Update and Changes Coming

I wanted to put this up here so everyone has ample warning. In a week or two. Or maybe three… I’m ending this blog officially. I will probably delete this account. I have exported the useful content and will be importing it over to a different account. The problem is this: my interests are too diverse and my focus shifts so often throughout the year that to have any blog devoted to just one aspect of my life means it is going to get neglected severely. As this one has.

I am not just my beliefs. I am not just my hobbies or my literary interests. I am a mixture of all those things. My focus throughout the year shifts with the lunar cycle and the season… and where my brain is.

If your interested in continuing to follow me, no matter how erratic the posting frequency or topics are, I’ll provide a link to that account in a day or two once I have it set up in a more… manageable  manner. But, that’s not only going to have my religious and spirtuality stuff, but probably some more genealogy in there as well. Mixed in with my other interests like movies, books, comics (so many good ones right now, too), games, food… My life is a hodge-podge of interests.

Maintaining a gazillion blogs is just too much. Seriously. Also, trying to start this new thing where I avoid ranting if I can. For my mental health well-being.

Book Suggestions Needed

I’ve mostly come up blank here so I’m putting the call out for others to assist.

A friend of mine has a son who has just loved the Rick Riordan books, but now wants more information on Greek Mythology. Actual information. She reached out to me because she’s more on the Heathen spectrum, her son is 10 years old but is at a 12th grade reading level. So, this presents a bit of a problem because of the reading comprehension level versus the emotional maturity level in terms of finding something that covers the myths more in depth with a bit more accuracy but keeps it a bit more age-appropriate for now. She’s not fool, she knows he’s not naive. But, he’s 10. It’s the emotional development part of it where some of it can be a bit much.

So… anyone have some book suggestions? Amazon links appreciated!

Well, That Was Unexpected

The information that poured in yesterday from my father’s “distant cousin” has me just… floored. There was a point where I was dumb-founded and I stopped breathing while I read it and looked at the scanned documents and photos. There was a point where I almost cried and then, after doing some of my own non-genealogical research to put things in perspective later, that my chest and everything went tight and I found it difficult to breathe.

I’m not sure what to do with this information, honestly. I probably will have to see if I can go back a few more generations, but that is going to require some international research. However, right now I feel knocked on my ass with confusion. I’m sparing names on here because of my own security and google indexing, but you’ll get the idea.

Family Research Begins

I’ve been interested in this for quite a long time. I want to know where I come from. This doesn’t define me at all. But I feel so damn disconnected from my family, which I know goes beyond my tiny immediate family, that I just want to have an idea of what is out there… what sort of history I come from. My father has been so hush-hush about it and I’ve been unable to ask his other relatives because those I’ve known… are dead and gone. I don’t know the names of any others or who is even in existence. Without knowing birth or death days, I was even sort of limited as far as doing genealogy searches online.

So, I asked my father the other day if he could please send me the birthdates for his parents because I was going to try digging on my own. He mentioned that a long-distant cousin of his had already done some of that research. Really? Excuse me while I headdesk here for a minute because this has not been the first time I’ve asked him about this.

This morning he forwarded me a copy of my grandfather’s obituary and death certificate, both of which are extremely helpful but very contrary to information I’ve been led to believe my entire life. My grandfather would have been 72 at the time I was born, had he been alive. He lived through two world wars but never served, which I’m going to guess was dumb luck with timing and his age. I was told he was born and lived in Upper Michigan until moving to Milwaukee, but certificate of death says no… he was born in Maine… in 1907. I have no idea what his mother’s nationality is based on her maiden name alone.

I also know that he was buried (not cremated) and is in a cemetery in Milwaukee. I will have to look into that next time I’m down there.

Samhain Follow-up

I have returned from my Samhain weekend at Circle Sanctuary. It was a very good weekend and while I am not on the same path as probably 95% of those who go to Circle events are, I got something out of it, I feel better and am glad to have gone. This is also a good step on me easing myself back into the pagan community after having been burned so badly and taking a couple years to heal. It is a slow process, I know. I’m working on it. I am eternally a work in progress.

