Category: misc

A young girl is on her hands and knees at the water’s edge, keening into the sea. There is no other word for the sounds coming from her, the sounds of a spirit bound too tightly slipping its cage and splintering from the force of it. She feels herself shattering, and no amount of trying to hold on will stop the process. She is beyond fear, beyond worry, beyond hope. She has given over to this moment, and she is caught up in fury, in desolation, in these big, crushing waves of emotions that are too big, too wild, to be held back. Her spirit has tasted freedom and it will not return to its meager existence. Her spirit knows the depth and beauty of the worlds, and it calls out for rescue.

He comes clad in moonlight and darkness, in denim and leather, in flesh, bone, and magic. The…

The grief rushes in, as a wave of numbing, crushing, cold despair crashing upon the shoreline of my spirit. Its breakers distract with their frothing, gleaming spray, while the undertow undermines the foundations at my feet. Joy and hope shift like so much sand, pulled out into the vast sea of roiling, storming, Holy Grief and Terror. Despair is tangible. Despair is crushing. It is not mine. It is not mine.

“Hold Fast,” He says, and His presence is soft, thick, good wool wrapped snug around me. We are wet, soaked in this ocean of Grief, but He keeps me warm even as wet wool can manage to do. My spirit wants to shatter under this strain, but He holds me up as the ground underneath me gives way. I think of the other part of the year, when the Holy Grief I bear witness to is not mine, is…

Alternative Title: I’m Gonna Keep Talking About This Until It’s a Generally Accepted Thing…

It happened again. Someone posted another article on mental illness being a sign of a healer being born on the Local Pagan Facebook Group with the general overarching but not direct message being that all native and ancient cultures saw it as this. Now I don’t deny that mental illness can be the birth of a healer. I’ve known too many people who have struggled with a history of it, myself included, that haven’t found themselves called to help others dealing with similar problems.

However, these articles tend to stress how society is actually the sick one, and how we need to stop shoving pills at people to fix all their problems.

Anyone who has ever been on psychiatric medication will probably tell you that pills don’t solve all the problems and most professionals are pretty…

Alternative Title: Get the Blog Juices Flowing!

And now for a bit of a “no duh” post..that will more than likely just sort of ramble.

Eclecticism has become something of a dirty word within reconstructionist/recon-derived communities, where it is viewed with distaste because of the appropriationist and culturally insensitive actions of the New Age community and the Wiccan boom of the 1990s. And this kind of mentality has come to dominate approaches towards methodologies like syncretic belief. Syncretism is well attested as kind of an intercultural transmission between different groups in classical antiquity, and even that is an overly used and misunderstood terminology.

Which is unfortunate, really, because eclecticism denotes a lack of rigidity and dogmatist allegiance to a singular set of paradigms. It is also not a new phenomenon: the Greeks viewed it as choosing the best of things. And it transcends cultural or religious methods that are taken…

Hail Loki, Scarlipped God and Revealer of Harsh Truths,
I ask You to intervene in the media coverage of Ferguson, Missouri.
May those who misrepresent events in order to maintain cruel, unjust dominance be silenced.
May their lies be shown for what they are.
May all those speaking truths, especially the “unpleasant” truths that the oppressors most want silenced, be heard and known to be speaking the truth, and
May those truths lead to a better world.

Hail Loki, Father, Mother, Hero of the Lokka Tattur.
I ask You to intervene in Ferguson, Missouri, to protect the children there.
May those would would make them outcasts, who would bind them, harm them, kill them, be blocked and defeated.
May the children escape unscathed from all malevolent giants who would pursue them,
May their families remain intact, and may those who have already suffered terrible losses find support in their grief.