Reflections on Moving

Since leaving high school I have moved house 6 times. This time will be my 7th. Seven is my lucky number and I must admit this time around I feel like I’m actually ready and that some really good things will come of it. The other times I moved were because I felt I had no other choice and came about due to commitments to family members and to myself.

When I first moved out of home I felt I had no other choice but to live with my boyfriend at the time. My college is in Sydney and there is no where else that I can do my course face to face, so moving to Sydney seemed my only option albeit an expensive one. Combining our wages was the only way we could both afford it and we didn’t really even second guess the decision to do that – we’ve always been the types to just do what needs to be done to accomplish our goals.

Last year I had to give up studying because I had to move back to my home town due to some family dramas; adults were acting like children and leaving those in need up shit creek without a paddle. Even though numerous confidants told me it wasn’t my responsibility I still felt that it was within my power to do something, and if I could do something then why shouldn’t I? I also had to work more hours to accomodate for the extra mouths to feed as well as the extra travel that my then fiancé needed to do to keep his job – which meant I had no time for study or for the travel required to go into college.

To be completely honest – I still resent the people who I feel were the cause for this. I’m in my 3rd year and if I had of kept living in Sydney I could have been graduating at the end of this year.

I can’t keep living in the past though and in reality it was my choice, I could have said no and walked away. Unfortunately my personality just wouldn’t allow that to happen but again, that’s no one’s fault but my own. However, now that this chapter of my life is coming to an end I’m excited. I’m feel like I’m finally ready to dedicate my life to what I want to do and start being who I want to be. I’ve been mostly focussing on the move at the moment and preparing my fiancé and I for the changes that are to come so I’m sorry if I’ve been a little slack with my practice. I’m working on a few things including my own set of divination stones, warding and protection for the new house, our wedding ceremony and creating some spiritual artwork so stay tuned for updates that I’m sure will be coming very soon.

Peak Moment 138 Starring John Micheal Greer

A video that relates to my last post for the Pagan Blog Project ‘C’ is for Children (and Culture).

Peak Moment 138: In his book, “The Long Descent”, John Michael Greer observes that our culture has two primary stories: “Infinite Progress” or “Catastrophe”. On the contrary, he sees history as cyclic: civilizations rise and fall. Like others, ours is exhausting its resource base. Cheap energy is over. Decline is here, but the descent will be a long one. It’s too late to maintain the status quo by swapping energy sources. How to deal with this predicament? He lays out practical ideas, possibilities, and potentials, including reconnecting with natural and human capacities pushed aside by industrial life. [www.thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com]

John Micheal Greer puts into words what I can’t. Of course, he speaks from a non-spiritual perspective but if you refer to his blog – he is a spiritual person. This supports my theory of culture and spirituality needing to be intertwined for a civilisation to be successful and sustainable – of course it is still just a theory (and everyone’s spirituality is different).

Pagan Blog Project #2 – ‘C’ is for Children (and Culture)

I’m ‘creating’ a culture for my children.

How do Children relate to my spirituality or to paganism for that matter? Well, my children and my children’s children continue to be the inspiration for a lot of the choices I make, including why I study Druidry and worship the Earth. It became important around the time I begun learning about Global Warming and the damage humans inflict on nature – how will that effect future generations and is there a way we can change our lifestyle now to improve that?

I’ve never really had much of a culture (unless you call bigotry and alcoholism a culture) and in my study of nature, culture seems to be a key element in achieving a sustainable and successful civilisation. It’s also effected me on a personal level as I’ve always felt out of place and that there was something missing – Paganism filled that void temporarily but the relocation of my bloodline to a place completely different from my ancestors and everything that I relate to spiritually continues to make me feel like an intruder. I decided that trying to lay an entire Earth worshipping religion over a land that’s completely different to the land where it was originally created is a band aid solution to a problem that needs to be fixed from the inside out – it seems to be the only way to permanently fill this void. In a nutshell; I’m personalising old traditions and applying them to a new land and set of deities. I will then use that as a foundation to ‘maturing’ the culture that we already have. White Australian’s do have a culture it’s just not very accepting nor is it beautiful – it’s rough as guts, intimidating, and exclusive (even if you were born into it, if you don’t like drinking ‘X’ beer, watching ‘X’ sport and just being a general asshole to people then you are excluded or tormented).

To me culture and spirituality should be intertwined but not to the point where we confuse fact and imagination. Spirituality and imagination aren’t bad things but they should be developed on an individual level – not forced down children’s throats before they’re old enough to ask the questions themselves. I want to teach my children about art, I want to tell them stories about mythical creatures and Gods/Goddess’, I want to teach them about dreams and how to celebrate without having the adults they look up to getting drunk. These things for me are spiritual but I don’t want to force my particular beliefs on my children and I don’t want them mistaking what I believe as fact because it’s not – it’s just the way that I see the world.

I want my children to feel like they have a purpose and that they belong here. I want to teach them to have respect and a reverence for the Earth that we don’t experience in our current culture, so that they can be conscious of how they treat her and every being that lives here. I believe that practicing a form of spirituality that regularly worships nature can do that – it’s not the only way but it’s the only way that seems fun to me. Then I can develop a culture, using those principles, that I will feel comfortable raising my children in.

Have been working on my own rune set and have also been reading a lot about warding and protection for a number of reasons (moving house, wedding ceremony, etc). This post by Devo from The Twisted Rope really resonated with me – their answers to a few of my questions also clicked somewhere in my brain (I was nodding and saying “yes” to the computer screen).

Reblogging so I can refer back to it later.

The Twisted Rope

During my time in Kemetic groups and forums, I’ve realized that very little is ever shared or discussed about basic ‘magix’. No one really talks about cleansing items or your house. Making amulets or sigils are almost never discussed. And there has never been discussion about warding or barrier creation. I personally think this is a shame, as you never know when things could go wrong, or when you might need extra protection in a situation.

To help with this, I have decided that I will create a series of blog posts relating to these exact things. I want to discuss my methods and means to cleanse, create and protect in a more ‘magical’ sense. My methods are by NO MEANS the only methods. They just happen to be what works for me.

If you enjoy this series, or want me to discuss different aspects or topics of a similar…

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