I can't fast in a traditional "eat no food" sort of sense. I can't go a day without food, even if it just sun up to sun down. I can't even skip meals. I'm not diabetic, but I do have issues with blood sugar, and when I don't eat I end up doing silly things like passing out and ending up with a nice lump on the back of my head.
I fast by cutting things out of my life, and not around food. I fast by not allowing myself to watch Netflix for a month. Or taking a weekend to unplug from everything, internet, phone, tv, the works. Usually I unplug at cons. These days it is a bit harder as there are things structurally in my life that make unplugging problematic for others and not just myself, but I'm still working that out. At some point, I'm going to attempt the exercise of a silent weekend. Preferably, while camping or otherwise away from my home where I hear everything in the streets nearby. Silent weekend. Unplug things that are not necessary and turn them all off. Turn off the phone, the music, even the fan. Journal, write, read, but do not talk or otherwise make noise. Sit with the silence. This is an endeavor I hope to accomplish at some point.
But one of the points of fasting is appreciating the feast. The abundance. And other than the verbal expression of gratitude to the people in my life who contribute to said abundance, other than occasional mentions of it to the Gods, Spirits, and other such Beings in my life, I am terrible at appreciating abundance.
I didn't think of things in these sorts of terms. Partly because I shy away from dichotomies. Boundaries are flexible, blurry things in my mind and life, as are definitions. So, thinking of feast as opposed to fast (or famine) is a difficult endeavor for me. They aren't dichotomous in the sense of opposites, but in the sense of complements, of counterparts.
Except a ritual last week (and why this entry is going up late) made me rethink my paradigms around these subjects. I was a ritual guide for another, and their ritual was one of cutting away unhealthy things and appreciating the abundance of healthy things in their life. Part of the ritual was a literal feast of abundance. There was more than we could eat or even offer. The rest were leftovers, intentionally, to be eaten at another time.
Also, it was actually a good example of giving freely to the Gods as well, because this individual decided at various points to give more in offerings than planned. They basically decided at various points that they wished to offer more, and so they did. I'm always pleased when people decide that to offer more (especially when such offerings create no hardship,) the Gods appreciate an abundance as well. But, as usual, I digress.
I fast in part to appreciate the feast. Now, I am working on structuring a new ritual for my life, feasting to appreciate the times of famine. Be it a dinner with friends, or perhaps just an overabundance of good reading, there are plenty of times for a moment of thanks, a moment of appreciation and a moment for my Gods.
Fasting I use mostly as a form of cleansing, and especially as ritual preparation Time that feasting takes it's own place in my life as something beyond the mundane.
Showing posts with label respect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label respect. Show all posts
Monday, March 25, 2013
Monday, January 21, 2013
Pagan Blog Project: B is for Boundaries
Maybe this post ought to belong more under L for Liminality, but boundaries will do. And if you wonder why this is a few days late, go look up Douglas Adams' opinion on deadlines.
I exist at midpoints and cross-sections, my life is a liminal space. Some of this is obvious, seeing as I'm not just trans (FAAB if you're wondering) but literally "in transition." My physical body hops back and forth across the line between what are considered traditionally male and female attributes. I'm not what most people would consider androgynous, but for those who really get to see my body there isn't a better word. Unless there was a word akin to ambivalent for androgynous, as I am not a blending, an absence, but rather a mix of strongly attributed signs of both male and female. But I digress. The point I make here, is that my life isn't actually filled with mixes of colors. It appears that way from a distance, like a Seurat painting, upon close inspection it is series of dots. I'm strangely unmixed, filled with boundaries instead of a smooth blend. So, unshockingly, boundaries have been on my mind a great deal lately.
Boundaries are something many (if not most) pagans/polytheists/etc. recognize as a thing power. Most magically inclined people I know have some kind of ward on their home specially based/focused on the threshold.
Look at transitional times and spaces, we find some truly spiritually powerful concepts. Dusk and dawn, the times of twilight when we exist in neither day or night. Midnight is the division between the days themselves, and aniversaries, be they the New Year, or the marking an occasion like the day one was born, are celebrated thresholds in time. The tops of cliffs mark the border between earth and sky, and sometimes water, if they fall off into a lake, river, ocean, etc. The boundaries are sacred places where difference meets.
Except, many woo/spooky sorts of people have a really terrible sense of personal boundaries. We don't admit to how much we nonconsensually push our energy on others. Coming from multiple communities where every touch was asked, even a handshake or a welcoming hug to an old friend, the I abhor idea of sending personal energy to another person without prior consent.
Except, many woo/spooky sorts of people have a really terrible sense of personal boundaries. We don't admit to how much we nonconsensually push our energy on others. Coming from multiple communities where every touch was asked, even a handshake or a welcoming hug to an old friend, the I abhor idea of sending personal energy to another person without prior consent.
