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.

Delphic Maxim #8: Know Thyself

This is part of my commitment to posting once a week on the Delphic Maxims.  

This particular maxim is just straight out excellent advise, which is probably why it's one of the most repeated maxims from the original list.

Particularly in Paganism, we are a group of faiths that attempts to be self aware and in the present moment at all times. While the last maxim, perceive what you have heard, discussed how to be aware in the world around you, this maxim lets us know we also have to be present in our internal emotional conflicts.

Knowing one's limits, tolerances, and preferences can only help us further enjoy our lives and being frank with others about ourselves and personalities should lead to better personal relationships.

While the maxim is probably core to most Pagans' journeys, I find the language so direct and specific that I have little to add.

Sharing this post?  Please keep the following information intact on your post:

Article copyright Swift Rabbit/ Southern Pagan Muses
southernpaganmuses.blogspot.com

Delphic Maxim #6 Know What You Have Learned

This is part of my commitment to posting once a week on the Delphic Maxim.  This  post was originally added to my personal journal, and I am cross posting it here for the sake of continuity.  There has been some editing on my part to clean up the writing, correct spelling, and properly credit others of ideas they presented me.

 It is even more important to remain aware of what you have not learned or perhaps cannot learn. I'm talking about book knowledge, social experience, cultural knowledge, and religious mystery here.

Book knowledge can often be easy to uncover, though depending on the field of study one might find a limit to discovered material as well. Knowing what assumptions one has made or what gaps may exist in one's knowledge is core to moving forward in studies or in applying that knowledge.

Social experience is personal. One can never learn a lesson or teach a lesson to someone else. One can advise or offer suggestions, but there is a true and important limit to one's understanding of other people and other situations. When it comes to judging another's words, actions, or view point it is knowledge and compassion for this lack of knowledge that helps me communicate and understand another, not my actual knowledge on said subject.

Cultural experience is very closely related to social. I think it's important to acknowledge the two are separate but linked. Both obtaining cultural knowledge and knowing when one is out of one's known culture is more important than to me than knowing every cultural nuisance of one's home culture.

Religious mystery is something I think is core to talk about in the Pagan Umbrella. We aren't all mystery religions and we don't all believe in religious mystery, but enough of us do that we need to be familiar with it (at least as familiar as one can be with a secret). Speaking purely for myself, this idea of a mystery faith was almost impossible for me to grasp when I first started exploring paganism. I was raised Christian and the whole idea that there was something one could not or should not teach another about one’s faith or the universe was completely foreign. After all, Christianity isn’t just a revealed faith, but one who’s core tenant is to spread the good word far and wide. The concept that deity might want you to keep quiet or may choose how to disseminate information in a way that one cannot adequately share the knowledge, is beyond imagination.

I followed on in confusion and ignorance. I have to admit I often thought and felt unkind things toward people keeping religious secrets. It seemed to me like there was some kind of exclusive club I wasn’t being let into or some grand information that would make my world view fall into place if only these people would give up the goods so to speak. Finally one person finally gave me an example of a religious mystery being experiential based and therefor impossible for them to relate to me as I had not had that experience and words couldn’t fully describe or explain the meaning of that experience. This idea was something that finally clicked for me in a way it just hadn't before. Suddenly the world of a mystery religion or a religious mystery made sense to me. It occurred to me, that I might already have a few of my own religious mysteries. I could tell people about the ritual and what I perceived as happening but no words would describe the fullness of my understanding or the way the information was imparted to me. 

It’s like trying to explain the feeling of white water rafting,  I can talk about the bumps, the sprays of water, the size and shape of the raft, the near misses with rocks, and moments where I was almost thrown out. The person I tell the story to can relate to a certain degree with what I’m telling them so long as I’m descriptive, but if they’ve never been white water rafting or they’ve seen a river or been on a boat, their understanding is naturally incomplete.

The point is that there is a ton I don't know and this used to bother me greatly.  There was huge pressure on me to know everything and be sure of everything.   Something the pagan community has given me is that I don't have to know it all and I don't want to know it all. That's a years in the making conclusion and one I have to come back to sometimes when I push too hard, but it's helped me tremendously over the years to be aware of ignorance and in some cases be alright with it. 

 So know what you've learned, know what you have not learned, and know that you don't have to and should not learn it all.

Sharing this post?  Please keep the following information intact on your post:

Article copyright Swift Rabbit/ Southern Pagan Muses
southernpaganmuses.blogspot.com

Delphc Maxim # 1: Follow God

This is part of my commitment to posting once a week on the Delphic Maxim.  This first post was originally added to my personal journal, and I am cross posting it here for the sake of continuity.  There has been some editing on my part to clean up the writing, correct spelling, and properly credit others of ideas they presented me.

My first and instinctive response to “Follow God” is a simple “no”. It doesn't last long, but part of me violently rejects the idea that I am a being meant to obey or follow above all else. Chalk it up to my problems with authority figures I guess.

Coming to Gods, was a long and slow process.  I started my journey into paganism by leaving God.  I felt divine and "other" presence and I realized it wasn't though the Abrahamic God.  I didn't know what I was feeling, but I thought it might be pagan, so I settled over in this direction.  

