Glad Yule!

Hello everyone. I hope your various holidays have been treating you well!

I've been busy but also less busy than normal for this time of year - it's pretty awesome, actually.

We've had an abnormal month weather wise - with several small snowstorms back to back, with a lot of freezing and thawing. The past week has been our more typical mild rainy December - but it was weird to see snow and ice on the ground, and have minus double digit windchills, before mid-January.

Garm and I did our runic initiation - I pondered for awhile on "sacrifice", and what I could possibly offer to the Alfather in exchange for the knowledge of the runes -  what I could give up to Him, that I had not already given. And then I had a small epiphany - as Odin sacrificed himself to himself, so should we - not a sacrifice to him, but to ourselves.

I gave it some thought-- and decided to shave my head.

 

It may seem silly, but as a woman, a shaved head is an unusual thing, usually relegated to butch lesbians (and I am a lesbian but definitely not butch) and cancer patients. Women with shaved heads purely for the fuck of it are rare.  I also have a very strong attachment to my giant floofy mane of curly hair. But this is something I've always wanted to try, just to shatter expectations of me and embrace my femininity in a different way. Nootls did the honours.

It's already growing back a little (I may shave it again because the low-maintenance nature of it is lovely for the winter.)

Back at the middle of the month, I started mixing together some ingredients to make a kyphi-style incense. I say kyphi style, because the general proportions and amounts of things were more or less following this recipe, but used a pretty varied list of resins and herbs, trying to make a sort of "Northern Forest" scent - evergreen resin, birch and pine bark, and juniper berries. I just combined the wet and dry ingredients tonight, and since benzoin powder wasn't available, I rolled the little balls in ground gum arabic to help it set. I had way too much "wet" ingredients left, so I mixed up some other stuff on the fly to combine with it, just for the hell of it - waste not want not! We'll see how it turns out!

Tracking my recipes in a messy, scribbly fashion.

My winter altar, updated just a little with some red berries (dried multiflora rose hips)

My incense, all balled up and ready to cure for a bit before use! Fingers crossed! 

Yule was lovely - we had a small ritual with our friends, had a candle processional through the house, put up our tree, and drank warm mulled cider. Christmas, which I celebrate in secular fashion with my friends and family, was lovely also. 

Together my little pack and I will feast on roast goose for Old Christmas (otherwise known as Little Christmas) since our schedules didn't align well over the holidays and Yule fell in the middle of the week.

I got out for a good long forest hike today - it's been long overdue, and was delighted to confirm that wintergreen carpets the ground in my local woodsy park. It's harvest-able far enough off the main path that I feel safe using it.

Such a pretty little plant!

 I've taken to trying to understand my hamr - here in the concept of the shape one's soul takes if it wanders away from the body. I've taken the shape of a Grey Goose for over a year now - but another animal has also arisen as prevalent. I've mentioned her vaguely before - a creature with a rather snarly reputation perhaps being debunked by modern science. I'm not quite ready to talk about her yet - we're still learning to understand one another and her role as a fragment of my soul.

But winter brings with it many journeys inward.

I hope some brightness shines for you--in my part of the world, the worst of winter lays before us, with the heaviest snows and most treacherous ice and the cruelest of the cold winds-- but knowing that now each day will be a little longer and brighter than the last gives me hope.

May it for you as well.

Chasing Ghosts

It's been a rough few weeks.

And a weird, busy summer.

I've been holding off writing (for too long) waiting to find the inspiration to talk about what's been going on with me, spiritually, but I'm having a hell of a time putting it into words.

Autumn is the season of the Pagan New Year. Of Samhain, of the growing dark, becoming introverted and introspective as the sky darkens, the air cools, our schedules start to wind down.

My practice has not been as active this summer as I would like - it happens every year, and I always feel like I am "missing out" on the season when everything is most vibrant, most alive, most buzzing with energy. But I haven't been, really. I have been vibrant, and alive, and buzzing with energy - albeit frequently exhausted. I suppose in some ways it does mimic patterns of the older ways of living - summer would be a haze of activity, planting, tending crops, working on house and homestead in fair weather,  the first work of the early harvest.  When the first whispers of winter wind around us, the days have come when we can settle and turn inward until the coming of the spring again.

I have felt a fair and odd amount of discord these days. Things are shaking loose, shaking up, stirred around. I am standing firm in some ways, and standing aside in others that I thought I would not. Miscommunication has been a bastard dog at my heel, and I am learning to separate things I must own as my doing from things that are not.

I once apologized for everything. And then, headstrong and mighty, apologized for nothing. Now I learn the hard lessons, that sometimes I must apologize for some things, but sometimes I should not - will not - will never - apologize. Learning to intuit the difference makes me mightier still.

I suppose it shouldn't shock me - a certain deity who likes dramatic change and transformation and kicking rocks at hornet nests approached me, and I have tentatively agreed to work with him. His energy is interesting to me - warmer and friendlier-seeming than the Alfather, but bouncing and giddy and a bit mad, and tugging at the corners of your mouth into a wry grin but you're not quite sure what's so gods-damned funny. I don't trust him any more than I trust Odin - but oddly have come to determine I also don't trust him any less, either. I'm still working out my thoughts on the matter.

