imaginary bad faith reader

From androdragynous on tumblr - as relevant, I think, to curating your religious process as it is to making artworks (for what is religion if not, in some way, a mix of both craft and art?)

this is advice I’ve given friends directly before and I’ve probably also posted it but I really like giving it so here it is potentially again: do not create something for an imaginary bad faith reader.

there will always be someone who finds fault in your work. there will be people who read the messages on it wrong. there will be people who will take every compelling aspect about your work off of it so they can put in their own.

you cannot make art for these people.

you will never write a story that is free from criticism. you will never draw a piece that everyone finds appealing. you will never compose a song that everyone enjoys hearing. you cannot, fundamentally, set out to create something and only think of how you can avoid someone not liking it.

because, and this is key, there will be someone who sees every angle of your story and feels its intent in their heart and gushes to their friends about it. you will draw someone’s favorite art and they will make it their phone wallpaper because they want to see it every day. someone will fall in love with your song and loop it on their way to work because it gets them through the day. and THOSE are the people your work is for. THOSE are the people you have to care about, because they love what you make for what it is - because it’s itself.

if you set out to create something and file off every sharp edge, prune every thorn, you will be left with something fragile and weak, and it will be fragile and weak for the sake of someone who does not exist but that you were scared of anyway.

sharing art is complex and tangled and powerful, and anything you care enough to create deserves to flourish as itself. get sillay.

(no subject)

Needless griping about people who don't even believe what they say they believe and therefore don't require a meaningful rebuttal on the territory they have chosen, you can just read between the lines of what they're saying & ignore them - but:

cryptofascist pagans who insist that politics in our spaces are

1. a distraction from actual magic/practice/etc


2. just people imposing their modern politics onto their religious life rather than actually listening to the spirits

are doing the exact same thing they're accusing others of.

The quickest way to stop culture war issues taking over your community conversations is to - say - get on board with resisting transphobia and racism. Even if just at a superficial level so the conversations can stop! If your actual stance is, you think it's all a bit stupid and it takes energy away from The Work - then it costs nothing for you to concede, and doing so is in alignment with your goal to move the conversation on.

as or the second half - I'm not without sympathy. I actually really dislike it when a blogger's persona seems to be posting the same stuff they would have been posting anyway, but in a witches hat. I guess cus if i wanted to be reading politics, I'd read a politics blog from a person whose area of expertise was studying society and philosophy instead of being a wizard. My religious life is escapist; I have things I wish to escape from; and besides, the role of religion is both to guide and support people in their day to day lives but also to transcend it, to draw our minds to the great beyond.

but drawing meaning from religion which is in accord with your other values and other experiences - I think it's inescapable, tbh. I aspire to the sort of religious life and connection, where I could say I would not otherwise have taken this road if not for the spirits leading me there - but I'm not self-deceived enough to think I've discovered it yet, or, have discovered it always and in all circumstances. Most people don't have that kind of godphone. And much of paganism considers the agency of its workers - we aren't compelled to say yes to gods, by and large, so why would we not seek otherworld connections in much the same way we seek mundane ones, with shared directions. To be New Age woo woo for a moment, but we all put a certain kind of ~energy~ out there for the universe to respond to, and to a great degree in this work, you find what you set your mind to looking for, to the ways you have consciously tuned your attention.

& I actually do believe that a lot of mighty powers cba with the little details of human culture wars - that's part of the Solar-to-Stellar distinction, right? The difference between Solar entities who are perhaps ancestors or who are intertwined with humans and their history, and may care a great deal, because they are a part of our lives; Lunar entities who are people-but-not-human, who may have unusual persectives on our quibbles or none at all because have their own culture's struggles at the center of their thought; and Stellar entities, the ones quite beyond it all. But within that pattern, we tend to assume that most entities have several of these faces - meeting an entity in their vast and cosmic awe does not preclude also meeting them as a thing-of-the-hearth with things to say about who's excluded from the feast.

But that posture of the rational centerist whose above it all which is without fail a mask for very right wing desires. & it's no sillier to assume an ancient god is a SJW than it is to assume it shares your secret hatred, and the contemporary ways in which you understand and express it.

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Anyway, you dont need to take these people seriously because they're using a lot of words to obscure their own human political desires on the assumption others will be stupid and not see. But it is useful to be able to refute an argument on someone's own territory (sometimes! but rarely as useful as just giving them the block as beneath your notice)