For the majority of my time as a Pagan, I've been without Gods of any sort.  I've had guides, local guardians, land spirits, and plant spirits.  I've called on angels.  I've traveled to a place where there is nothing but divine energy and where I was made to understand that everything in all worlds and planes is a form of this divine energy.  Such a thing is so far removed from human motives, it can be hard to consider a God though I never had trouble classifying this Energy as Divine.   

I was Godless until I moved to Alabama and was literally greeted by the local God of the region.  We've been working together and getting to know one another for almost two years.  It's still a state that is not at all natural to me. We negotiate a lot. We are fluid and respectful of each other. 

 The word follow is too forceful to describe the interactions between myself and my Gods.  Its tangled up in the Christian sense of surrendering the self and restricting one's nature to please a deity. It takes away my will or what I want from the equation entirely and simply requires I kneel to all demands. Objectively, I realize follow doesn't have to have any of these implications.  Emotionally, it's a word I reject often before I've thought too much as to why.

There are all sorts of way to follow. Before I had Gods, there was still something sacred, worthy of respect, and bigger than me in the world. I took time to acknowledge, admire, and learn from this nameless experience based thing. Often this feeling came from the natural world for from random acts of kindness others demonstrated. It was something I valued as transcendent and core to my own life. These were moments in time that I needed to honor and that I would cherish and carry with me. I think this could qualifies as following God so long as the idea of God in general is not required to have too many human characteristics or human like will.

 If following God means to acknowledge and honor God then most moments of most days I'm the model of this maxim.

On the other hand, if following God is something that's done without question, without discussion, and without hesitation then I really only have a 50/50 track record.

Furthermore: I don't think Gods inherently know what is best for a human or for me in particular. I'm not certain one should follow every edict a god may choose to make.

Star Foster thinks there are two bits of criteria to judge one's ability to follow god. She asks us to consider:

“1. Is what we are pursuing godly, sacred and of high virtue?

2.Are we following that instead of trying to drive the train ourselves?”

I have no qualms with her first meditative question assuming what's godly is paletable.

The second concern bothers me though. I'm all about driving my own train. Gods might be like life's GPS, but I should be able to take a left when they want me to take a right.  My ability to go "off program" is especially important if while traveling to said destination I want to explore the farm stand over on the left, or I notice heavy construction to the right and want the GPS to re-route me away from there.  GPS's don't know all the driving conditions or all the possible stops a long the way, which is a great analogy for pagan gods who are not all knowing or all powerful.  They may be leading me to a grocery store but not know about the farmers market I spot along the way.  I know where I prefer to shop at.

The point: there are perfectly good benign reasons not to follow Gods. Indeed I wouldn't even necessarily call a farm stand stop directly disobeying Gods so much as leisurely following. While my interactions with a more human minded deity is very new, there has already been a time where I went left when deity said right and they just re-routed me to where they wanted me to be because in that instance it meant that much to them. If Gods can do this, I don't see what it matters how willingly or immediately I follow. When they want me to get there, I'll be there.

We all know what if best for ourselves or at least this is a core truth we should all strive to find with or without Gods. I think we need to follow the call that works best for oneself whether that involves Gods or not.
 

Sharing this post?  Please keep the following information intact on your post:

Article copyright Swift Rabbit/ Southern Pagan Muses
southernpaganmuses.blogspot.com

Delphic Maxim Weekly Posting Project

What are the Delphic Maxims?

According to witchipedia: “The Delphic Maxims are inscribed at Delphi and are said to have been delivered by Apollo Himself. The Maxims are suggestions for pious living, not quite commandments, really strong recommendations. According to legend, they were written down by The Seven Sages who are usually identified as: Solon of Athens, Chilon of Sparta, Thales of Miletus, Bias of Priene, Cleobulus of Lindos, Pittacus of Mitylene and Periander of Corinth.”

How many Delphic Maxims are there?

There are 147 Delphic maxims and they are on witchipedia but straight up list with alternativeinterpretations of the maxims can be found here.

Why are Delphic Maxims Important Today?

For those follow a Greek path they are a description on how to be a moral person. For those of us not following any flavor of Greek path they still may be of interest because they provide both a non-Christian and specifically pagan moral path which we may use as a starting point for finding our own morals and faith. There are other examples of Non-Christian ethic commands, the nine noble virtues inform the Norse path, and we are probably all familiar with the rede and the outer court 161 Wiccan laws (which are mostly meaningless but that's a separate post entirely).

Why I am Blogging About Each Maxim in Detail?

Star Foster's orginal post here started an impromptu blogging party way back in May surrounding the Delphic maxims. Many people were partaking in this event (myself included though it was under a personal journal). Her attempts to make modern understanding out of old pagan law spoke to the community and it spoke to me personally.

I don't follow any kind of reconstructionist tradition, but I appreciate taking rules that were traditionally pagan and considering what wisdom they carry over to the present, and whether they have any meaning in the path I follow. One of the most well known quotes “Know thyself” comes directly from the maxims. Even if all of the other 147 laws are duds, it's worth looking more deeply into something that offers a least one significant nugget of truth.

My blogging in the past has been very sporadic. I'm looking for some stability in posting. One of my weekly reoccurring segments is going to be to pick up these maxims and talk about each at length.