Day Four: Prayer and Offerings

4. Beliefs – Prayer and Offerings

It’s only been recently, relatively speaking, that I’ve started giving any thought to prayer at all. I’d say within the last year, two years or so. Before that time, so much of my spiritual life was directed towards self-improvement and using tools like journeywork and Tarot to get a better perspective on my life and issue that needed resolving. You know what another great tool is? Therapy.

To be perfectly honest, this is proving a very difficult post to write. I feel like there’s a lot of ingrained embarassment about it, like...I feel like all my athiest friends will judge me for talking about how I pray. Is that weird? I feel it’s a little weird, being self-conscious about admitting this. Yes, when I am troubled, I pray and it makes me feel better. I can’t be sure if anyone’s actually listening, or if this is all in my head, but for the most part my worldview is appreciation and honoring above absolute understanding. I can take it on faith that my prayers help me, and that they give some pleasure to those I’m honoring.

Of course sometimes it’s not about supplication, like “help me get through this troubling time.” Sometimes prayer is all about the spontaneous creation of words, put together and sent out into the world to be enjoyed. So in that sense I view it as performance art. A very private sort of performance, but the idea is there all the same, and there’s a certain amount of staging that is required. I usually like to accompany prayer with an offering, just to be polite and reciprocate. If I’m asking a deity for something it’s only logical to offer something in return, to maintain a good relationship.

Making offerings is a bit of a trial and error process, but it’s highly interesting. It’s hard to describe how the process feels, but it’s like a change in air pressure, or a tingling on the back of my neck like the kind that happens when you catch someone watching you. Deciding what kind of offerings to make is a sort of intuitive process. Sometimes water is sufficient, particularly if I’m outside. It’s easy to libate, isn’t doing any harm to the environment, and I can partake of it without getting loopy, as opposed to say, a nice merlot. Other types of offerings I’ve branched out into. In my initial “hey anyone wanting to work with me, here’s some gifts for you” offering I used ghee that I’d made myself out of organic butter, and that got a pretty strong response. The amount of work I’ve put into an offering increases the likelihood that it’ll be well-received, I think.

I wasn’t expecting milk to go over as well as it did with Shining God. By the time I started offering it I’d done enough research and meditation to narrow down a bit which solar deity I was working with, but the huge favorable response to milk was a great help—I had the strongest impulse to pour it out on a rock as opposed to just a bowl or on the grass and I couldn’t quite figure out why until I did it, and it was such a strong visual key that things immediately clicked. It was very emotional, in a weird way.

I feel like at this point I could start to completely ramble and I have to go to work soon, so I’m going to wrap this up with a brief non-inclusive list of things I’ve used as offerings:

Artwork, small bits of sculpture, words, sex, mentrual blood, water, milk, tea (green, oolong, black, pu-erh), alcohol (beer, vodka), incense (loose and sticks), ghee, bread, honey, strawberries, knitting

And surely this will expand as time goes on.

Day Three: Deities

3. Beliefs – Deities

Okay so I really don’t know what to write for this day’s theme, but Girlfriend is insisting I keep up with this post per day for the new year deal, and I’m too tired from work to think up another subject for day three and then sneakily go back and change in the master post so no one is the wiser.

So: Deities! Or my rambly musings on the nature of Deity in general.

One of the most useful things I have come across in my time identifying as Pagan is the God Map, a concept illustrated wonderfully by Joyce and River Higginbotham in their really quite good book entitled Paganism: An Introduction to Earth-Centered Religions. The God Map basically shows, in a nifty and easy to comprehend graph, how various religious throughout the world have different ideas of what Deity is, on a spectrum of abstract to concrete and permeating to transcendent. There’s a great rundown of it on another blog that I found during a frantic search effort while trying to explain my jumble of thoughts to Girlfriend one day. Read it here.

I don’t yet know where I stand on the God Map. Like, okay, some spiritual encounters I’ve had, like Lake Michigan, are very far removed from recognizable communication, and I would hesitate to ascribe anthropomorphized characteristics to spirits that are places. I’m very much in the animist region, in that respect. Permeating but concrete, but not so concrete as this is a guy in the sky who has a beard and wields lightning bolts, or any other sort of defined appearance other than the actual physical appearance of a very old lake that has claimed the lives of a lot of people over the years.

