P is for Place (and for Promises)

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project (PBP). It’s the one for the letter P.

In theory, I really like the idea of being spiritually connected to the place where I live. To know its History and histories, to know what animals and plants live there and how everything interconnects, to feel its spirit and recognize it as home. I often dream of being a gardener, of taking care of plants (and, indirectly, animals), of knowing their nutritional, medical, and spiritual properties, what they need to thrive and when to cut them back, of eating food that I have grown myself, of experiencing the seasonal changes through it, of spending conscious time outdoors on a regular basis, of having an “outside” that is part of the space I live in, of being spiritually/ethically/ecologically responsible for a piece of land and all that lives on it.

In practice, however, I barely manage to keep my potted indoors plants alive. I forget planting seeds at the right time, several years in a row, and I don’t want to just go and buy plants, watch them bloom for a season and throw them out in the fall, only to repeat the process the next year. I actually don’t even have much of an idea what plants would thrive in the conditions of our tiny little garden. Sometimes, I remember to pull out some weeds that would take over otherwise (Japanese knotgrass, I’m looking at you). But most of the time, I almost forget we even have a garden, not to mention that this garden might have a spiritual component to it. I have never even tried to communicate with the spirit of our garden, let alone with the spirit of the larger area around the house I live in. And that’s not for lack of knowing how to go about that (although I sometimes tell myself that this is the reason). And not even for a lack of patience to sit down, be quiet, and listen (although I often find it hard to do just that).

No, it’s because I have this idea that connecting to the land is like marrying someone. It means something. It’s a serious commitment. You don’t just go and do it on a whim without thinking long and hard about the consequences. You don’t do it while thinking “oh, I can always get a divorce if things don’t work out as I imagined them” in the back of your head. You don’t do it and expect that it won’t change you. You don’t do it unless you wholeheartedly believe it’s the right step.

And, frankly, I’m not so sure that I actually want that kind of a connection to the place I’m currently living at (and have been living at for more than five years). You see, this place has always felt temporary and inbetween-ish. We moved here because it was what we could afford when we were looking for an apartment together. We liked the area because it didn’t seem to be claimed by any one district of the city (the organizational belonging is different than the geographical belonging, none of the districts seem to particularly care about this area, and it’s never featured in those “what life is like in district XYZ” articles the local press sometimes runs), which meant that there were no expectations of a specific lifestyle attached to it. No one was judging my “coolness” when I left the house (as they did where I lived before). And we liked it for the green around the house, the wild animals who come visit, and the proximity to the park. All in all, it seemed like a good place to stay while we took care of other things in our lives.

Of course, the area has a history nonetheless. And it’s not one where people like me feature in any of the main roles. And maybe that’s precisely why I like it here: the near-complete lack of demands that is placed on me here. No one cares who we are and what we do as long as we respect our neighbors’ loudness tolerances (which is easy since we’re usually rather quiet at home) and take care of our part in cleaning the staircase and circulating the key to the shared laundry room. Which is, of course, also one of the reasons that I still feel so temporary here: no one cares. There’s no sense of neighborhood as something active (with few remarkable exceptions), no sense of community or togetherness or anything.

So, while I have all these dreams of a place to stay, truly stay, all these dreams of belonging to a neighborhood collective of people I care about and who care about me, of sharing my household with a cat, of having a garden, and, ultimately, of having a material and emotional home in one and the same place, my reality looks very different. And I have only very vague ideas about how to get from here to there, if I should happen to decide one day that I do indeed want to get there. That I’m ready to commit to this dream and make it happen as best as I can.

Because this is really what it’s all about: commitment. And my seeming inability to commit to anything long-term. Because I have no idea how to do that. Because all I’ve ever done is decide over and over again to not quit, to stay, to take yet another step. That’s how I managed to stay with the same organizational collective for over ten years, creating wonderful events without ever being paid for anything we did. That’s how I managed to be in a relationship with the same person for over seven years now. Not by marrying them once and vowing to love and honor and stay with them until death do us part, end of story, but by asking myself over and over again whether I still want to stay with this person and answering with “yes” every time, in varying degrees of wholeheartedness. Because there have been days when I wasn’t entirely sure where we would go and whether I would find it enjoyable or even bearable there, but when I still wanted to find out, so I stuck around.

