Day One: Why?

1. Beliefs—Why am I Pagan?

The short answer is that I don’t think I could be anything else. When I was a wee one, my favorite activities (aside from drawing on the walls with whatever I could find) were collecting things I found outside: pinecones, sweetgum balls, shells, pebbles, feathers—all sorts of stuff. It got to be so much stuff that my mom had to take a plastic box and label it “Nature Box” to go along with my duplos and my little ponies and stuff, because I just had So Many Things. I never stopped collecting things, really, not when I was thirteen and angry at everyone and called myself Wiccan and was every bad stereotype ever, not when I stopped really telling anyone about anything I believed because it’s no one’s damn business. When I go on vacations, or live in another place, I’ll bring back small rocks to remember them by.

I was, thankfully, raised by parents who generally thought I needed to find my own spiritual path. My dad was raised Catholic and is now severely athiest, although that doesn’t keep him from having a tongue-in-cheek interest in all the ancient aliens nonsense that passes for programming on the History Channel these days. My mom, similarly, was raised Lutheran but now, I think, she’s agnostic. Anyway, when I was born, they thought I ought to have some sort of religious schooling just so I’d have answers to toddler questions, but I was never baptized. I went to sunday school at a very open, friendly Presbyterian church that my parents didn’t really get anything out of, though the people were nice. And basically by age seven I’d decided that I didn’t really believe any of this Bible stuff, and I wanted to stop going to church, and that was fine by my parents. I was one of those precocious kids who always absolutely knew her own mind.

So far none of this is very pagan-specific, I know. In my angsty middle school years I discovered this thing called “Wicca” (which of course, now, I recognize is not really Wicca at all but fluffy eclectic paganism, but I was young) and it was very eye-opening and empowering and I got very self-righteous about those evil Christians and stolen holidays, the usual rigamarole.

Thankfully I outgrew that, because I’ve always had a strong love of reading and research and history and I learned what was what and what didn’t work. One of my huge problems with “Wicca” was that I never really had a connection to the deities. I’m not quite on board with the soft polythiest interpretation that’s common in wiccish eclecticism, and beyond that, I could never, ever, for the life of me remember the dates and names of the damn wheel of the year holidays. To this day it’s impossible.

In my seemingly lifelong quest to find a spiritual structure that works for me, is managable and fulfilling in my life, I have yet to find a single tradition that really speaks to me. I haven’t been “thwapped,” so to speak, by any dieties in particular, and for a while I was rather disgruntled and insecure and thought no one wanted me. What I had to learn, in effect, was how to be mindful of the spirituality in my everyday life, and build my faith from the ground up, starting with my daily routines and finding ways to incorporate religious and spiritual practices into that.

In recent years I have grown rather fascinated with Reconstructionist paths, though none in particular jump out at me as something that I need to be doing with my life. I enjoy the approach though, the research, the history, the necessary critical analysis, generally the very thorough structure that goes into a religion. Ideally that’s my approach as well, though I have a lot of disparate elements that make up my personality and environment and religious views. “Eclectic” seems to be a dirty word in some circles, it conjures up images of people who throw in radically different dieties from radically different cultures with no thought as to appropriation or how these different elements work together. I don’t want to do that. I want to have structure and order and an holistic way to live my faith every day, and in that respect I like to call what I do “Constructionist.” I want to build my faith with a strong foundation and make it functional and fulfilling and beautiful, while at the same time reflecting the odd patchwork that is my life.

The blog is called the Liminal Pagan because once I first heard the world “liminal” and learned what it meant it struck me to the core. This is what I’m about. There are so many ways in which I just..cannot fit into a simple category. Growing up biracial has had a huge impact on my world outlook and, consequently, my faith. I’ve never been one or the other, I have a tendency to reject polarized approaches to religion, politics, philosophy, art (and this would be why actual traditional Wicca doesn’t work for me either, personally), and in addition to that (and I swear I’m not trying to just become the most marginalized person ever), my sexuality and spirituality don’t fit into a neat box either. I’ve stopped thinking that this is a problem and more of a signpost indicating that my life, and my path, is going to be something I have to define for myself.

That sounds about as good a stopping point as any, so I’ll elaborate more on a lot of this stuff in further days’ posts.