I finished reading RitualCraft - such an easy read for such a massively thick, heavy, fine-print book. I was pleasantly surprised. I learned a lot (including that I love high drama and formal language in ritual...) I'm not a fan of the tendency to list gods by what they can be summoned for - a "correspondence" chart listing deities alongside herbs and crystals for specific wants or problems, rituals where every god fitting a certain archetype is called.... But I think (correct if I am wrong) that that is a pretty Wiccan thing, and it is a Wiccan book, so...  I guess I'm a "firm" polytheist - the gods may ultimately draw from shared wellsprings of human history and consciousness, and so overlap somewhat, but they are not merely symbols that can be interchanged with one another and called on for everything when there has been no working relationship established.

Once things settle down, since I finished my first year's worth of post-initiation reading for IDGAF, my next "learning project" will be taking time to really devote and properly commune with my gods. Most of my work I've done with Odin - I would like to take the time to learn the others who have approached me, or that I've made entreaties to (with proper thanks and agreed payment given after) , and form proper relationships with those who plan to stick around.

I have more to share, so much more, but I have not the words for it all. But change has been wrought, and is being wrought, and I cannot wait to tell about it.

Welcome to the new blog.

Welcome to the new me.

Hail and farewell for now. 

Illness, Books, Mead and Horn

I've been a bit under the weather as of late--almost literally. The climate this year is fubar, and it's not uncommon for us to swing from temperatures in the positives--as high as plus 6 or 7 (Celsius) to minus 20 or more with windchill. This has been screwing with a lot of people health wise, since nobody can get adjusted to the climate. We're also finally entering the stormy weather part of winter. This has never really been an issue before the last few months, but I've been getting headaches, which my wife and my doctor both think are migraines, sometimes lasting DAYS before a weather event. I'm not sure if it's age, or stress, or what brought this new thing on, but man. The pain isn't debilitating alone, but after that long, it drags on me. I've also been having bad breathing the last few weeks, despite taking my puffers pretty steadily. I now have a script for an oral steroid to help my breathing, and for migraine abortives to help the headaches, and I'm going to be sent for a CT scan to make sure the headaches have no worrisome underlying cause. Prednisone spent most of the day fucking up my guts and making me feel like general poop. Bleh.

I just wanted to share that, since I'm actually kinda proud of how much I've accomplished in the last few weeks despite feeling like shite so often.

I ordered four new books with giftcards I got at Christmas (we jokingly coined in Bookmas). The Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda (translated) a book called "Elves, Wights and Trolls", and "By Land, Sky and Sea" by Gede Parma. I finished the Prose Edda and moved on to Gede Parma as a change of pace before I tackle the Poetic Edda. I'm enjoying Gede Parma's book enough that at some point when I get all of this sorted, I want to read Penczak's Shamanic Temple.

Once I'm done all four of these books, I'll have 4 of my 6 required "further learning experiences" needed for the year, to maintain my IDGAF Initiate status. I need to catch up on my Land Stewardship--with the weather so up-and-down, it's been hard. I have a suet cake to put out for the local birds, but whenever we're due for cold temperatures and snow, we're scheduled to get pouring rain within a day or so, which will melt the suet. I've been trying to wait for a bit of consistently cold weather, and it just ain't happenin'. I want to get it out there, too, because the mild temperatures at the start of winter meant that a lot of birds who would normally migrate stuck around late, and are now struggling in the colder weather. (Birdwatcher. I know these things.)

We bottled our sweet mead batch this Tuesday, as I was home from work due to severe weather. It's been sitting for months while I waited to make sure it was ready--and it's actually drinkable now, not needing to be aged longer in bottle. It has a sweet honey finish that is somewhat floral. I like it.

Last, but not least, I finally finished the cleaning and fancying of my drinking horn. It took a lot of work to get it clean, and for awhile I despaired actually getting it clean enough to drink from--it had a horrible smell that wouldn't go away. I finally soaked it with rubbing alcohol, and then scrubbed it before curing it twice with Guiness. Now it smells like nothing when dry, and a bit like CowBeer when wet. To make it more "mine", I dressed it up with some leather (which I cut, stamped/carved, and dyed myself) and a small carving.


A shot of the carving and stitch work in the back...  The carving was "darkened" slightly with plain old brown colored pencil (Prismacolour, which are wax based) to help it stand out since I couldn't really get it deep enough with the tools I had to make it "pop" on it's own.

 And the leather work on the front! The dragon is (in case it wasn't obvious) a pretty important personal symbol for me, hence why I added one.

I have been "informed" that to consecrate the horn, I need to use it in a blot to Odin when we do our Imbolc rite, (which we are waiting on for the weather to be more "end of winter in sight" than it is now;) using our own home made mead. 

I will mention a little bit about my decision to engrave the horn with the Valknut. I have seen a million and a half explanations of what that symbol supposedly means, the only historically accepted one is "knot of the slain" and "something something Odin" (It's seriously really vague and not seen much.) I've seen some modern heathen takes on the symbol, ranging from "Odin can take you (ie. get you killed) whenever he wants to be Einherjar--and you're cool with that" (I haven't been able to find any source for where this came from though) to "sworn to/works with Odin". My take is more the latter - I associate the symbol with Odin, he has given me things in meditations bearing that symbol, and I accepted the challenge of taking and keeping these gifts. He was willing to allow me to put the symbol on this horn, provided I consecrate it in the manner described above.

(In case anybody who stumbles on this needs it clarified--the Valknut is not a racist symbol. Some skinhead groups have appropriated it, along with other Norse imagery, but nothing about the symbol itself or it's Pagan/Heathen uses is inherently racist. Just wanted to clear that up.)

Man guys, I used a lot of parentheses tonight.