A concept I picked up at a BDSM class was the idea of ETDs, energetically transmitted diseases. The woo-folk in the class all got sudden looks of realization. Upon the instructor saying "you know how you hook up with someone, and end up with their baggage?" everyone else's faces in the room got the same look. Ever since then I've been drastically more careful about my own personal energetic boundaries. Particularly when hooking up with people, I'm very careful about making sure neither of us walks away with the other's shit to deal with.
Except many people who work with energy do NOT think about boundaries. So many people send healing energies at others without prior consent. Sure, healing energies have their time and place, but to me it's akin to penicillin. Sure, it revolutionized medicine and treated all sorts of things, but if you give it to me, I end up in the hospital. Not to mention the number of things it doesn't do anything about. Sending unwanted energy? Same thing. Other people having written about this subject more in depth and more eloquently. But the fact remains, many pagans/woo type folk are shit about consent.
I hold no excuses, and in my early years as a practitioner I was not so great about consent either. But partway through high school I realized my energy didn't "play well with others." There were a lot of reasons for that, but those didn't matter half so much as the realization that pushing unwanted energy onto others caused actual problems. My life was a shitstorm of mostly-failed attempts at coping, and no one deserved an ounce of what I was going through. Their lives were hard enough without someone else's shit dropping in on them. When I finally heard the concept of ETDs, things clicked into place. Years prior I had that knowledge but not the words. I stopped working with others in any spiritual or magical capacity for years until my life, and energy, were drastically more under control.
Clear defined boundaries are something we need to pay a lot more attention to. Yes, because they are healthy useful things that keep us all healthy and productive. Yes, because of consent. Yes, because even spirits and Gods sometimes need to be told a clear "No." But beyond all that, we need clear boundaries because boundaries are sacred. That clear line delineating between my energy and yours? Sacred. It is a holy thing to me. Respecting that boundary, and crossing it with permission are sacred acts to be celebrated. Respecting the power found in boundaries, and liminal spaces, requires respecting those boundaries.
It isn't about crossing lines or not crossing them, it's about being aware of permission, of consent.
I hold no excuses, and in my early years as a practitioner I was not so great about consent either. But partway through high school I realized my energy didn't "play well with others." There were a lot of reasons for that, but those didn't matter half so much as the realization that pushing unwanted energy onto others caused actual problems. My life was a shitstorm of mostly-failed attempts at coping, and no one deserved an ounce of what I was going through. Their lives were hard enough without someone else's shit dropping in on them. When I finally heard the concept of ETDs, things clicked into place. Years prior I had that knowledge but not the words. I stopped working with others in any spiritual or magical capacity for years until my life, and energy, were drastically more under control.
Clear defined boundaries are something we need to pay a lot more attention to. Yes, because they are healthy useful things that keep us all healthy and productive. Yes, because of consent. Yes, because even spirits and Gods sometimes need to be told a clear "No." But beyond all that, we need clear boundaries because boundaries are sacred. That clear line delineating between my energy and yours? Sacred. It is a holy thing to me. Respecting that boundary, and crossing it with permission are sacred acts to be celebrated. Respecting the power found in boundaries, and liminal spaces, requires respecting those boundaries.
It isn't about crossing lines or not crossing them, it's about being aware of permission, of consent.
Friday, April 27, 2012
I is for Iconoclastic Inertia (Pagan Blog Project)
Iconoclast- n. a person who attacks established or traditional concepts, principals, laws, etc. / a destroyer of religious images or sacred objects.1
America's main enduring tradition is iconoclasm. Less the religious aspect (although that frequently applies as well) American's love uprooting tradition and cheering for the underdog. Well, assuming America is the underdog, which in our cultural paradigm must always be the case. Logic need not apply. America is fairly young, and began with a revolution against a more powerful empire while uprooting and destroying the indigenous people and religion. Most of us were raised on the "greatness" of the iconoclasm of our predecessors, no matter how offensive the crimes of the past might be. We continue this tradition today by upholding the "Mavericks" in Congress, no matter how much such individuals actually support the status quo. Currently, there is a distressingly large push for radically regressive measures in the name of "traditional" values against actual traditional values of the country. As I said, logic need not apply.
It may make no sense, but there is a continual undercurrent against traditional principals.
That traditional disparaging of tradition is harmful for paganism. The view of so many Americans to most situations is a dismissal of how things were done, dismissing our parents as out of touch, dismissing previous wisdom and dismissing most rules as impinging on personal freedom. It's a view of destruction, destroying the past again and again. I'm not exactly a traditional person (being queer, trans, having visible ink, piercing, etc.) but I take issue with much of this destruction. We've destroyed indigenous cultures, both the Native Americans as well as Native Europeans. We've destroyed the past of most immigrants who were not white, erased our cultural histories until Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, and more blended into the same homogeneous 'whiteness' rather than enriching each other with distinctiveness. Nothing is coming out of it, because we're not paying enough attention before we smash something to realize there might just be something(s) worth learning. We destroy, but rather skip the rebuilding, recreating phase.