In other more recent Deity interactions, for example with the one I tentatively title Shining God (more about Him on day 12), I get a fairly concrete mental image of a golden, smiling, male solar deity during meditation, as well as UPG associations of sunlight reflecting on water or leaves. He is a solar-associated god but also not the actual Sun, which I do honor in a different way. The Sun itself, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t give a crap whether I worship it or not, it keeps on doing its thing regardless of any human activity. Shining God, however, seems to enjoy or at least look kindly on mindful offerings, and to further muddle things I will sometimes address Him and the Sun interchangeably in prayer.

So you see, it’s already a bit tangled. In addition to this, I’ve only recently begun trying to have good, productive, respectful relationships with more concrete deities and I’ve yet to research/experience enough to say definitively what I believe the nature of these gods are. 

Day Two: Cosmology

2. Cosmology

This is a bit of a tricky area for me. At heart, I think, I’m an animist. (note that I added a glossary tab up top there to help allay any confusion my fast and loose term-dropping may cause) I believe that the universe came about through the normal scientifically-accepted means, I just happen to also believe that the natural world is full of spirits.

There have been times in my life where I’ve been aware, with absolute certainty, of presences or personalities in nature. This is one of those tricky sometimes silly-sounding things called Unverified Personal Gnosis (hereafter UPG), when one comes into a state of knowing something, really fully knowing something that’s been reavealed, but there is no way to prove this to anyone else. And in a way, I think, it shouldn’t have to be proven to anyone else, if the meaning you get out of the experience is a personal connection with the divine.

Anyway, during these instances of UPG I have felt in the presence of things so much older than myself, larger and more powerful and completely foreign from any human presence. These have been spirits of specific places, and sometimes they make me feel welcome and sometimes they simply make me feel like a foreigner who doesn’t belong. But either way, they make me feel something, and I’m grateful for the interaction and knowledge of their presence.

More recently, as I perused various online Pagan forums and read (lurkingly, I am a master of lurking) about other people’s encounters with specific deities, with names and images and attributes and everything, I found myself wondering if I even believe in gods at all, or if these spirits of place are all that’s out there (or all that care about making themselves known to me, anyway). Also, since so far these place-spirits show up when I’m traveling or hiking or other occasional times when I’m not at home, I wanted to try and expand my horizons a bit and put out a call, as it were, for any deities who were interested in working with me in my efforts to get a solid daily religious practice going. There have been a few answers.

Right now I can’t say for certain where I fall on the polytheism spectrum; I don’t know if say, all spirits in the world are aspects of one greater whole that permeates the entire universe or if everyone is separate and distinct. Place spirits feel different from Ancestor spirits, and those feel a bit different from more Deity-type spirits, and there’s another low-key type of spirit-feeling I get when I’m putting energy and work into something, like reading Tarot or working on a painting that’s really coming together.

Something that really fascinates and terrifies me is the thermodynamic concept of entropy. I first was smacked in the face by how amazing it is while reading Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia while sitting in the park in Charleston with my wonderful girlfriend. It’s difficult for me to conceptualize the idea that like, all the energy in the world has basically come from the sun or residual radiation from the Big Bang, and slowly it’s all being frittered away and at some point the universal temperature is going to normalize. When I try to vizualise this really, really full of math concept (note: math is not normally my friend) I get a mental image of a great beast, permeating the layers of reality, devouring everything indiscriminately. And because I’m such a huge Borges fangirl I imagine that beast is a Tiger.

Generally though I tend to keep my focus closer to home, so to speak. However: if I ever become an intrepid spacefaring explorer I will probably be making offerings to the great devouring coldness before I go, just to be on the safe side. 

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.  

Fermentation and Culture

Thoughts on fermentation:

It may seem a little out there to have a post about tea on my spirituality blog, but this is a perfect example of how my thought process works, regarding daily spiritual practice.

The first infusion (rinse) went into a bowl, and that along with half of the second infusion (which I drank) got left as an offering. In drinking tea I cannot help but think about all the work, the human effort and inspiration that went into crafting the tea, and how the combination of different forces and factors has created the beverage I consume daily. Pu-erh tea in particular has a lot of work put into it, and it’s a group effort between the leaf, the person crafting it, and the bacteria that ferments it (and, eventually, the person brewing and drinking it).

