Today is the Wiccan Sabbat of Yule, a celebration of the longest night and the return of the sun. Today, though, I am pooped. Unfortunately, my celebrations will have to wait a few days until I can do them justice.
I would like to wish a happy Yule to all my Pagan readers. I am sorry I wasn’t able to get around to all your blogs to leave a message.
Yesterday I was thinking about my attempts to keep a gratitude journal over the past several years. I usually only managed to keep it up for a few days, or a week at most, before I forgot.
Today, I came across this link: Gratitude Experiment. While it may seem to be a little New Age airy-fairy, I think it has a wonderful message. I wonder if a lot of what is wrong with everyday interactions between people is the lack of gratitude.
“Reflections on life from a somewhat confused spiritual seeker” reads the description of my blog. My title on Aeclectic Tarot Forum is “spiritual seeker.” Why? I am certain that I am Pagan, my own reformed Eclectic branch of Wicca to be exact. I suppose I’ve taken on this title of confused spiritual seeker because I am still trying to find a way to blend the religion of my childhood with Wicca.
I was raised Presbyterian. Although neither of my parents were particularly avid church goers, my maternal grandfather the elder of our church and encouraged by attendance. I loved Sunday School because of all the wonderful stories, but that is all they ever were to me. I knew from a pretty early age that something was missing from my religious upbringing, and I often thought that maybe God was actually a woman. (It was a thought that I kept to myself due to my grandfather’s strict beliefs.)
I was around fourteen or fifteen when I finally declared myself a Wiccan, an event proceeded by a lot of research into many different religions. Now that I’m 28-years old, I realize that I have been Wiccan for more then half my life, longer then I was Christian. (Or, at least longer than I was aware I was Christian, since I have no memory of my Christening or attending church before I was about five years old.) I think it is odd that I have belonged to my current religion for the majority of my life, but I am still trying to integrate my old religion. Maybe it is an attempt to please my late grandfather, I just don’t know.
Lately I am having the most trouble trying to integrate the Kabalah and the Tarot. The Kabalah is a Jewish mystical system that is also used by Christian magicians and other Christian mystery systems. I took about a year’s worth of lessons from BOTA, which draw on Christian mysticism, but stopped when I found the Christian symbolism to be too much. I am fairly certain that I’m not running away from this symbolism because I am trying to get away from Christianity. I think that I am well beyond such juvenile actions with regards to my spiritual path, and I do recognize and appreciate a great deal of what Christianity has to offer me. But, I think I am finally coming to understand that my religious path goes in another direction, and I am holding myself back by trying to force myself to fit these systems into my current practices.
To many Wiccans the time between Samhain (October 31st) and Yule (approx. December 21st) is a time set aside for reflection and meditation. I find this difficult though, because for the average person, this time is the busiest of the year with parties, shopping, dinners, etc.
I don’t know how to balance my spiritual needs with everyday life, especially this time of year.
As any Tarotist will tell you, the search for the perfect deck is endless. I’ve gone through over thirty different decks since I started reading Tarot over fourteen years ago. Some decks have stayed with me for a long time, while others were passed on almost as soon as I had bought them. It can be hard to say what is wrong with a deck; it may have a different set of correspondences then what I am used to, or the illustrations aren’t to my taste, or it just doesn’t feel right. One day, I’d like to create my own prefect deck.
In my deck, a specific colour would dominate each suit. For example, red for Wands/fire, blue for Cups/water, yellow or purple for Swords/air, and green for Pentacles/earth. The season and time of day corresponding to each suit would be clearly shown on the court cards. I would name them Princess, Knight, Queen and King, and show plainly which Zodiac sign was associated with each.
In terms of the format of the deck, it would be slightly smaller than the average Tarot size so that it would be easier for me to shuffle. The backs would be attractive and reversible, but not have a distracting pattern on them; maybe a flower pattern or the like. The illustration side would be borderless, because this makes the picture more open an inviting to me.
I’m pretty certain that I would leave out any references to the Kabalah or Christian mysticism. I would want it to be a Pagan deck, featuring images that relate to the Wheel of the Year and other Wiccan themes.
The only thing really holding me back, besides any concrete ideas for the actual images, is my inability to draw.
Blessed Samhain to all my Pagan readers. A day late is better then not at all.