Polytheistic paganism requires rebuilding and recreating. We reconstruct because there is no other way to discover what came before (unless someone out there actually has a TARDIS, in which case, please come by yesterday.) We have to look back at older wisdom, because we can't always know exactly what was done, we must investigate why.
I'm not a pure reconstructionist. Gods, I'm not even in a specific pantheon, but I still spend two hours doing research for a five minute devotional offering to Apollon. Two hours, because I do very little Hellenic practice and despite having good resources I needed to know not just what to offer Apollon, but how and why. Two hours to piece together scraps from various people's personal gnoses (verified and unverified) in addition to the records left to know how I should do this small devotional offering.
Unlike most polytheistic pagans, I'm not huge on ancestor worship. Not because I don't want to, but rather my blood ancestors wouldn't appreciate it, and back much farther than most (as my family is really damn Jewish.) Until I can work out if it would be of use, it means I must look to other places for a similar connection. I recognize the wisdom these links to the past bring. The understanding of hardships that are often beyond our comprehension in an age where we can have a face to face chat with someone anywhere in the world. I'm not saying today's world isn't hard, quite the contrary, we can learn from the past to help us function in this rather shitty time of continual recession and the assault of the repressive right-wingers.
Maybe I am an iconoclast. I want to attack the underlying assumptions of monotheistic USA, from the conception of "self-made men" to American exceptionalism... but especially, I want to attack the notion of simple answers. "Self-made men" usually "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" and make money that the government takes and gives to "parasites." If you can't tell, I call bullshit on that entire sentence. This culture has a mythos that individuals make themselves, erasing family, mentors, friends, and the systematic opportunities that differ so greatly between people. American exceptionalism is a disastrous concept that states the USA is some morally upright country supposed to spread liberty throughout the world. I say disastrous because not just of the history of slavery, genocide, internment, but the present day wars on other cultures as well as our own. We have the highest prison rate in the world, and it is destroying swaths of our society instead of building towards a future. Not something worth spreading, but we are anyways. But I digress.
Regardless, really what I protest and attack is the simple question simple answer view of the world that is so prevalent. It's one of the things I love about polytheism, there are no simple answers. I have to look at this huge expanse of beliefs, and consider, deliberate, study and understand. No, not everyone seeks such a spiritual path or has the time to invest in such inquiry. That's just fine and dandy, but the questioning is important anyways. Mostly because I think that people don't have to be as stupid as they presently are. Critical thinking is something supposedly taught in schools, where everyone is told where and when to move according to bells. We aren't taught to question, because we're taught to look for the simplest answers, to get the grade, to get to college, to get the diploma, to get the job, etc. It's a mindset that in my view we have to break out of in general, but especially so to practice polytheism. Honestly, I feel it is a mindset needed in Christianity, Judaism, Atheism, in every sphere across the board. We need to question, and then listen to the answers.
Critical thinking doesn't work without listening. Typical inert iconoclasm that doesn't engage doesn't teach us anything. Ask why Athena might not be the best goddess to call upon for a female sexual empowerment ritual. Ask what happens next in a story, and listen. Especially listen when the entity speaking isn't exactly corporeal. They're words are all the more likely to get lost in translation from spirit to body. Rather than the dismissive, narcissistic, ignorance so often embodied to erase the past, listen. Listen to the Catholic grandmother who talks with spirits, the Jewish mother who prays to St. Anthony when something important got lost, as well as chosen mentors and teachers. They're wisdom is disappearing.
I'm not saying "do whatever your elders tell you" because lets face it, if I was I'd be doing rather different things with my life. At least listen, and understand their words, because it is a better foundation to build upon.
And because after my only semi-coherent ranting I need something cute, here's a picture of a sugar glider.
1. iconoclast. (n.d.). Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Retrieved April 26, 2012, from Dictionary.com website:http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/iconoclast
America's main enduring tradition is iconoclasm. Less the religious aspect (although that frequently applies as well) American's love uprooting tradition and cheering for the underdog. Well, assuming America is the underdog, which in our cultural paradigm must always be the case. Logic need not apply. America is fairly young, and began with a revolution against a more powerful empire while uprooting and destroying the indigenous people and religion. Most of us were raised on the "greatness" of the iconoclasm of our predecessors, no matter how offensive the crimes of the past might be. We continue this tradition today by upholding the "Mavericks" in Congress, no matter how much such individuals actually support the status quo. Currently, there is a distressingly large push for radically regressive measures in the name of "traditional" values against actual traditional values of the country. As I said, logic need not apply.
