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.

Forgiveness and Guilt from One Faith to Another

For me spring is about freedom and life.  It's about energy and love.  My honoring the season change involves exercises like fairy joy bubbles, taking lots of photos of seasons' change, watching the progression of flowers' growth and learning something new about local flora and growing, if I wasn't moving yet again shortly I would be halfway through growing some flowers herbs and veges.  I go outside for walks and being grateful and I will be coloring eggs.  These are all my expressions of love and joy and being absolutely thrilled for the spring.  I don't think I can begin to put into words how sacred and joyful spring is. 

Now for Catholics, spring/Easter season (because nothing is supposed to be related to weather) is far more complex.  In my mother's case spring brings up a lot of concerns regarding guilt, forgiveness, and sin.  I suppose it's only natural, she's fasting right now in the lenten season.   She's meant to consider Jesus' sacrafice, and I know that Good Friday, the day Jesus was on the cross, has always been particularly hard for her.

As a child, I can remember being very confused over Good Friday.  My mother always took us out of school, whether we had the day off or not, which fluctuated.  We always colored eggs and baked sweet bread we would wrap around the eggs.  We would always refrain from using technology from the hours of 2-4 because apparently that's when Jesus was on the cross and you should spend time in quiet reflection. 

Everything about the time seemed so muddled to me.  Because this horrible violence is happening to the savior at our hands for our sins, but there's this deep excitement because on Sunday Easter is happening soon.  Without this horrible violence and betrayal there would be no miracle.  It's still very confusing to me, though thankfully no longer as painful.  Wouldn't the deeper miracle have been for the people to recognize Jesus and to save and protect him?  What could he have done with all that power if he didn't have to rise from the dead?  If he came for peace and a better world then how does this violence do anything but perpetuate what is wrong in our world?

It is a pleasure to me to not have to ask those kind of questions or have this worry that there is something deeply wrong with me.  I was horrified by so many aspects of Catholicism and not able to work through it the way other followers seemed.  I felt like I was bad and wrong twice, once for what happened and again for not being on the same page as other Catholics. 

My mom is still Catholic, we inevitably end up discussing guilt and forgiveness.  One thing she said to me that really struck me to core to our discussion was: "To be really and truly sorry and able to repent means that you won't do those actions and more.  So if you repeat the same actions again, it means you weren't really sorry and couldn't really be forgiven in confession."

To me, and I have no doctrine to back it up, we are most sorry for things we can not help.  I feel guilty and sorry that I have so much while others have nothing.  But what's the real solution to that, how do I "not do that again" or make that right?  Do I give up my position of privilege and join other people who are homeless?  How does that help?

I feel awful that two things I value most, my creative ambitions and my relationships with my family clash.  Each suffers from my experience with the other.  When I'm with my family, I think of the writing or the book assembly I could be doing.  When I'm working on my projects, I think about how long it's been since I've spoken to my family, but if I stop and have a word with them, how they will draw me away from the work I'm doing.  I feel torn between the two, and as if I must sacrifice or compromise one for the other.

I often feel morally compromised at my job, unable to give the best advice because it may look like the boss trying to dictate an employees affairs when really all I want to do is give the best advice in the most straight forward way.  To protect my own interests I stay silent, but it's not genuine to who I am or the most I'd like to give people.

I need/want/hope for compassion and understanding regarding these struggles and others like these the most.  Am I going to keep having these struggles?  Of course, the only way I know how to stop these struggles is to stop living.  That doesn't make me feel less sorry about them, or less like there is a sense of wrongness in our society that these are some of the choices and compromises we make. 

I might wish that if I were sorry for it, I'd be able to fix it or stop it, but that's not always my experience.  I think part of why my mother struggles so much is even though that's her doctrine, it's not her experience?  I think that's why each year we have the same hurt sad conversation.

