(no subject)

One of the nice things about "orthopraxic not orthodoxic" is it frees you from the need to really feel anything or experience anything, a reassurance that just having done a thing is more than sufficient. Which is very humane, I think. I am in a deep depression, so I feel nothing - and I can't say that doing my small rites give me comfort. But it's good to know that feeling nothing is not a failure state.

I've been feeling more critical of that mantra recently for a couple of reasons; primarily the large quantity of "how to" content vs the small quantity of "devotional" or "conversion" literature. Books that will get you onto prayers and practices while you're still thinking - steady on. Accepting something as your GOD is HUGE, it's a monumental undertaking and not unlike marriage, and so is the theological reorientation of accepting the divine is real (or accepting the divine is not like you were raised). I worry that paganism-as-practices can produce shallowness, or distancing - or make the process of seeking more difficult - because it's a lot easier to find 101s on how to meditate than how to pray.

(Last week, I was sent a friendly letter from the local church, and contemplating making my own "pagan evangelist" tract to send back. which is interesting and I recommend you try it, because it sets you thinking: what do the gods promise their followers, what are the benefits of walking this way, how would you "sell" what you're doing to another in order that they believe it. You know, get the essence on paper. The essence of evangelism is something like "believe in Jesus and you will go to Heaven" I guess for trad craft it would be "honour the devil and he gives you magic powers" and as for Fencraft, "seek the Landweird and hope you never find it".)

For me, at least, belief does precede action (Tho ive found people say equally that their actions and the experience of what happened next created belief). So it's clearly a symbiotic process, I think a lot of what I advocate for - walking/reading/disconnection, and the umbrella of Landweird - are really practices that lead one to belief, the sorts of things which do not commit you to anything and aren't quite worship, but tend to create encounters with things that make you ready to begin it.

And believing in something has been transformative for what I do, which shouldn't be surprising for a religion; but it's taken me 20 years to get to this point, so it is an interesting transformation to go through - from paganism for pleasure to paganism from faith, or something like that.

And as much as "faith comes second" is a normal, and invigorating, idea within paganism; I confess, I have a lot of time for simple faith. Keeping the infinite in mind throughout the day, in little encounters with the natural world, is reverence and bliss; as much as I dream about rites in thr woods, it's also nice to know that this is enough - a process of noticing, of unlearning, of listening to deep time, of taking starlings for saints and trying to learn from them. I find this good. We make our heaven here and now.

(no subject)

It's funny how my theology seems to be drawn to overlapping monotheisms. Paganism has a taxonomic quality, the use of correspondence systems leads us to box spirits into male/female, fire/water, and so forth. And now I have a correspondence system all of my own. But my perceiving seems to defy the purpose of sorting things into boxes.

There is the horned one in the woods but also in the sky; and rhe devil us in the sky and the moon and the woods; and the queen of the land is in the sky and the water and the woodlands; and the queen of fairy is also in the woods but also in the sky and in fhe hedgerows and fields; overlapping monotheisms. It seems obvious that there would be one god in the sky, another in the forest, and so forth. But this seems wrong for me. Nature's divinity is so expansive thst I cannot help but see the spirits I connect to in eveything. And maybe that's a fit for nature, which has never been monogamous, that THIS kind of sky would be for one power, and THAT kind for another, all kinds of sky for all kinds of being; if nature is infinity expressing itself, then it doesn't seem so strange. That the great powers of nature would not be confined to a single job title, but express Themselves through all the parts of the infinite. The devil oh a silver pool with white flowers, the devil in the coal under the mountainside; the changeling buried in the earth under the corn, the changeling laughing in the red wind; a great hunt of the wild in the woods, and another that rides in thin black streaks of night across the sky.

It's not that all gods are one god, more that within the Landweird one reality does not erase another. Echoes and layers like a cheap tape, with older memories bidden underneath. It isn't necessary to use a taxonomy to fix them into a pantheon with each in their place, so long as it can be used as a series of gates to take you to the right place. Why should there not be many gods of sky, in a land as old and strange as this? Why should there not be a jumble of spirits who reconcile within themselves generations of contradiction? This is why a map is important. It helps us orientate ourselves within the gods, which is to say - within the land - and see our way clearly to the fragment we seek.