waking myself up again

So lately I've been feeling spiritually dead inside, which is not a good feeling to have, and it tends to contribute to a general feeling of mild depression. which I'm already prone to. So.

These periods of disconnect are surprisingly common among those of a Pagan persuasion, so much so that a term has been coined: Fallow Times. On some level just knowing that I'm not alone in going through this helps the climb out of the hole become a little easier.

This was a time of letting the stagnant, devouring pattern of everyday life just sap my interest in things. I know it wasn't a complete disconnect from the gods because I kept getting little nudges in really indirect ways, even as I was wailing and gnashing teeth about not getting any responses to the rote prayers and halfhearted offerings. I heard about mindfulness meditation for the first time ever, and got interested to the point of buying a really nice book that I'm not finished with yet, and it reminded me of the joyful way I used to look at the world.

Everywhere I went on the internet I seemed to keep running into articles and quotes about self-care and personal sovereignty, and how these things are often just at odds with the western ideal of productivity. This type of productivity eats up my energy and good feelings like nothing else. :c

I also haven't been cooking much, lately, and the things I have been making are not inventive, engaging things but basic quick things. One of the funny things about being unemployed was that (thankfully) I had enough resources to cook, and I really deeply enjoyed doing that, as a way of managing my environment and taking care of myself and those around me. It was a job, and I enjoyed it. But now that I'm employed cooking has become just another damn thing I have to do if I want to eat, and I'm already tired from standing on my feet all day or evening. It does not contribute to fun and engaging cookery. I think what I'm going to have to do is just plan my weeks out more thoroughly, and save big cooking projects for my days off. That's what it's going to have to be.

As for crafts stuff: I've had lingering, horrible guilt over the fact that the ram I was knitting for LG's shrine still did not have horns, and that's definitely contributed to a slowing-down of knitting fun. Well. That and the fact that we've had INSANE DEADLY HEAT for like three weeks running now and I haven't really wanted to touch yarn and have anything big and wooly on my lap. (Oddly enough I HAVE gotten the spinning bug during this time, but that involves less actual smothering contact with heat-trapping fiber)

Well that silliness STOPPED TONIGHT. News flash everyone: Reese the Ram has horns, dammit. And they look super cute as he is sitting on my nightstand, all big fat sheep belly and tiny cartoonish legs. This is a good first step, I think, to getting back on track.

Next Steps: doing things on a weekly (or daily, but I don't want to take on more than I can handle while I'm still finding my feet again) basis, and continuing the now laughably extended 30 Days blog posts.

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.  

30 Days of Paganism Master Post

Okay, since I clearly failed at the revamp effort in June, I'm appling an actual format to the posts so I can write about spiritual subjects regularly. So There.

Here, then, is my slightly tweaked 30 Days of Paganism Intro and Link List:

0. Master Post
   1. Beliefs – Why Pagan?
   2. Beliefs – Cosmology
   3. Beliefs – Deities
   4. Beliefs – Prayer and Offerings
   5. Beliefs – Dance Magic Dance
   
   

   6.Beliefs – Place
   7. Beliefs – Divination
   8. Beliefs – Holidays
   9. Deity and Gender
   10. Pantheons and Patrons and Eclecticism, Oh My!
   11. Pantheon – Blood Mother
   12. Pantheon – Shining God
   13. Pantheon – Liminal God
   14. Pantheon – Genius Loci
   15. Pantheon – Ancestors and Animals
   16. Nature and the Dead
   17. Daily Routines
   18. Community and Why I Suck At It
   19. Paganism and my family/friends
   20. Paganism and my partner
   21. Other paths I’ve explored-- Hall Of Regrets
   22. Paganism and major life events
   23. Ethics
   24. Personal aesthetics and Paganism
   25. Favoured ritual tools, and why
   26. Any “secular” pastimes with religious significance, and why
   27. How your faith has helped you in difficult times
   28. One misconception about paganism you’d like to clear up
   29. The future of Paganism
   30. Has This Been Useful to Me?
   
   
   Hopefully something good can come of this, and I won't spend the month being a complete lump. who knows! ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN.

Repurposing the Blog

So. I've gotten sick of having this periodic waxing and waning of concern for my spiritual growth. This past year has done a lot for helping me really incorporate my beliefs into a general milieu of daily activity, but my relationship with the greater world of Paganism is an on-again, off-again one. And I think that needs to change.
So what do I, a solitary sort-of eclectic sort-of apathetic pagan do? I start a blog. This is just how it's done, it seems, in this day and age. Also this means now I can sound off on issues like OMG THE LABELING CRISIS in a venue other than comment threads. Man, comment threads, such turbulent places. Anyway.

I re-named the blog The Liminal Pagan, because honestly that's about as concise a name as I can think of. I'm still a foodie, and I still love incorporating my spirituality into the kitchen, but can I really call myself a Kitchen Witch? I don't know. I've grown about as leery of the term "witchcraft" as I have of "eclectic neopaganism," and besides that the magical system I'm currently investigating doesn't fall under the umbrella of European Witchcraft. Mostly.

The "Liminal" in the name applies to several different aspects of my life: I identify as biracial (even though there's more than just two ethnic groups in my heritage, but I base the term on how my parents self-identify), bisexual (but these days "queer" seems like a better general descriptor), flexaterian foodie (who loves bacon and making pie crusts with lard), eclectic pagan (who is deeply invested in avoiding cultural appropriation and simply going with "what feels right.") I am betwixt and between several easily-defined categories, and that has made some things in life difficult for me. The most consistently difficult has been my quest to find a religious system where I feel truly at home.

What I hope to do with this blog, other than share my successes (and failures) in the kitchen, is ask myself a lot of difficult questions about my own spirituality, and, in attempting to answer them, collect a viable, coherent framework for how I live my spiritual life.

I certainly don't feel like I'm a special and unique snowflake (or trying to enter all the events in the Oppression Olympics), but I do believe that the problems and questions I face make for an interesting viewpoint on the world of Paganism, hopefully one that is worth reading. I also hope that my efforts will be useful or interesting to folks who are dealing with some of the same issues as I am.

Sounds good? Let's get started.