Seeing more clearly

I'm feeling better today.  Clearer.  More focused.  Been a long time since I've felt that way.

I love the cds I ordered.  Damh the Bard.  Probably is helping me focus a bit when I read or try to concentrate on spiritual matters.  I told Zach today that this is the first time since leaving Christianity that I've felt hungry for spiritual content.  And it was long before I left Christianity that I had that feeling as well.

I really feel good.  I can't remember when I last felt that way.

Spiritually that is.  Physically I have a lot of room for improvement.

Although the turmeric I'm taking has diminished the pain so much that I'm taking about 2 tramadol a week as opposed to 2-3 a day.  I haven't had a tramadol since last week.  Friday, I think it was.

Now if I could just get the dog to sleep through the night so I can...

I'm feeling a very strong pull to Cerridwen and the cauldron.  I still have the same pull toward Cernnunos and now Zach has that same pull.  I would never encourage him one way or the other but it's nice to be on similar paths.  We meet each other more often.

I've also noticed Nuada on my path. 

It's rainy and cold tonight so I'm fixing chili for supper then an evening of sock-knitting.  My brother-in-law was so helpful with my mother's final days (I couldn't be there due to the congestive heart failure) so I had promised socks and since I'll be meeting him for the first time this Thursday, I'm going to try a near-impossible feat of finishing the socks in 2 days.  And since I haven't actually started them yet...

Won't be online much until it's done so see you on the flip side.

No more

I must be an old fossil.  Tumblr is hard for me to navigate.  Zach is going to help me with it but I'm not sure that's where I'm going to end up.  I don't do as well with change as I did when I was younger.

It's very hard for me to escape all the negativity in my life.  I'm sick to death of people telling others to just look at the positive things and to write down one good thing about each day.  When you're drowning in pain and emotional anguish, throwing you platitudes doesn't help you swim to shore.  To me it's nothing more than telling me to mask my pain and shove it where I can't see it anymore.

Yes, I know that negativity affects spiritual work.  Tell me how to find a way out of this black hole I'm in and I'll try to be more positive.  When I used to confide in people, I was told to shut up and do something about it instead of whining.  What?  Just what was I supposed to do?  Not one person offered any assistance.  Just told me to get over it.

I determined yesterday morning that I was going to be more positive.  I woke up feeling brighter than I have for ages.  Went to the store in the car I thought had been fixed only to have it overheat again on the way home.  On a remote country highway.  Headed back to town instead of trying to make it home since I was closer to Walmart than I was my house.  It overheated again on the way.  Fortunately a police officer stopped and gave me a ride to Walmart to pick up antifreeze so we could get home.  Several cars passed us by without even glancing in our direction.

So now my car is down again.  I was supposed to meet my sister and her husband in Madison on Thursday for lunch, on their way to Green Lake for a conference, but no way can I trust the car.  So we agreed to meet closer to home.  Only now I'm not sure the car will be done in time for that.

Tell me again how I'm supposed to find something positive about that.  Yes, I wasn't stranded.  But do you know how many times I've had similar situations occur?  Dozens.  I've had to take a taxi ($20), get Tom off of work, walk across Beaver Dam (took 3 hours...I'm arthritic and overweight) to get to a phone so I could call a taxi.  Each time I struggle to hold it together so I don't fall apart and embarrass myself in front of strangers.

There are things going on here I can't talk about for personal reasons but they add to the burden of struggling to just make it.

So don't challenge me to be grateful about something each day.

Ever since we moved here, we've had one thing after another pile on us.  There's no doubt in my mind that we are under a curse.  No doubt at all.

I'm tired of pussy-footing around.  I'm going to research it and figure out what to do but I'm fighting back.  No more nice guy.  No more believing that good wins out.

I'm going into battle.

Hoping my life is better after the weekend.

I really meant to write more but between my computer being as slow as mud and the car still not fixed (and Zach and me stranded on the side of a country road yet once more)  it's not looking like I'll be as consistent as I want to be.

Plus Zach wants me to switch to tumblr. 

Since no one I know personally ever reads my blog, and hardly anyone else out there is reading either, I'm considering it.  It may be that blogspot is old hat and time to move on.

I'm dealing with a great deal of defeatism right now so I'm going to take the weekend to ponder it.  I'm definitely going to be leaving facecrack though.  Even if I didn't have to deal with the complete slowdown of my computer due to that evil entity, any friends I had on there have moved on to other pastures so there's no point really.

I'll be back after the weekend to let you know.

You being the empty space out there.  Or anyone who does read this and it doesn't show up on sitemeter.  If you're there, I thank you.

See ya on the flipside.

Intuition and getting the mood right

I've never been one of those people who is completely aware of everything that goes on around me.  I tend to live within my bubble and sometimes sleepwalk through it.  The other day Zach and I were shopping and I never even heard the guy in the next aisle who was moaning loudly, according to Zach.  I was focused on my shopping and nothing else.  This leaves me completely out of the loop if the fae or the gods want to get my attention.

So now they're making loud noises in my house by virtue of breaking things.

A few weeks ago, even after I had determined that the Celtic gods were the best fit for me, I still had the Norse gods on the altar.  In fact I was arranging the altar to better suit them.  The Celts were on top of the entertainment center with a mini altar of sorts.  While I was setting things out, one of the Norse pictures fell off the wall and broke my dragon oil burner.  Now, there was nothing wrong with the hook I had it on.  Nothing wrong with the picture either.  It just fell off.  No vibration, no accidentally knocking it off.  Just effing fell off.

