in ritual, it's something I'm trying to write in more time to do in my practice, but my faith, as a whole is really more about opening myself up to differences than drawing things together in the singular.

I wish there was more explanation regarding the selected details too.  Out of all the themes one can choose in any Sabbat, why does this ritual celebrate this one in specific?  Why certain numbers of candles and why those colors?  Why this food and drink?  Why these scents or oils? 

This is not to say that I can't guess why. Heck, this isn't even to tell others that every detail needs to be written into a posted ritual, though a link to the information that our using would be nice.  It's not about critiquing another's practice or offering (you'll notice I haven't posted any links or made this post about specific information), it's just about helping a person to see specifically where your ritual and your practice are coming from so he or she can best judge if this information will be helpful to him or her.  I mean if the the information were very helpful and I wanted to learn more about the tradition from which the knowledge comes from, how would I do that? 

I know this is a lot of questions and a lot of complaining I'm doing about people who have for free offered their time and insights to our community.  I do want to acknowledge that anything they chose to share online is a gift of sorts to those seeking.  I also want to acknowledge that quite a bit of the information was rich and meaningful to me, despite this little nit picks I have.  So let me close with a than you to those who share their thoughts and content online and simply add that this post is asking for more not trying to silence anyone into giving less.

Pre-Samhain Local Land Worship Meanderings

The pagan adjacent boyfriend wanted to help me celebrate the autumn season, so he suggested we go to a haunted house. I went and I enjoyed it, but of course wandering through an abandoned school that's been purchased and re-vamped into a Haunted House that predominately features cannibalism of different genres, ax murders, insane asylum patients, and clowns has nothing to do with my holiday. He sort of know that, but he feels lost in helping to support my faith where he sees I'm not doing what I've talked about doing back in Massachusetts.

I think it's hard for him to grasp the concept that my Neo-Paganism is locally connected and I will celebrate seasonal changes differently in Alabama vs Massachusetts. It's true this time of year was magnificent in Massachusetts. It was starting to get cold, there's about a 50% chance that a frost has happened already (it has this year). All these local farm stands and harvest-ish themed things seem to appear over night. There were a lot of hot drinks and hot fresh meals. Apple donuts, pumpkin donuts, cakes, pies, fresh acorn squash and butternut squash. Apples as far as the eye could see!

Beyond that, there was this strong tie to colonial times in MA. There were Victorian homes everywhere. Pagan/new thought and the general population liked to connected modern celebrations with older ones. Honey sticks, herb gardens, ghost walks more information that scare , apple bobbing, donuts on the string. All the semi-traditional things were still celebrated by the general populace.

Also, because it was getting cold, there really was this sense of urgency to batten down the hatches and prepare for winter. There is a real concern regarding purchasing heating oil, wrapping up summer gear, purchasing enough canned goods that should one be stranded one could still eat. I associate all of this as part of what I should be doing and what I should be looking for in others this times of year. I can't say how much of a relief mild winters are and at the same time, how it leaves me both in me practice and life sometimes at a loss.

There is way less work involved. There is no sense of urgency along with the crazy joy that nature is beautiful and brutal. There is always thankfulness for lovely days, but the praise seems less meaningful when every day is beautiful and mild and the coming winter will be soft compared to what I know. It's true this year our summer was brutally hot and dry. I watched corn literally burn away over the course of a day in the relentless sun. In some ways, this winter will be a relief. Everyone here thinks it will be unusually cold and wet, which will kill all the extra bugs we have, restore our water table, and hopefully heal some hurting farms for the spring.

Some of my practices will be the same. My reverence for my ancestors is more or less the same. This year my celebration will be especially focused on my Grandfather as he passed in Aug of last year and his birthday was Oct 28^th, I feel particularly close to him right now. My reiki meditation will essentially be the same, though the themes, the requests, and the healing is somewhat changed.

My month of semi-public celebration is very different here. I am spending more time in quiet reflection before Samhain than I ever have before. This kind of quieted mind used to come as I burned out all my frantic energy in preparations for the fall. I am reminded of the fable of the hard working ant and the lazy grasshopper: all my life I've been the ant and now even though my preparations for the seasons are appropriate, I feel like the grasshopper.

I am walking out in nature more often. I spend hours at the Tennessee river where I feel particularly connected to the river's divinity. I walk slowly and thoughtfully. I wander off the path and through the woods or into the river to explore and contemplate. I feel like a baby who has to put everything in it's mouth to learn what it is and what it means.

Right now, I feel that Alabama requires more complex acknowledgments than MA lands did. There is death and decay in the land right now. I can see it in the trees, smell it in some areas, and I feel that old ending magic I did in MA in areas of the land. With that energy is the energy of life still in full bloom, berries are all over tons of the bushes an trees, cotton is in process of harvest, flowers are still blooming, the sun is still out for huge swathes of time, and the weather itself still gets up to the 80s most days. There's actually this sense that AL is a safe haven and that more life is coming in soon to partake in the offerings. Song bird and water bird migrations have just started in these parts and will be in their peak in November.

I'm still coming to terms with the idea that there will be more than snow for me to look forward to in November. I feel like that quiet shut down I expected to come at Samhain time, won't really hit until the beginning of December.

For now I'm going to try to keep my mind quiet and open. I want to hear what my Gods and the land is telling me. I'll leave this post with a few pictures I've taken of Alabama fall in attempts to see, understand, and worship the land. 

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