Month: January 2015

The Pagan Experience, blog project, wk 4, alphabet letters

Published on by Boneweaver (aka pjvj)Leave a comment

Prompt from The Pagan Experience: Any writing for the letters A or B– I am keeping this familiar format on week 4 of each month for those who have joined me from the Pagan Blog Project.

My word is assumptions. (No, I’m not going to pull out the old ass-u-me thing because I think that is bogus based on how the human brain works when trying to sort things quickly.) Assumptions that are not checked against reality, or no effort is put forth to see if the assumption is correct or incorrect, that is the thorn in my lovely aching side. Lazy assumptions, because it’s easier than wrangling difficult or new-to-you concepts. I’ve had it with all of them.

Pagans who’ve glommed on to the New Age movement are especially adept at assumptions of “how people should behave” and at what empathy, compassion, kindness, and love look like. They create tiny boxes. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, those boxes hold all the things that are familiar to them and all the things that are exact replicas of how they do those things.

This is the easy way out of truly getting to know the variety that makes up humanity. It is a way of avoiding the difficult work of learning nuances and shades of presentation by dismissing anything and anyone that doesn’t fit neatly into your box. All done while claiming to be Super Spiritual™ themselves and Doing the Hard Work™.

Hey there box person. You missed a step.

Maybe even several steps.

So this is happening! Join me!! On Sale to boot! (sale ends Saturday)

Published on by Boneweaver (aka pjvj)Leave a comment

At the Crossroads: Finding Your Purpose… is HERE!

by Chief Luisah Teish

KNOWING YOUR PURPOSE IS THE KEY TO ADDRESSING OPPRESSION AND ACHIEVING COLLECTIVE LIBERATION.

Political, cultural and spiritual liberation were never meant to be separate: they are extensions of each other — and they were always treated as such in the most radical of social justice movements.

Knowing who we are, and what we need to do — with deep clarity of purpose — is the most dangerous thing for systems of oppression. With purpose, we cannot be used or enslaved.

We want to grow our personal and collective power exponentially by tapping into the infinite wells of the spirit, so we put together this offering…

….

You’ll have to hit up the web site for the details, but this looks fabulous. I took the free Spirit of Activism class 2 weeks ago. I am SO excited!

LINK

The Pagan Experience blog project, wk 3, Deity and the Divine – Art for the Gods

Published on by Boneweaver (aka pjvj)Leave a comment

Deity and the Divine– This will be the third week’s topic every month in this project so there will be ample time to cover all of the patrons in various fashions. This one, though, goes out to Yemaya and Poseidon. I embarked on a mixed media art piece a bit over a year ago and completed it recently. It is named _At the Beach_ and it represents my core deep love of the sea and it is also a devotional piece to my sea Deities.

You’d think with that kind of time it would look a lot more full. Ha! No. There was a large spiking learning curve involved. I put on and removed more things than it ended up having on it. Attaching heavy items to muslin, painting on muslin (which originally was pastels and fixative – pro tip, that doesn’t work on muslin), fishing line and thread, and making and ditching various forms of netting that eventually were ditched for fishing net actually made for the purpose.

I learned after the first six months where I pulled 10’s of things back off it to add a wee piece, look at it, stand back to see the whole, and then walk away for a day or so to see if I was still keen on it. This added bunches of time. As did walking away from it completely in a fit of frustration last summer and not returning to it until this past Autumn.

It is about  2 yards of fabric, measuring 43″ across and 33″ high, doubled and tripled in places. It has glass beads, buttons, hand sewn fabric pieces, an abundance of yarn, sequins, seashells that I collected at the beach, a sand dollar a friend collected from her West Coast beach, gifted shells from another friend, sand from my favourite beach in Delaware, a few beads gifted to me at my Feri initiation, along with the painted water. I adore it. And I adore it in spite of others likely looking at it and going, “buh?” It fills my heart with such Joy!

2015-01-15 17.27.30

2015-01-15 17.27.53

2015-01-15 17.28.21

2015-01-15 17.28.38     2015-01-15 17.28.46

2015-01-15 17.32.41   2015-01-15 17.33.12

2015-01-15 17.33.40    2015-01-15 17.34.01

The Pagan Experience blog project – week 2 – spiritual practice

Published on by Boneweaver (aka pjvj)Leave a comment

Wk 2- Jan. 12- Personal Practice– Share your favorite spiritual/magickal practices.