Even I got the message and put my beloved Celts on the altar and switched the pictures to Celtic deities.  Nothing untoward for a while...

...until last night.

Zach still is very fond of the Norse so I put them up on the entertainment center and they did look lovely.  I lit a votive candle on their shrine when I did my nightly prayers and ritual for the Celtic gods.  An hour later, the glass candle holder exploded, throwing the glass a distance of a few inches away.

I can take a hint.  They gods will go into the armoir in a nice place of honor for them.  Zach has decided to leave them in there and if he wishes to in the future, will just use that as the altar for them.  I had to sit with him and explain that I didn't get the sense that the gods were furious and trying to punish us.  Just get our attention.  After all, we weren't hurt, the house didn't catch fire and the oil burner can be glued back together again.

Maybe it's a case of be careful what you wish for.  I had prayed for more insight and using my intuition better.  I can't say I know exactly what it was all about, but I do know I feel a sense of peace with the Celts that I don't feel with the Greeks or the Norse.  Although I still love them all.

But nothing feels the same as the glow I feel when I interact with the Celts.

I had a chance to use my intuition in a more mundane situation today when I got a call about some topical pain relief this company wants to "prescribe" for me via an online doctor.  I wasn't feeling comfortable with it and the guy seemed annoyed with all my questions about the ethics involved.  Finally I agreed to go to the website to validate his company and the effing computer wouldn't go to the site.  I kept getting timed out.  That was enough for me.  I told the guy I wasn't interested and he hung up on me.

I don't know what I saved myself from, but I do feel like I dodged some kind of projectile.

I'm going to work more with my tarot cards and have ordered a book to go with my Druid Animal Oracle cards.  I've had the cards for a while but didn't really know how to read them.  I'll get the book tomorrow.

Got my birthday present today (from me, of course).  Two Damh the Bard cds.  I've wanted some for years and decided it would be a real benefit for my rituals.  Not to mention just the pleasure of listening.

I've got some Druidcasts on my mp3 player and am in the process of autumn house cleaning.  It's taking me a lot longer because of my physical limitations and the immense fatigue I suffer but I am seeing some progress.

All in all, spiritually I feel a lot lighter.

Who am I and how did I get to this point?

I didn't do a lot of soul-searching during my absence from blogland, but I did do some.  One of the biggest things for me was trying to figure out why I had such a hard time finding a path I could stay on.  I was feeling silly because I seemed to be all over the map.  So I thought two questions needed to be answered before I could find the conclusion I was so desperately seeking.

Who am I and how did I get to this point?

Who am I isn't that easy a question.  It's complex and a result of over half a century of trials and struggles.  Since leaving Christianity it's been the biggest question in my mind.  Trying to find my pagan place in the world was impossible because I didn't know who I was.  I had spent my life being whoever I was supposed to be:  wife, mother, daughter, Christian.  I never got the chance to be who I wanted to be.  In fact, I didn't even know who I wanted to be.

I regularly rotated pantheons:  Greek, Celtic, Norse, Greek, Celtic, Norse...ad nauseum.  And I couldn't figure out why the grass was always greener over that proverbial fence.  I had settled on the Norse before my sabbatical and did stick with them for a while until I realized I wasn't happy with who I was while worshiping the Norse gods.  I am fond of them but I didn't feel like myself while I was with them.  I'm extremely liberal socially and fiscally.  I lean more toward peace than war.  I want to work more for the environment.  The Norse gods seemed to have a lot of followers who were testosterone-driven, war-mongerers and into conservative politics.  Same with the Greeks.  Lots of rules, lots of conservative-leaning thinking.

So obviously the Celtic gods were a good fit for my personality.  Why didn't I want to go in that direction?

The answer to that was with the second question.  How did I get to this point?

When I left Christianity, I thought I wanted something authentic.  I didn't want to be lied to again or fooled into believing in something that was largely made up...again.  And yet, I recently realized that I was basing the authenticity of all gods from the bible.  I still looked at that book as reliable and credible, even knowing what I know about its origins.  To me, the Greeks had authenticity because of the antiquity of the books about the gods.  Ancient meant it had been around and stood the test of time.  The Norse came in second because there were written records, even if they were tainted with Christian revision.

But the Celts were all over the map.  Not only was there no set pantheon, the gods came from different cultures, tribes and continents.  The writings were nearly non-existent and the writings we did have were so mangled by Christian interference as to be unreliable...in my opinion.  It was difficult for me to commit to gods who seemed put together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Until I realized that I had as my standard an equally unreliable book.  I had discredited the bible in my own head years ago but apparently it was so embedded in my psyche that I still used it as the measuring rod to stand against everything else.  Realizing that enabled me to break from the artificial constructs I had created and be free to go with my heart toward the gods who fit me best.  The gods who respond to me when I call upon them in spite of me having shoved them in the armoir over and over again.

So...my path is with the Celts as it was when I first started this path.  I'm leaning toward Druidry once again although not necessarily following any particular flavor.  I consider myself a witch of sorts although as with the Druidry, it's not a part of my religion, per se.  It's just who I am.  And I am who I am because of how I got to this point.

I'll be back

I've been considering what to do and as I continually write blog posts in my head, I've decided to come back to writing them here instead.  My projected date of re-entry into blogland is my birthday...September 22nd.  Bilbo and Frodo's birthday as well as the Autumnal Equinox.  I don't do Mabon.

I plan to keep up only this blog so it will be a combination of both my crafts and my spiritual life as well as the mundane stuff.

Might be some other changes as well, but for now....

I'll see you in a couple of weeks.