4SJ2014 – Goals and Intentions

Two weeks in to my Four Season Journey (4SJ) and I’m starting to get into the swing of things. I’ve been regularly writing in my Thirteen Moons Journal and recording any dreams that I have as soon as I wake up.

As part of the Course Work for the Opening Gathering (OG) I’ve got to come up with some intentions and goals to use in ceremony so I thought I’d do a bit of brainstorming here.

My Intentions

• To learn about myself by connecting with the ancestral knowledge that I can feel lurking just beyond my reach in my subconscious.

• To help other people access this same knowledge. I want to change the way people perceive the Feminine and through that, change the way they treat it/her.

• To learn to use my intuition properly and to develop my divination skills.

• To approach my life and my studies with curiosity, respect and acceptance.

My Goals

• Make friends with like-minded people.

• Get involved in discussions (and expressing my opinions regardless of what I think other people will think of me).

• To feel more confident and well-spoken on the topic.

• Allow my creativity to lead the way.

• Make a drum, a medicine bag and a mask.

• Make myself available to my community (and feel confident and proud at what I’m doing).

School of Shamanic Midwifery – Four Seasons Journey 2014

I’m excited to announce that I’ve begun my Four Seasons Journey (4SJ).

What is a Four Seasons Journey (4SJ)

The 4SJ is a year long course beginning in November facilitated by the School of Shamanic Midwifery.

During my 4SJ I will learn about the cycles of moon, earth, life and death and the menstruation cycles. I will learn heightened self awareness which will allow me to heal myself and in turn heal other people. I will learn about MoonTime and practice MoonLodge, I will get to practice shamanic journey work and make a drum and medicine bag.

What’s the Importance?

I’ve talked previously about the wounded feminine in my “D is for Doula” and “The F Word” posts and I still truly believe that a lot of the world’s problems could be eventually resolved if we stopped demonizing feminine attributes (such as creativity, intuition and empathy). On a more personal level, I would like to get more in touch with my own innate feminine nature.

As part of this journey I will also learn how to facilitate women’s and maidens circles which is one of the main reasons I’m doing this course. I would really love to hold space for young girls who have just gone through or are approaching menarche as part of a sexual education course through primary schools (obviously still a dream but a reasonably realistic goal none-the-less!).

Please Check out my 4SJ2014 Category for more information!

Weather Observations – 29/10/13

The weather has not changed much since September. It’s still been hot, dry and sunny – summer has come early this year. Flies have been multiplying like crazy and our house has been temporarily overrun by them.
Bush fires have been burning through most of my home state with a couple of big ones located about an hours drive from my house. The skies have been filled with smoke ever since my birthday week (17th Oct). Thankfully we haven’t been threatened by any bush fires; my thoughts go out to all those who have been or are.
The sun is hot and burns the skin very easily.

Many of the ducks have been producing ducklings (daww) and surprisingly a majority of the ducklings I saw in May have survived and are looking like gangly teenagers now.

The ocean has been bitterly cold for the last few months but about a week or two ago had clearly warmed up – could this be changing tides?
Whales have also been migrating up and down the coast for the last few months… I haven’t seen any.
Dead mutton birds have also been appearing on the sand at the beach due to their long migration home. I’ve found a couple of alive ones who were clearly too exhausted to move on (they allowed me to pick them up). In this instance it’s hard to know what to do. I felt sorry for the birds but wasn’t sure if saving them now would really do them any good – they’ll just die next migrating season won’t they? I moved them into a nice shady area where they could peacefully die. I felt like that was the right thing to do.

As usual the magpies chicks are leaving their nests and we’re seeing extremely territorial behaviour from them. I’ve not experienced a swooping this year but I think they’re used to me (I feed them sometimes).

Weather Observations: September

The weather has been really dry and sunny for the last 5 weeks. Lots of birds and bees.
Temperatures have been getting quite high and the fire season started a lot earlier this year.
The last week or two has been very sporadic with the wind picking up at around 3pm.
Daylight savings started last weekend (and now I’m all disorientated haha).

