I Can't Live Outside of Time or Place: Why there are Mysteries I Won't know and How That's a Gift

Two weeks ago I got three quarters through writing blog entry about how my perceptions of the weather and reality are different. In this case I was writing about how warmth and more daylight don't correspond and what that might me for mean in my practice. I have to put some of that writing a side as no longer relevant to the season or to my mind set. But the were a few kernels I still thought were pertinent to my practice and perhaps others.

I am not a farmer. I'm not dependent on the state of the land, the weather, or my crops for life. While I am effected as we are all effected by food shortage and drought it will never be the way our ancient ancestors were. I personally will probably never be living of the land in any way that resembles the farmers or trappers of ancient times, where so much of our faith's inspiration is pulled. Those mysteries are closed to me, are always going to be closed. I get a lot from the land. I forage (or wild craft or whatever we're calling it). I feel called to the land and moved by it. My heart is utterly pagan and multiple with depths of varying measures and traditions of both long lineage and dubious new beginnings.

I've known I'm not a farmer and still I've longed for lost knowledge. Perhaps it was my inner bookworm or the selfish greedy bit of me. I used to think it was just my thirst for knowledge, even as a little kid, I was creating binders and one stop all information shops. I loved books and the kind of abstract power they could give you. Now I've begun to see that part of me, hoarding and demanding all the power as something within me that may be slightly malicious. Sure, Know It All was always willing share but she didn't just want to know some stuff of value, she wanted to know it all, to be the source, and for others to have to come to her to know it all, to be grateful. It's a little sick. Sometimes I see Know It All's stamp on a blog post and wonder if I am truly informing/trying to start a conversation or trying to be an authority. It's hard to let go of that want and even harder to recognize it driving me in ways that people would otherwise say are good but to know the ends have a big Ego Goal waiting.

Funny how its this aspect of me that I dote so much self love and value on that the Gods have never shown much affinity for. There was a point where Their dismissive nature regarding this aspect of me hurt. I was too vested in being/gaining/growing authority through knowledge and grabbing at what I could to have it. I couldn't see what was wrong about knowing, about being able to consider all the angles, about having a deep through passionate understanding of all aspects of the Gods' traditions, desires, wants and needs.

They told me, it wouldn't have meaning. I could know it and really never understand it. I've never be able to use it or express it. Knowing these mysteries lost in part in time but more so in life style shift which the mysteries did not grow would be worthless to me and to others like me. They kept insisting this was Knowledge I was not to have, that at best it would be meaningless and at worst it would drive me mad. Since I thought not knowing was driving me mad, I was able to pretty well ignore Their underestimation of me. Besides, I've lived without gods, surely I can gain a little information without Their approval? Doesn't there have to be some text that hints to the path to gain mystery x or can't I splice enough information together to spontaneously create the path to mystery y? It had to be possible and attaining it could only be a good thing.

I'm several years into creating my own personal calendar based on the Wheel of the year as it applies to me locally and am beginning to integrate Roman, Greek, and Etruscan holidays and themes where I can. Just as it was clear to me that a British seasonal calendar would not fit a southern location seasonally and I'd have to alter things, I can see how the Mediterranean weather is not 100% a match plus I can see how socially, politically, ethically I am not where these ancient people were and I don't necessarily plan to return to their state. Still their religion was a living breathing shawl wrapping up their realities. It's not something easily or entirely able to be separated from their lives and as such some changes are inevitable. I've come up with hundreds of uses and alternative rituals and thoughts on when celebrating x or y holiday would be appropriate and when it would not. I can feel the little pings of approval when I grab an applicable droplet, and when I can sift the gold from the silt. It has never silenced the part of self that thought we/I could resurrect and modernize these faiths in a way that we'd all know what Right.

This revelation about how I still have trouble discerning aspects of time and weather has made it clear to me just how different an era I live in. That I can argue the semantics of daylight vs warmer weather and assign value and meaning to each that is mostly personal and very little based on survival is too far removed from the lives of some of my source material. They knew and experienced things I won't be able to touch, and likewise I know the divine in a way they could not. Our ways are just too different. Our Gods might be the same and some of the feeling we get could be the same but how we knew it and what we needed to know is just different.

While I'll still study, research, and reflect. There are just things I'll never know and for once that thought isn't driving me face first into the books. It's a perfect Imbolic present.