Halloween Thoughts & Plans

It’s been a few weeks and frankly, I’m exhausted.

Work had a two-day Summit early this week which always runs me down. As a fairly introverted individual I find extended socialization with people I don’t share a great deal of interests with physically exhausting, on top of it is a lot of corporate rah-rah stuff, I worked a great number of extra hours and I never had time to really rest from that to recharge. Wednesday we had an electrician come after work to replace our dead ceiling fan/light and found out that the one from the previous tenant was never anchored properly and was not far from crashed down (lovely!). Yesterday I was packing because today I’m leaving for the weekend.

In the realm of: Oh, what now?

So, yesterday morning’s Social Justice Warrior crap hit me in a prodromal migraine period, which means that I stewed on it all day as I threw together that epic rant. I posted it after the migraine had subsided enough for me to proofread enough for some degree of coherency, figured it was okay and toddled off to bed. What could go wrong?

I need to stop thinking that. The universe and creation seem to take it is as a challenge to my psyche. I’m postdromal today which makes me a little more emotional than I care for, but, my husband thinks this circumstance is completely warranted. Allow me to share.

I went to the end of the driveway to get my mail today after work -since I am blessed to work from home, started digging through the unusually large stack of mail and spotted a familiar mint-green envelope that I really should not be receiving anymore. Actually, I should have stopped receiving this damn envelope after a certain meeting happened near the end of 2012 when I had enough and formally stepped down from the role of President of the organization I had founded, financed (almost entirely on my own), put a good 75% of the work into on my own and ran.

I was burned out, I was bitter and cynical. Everyone in the pagan community had an opinion. Everyone wanted something that I couldn’t offer them for an endless number of reasons: I didn’t have the money to put it together, the resources, the training, the knowledge… But, that meant I wasn’t suiting their immediate needs. No one wanted to step up and help. I was their paragon of pagandom. By stepping up at 22 years old (at the time this venture was put together) and filling a void in the community, I had somehow become a magical wish-dispensing machine for the pagans in the entire portion of my state upon which to make demands.

We Need to Create Support for Disgruntled/Frustrated Pagans

I agree with this… which is something that seemed to arise from a conversation in the comments on one of Siannon’s posts between myself and another individual. I wish there were local pagans up for something like this. I’ve got about two others and… when we tried to even just get a regular discussion group together to talk about even vague-ish things… no one wanted to. *sigh*

The Lefthander's Path

I have come to realize that we really need to create support systems (lay-led) for disgruntled, disenchanted, frustrated, lapsed Pagans/polytheists/heathens, people who are considering leaving their religion, or perhaps already have. We need to do this on a local level. I’ll bet there are *many* Pagans in the Twin Cities area who do not attend events for these sorts of reasons. Once again, though I’m not sure if I want to deal with the drama! I’m also not sure how to advertise such a group or run it. I’ve kept too much of my past bad experiences to myself, because of I’d internalized the “Must Not Make Community Look Bad to Outsiders” mentality which is very creepily cult-like when you think about it. I think the Pagan “community” makes itself look bad the most.
I have spent so much time trying to convince myself that I just need to find…

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Cultural Appropriation, Social Justice Warriors and Other Crap… Enough is Enough

Hold on to your asses, things are about to get offensive and my give a shit… is so far gone if you want to make a dolly of me and burn it in some fucked up version of effigy… go for it. Have at it. You go on with your bad self because I am so many levels of done with this Social Justice Warrior bullshit I kind of wish thunderbolts would shoot down from the sky and strike dead every asshole guilty of this shit, or strike me dead so I don’t have to put up with it anymore. Also, if you have a low tolerance for cussing… this is probably not the best thing to continue reading because I’m going to cuss… a lot.

On Spiritual Emergency, Shamanism, Mental Illness, Therapy, and Anti-Psychiatry Sentiment in the General Pagan/Polytheist Community

I just found this blog and wow. And, if you’ve followed me anywhere online for any amount of time, you know my struggle with my mental illness. My long and sometimes debilitating struggle and how much I loathe how pagans seem to approach it. This… is amazing. Read it, all of it. I encourage you all to do so.

Foxglove & Firmitas

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…

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