It may make no sense, but there is a continual undercurrent against traditional principals.
That traditional disparaging of tradition is harmful for paganism. The view of so many Americans to most situations is a dismissal of how things were done, dismissing our parents as out of touch, dismissing previous wisdom and dismissing most rules as impinging on personal freedom. It's a view of destruction, destroying the past again and again. I'm not exactly a traditional person (being queer, trans, having visible ink, piercing, etc.) but I take issue with much of this destruction. We've destroyed indigenous cultures, both the Native Americans as well as Native Europeans. We've destroyed the past of most immigrants who were not white, erased our cultural histories until Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, and more blended into the same homogeneous 'whiteness' rather than enriching each other with distinctiveness. Nothing is coming out of it, because we're not paying enough attention before we smash something to realize there might just be something(s) worth learning. We destroy, but rather skip the rebuilding, recreating phase.
Polytheistic paganism requires rebuilding and recreating. We reconstruct because there is no other way to discover what came before (unless someone out there actually has a TARDIS, in which case, please come by yesterday.) We have to look back at older wisdom, because we can't always know exactly what was done, we must investigate why.
I'm not a pure reconstructionist. Gods, I'm not even in a specific pantheon, but I still spend two hours doing research for a five minute devotional offering to Apollon. Two hours, because I do very little Hellenic practice and despite having good resources I needed to know not just what to offer Apollon, but how and why. Two hours to piece together scraps from various people's personal gnoses (verified and unverified) in addition to the records left to know how I should do this small devotional offering.
Unlike most polytheistic pagans, I'm not huge on ancestor worship. Not because I don't want to, but rather my blood ancestors wouldn't appreciate it, and back much farther than most (as my family is really damn Jewish.) Until I can work out if it would be of use, it means I must look to other places for a similar connection. I recognize the wisdom these links to the past bring. The understanding of hardships that are often beyond our comprehension in an age where we can have a face to face chat with someone anywhere in the world. I'm not saying today's world isn't hard, quite the contrary, we can learn from the past to help us function in this rather shitty time of continual recession and the assault of the repressive right-wingers.
Maybe I am an iconoclast. I want to attack the underlying assumptions of monotheistic USA, from the conception of "self-made men" to American exceptionalism... but especially, I want to attack the notion of simple answers. "Self-made men" usually "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" and make money that the government takes and gives to "parasites." If you can't tell, I call bullshit on that entire sentence. This culture has a mythos that individuals make themselves, erasing family, mentors, friends, and the systematic opportunities that differ so greatly between people. American exceptionalism is a disastrous concept that states the USA is some morally upright country supposed to spread liberty throughout the world. I say disastrous because not just of the history of slavery, genocide, internment, but the present day wars on other cultures as well as our own. We have the highest prison rate in the world, and it is destroying swaths of our society instead of building towards a future. Not something worth spreading, but we are anyways. But I digress.
Regardless, really what I protest and attack is the simple question simple answer view of the world that is so prevalent. It's one of the things I love about polytheism, there are no simple answers. I have to look at this huge expanse of beliefs, and consider, deliberate, study and understand. No, not everyone seeks such a spiritual path or has the time to invest in such inquiry. That's just fine and dandy, but the questioning is important anyways. Mostly because I think that people don't have to be as stupid as they presently are. Critical thinking is something supposedly taught in schools, where everyone is told where and when to move according to bells. We aren't taught to question, because we're taught to look for the simplest answers, to get the grade, to get to college, to get the diploma, to get the job, etc. It's a mindset that in my view we have to break out of in general, but especially so to practice polytheism. Honestly, I feel it is a mindset needed in Christianity, Judaism, Atheism, in every sphere across the board. We need to question, and then listen to the answers.
Critical thinking doesn't work without listening. Typical inert iconoclasm that doesn't engage doesn't teach us anything. Ask why Athena might not be the best goddess to call upon for a female sexual empowerment ritual. Ask what happens next in a story, and listen. Especially listen when the entity speaking isn't exactly corporeal. They're words are all the more likely to get lost in translation from spirit to body. Rather than the dismissive, narcissistic, ignorance so often embodied to erase the past, listen. Listen to the Catholic grandmother who talks with spirits, the Jewish mother who prays to St. Anthony when something important got lost, as well as chosen mentors and teachers. They're wisdom is disappearing.
I'm not saying "do whatever your elders tell you" because lets face it, if I was I'd be doing rather different things with my life. At least listen, and understand their words, because it is a better foundation to build upon.
And because after my only semi-coherent ranting I need something cute, here's a picture of a sugar glider.
1. iconoclast. (n.d.). Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Retrieved April 26, 2012, from Dictionary.com website:http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/iconoclast
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