11\10\13 Another Adventure Begins

I’m a high achiever, I like to be in control and I put pressure on myself to always be the best I can possibly be.

As far as I know, these aren’t bad qualities and yet… I’m not happy. If anything, these qualities are making me continue along a path that might not necessarily be right for me at this point in my life. I’ve had dreams of being an important, successful person from a very young age so one thing is for certain – just because I’m changing my path, doesn’t mean it will be any less amazing than the one I was previously on.

Weather Observations – 19/8/13

It’s been a wet spring – it hasn’t necessarily been raining but there’s been a lot of moisture in the air. The plants have been loving it. Majority of days have been sunny and quite warm late morning to early afternoon. Nights have been cold with fog and frost sometimes making an appearance.

About 2 weeks ago I saw a big group of Jellyfish in the river that I regularly cross to get into Sydney. I kept my eye out for them again last week and I couldn’t see any of them – was that their seasonal breeding time? Brian says he’s observed a similar group quite a few years back when he went for a holiday on the river during the summer months.

The birds have been pretty loud and fussy for the last 3 weeks as well. I’ve seen nests appearing in the tops of trees.

The wind has also picked up a bit on a few days – it’s a warm wind that seems to circle around (instead of coming from one location). This reminds me of a spring about 3 years ago when it was so windy that all the wattle trees had their yellow flowers blown off – they all sat in little yellow fluffy piles on the road.

The wattle is still out now though and hasn’t been effected by the wind much. Although it did only hang around for a day or two.

Weather Observations – April

For the last few years the first week in April rains non-stop with more rain on and off either side of that week. This year the rains (and the floods – always the floods) came around a little later than expected and didn’t last as long.
We were experiencing Summer-like warmth right up into late April.

I remember back in about September last year there being a lot more wattle than usual blooming. I believe that the longer the wattles bloom and how many actually bloom could be an indicator of how hot and how long the Summer will be.
Will have to observe this over the next few years to be able to test my theory.

I’ve also moved so haven’t been able to keep track of the animals as much as what I would like.

Pagan Blog Project #3 – ‘D’ is for Deity (or lack thereof)

I’m an Animist which means that I believe that “natural objects, natural phenomena, and the universe itself possess souls.”

Whilst a Deity is classified as:
1. A god or goddess.
2. Divine character or nature, especially that of the Supreme Being; divinity.
3. The estate or rank of a god: The king attained deity after his death.
4. A person or thing revered as a god or goddess: a society in which money is the only deity.
5. The Deity, God; Supreme Being.

[Definitions obtained from dictionary.com]

I don’t really worship any particular Deity as such. I acknowledge a God and a Goddess on my altar but they do not have names and are mostly a representation of the masculine and feminine energies present in us all. I’ve always felt that this idea of worshiping a being a bit dangerous – and maybe that’s stemmed from my experience of Catholicism and Christianity. I don’t think that any one being should be given that much power

I do however worship the Earth and maybe you would class that as a Deity. I hold extreme reverence for everything to do with the Natural world. We live in such a beautiful place that holds such wonder and amazement – I can see why people would assume some magical, all powerful being could be the explanation of it all.

Earth – or Mother Earth – is not a she nor a he, she is both and neither and everything in between and beyond. There is no classification or group, no feelings or thoughts or anything of that matter. Earth just IS. She is there, just being. Everything in the universe is just being and it is incomprehensible. We try to personify everything into these deities and giving them all jobs which leave it all neat, tidy and all packaged with nice little bows. For me, this isn’t how it is. For me it is all chaos; everything is created by complete chance and circumstance – our Earth and us included.

We were not created by anything or anyone, we evolved like everything else and by pure chance we developed the ability to think about ourselves and go beyond our instincts to question the purpose of everything. I believe that the reason for this isn’t metaphysical, I believe it’s the reason for every other adaption – survival and reproduction.

–> I’m going to leave it there for now as I feel I’ve said everything I can at this point in my studies (I also feel like going a bit off topic so will leave that for another post). Feel free to comment with any questions.

Also I’m sorry I’ve been a bit MIA. Check out my tumblr for an explanation and follow to keep track of my thought process.

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.