List of Religious and Creative Projects I'm Currently Working on with Status Updates:

1. House Spirit Series: This is a series meant ideally for children ages 5-9yrs of age. They are picture books about hospitality and gracious behavior.
   1. The scripts for being a good host and being a good guest are complete and I had composed two picture books using common licensed material. Since then I've reviewed the two “complete” works and decided that the pages are too wordy and the graphics too busy.
      1. I'm in the process of making the two books longer with cleaner pages. To do this with my current creation software, I will be upgrading the works from their smaller half page format to a large full page format, as then I can create infinite connected pages. This should also give me opportunity to make larger fun text fonts and colors.
      2. I think I'm going to include my house spirit on each page so it's like he's talking to the reader on each page. This means that I'm going to print my graphic off and try to draw zim in different talking poses for scanning. Hopefully that goes well. The little rabbit sprite is very simple and cartoon-ish so I think he'll be easy enough to adjust.
      3. I'm also going to make the books more interactive for parents and co-parents by creating suggested areas with prompts where parents could break down house rules or expected behavior.
      4. Also, I've been reading through, and I'm considering keeping or including vocabulary stretch words with a glossary in the back because I think kids should learn about compassion and empathy both what they are and what the right words are.
      1. As far as furthering the series goes I would like to also cover how to handle different faiths and traditions. Right now I think it will be 4 separate books
         1. religion inside a multi-faith family: this one will cover the idea that parents may have converted from another faith that some or all of the rest of the family follows. It will talk about how everyone has their own right to follow a faith that makes sense to him or her but no one should have the right to tell others what to believe or how to believe. Challenges come over how to cover faiths that believe they have the one true path, possible adult bitterness/ attempts to convert, being respectful of beliefs that may not make sense to a child and balancing openness/respect /embracing a their family culture and keeping appropriate boundaries as needed
         2. religion among friends: this one tackles the idea that a child and his or her friends probably have different faiths. It will address how the pagan child is probably a minority faith and how his or her friends may look to them to be the pagan ambassador, which while not meant cruelly usually can still be a burden. It will go over tools the child may need and how to try to work past that person into being just one pagan as his or her friends are one Christian or whatever and not a representative of all of their faith. It will also talk about what is or isn't an attempt to convert, what is participation and a friendly invitation and what might not be meant so kindly.
         3. religion in society (like Christmas and Easter). It's impossible to miss Christian influence in our culture so explaining it some and what the family does instead or in addition is really the best way to go here. I'll probably write this one last because of all the pagan-ish kids books I'm writing, this one is the one that will probably be the most specific and therefor be of the least use to other people.
         4. ,religion in schools and when speaking with adults who are non-family members. This one is important because if a student and family decides to be “out” about his or her faith, there are things a student need to look out for and know how to handle. We always hope that it won't come up, but forewarned is forearmed.
      2. I have an idea to tackle starting school, deciding whether or not to be an “out” pagan, handling bullying both religious and other varieties and what to do when others are bullied and when you may accidentally be the bully. I want to work on it after I'm done with the other six books, and I think it will be it's own series that I'm going to call the Little Witching series. I want mirror books one with a male lead and the other with a female lead. Tentatively I think there will be 5 or 6 stories and if I make a male lead and female lead mirror it will be elven or twelve books.
      3. I'd like to work more with fantasy and myths for kids where the morals are less spelled out in step by step directions or advice, but I don't have any ideas brewing except that I'd love to have follow up questions and considerations.
2. Portraits of Roxi Starr: I love Roxi Starr and her story. I'm very pleased with how the characters are developing and painting a very real very flawed world. I am right at the point where Roxi will enter fairy world and I know how I'm going to work that part, but I Have about 8 more scenes I need to write first that are fighting me. Also to be honest, while I love my adult venue, the House Spirit Series and a few of my multi media projects have taken up most of my time because of the challenge involved in pulling so many different bits together. Fairy land is going to be rough on me, and I'd love any references people have to myth or lore that happens on or near fairy land to help inspire me.
3. Creating a Family friendly series of Spring Advent Activities: Reading all the family blogs creating winter advents to counter act Christmas culturally for their kids was really interesting reading, if somewhat perplexing to me. I understand historically why winter was a good time for huge holiday celebrations, but energetically, I don't in my own practice feel it's an appropriate time for a bunch of celebration and much anticipated count down the advent implies. To me, pagans, heck the world, should be breathlessly anticipating the coming of spring. So I've been putting together a collections of thoughtful child and adult friendly Spring count down activities. I would want to start Feb 2^nd on Imbolic and continue until the first of Spring in March. This is 50-52days so it's a lot of daily activities to come up with. Right now I have a list of 22 activities so I'm about 40% done with the list. Then I need to write an introduction explaining that the order I put these activities in makes sense for the Southern USA states but may need tweaking based off of the area you live, and I need to write out exactly what kind of meanings and follow up meditations, questions, and what not can be done with these activities to help create a thoughtful religious experience. The advent book perhaps full activity kit will be geared toward nature and self centered varieties of paganism but there is ample places to insert god and goddess myths of different faiths, which I'll try to make obvious and add suggests to as well.