Sometimes that makes me think I am incapable of commitment, with all the cultural baggage of that assessment that tells me I’m a quitter, I’m dysfunctional when it comes to serious relationships, and I need to change. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still playing it safe, because the last time I didn’t play it safe I ended up in a psychologically and verbally abusive relationship that seriously damaged my trust in my own instincts due to all the lies I was told, and I have no desire to repeat any of this, ever. Even if it seemed the most romantic thing in my entire life for much of the time it happened, and I have to admit I sometimes miss the incredible intensity of all the emotions back then.

Then again, I remember that the only constants in my life seem to be change, and ultimately being different from whatever community I thought I had found. Somehow, I always end up on the edge, in the margins, off to the side, half-in and half-out, in liminal spaces. Which is a strange place to call home, and yet it probably is precisely where I am at home. Which is why I still believe the place where I geographically live makes sense. Because, like me, it doesn’t really belong anywhere. It’s in-between things, touching on many of them but not actually being a part of any of them. But it’s hard to grow roots in such a place. It’s hard to commit to something that I know I will leave again, eventually.

Which seems strange because I have no problems at all with temporary jobs and take them very seriously while I have them (to a degree that seems unusual, if I am to believe the feedback I’ve gotten), with adjusting to changes even if I didn’t choose them, or with sticking to something/someone important while things are tough. This is not a case of generally taking the easy road or not making/keeping promises. But I have learned again and again that even fundamental things about me can and do change, that I have no way of knowing whether today’s passion won’t be next month’s indifference, so I assume that nothing is forever. So how can I honestly and wholeheartedly commit to anything that is of indefinite duration?

Furthermore, when it comes to places, and spirits and plants and animals, there’s another factor for me that keeps me from entering the kind of temporary commitment that is fine for many jobs and groups. After all, you can always explain things to humans (even if they end up hating you for your decision). But I never again want to give away a cat because I couldn’t find a new place to live for both of us when I needed to. I feel bad about planting stuff and then neglecting it because it’s not like plants can easily go elsewhere if they don’t like it where I put them. So I end up not having a cat and not having the kind of garden I could have, even temporarily. I end up not connecting to the land spirits right here. Because I really don’t think this is a place to stay, so I don’t want to make leaving it any more difficult than it already is (because, let’s be honest, there are many things about it that have grown on me).

As I’m writing this, however, I wonder if this sense of temporariness, of un-belonging, of inbetween-ness, of liminality is the spirit of this place, or at least a huge part of it. So maybe I am already connected and just don’t recognize it? Or maybe I just need a better idea of how to interact with a spirit of place that doesn’t mean I’m bonding myself to the land “forever.”

And there’s another factor that adds to my sense of disconnect here. Most of my spirituality-related thinking and reading and writing is done in English, which generally is my second language. Most of what I read refers to an American (and sometimes British or Australian or Canadian) context and has little or no relation to what happens here in Germany. That puts me into the strange situation that English is my first language when it comes to spirituality (because it’s the language in which I learned most of the concepts and names), so expressing these things in German always feels awkward and provisionary and often downright wrong to me. Even the few things I have picked up about Northern Tradition Paganism, Heathenry, and Asatru have been predominantly in English, and I still get a strong sense of disconnect when they are expressed in German (I’m actually often mentally translating things into English to see if people are talking about the same things as I do). Yet I am in Germany and have lived here all my life. I might even want to address Germanic deities or other local spirits. But I would do so in English – and that seems weird enough for me to wonder if I’ll even be able to make a connection to them if I don’t speak German. Almost every time I meet someone with whom I could potentially talk about spiritual things, I am put off by their German and their inability to understand me when I speak English and the resulting need for me to translate things into a language that feels ill-suited to express what I mean). None of this helps with finding a connection with where I am, and all of it lands me even firmer in yet another neither-here-nor-there territory. Even if it’s all in my head and the spirits couldn’t care less in what language they’re addressed as long as I address them at all…

At any rate, my mind is currently an interesting mess of thoughts about commitment, the lack of home, the desire to belong, and it all spills over into all sorts of areas.