Fermentation is one of those weird, ancient food prep techniques that really makes no sense when you think about it, allowing things to rot and then consuming them anyway and somehow that makes the food different and in many cases better tasting and better for you than just eating it raw. What the hell, man! The first people discovering cheese when like, their mare’s milk got jostled and bacteriafied in a leather pouch on the way from point A to point B must have freaked out. It’s one thing, really, to eat something like that once because you know, early human cultures, subsistence level society, etc, you’d better clean your plate. If you are working with limited resources, yes, it makes perfect sense that a food-mistake ends up getting eaten or drunk anyway. But the weird thing, the special marvellous human magic thing, that happens when people decide to do it again, on purpose. We as a species are great at making tools, and taking disparate elements and combining them and making something completely different from them. And we’re great at thinking completely outside the box. We think nowhere near the box. The box is on a different continent.

Eventually, through generations of experimenting and probably lots of people getting poisoned from bad fermentation efforts, we end up with with a standardized process to make edibles that are really delicious, infinitely varied, and full of the energy, focus, and passion of a lot of human beings: Beer, bread, yogurt, cheese, dried sausage, miso, pu-erh. When I sit down and take the time to actually think about it, it blows my mind.

The thing about fermentation is that you need bacteria. And these days, in modern western society, bacteria is a thing that we in general are terrified of. Every day at work I am confronted with great huge pump bottles of antibacterial hand sanitizer, because it’s cold and flu season and for god’s sake get the germs off your hands. But I always take the time to wash my hands with soap and water instead, because I don’t want to kill off all the bacteria on my hands. And I especially don’t want to do it with glorified rubbing alcohol that dries out my skin and creates a billion little microcuts and allows more bacteria, the different, nasty death-kind, to get into my bloodstream.

Bacteria are weird. We vilify them and fear them and yet we need them, to make things we consider staple foods. A group of bacteria isn’t called a population, it’s called a culture. And that makes me think about what defines a culture, both human or bacterial. In both cases we have a group of individuals working in harmony, and that group creates something unique, something that differentiates it from other groups, something that leaves its mark on the world. As an artist and a crafter and a cook I participate in my culture, and I try to add to it and enrich it with my efforts. I can’t do it, can’t create or savor or fully participate, without the aid of other people and other organisms, and without the forces that create and maintain life on this earth.

And for that, I offer the tea I brew as thanks and recognition. I hope it was well-received. 

Pu-erh Tea

Tea Adventures: Ripe Pu-erh

About three weeks ago, I bought a lovely little gaiwan, or lidded cup, in the interests of furthering my tea appreciation. I adore oolong teas and I want to learn more about the traditional Chinese gongfucha tea ceremony and, generally, the style of brewing that focuses on multiple short infusions of the tea to get a lot of brewings out of a small amount of leaves. It's practical!

The gaiwan is totally adorable, and a much better learning tool than say, immediately jumping into a yixing clay teapot, because those things can be a serious investment (they were the best part of that crappy second episode of series 1 of Sherlock, IMO). The gaiwan is also way useful, since it's nice glazed porcelain it's not going to absorb the aroma and flavors of tea like unglazed yixing ware, meaning that I can try out a lot of different kinds of tea in the gaiwan and not be locked into just, say, tieguanyin. Granted if I had an yixing teapot I'd be drinking tieguanyin all the damn time, but that's neither here nor there at the moment. My first try with the gaiwan was with some gunpowder green that I have had sitting around for a year, I'm not gonna lie, because it's rolled so tight the tea keeps very well, and I've made a dent in this giant pound bag but man. 

It worked nicely, but I didn't get any pictures of the process. This afternoon,however, I decided to be bold and try a type of tea I've never brewed before: pu-erh. With the gaiwan came two little samples of pu-erh, one "raw" traditionally-processed bunch from 2008, and one "ripe" or artificially fermented (and therefore cheaper, more consistent, and easier to brew) sample from 2006. I went with the ripe sample, and I still have about half of it left over for another go, but I'm totally not done with the first brewing yet.

And now, photographic evidence of my adventures in being brave and a grownup and trying new things:

My gear all set up. Yes I am using a shot glass as a drinking vessel because I don't have nice small teacups.

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.