4. Pagan Calendar Project: So I've made a lot of head way on my own personal calendar including major holidays for different branches of paganism and for other religions. Working on it has really opened my eyes to what I am culturally and faith wise yearning for. I'm definitely searching for a more family/community centered aspect in my practice. It's also opened my eyes to how unfulfilling the wheel of the year has been in my life. I've been very loosely following it and really twisting the meanings and purposes of major dates to suit how I see the seasons (which is different here than how I saw them up north). So I'm in the process of reading and reviewing different cultural material to see how different seasons were traditionally viewed and celebrated and to gain ideas about what would be meaningful in a modern practice. I'm focused in on Etruscan, Greek and Roman practices because coming from a traditional Italian household, there are familiar and known ties so I'm not re-learning all this symbolism, plant meaning, design work, food preferences and what not. I've been reviewing the holidays to see what would be meaningful to celebrate yearly and what would be good to know about for specific life events or situations. I'm also looking into the dynamics in the Greek calendar and melding it so the current Alabama seasons matched weather wise as much as possible with the Greek calendar. From what I've been reading regarding calendar creation in ancient peoples more than the dates, what was important in marking time was when growing seasons and specific weather happened, rather than exactly following their calendar time, it makes more sense (to me) to frame days based off of when similar weather happens here. There is a big push to do this now in my life because I have a friend who would like to practice with me and she has a newborn, who when he's older may look for the structure in faith and religion that both my friend and I had in our own lives. Religion strongly affected us as kids and while we agree our birth religions are overall negative experiences, the ability to have holidays, structure, a way to act out express and show a divine narrative and know about the other world feeling is something I think kids yearn for. I hope to have studied enough to be able to fully update and start following my yearly calendar next year. Currently I'm looking to hold on to Imbolic, amd Halloween week (which I celebrate all funky which is why I don't even tend to bother with Samhain as a title), but otherwise I'm looking either making my own holidays for following Italy/Mediterranean inspiration.
5. My Wedding: Yeah, that's happening fall 2016 and I am currently planing to make it a blend of pagan and more traditional Christian themes. I do have interviews with a few pagan ministers, but the ceremony itself is mostly up to me to create along with whatever pre ceremony explanations I want to give out to my decidedly non-pagan guests. My friend is helping me with this. It's barely begun and I feel (hope) a lot of it will shape as I work my way through my wheel of the year because I'm having trouble find sources that are of any help in the creation process. I've never given my wedding a lot of thought, because as a kid I always thought it would be most romantic and preferable to elope. It's been a long road of reflection and pondering for me to understand that weddings aren't really about the two joining but about the families. It's hopefully an outlet for families to express joy regarding their family member's joy, to welcome a new extended family, and to feel still relevant and close to the newly married couple. That said, the actual marriage has meaning meant only for the couple and perhaps the divine which needs to be expressed during a wedding too. Or why I feel like the place the ceremony is at, what is said, who is invoked and so on is deeply important to me on a personal level and while I see the need to compromise that with family expectations and desires, they can only hold so much sway. The balance is very hard for me.
6. Photography Stuff: I find I do best on the photography and editing when I take the pictures in season and look at them critically after the season has passed. So I just completed looking through and editing my fall cemetery photographs. There's some really neat surreal creepy and sad looks that I'm thinking of working up into postcards and prayer cards. I have a good 100 or so spring pictures, but I'm not feeling inspired to work my way through them just now.
7. The Blog: I actually have another blog post about my family and my wedding plans written which I haven't posted because honestly it's kind of bitchy and emo and I'm not sure what kind of community value it has except to express clearly that the struggle to be pagan in modern society is an on going battle for everyone and often one that we have to fight even within the family unit. Whether it will make it on to the internet I don't know.
   1. I'd like to write about my experiences with the weekly pagan meet up group but that post is fighting me in creation. Right now it's a concept about my struggles to find satisfactory meaning within the group and why that does or does not sometimes work. I'm thinking about using the entrance of a new comer and how she made me feel as a vehicle to explore this aspect of in person pagan community.
   2. I'd like to write about animals and spirituality. What it means to see or used different animals in design or to feel drawn to different animal images/concepts.
   3. I'd like to write about my intentions to get married and my love life and how it's changed and what that means to me and in a broader context of the world.

And that's it, what I'm working on right now creatively. Is anyone else working on a million projects? Does anyone have any interest in on of these project over others? Give me a shout out and let me know what's going on in your own creative or religious life.

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.