Paganism

#ChangingPathsChallenge2024: Feasts

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When I was growing up in an American Baptist church, we often had meals at the church. We called them “dish to pass meals.” I’ve head others refer to them as “covered dish meals” and “pot luck meals.” The idea seems to be the same. Everyone brings some food to share and people eat together. While I haven’t done much research to verify, personal conversations suggest to me that this is a common enough practice among various Christian churches that it could almost be universal. I also suspect (again, without research data) that it’s common in most religions. After all, religion has traditionally been about communal identity and bonding. What better way to bond than over the sharing of food.

One of the things that I appreciate about Paganism is that Paganism often recognizes the importance of these communal feasts, often raising them to the level of religious observance in their own right.1 Often, the feast even becomes part of Pagan rites.

And again, this is where I look at the Heathen/Norse Pagan sumbel. While the rite itself may not involve feasting (though it involves a significant amount of drinking), feasts before or after the sumbel are pretty common. And the sumbel itself involves multiple rounds of drinking in community and making toasts and boasts as well as making oaths. And while much of this is done to honor the gods, ancestors, and wights, many have also commented on the community building and bonding aspect of the sumbel.

(This post is part of #ChaningPathsChallenge2024. For more information about the challenge and a list of topics, see Yvonne Aburrow’s post announcing it.)

Footnotes

  1. I should note that I was raised Baptist and Baptists are notoriously anti-liturgy. So there may be more liturgical or liturgy-friendly churches who do see their feasts (by whatever name they call them) an act of religious observance too. I just personally switched to Paganism before I encountered that mindset. ↩︎
Paganism

#ChangingPathsChallenge2024: Cycles

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Note: This was the prompt for yesterday. However, I blogged today’s prompt yesterday so I could talk about the solstice on the actual summer solstice. So today, we’re going back to get yesterday’s post. Tomorrow, we’ll be back on schedule.

Cycles are a natural part of life. We have the agricultural cycle. We have the sleep cycle. We have the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Cycles tend to be a pattern that nature is really good at duplicating and implementing.

Cycles are quite useful because cycles and often do build on previous cycles. This creates a sort of spiral pattern and a sense of progression rather than simply “going in circles.” As I go through the same cycle, I might notice different things, expanding my understanding of that cyclical process, myself, and the world around me. As an early childhood educator might tell you, repetition is an important part of learning. Again, this seems to be a concept that nature understands quite well.

So when I find myself repeating a cycle — assuming it’s not a cycle I need to break in order to encourage healthier patterns — I try to see what I can learn as I take another trip around the loop.

(This post is part of #ChangingPathsChallenge2024. For more information on the challenge and a list of topics/prompts, see Yvonne Aburrow’s post announcing the challenge.)

Paganism, Religion

#ChangingPathsChallenge2024: Solstice

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Note: Today’s topic is supposed to be “Cycles.” But I decided I wanted to do tomorrow’s prompt instead so I could talk about the solstice on the actual solstice. It’s a day early this year.

One of the things I find unfortunate is how many in the Pagan community is how we give a lot of attention to the winter solstice, but not so much love for the summer solstice. In some ways, I get it. The summer solstice is hot — especially this year in places like my home where there’s been a heat advisory. And while the winter solstice is cold, it’s easy to put on heavier clothes and wear a blanket. I can only strip down so far — especially while in public! And of course, the winter solstice has all that gift-giving to make it more appealing. (Maybe we should start giving gifts at both solstices!)

And yet, I do appreciate the longest day of the year. I like the thought of having so many daylight hours and celebrating the fact that the growing season is well under way. At this point, we are a couple months at most from the first harvest and its wondrous bounty of grains. I like watching the corn starting to grow and the small animals flying and running around in the yard.

This time of year is filled with visible life and activity. This is something to celebrate and gives me a new sense of life and purpose. So while I may be grateful when the days start shortening once more and look forward to the cooler temperatures of autumn, I will pay honor and show appreciation for this longest day each year.

(This past is part of #ChangingPathsChallenge2024. For more information about the challenge and a list of topics, check out Yvonne Aburrow’s post announcing it.)

Paganism, Religion

#ChangingPathsChallenge2024: Time

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Time is one of those ideas that you have to look at from a few different perspectives. As a human being, I have a limited amount of time on this earth, measured in decades. As such, I am inspired to squeeze as much as I can into the time that I have, making the most out of it. I try to accomplish as much good as I can in hopes of both making the world a better place and leaving a legacy worth remembering and building upon. In many ways, I wish I had more time.