I’m going to share one of my current favourites which happens to be the new one implemented this year and lines up with my intention mentioned in the first project post. I am chanting or singing each morning. I wrote a chant that uses words from the flower prayer by Victor Anderson:

Who is the flower above me?
And what is the work of this god?
I would know myself in all my parts.

I quite like it, but I have switched to another because I am going to Winter Witchcamp in February. I want to be fully present in their community and I want to prep for that in ways more than packing up my stuff. Since 2006 this camp has opened and closed camp with a prayer bead set that they crafted and wrote words for as a community. It is long. I have it printed out. It takes me about 15 minutes to do it. I read the the parts and sing the repeating 3 lines that are like a refrain. Some days I sing parts that I might speak in addition to the refrain, but I like how the spoken word flows into singing the repeating three lines. This sets the tone for my day of doing something I love doing that lightens me (fulfilling the 2015 intention) and it connects me to the earth and the Divine with myself as the connector.

The whole prayer in pdf format can be found here.

The Pagan Experience blog project – week 1 – intentions for 2015

Published on by Boneweaver (aka pjvj)1 Comment

I am joining (a bit late) and we’ll see how it goes, yes? A prompt is offered for the beginning of each week and you write a post about the prompt. My first couple of posts will be decidedly short as I catch up, and the subjects don’t really need a lot of words, even for me.

WK 1- Jan. 5- Resolutions– What are your intentions for this new year? How will you find the resolve to bring them into your manifest life?

My intentions are to remain as present and conscious as possible to what I am filling my time and therefore myself with. I want to devote the extra time I have to things that make me lighter instead of heavier. Things that will bring Joy and not feel like a burden. I will have a morning practice that I do after coffee, but before the internet time suck happens. I will make sure of this by setting a timer that will remind me. That practice may change shape over time and more might be added, but the first one must be something that lightens my spirit.

Waking Up

Published on by Boneweaver (aka pjvj)Leave a comment

REBLOG

EmberVoices: Listening for the Vanir

Sometimes my legs fall asleep, from my numb toes all the way up to aching hips. The ache is dull, muted. Just uncomfortable enough for me to want to move.

But moving requires waking my legs up, and while I am acclimating to the difference, every nerve from my hips down is SCREAMING at me that something is VERY VERY WRONG. Numbness and dull ache have nothing on this screaming. My nerves don’t scream like that on the way down to numbness, why must they scream so on the way back up?

I don’t know, but if I don’t go through it, if I don’t put up with the pain of re-acclimating, I can’t WALK. I literally can not go forward. Even crawling would just induce the pain.

Change is like that. The dull numb ache of being in a bad place is barely bearable, but the pain of trying…

View original post 72 more words

A New Year Poem

Published on by Boneweaver (aka pjvj)1 Comment

As I posted elsewhere, my mum always said that whatever you do on New Year Day you do for the rest of the year. This year I tried to plan more for desires than do-not-wants (such as laundry, which she cautioned against every year). My list for yesterday was reading, writing, art, divination, Netflix, nap, Tai Chi, and tasty food for dinner. I got in all except the nap. Perhaps I won’t need them in 2015!

Anyway, I wrote two poems, one for New Year and one is a morning prayer (to be sung) using words from “The Flower Prayer” and adding others. I’m sharing the New Year one here:

It’s a new year
marked by a new day,
people cheer and make promises
they never really intend to keep;
which seems like a lie, but really,
it is an unveiling of truth.

Everyone knows there is nothing new

about the day or year;
it is same as the last,
though hearts beat a bit weaker,
kidneys slow a hair,
gallbladders churn a tad differently;
and knee-skin sags
along with the corners of our eyes.

Our floors creak louder
and the dogs bark softer;
trunks thicken
of both trees and man,
but the sky looks the same
and the earth turns on her same course
’round the sun.

We celebrate anyway,
this oldnew dayyear,
we celebrate, not because we must
but because we can;
and in the brief time between
the stroke of midnight and January 7th
we are filled with hope,
and promise,
and whispering joy.

Life returns to what it is,
same as what it was,
and we plod through ten months
until we start to think again,

about the soon-to-be-new year

(just like the old year)
and the familiar tingle takes hold,
the mirage of change
in new habits
that we know will fall away.

Yet we are content with that,
as our kneecaps loosen
in their skin-clothes,
the dogs bark in breathy tones,
our hearts skip a beat
as we walk the stairs to bed,
full of only the future,
and pretending for a week,
that the past is wholly other
from the now.

Jan 1, 2015 ©Pamela V Jones