 Beyond that, to me, forgiveness/compassion is a choice that we have to make to ease others and ourselves despite the fact that there may be nothing they can do to ameliorate of make the situation right.   We are all only human individuals, and singularly we can only do so much.  I think meeting people with both compassion and realism is needed to make the world a better place.  We don't have to allow wrong actions or be silent in wrong actions, but we need to see a whole picture of a person along with realistically what we can expect or do.  

 This idea that we can change everything that's wrong in our lives or ourselves is a great tool to critically look at every option we have and all possible solutions and I do think we need to be thorough in our search for self improvement.  On the other side we need to respect where each person may be and that we are imperfect beings in an imperfect world.  We would like not to repeat the same wrongs but sometimes, even when it's avoidable we're going to make the same mistakes.  It's more about what you as a person do next, than the kind of mistake you made to start.

Babies, Families, and Art Creation

My best friend in the entire universe is having a baby in a month.  I am over the moon for her.  My only regret is that we live so far away and I won't be able to see him until the summer.  I love him so much and have so many ideas for what we can do and experience together and he's not even here.Plus we'll be lucky if we see each other twice a year in person. 

My friend isn't pagan but she is feminist, counter culture, highly spiritual, and desperately missing the rituals of her Catholic faith in not the doctrine that goes with it.  I wish I could be there to hug her and throw rituals along side the celebrations for her.  In that stead, I've been consuming with a voracious hunger any information regarding raising children pagan.  Family trads have always been of interest to me, though often on the outer zone because while I love kids, I am not ready to have one and may never be.

I never realized how much we as a group had idea wise for children.  I think there is more diversity of information on how to healthily introduce kids to religion than there is diversity of rituals offered for adults.  Plus the kids rituals have less tools and are more intuitive. Not everything is a gem--I've read through a lot of kids myths and stories that are not my taste (though by no means bad).  Also I've noticed that all main characters in original works seem to be female, which actually is making is hard for me to present the little man to be with an equal gender assortment of books.  Yes I know the world at large is male dominated, but I want the male lead to be as progressive and multidimensional as my female lead.  I have time though, the little baby isn't born yet.  

While I hunt, I've also been piggybacking.  I took two of about.com kids' bedtime prayers and made the into kids picture books using public domain material.  It's got me appreciating the format artist in a way I never knew I should.  I didn't write these works, I didn't break the work up in any fancy way, just pretty much one line of the poem gets it's own page, and I had a software that makes creative layout ridiculously easy.  Still it probably took me about seven hours a book to put these two together (and these are short books only 12 pages including title page, name plate, and ending page). That time doesn't count the hours hunting for the right public domain material to accent the writing. 

It's helped me understand why there aren't more pagan kids books (or adult picture books for that matter) and why we need to support people who are doing this work. 

I'm really proud of the end results though, even the mate, who is not of the artistic bend or pagan or into kids things thinks the first one I did is amazing and the second one is solid.  He quipped that I should have presented them in reverse because then he would have found both books amazing, but I led with the stronger work, so he found the other one much less than it really is.  

It also made me hungry to create more of these little picture books. I'm thinking of creating a house spirit series where a local house spirit helps to explain some concepts that fall under Hir domain.  I've got being a good host, being a good guest, and maybe creating your own house spirit shrine.  I wrote out Being a Good Host, it's going to be 20pages long including title, cover, name plate, end plate and back page.  I've spent days looking through public domain art and I think I finally have enough to really work with creating the book.  I worry that the writing is kind of dry but I guess a lot of those manner-ish books are dependent on good presentation with interesting pictures to help with the potentially less amazing subject matter.  It took me a lot of thesaurus use to find smaller more reasonable words.

So Questions:  Is anyone interested potentially in a copy of these original kids books I'm working on (I can send the writing to you and I can alter some of it so it fits your family and faith better)?  Does anyone have a work they'd like me to adapt to a kids book for them or any ideas on what they'd like to see as a kids read?  Are there any readings or writings already in print of one form or another that you would recommend?