And yet, time stretches behind me and ahead of me. If I live to be 100 years old, my lifespan will only account for 0.00000000725% of the current age of the universe as we know it. And the universe most likely will go on for billions of years after I’m gone. Probably more.

To me, this is both reason to understand that how I spend my own time is important and to realize that I will not individually change much in the grand scheme of things. For that reason, my limited time urges me to think and act communally — ideally thinking of the global community. it is only in participating in history and doing even my tiny part to make change that we can change the course of history and have lasting impacts through all time.

(This post is part of #ChangingPathChallenge2024. For more information about the challenge and a list of topics, check out Yvonne Aburrow’s post announcing it.)

Paganism, Psychic Stuff, Witchcraft

#ChangingPathsChallenge2024: Intuition

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In my career as a software developer, I’ve occasionally gotten a reputation for having a knack of finding and fixing bugs in software I often joke that’s because I engage in intuitive debugging. What most of my coworkers don’t realize is that in many cases, I’m not joking.

I tend not to think of intuition as something that is supernatural. Instead, I think a lot of our intuition is a matter of allowing our brains to roam free and paying attention to the unexpected connections it makes. The reality is that our bodies take in a lot more sensory input than we realize. Our brains filter out a lot of that input, focusing on details to build a picture that we think is going to be most useful and filled with the select details that matter to us.

For me, tapping into my intuition primarily involves with shutting that filter down and letting my brain sift through the “raw data” again and notice things it’s been trained to ignore. It can then explore new patterns that might get missed due to that “filtering process.”

This is why I also think that one’s intuition is not 100% accurate or reliable. The new information and ideas that such intuitive moments still has to be tested and verified before accepted or acted upon. But I don’t think that’s any different than the ideas and conclusions my more (consciously) analytical mind arrive at, either.

But being able to let my mind relax and expand in ways that let’s it look at the same input and ideas fresh is a useful skill to develop in my opinion.

(This post is part of #ChangingPathsChallenge2024. For more information about the challenge and a list of prompts, please check out Yvonne Aburrow’s post where they announced the challenge.)

Introspection

#ChangingPathsChallenge2024: Journey

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I’m half tempted to just post a video of Don’t Stop Believin’ today and calling it good enough. But that feels like cheating, especially after writing such a short post yesterday. So allow me a moment, dear readers, to get a bit more serious.

Many say that life is a journey, and I think there’s a great deal of merit to that. From cradle to grave, we each wend our way through this world. We meet people. We contribute to our communities. We touch other lives and are touched in turn. By the time we reach the other end of our journey through this life, we have made many memories and left many footprints — usually metaphorically but occasionally literally — behind us. These things create a record of our lives, our travels, and our impact.

I think we often tend to mistake the destination for the journey itself though. We think the destination is the point. I think this often diminishes and disrespects the journey itself. After all, what if the destination is unimportant. What if there ultimately is no destination at all? Perhaps this is the journey of the wanderer or wayfarer, where the whole point is to see what there is to be seen? What if the goal is simply to touch lives and be touched in return?

Of course, when it comes to life, the final destination is the grave or the urn. (Alas, the EPA tends to frown on actually scattering your ashes these days.) Is there something that comes after that? I don’t know. But what I do know is that if there is, that will be an entirely new journey. I’m too focused on the current one to give it much thought.

(This post is part of #ChangingPathsChallenged2024. For more information on the challenge and a list of prompts, check out this post by Yvonne Aburrow.)

Paganism, Religion

#ChangingPathsChallenge2024: Life

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I see the celebration of life as central to my religion. Without life, we would have nothing and would have no way to enjoy anything anyway. Everything else is an exploration of how to celebrate that life, preserve it, and make the most out it.

(This post is part of #ChangingPathsChallenge2024. For more information about the challenge and a list of topics, please check out Yvonne’ Aburrow’s post announcing it.)

Introspection, Paganism, Religion

#ChangingPathsChallenge2024: The Sky

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When I first started exploring a Pagan path, I decided to go outside and sit in my yard, staring up at the sky. It was shortly after a full moon and I had been dealing with the end of both a relationship and a friendship. I sat there wanting to cry.

And yet, in my mind’s eye, I felt the presence of a goddess. I’m not sure whether it was any particular goddess, as I must have been mere days into my exploration of Paganism and polytheism. But I felt her watchful eyes upon me. It was fairly cloudy that night, and I also felt as if the clouds were her, covering myself and the whole earth with her cloak, offering comfort and some sense of warmth.

To this day, I often feel as if the atmosphere itself is charged wit the energy of the deities. Sometimes that energy is buzzing and active. Other times, it is gently soothing. Yet no matter what, it is always there, beckoning my own spirit to sense it and respond to it.

