Hearth & Horn

Two quick updates:

• Finally have basic pages on the Domains back again - they've not been edited a lot from the wordpress versions but they were a problem gap on the webiste, now fixed
• I've been working on a fun television page which isn't going to be finished for a while, but here is the playlist. Among other things, I just find the quietness of this era of television very soothing, so I can have it on in the background when I'm bored of music. Especially enjoyed the John Betjeman program on churches today, what a deliciously relaxing establishment snoozefest.. The channel is a blend of actual Fen-fiction and documentaries with some more generic, wallpaperesque programming like adverts, weather forecasts and the 1970 election night coverage.

I'm kind of behind where I wanted to be due to the electricity issues at the house. I am the kind of poor which means I've kept every laptop i've ever owned and they're all differently broken, so getting Fen work done is like. Plugging my external hard-drive into my Windows lap (windows lap has no space and is windows), networking my Windows and Linux lap together (linx lap has no USB and is the speed of 15 years old; can't run modern websites), so that I can transfer data from one place to another as needed.

But with the electrics how they are, that blows the fuse and it's a few hours for power to come back and risks fires. So some of the stuff I wanted to do with oomphing up the picture library and getting work on my playlists are on pause.

but the lack of options and extreme boredom of the builders being over - can't really do anything but sit in a single chair with an A4 space in front of me, ready to do lifting at any time and exhausted from boredom and lack of food and sleep and the rest and so many dog crises - lends itself well to getting gruntwork done. Like transferring over text articles - which is time consuming, but not really difficult or effortful. The builders always forget to tell me exactly which rooms need to be empty each day, so there's a lot of surprise!lifting.

(Today, husband needed the loo so he brought the dog home. Poor doggy has been out on 8hr daily walks to get him away from the builders, and he hates it. We attached the dog to the fence outside and he stood on guard, sitting and standing and looking about at whimpering and all in all, in a panic: a new social context? the horror! what is he supposed to do? getting him off the fence was tricky, because he decided to guard his radius. Eventually, i went through the brambles behind the houses on the overgrown path, climbed over my neighbours wall and through their garden to release the lead from behind their wall, attach the lead to a lead with a weight on it and toss it over to my husband. My husband holding the lead IS a context he understands, so he trotted off with no difficulty. Troubleshooting doggy drama is so much easier now than it was, we have his behaviour predicted almost exactly. You just have to design around what you know he's going to do and feel)

I really feel ready to get started on tumblr and recruitment and discord and lessons or meetups, but I'm off discord for personal reasons for a while, and they did a thing with my meds so i am in no fit state to expand. I am a little island. I have no space, time, emotion, care or feeling left for anybody but myself, like I've powered right down and am in maintenance mode until the situation improves. It will soon, I just need to be very quiet in my soul until I can expand. I'm constantly on twitter and reddit but forgiving myself for it: dissociation is much needed, and I cannot be all perfections at once. And the podcast is on hold because of the noise in the house.

I'm not loving the bite into my religious time that maintaining the website consumes and yet, it is an investment in the future. An initial problem Fencraft sought to solve was the difficulty of being your own priest, the effortfulness of that. So with each work I put into building it now, the greater the pleasure of just rereading my own stuff. Like automation. I want an external force to do the labour of my faith for me, so I can just enjoy it. My past self is doing that labour. It feels great when I can get up some writing on my phone to read, as another person might consult their bible

Some quick updates:

I completed a big section of the new website: updating and expanding the How To Beginner Practices booklets. So if you ever wanted 4000 well-formatted words on how to read a book, it's all there now. I'm sort-of gearing up to do classes, but really it'll just be...reading out some of that stuff and making some social time so people can feel motivated by doing it together. Right now, stuff is going on and I never want to speak to another human soul - great for getting the website shipshape, less so for community moderation.

I've also added a novelty 404 page to the site - which does have sound if you enable the browser to play it, although it's a bit fernickity. When did the internet decide it was more social to allow your end-user to choose if they hear your godawful site music, eh? Bring back autoplay.

And I have a first draft of a calendar, which is a proper weight off my mind, though it's far from having all the details. I'm finding it's focusing my ritual time in the way I need.

---

I'm getting a wendy house. One came up for free on local gumtree. It's a glorified shed with a little veranda, and my husband grumbled that he wanted to stay in bed more than getting a "damn wendy house" and that's rather stuck as a way of thinking about it: it's not a grown up desire for a Tiny House, but a childhood one for a Tree House.

I'm still not wholly sure what I'm going to do with it, because part of me does want to turn it into a girly dream palace with frilly Victorian curtains and a tea set; but essentially, it's going to be my temple space. All these visions, like carved dragons on the wooden ends and thatching on the roof, stars on the ceiling and a permanent circle on the floor who knows. None of that will get done, of course. I'm thinking of making it over as if it was a hobbit hole, and I want to be able to sleep in there (how?) but it's only 6ft square so an actual bed is going to swallow the whole thing. I think I might want to write in there too, and want at least one cosy chair if not two; and an altar, and a wood-burning stove. But still - there is room for an altar and a circle and some shelves; or two chairs and a little table; or a bed, a stove and a side table. I don't tend to need objects for my rituals, like an altar shouldn't just be a clutter-attractor, so maybe a focal painting or paintings on the wall will be better than a table with stuff on it. Mostly I think I just like the idea of somewhere to escape to.