Now that Halloween/Samhain is over, it is full steam ahead into the holiday season. The gift shop where I work (still!) has been slowing putting out Christmas items for the past couple of weeks. And, surprisingly, people have been asking about cards and various gift items since the end of September. This Sunday, when the store is closed, we will do out annual all day blitz to get most of the Christmas items out. The following day we will start to see the the mad Christmas holiday rush, where people buy anything and everything.
Instead of turning this into a rant about the commercialism of Christmas, I’d rather talk about what I plan to do during the month of November. For Wiccans and other Pagans, the time between Samhain and Yule is set aside for reflection and remembrance. It is a time to take stock of what has gone before and what is yet to come. This month quanta and I quite literally plan to take stock; we will be finally doing a home inventory. There are also a few personal projects I will tackle, including extracting myself from my job.
Sometimes I am so very, very frustrated by what I see when I go looking at pagan websites. The internet is supposed to have been this wonderful social revolution, yet everything is the same no matter where you look. It seems like every site has the same collection of spells, blinking graphics, and plagiarized material from Llewellyn books. Where is orginal thought?
Yeah, I realize that I can easily be included in this group too. Maybe being part of a religion means that you will produce similar material as other members of your religion. Religion gives you a framework, and everyone who falls that religion has the same framework to deal with. But I’d still like to see some new thoughts and debates.
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
I’ve sworn off self-help books many time in the past, yet I always find myself drawn back to them. My current rotation includes The Power of Now (which I’m not very impressed with), Emotional Alchemy (not bad, but not quite right for me), The Comfort Queen’s Guide to Life (a fun read and very helpful), How to Make Your Creative Dreams Real (wonderfully helpful and also a little painful), Simple Abundance (an inspirational daybook).
Looking over that list, I think I just learned something. Books written for women and/or about the creative experience (whether it is creating something concrete, like writing, or intangible, like a serene home) are more meaningful then books that tell me how to fix myself. Maybe nothing is broken…
I often feel like the time isn’t right to work on my spiritual well-being. I’m either too tired, too busy, too unfocused or too stressed. In short, I let real life get the better of my spiritual life.
But what if that is the way it is supposed to be? Is part of spiritual growth learning to integrate our spirituality into “real life”? What if we don’t need to go on meditation retreats in order to hear our inner voice or the divine? How would my life be different if I could hear Them on the subway or while making dinner? Maybe that is the way it is supposed to be.
Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
I am very well aware that Wicca is not a perfect religion. Our history is a little questionable when it comes to Gardner, who claimed he had rediscovered an ancient Goddess religion. There are also many contradictory views about our gods: are They male and female?, do They have names?, are we Them?, etc. Lately, though, I’ve been noticing a trend towards questioning the “Wiccanness” of the Threefold Law.
Simply put, the Threefold Law states that any action we do, for good or bad, will return to us three times. To me this seems too reminiscent of those punishment/reward faiths that so many of us have tried to leave behind. Wicca isn’t this sort of religion, and I feel that we don’t need this sort of law.
As Wiccans, we believe that all people and all things are part of the divine. We also have the Wiccan Rede (An it harm none, do as thou will.) to help guide our actions. With both these things forever in our hearts, it is obvious that any action we do will affect ourselves through that connection. Also, if we are truly aware of our Will, as the Rede requires us to be, we shouldn’t have to worry about preforming actions that we would need to be karmically or divinely punished for.
None of us are perfect though, right? So what about those times when we do something exceptionally good or exceptionally bad? Here is where we run into a little bit of difficulty. As I have said, I don’t believe in the punishment/reward form of religion, where a deity judges each of our actions. Instead, I believe in cause and effect; our actions influence what will happen to us. I’m not trying to say what you are asking for or deserve any bad or unkind things that happen to you. Rather, it is more like if you walk around with a bad attitude, it is more likely that you will attract others with similar bad attitudes, with predictable results. And, conversely, if you always have a good attitude, you are more likely to attract similar.
I'm a mom, wife, needleworker, knitter, wannabe writer, and most of all a spiritual seeker. I'm not sure yet what I believe, but I sure as heck know what I don't believe.
I blog about my adventures in needlework, knitting and other crafts at Stitching Lotus.