(This post is part of #ChangingPathsChallenge2024. For more information on the challenge, including a list of daily topics, please see this post by Yvonne Aburrow.)

Paganism, Personal Development, Religion, Spiritual Development, Witchcraft

#ChangingPathsChallenge2024: My Path

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Some days, i really wonder if I have a spiritual path. This is in part because I often feel like I don’t do much. I’m not a huge ritualist. I don’t spend a lot of time doing fancy rites, complicated offerings, or grand magical workings.

I take some heart when I read Gerald Gardner’s books. He wrote that the witches he met practiced a simple craft and that it often seemed more kike children’s games them some fancy ritual or complicated process. That seems to match my own spirituality, in many ways. I often say that for me, witchcraft is more a matter of perspective. I feel I see and think about the world in certain ways that I consider “witchy.” And most days, that seems good enough for me.

Another thing I often wonder, though, is whether things would be easier if I followed a particular tradition or joined a particular group. I often feel like I’m blazing my own trail. While I often like that and the way it enables me not to get wrapped up in things that don’t really make sense to me, it also leaves me wondering how well I actually know what I’m doing. I often find myself wondering if I could accomplish more under following the tried and true methods of a tradition as imparted to me by a teacher.

And I suppose if I ever found the right teacher at the right time, I might go that route. But until then, I find myself on a certain path of my own making. So for now, I’ll continue to wend m way through things based on my own reasoning and intuition and the occasional insights offered by my deities and any other allies I might come across. Because as much as I might wonder about other paths, a huge part of me still wants to see where this path I’m on will take me.

(This post is part of #ChangingPathsChallenge2024. For more information about this event and a list of topics, please see this post by Yvonne Aburrow.)

Personal Development, Religion, Spiritual Development

Letting go of certainty and being right: Exploring a journal prompt from chapter 10 of “Changing Paths”

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Happy Friday morning, dear readers. I hope you’re enjoying reading my posts for #ChangingPathsChallenge2024 as much as I’m enjoying writing them. I thought I’d briefly mention a couple other blogs participating in the challenge. Of course, Yvonne Aburrow, creator of the challenge, is participating over at the resources blog for the book. I’ve also managed to run across The River Crow, who has written some delightful poetry for many of the prompts. I highly encourage you to check out both blogs and their entries. And if you know of other people participating, be sure to drop a link in the comments!

In the meantime, I wanted to write a post about chapter ten of the book Changing Paths, which is entitled “Unexamined Baggage.” For this chapter, I’ve chosen this journal prompt from the book:

Check your baggage. What ideas or values or assumptions are you carrying around from your original religious or philosophical tradition? Which ones do you want to jettison, and which ones do you want to keep?

I had to think long and hard about this one. I feel like I’ve unpacked and discarded most of what I picked up from my days as an evangelical Christian. Sure, I’ve only recently started examining and working through the ways in which my previous religion was mired in white supremacy. Similarly, I’ve been going through an unlearning process in which I critically examine what my Sunday school teachers, pastors, and other Christian leaders taught me about Judaism and the antisemitism that often gets baked right into some of the common tenets of Christianity. But these are both things I feel like I’m well on my way of ridding myself of.

Eventually, however, I think I thought of something I picked up from Christianity that I still struggle with at times: The constant need to be right and even to prove that I’m right. As an evangelical Christian, I was constantly reminded of the need to “be prepared to give a defense of the faith at all times.” So debates — or arguments disguised as debates — were something I often engaged in. I felt the need to prove that my faith was rock solid and correct. To be honest, that’s a need to is hard shake.

In some cases, I’m not sure I want to shake it completely. For example, I think there are some things that are worth arguing dogmatically in favor of, such as the basic humanity and dignity of all people. Along those lines, I will unapologetically fight for the rights and proper treatment of all people. To do otherwise would strike me as a betrayal of my principles.

And yet, even in these cases, I find myself stopping to check with myself as to why I’m engaging in such fights. Am I doing it because it’s the right thing to do and because people will be harmed otherwise? Or am I doing it in order to be right? In many cases, I suspect both motives play a factor. However, I think only the first one is a motive that should be encouraged. In the end, the well-being of others and the search for justice for them is not about me, nor should it be.

In other cases, I just think it’s important to remember that I’ve been wrong in the past and I could be wrong again. So I try — though not always successfully — to remind myself to hold to many beliefs and view loosely and humbly. Because again, it has to be about a search for truth rather than the quest to be right.

The thoughts of a gay witch living in upstate New York.