So the website is down as part of a preliminary annual tidy-up, so here's my key to-do list:

• Improve CSS to make the 'index' area of the website mobile responsive (i.e. nice to view on a mobile phone
• Replace Google Fonts with self-hosted fonts (bit quicker to load, and avoids putting google tracking cookies on my guest's machines - ew!)
• set up rsync (or similar) which will enable me to keep my folders on my computer and the website in sync
• make a HR that I like
• mobile responsive links page
• Check the header HTML is all correct and do that thingy which makes it link nicely on twitter and facebook > wait for the right picture from storage

The other major life update is that I've started using a Bibliography Manager to keep track of my Fencraft references, and I'm feeling a lot better. Until now, it's been duplicated all over the place, on scraps of paper and various files, and that itself has been a source of panic; but what actual academics do is they download a program to do this for them.

Just to put into perspective why the lack of organisation was making me panicky, my Bib file currently contains 102 sources. And I haven't yet put in any television or music, both of which I lean on a lot.

It is such a relief to get it out of my head and into some kind of structure.

I use JabRef. You can set up and adjust what you have to enter for each document type (book, album, etc) - adding and removing new fields as you need them; and it has has room for a review. There's also nice features to tag read/to-read/skim-read; starring the best resources; giving a rating. You can also link directly to URLs or to files, which has been useful for imposing some order on my unwieldy document-saving structure.

The one thing it can't do afaict is associate a picture with each reference - say, a book cover - but then its not really supposed to do that. It's just a visual interface for working with a database, very functional - and I like that, it's clean and unfussy.

And then - although I've not done this yet - you can export it in all kinds of formats. I'm hoping to make this my next major update. Wrangling the Reading List is taking a lot of time, and I don't really have the hours to write a fully formatted review blog post on all of them - so my hope is that a sparse bibliographic reference and a couple of words of advice will allow anyone to start following up my rabbit holes at will, leaving me free to develop the more "functional" parts of faith and also maybe grab a few hours to actually engage in prayer, if I'm lucky.

(it's also very soothing. Between this, my ebook library and my mp3 collection, it's been satisfying a relaxing librarian's itch to catalogue - the perfect lockdown task, repetitive but fulfilling)

So yeah. Bibliography managers, everyone. Basically, the only way to get on top of a project of this scale.

"Even though the Landweird is associated with deep ancientness, we have never seen it proposed that it might be itself the oldest, greatest or creator god. It seems ancient because it has contained within it ancient things; but it is itself comparatively new, and most importantly - growing, for the time of our forgetting will never be done."

Coming back to a major update to review it before posting, and dear reader let me tell you that I am very pleased with what past me has created (now if this was only the sort of thing for which it was easy to find images...)

Big Fencraft website update today, trying to soothe my jangled nerves by a bit of work on something uncomplicatedly beneficial.

Among other things, the Solar/Lunar/Stellar map can be used to classify different forms of magical practice and pagan spirituality.

(and just between me and you, dear reader, this is where a lot of these correspondences originated from. Trying to split out different trends in
which I was observing, but didn't really see named. I think if you can't clearly define and name something, you're then disempowered from discussing it objectively and judging whether it's a good fit for you/yr goals)

None of these essays should be taken as dogmatic, but I hope that people reading them will know more clearly "that's what I want to do, and this is why"

• The Three Paths
  • Three Types of Power
  • Three Types of Relationships
  • Three Types of Daily Practice
  • Three Types of Magic

I am ready to launch the first stage of the Landcraft correspondence system, which organises all things in terms of the Solar, the Lunar and the Stellar.

The purpose of the Landcraft correspondence system is to be an alternative to the four classical elements, the gender binary, and the Tree of Life, an underlying system of magic for people who do not wish to use the standard correspondence systems for various reasons;  a system of correspondences which, additionally, feels earthy and pagan, organic and authentic to the land and the folklore beneath our feet. It is an open system: you may combine it with any other pagan tradition, not only Fencraft; as well as re-mixing and hacking it for your own purposes.

Now available:

• An overview chart of the correspondence system, summarising its binaries and contrasts
• The Wanderer's Map, the way that the three celestials* come together to make a map of our world, our cosmology, our folklore and the otherworlds
• A summary of what each of the three represents: the Solar, the Lunar, and the Stellar.

I hate the term "celestial", hate it hate it hate it, and very much welcome other suggestions.

These parts of the system have been fixed and certain for around two years now. The next step for Landcrafting is to release the fuller correspondence charts (colours and so forth), pin down how the dual-celestials work (concepts like the Solar-Lunar, the inbetween elements), and how they interact with physical elements (like Fire, Land, Water, and so forth). And then finally - the big bit that's still missing - how you actually *use* them in ritual and magic, which is still eluding me.

I've also written a first masterpost of Rural Psychogeography, works exploring the hidden mysteries of the land. I am now obsessed with Chanctonbury Rings.

Mood? A deep, relaxed, mellow breathing-out of satisfaction, completeness and success.

The good news is, I am rediscovering some great stuff in there. Posts which are almost ready to go, and old concepts which - I'm not going to use in the form they came to me three years ago, but do still have a place; and interesting suggestions, things I want to mull over further.