O is for Other

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project (PBP). It’s the first one for the letter O. Or rather, it’s the only one for the letter O because I’ve just decided to officially go with one post per letter for a while because there are so many other things that occupy me right now that spirituality has taken a definite backseat.

At some point last year I realized that a huge part of my identity was tied to the concept of being “other.” In fact, the one thread that runs through my entire conscious life is feeling different from (nearly) everyone else.

I’ve been the only kid in my class who could read before she started school (I somehow taught myself but have no memory of doing that – one day I just could read). I was the only kid who didn’t belong to any religion during my childhood. I felt like the only girl who never understood the dynamics between boys and girls when puberty hit us all (and what I understood seemed incredibly stupid to me). I was the only girl who repeatedly got the key for the boys’ locker room at the local swimming pool (which was hugely embarrassing to me since I wanted to be good at being a girl so much). I was a very late bloomer in terms of physical development (and therefore was excluded from all teenage girl bonding over menstruation and such). I was the only one in my social circle who never had a “real” boyfriend during adolescence (and the two I was with barely lasted longer than a week or two that consisted mostly of me feeling pressured to be more sexual with them than I wanted to be, and I definitely wasn’t in love with either of them). I was the only one who read books on anti-psychiatry in eight or ninth grade (age 14/15) during school breaks (which got even weirder when people learned that I did this out of personal interest, not for a school project). I was the only one with tomato-red hair in my entire school when I was around sixteen (and got harrassed by strangers on the street for that on a daily basis). I was the only one in my class who would speak up on sexism and ask the philosophy professor to do a unit on feminist language philosophy (which he seemed delighted to do, earning me even more annoyance from my classmates).

I eventually became a lesbian along with being a feminist, which at least meant I wasn’t the ONLY one anymore. Suddenly, there was a whole community I could belong to. How completely exhilarating! If only I had managed to be the “right” kind of lesbian for that social circle. I was an utter failure at being butch or even androgynous (although I didn’t have the vocabulary to even talk about these things), I soon became fed up with sexuality being discussed only in relation to violence and abuse, and I – horror of all horrors! – wore a bright red gown from the second hand store to the ball to celebrate an anniversary of the local women’s (read: feminist and lesbian) magazine. With my big Doc-Marten’s-eque boots and a strange haircut. There was ONE other woman in the room who was also in a dress, and she was straight at that point (I think). Then I wanted to spend time with men again, because some seemed really great people to create really great events with, so I eventually lost my place in the lesbian feminist community for good. Instead, I reconnected with the leftist/punk subculture and went on to be the only punk lesbian in my city (an identity I was told I couldn’t take on by a so-called friend because it didn’t exist).

A bit later I was the (then-)only female member of a group of otherwise gay men who organized a weekly non-profit queer bar night. I went on to become the only self-identified femme in my queer-dominated social circle (I didn’t have much in common with the only other femme I knew of in that city), which got me ridiculed, laughed at, dismissed, and reduced to my outward appearance. It also meant that people questioned my queerness and my commitment to the queer community on a regular basis. When I went to a women’s dance every now and then, I still was the only one in a skirt. But hey, at least I had a queer social circle that made me feel like I belonged, even though I made people uncomfortable occasionally! That queer circle stayed home for large parts of my soul for about a decade (and I’m ever grateful for that). I could even integrate my interest in BDSM into it (and also gained a whole new community when I started exploring it in practice, even though I definitely remained at the fringes of that as well).

Then I got a partner who didn’t identify as a woman anymore but considered himself a transgender butch and went by a male name and male pronouns. We were the only couple of that kind in the local queer community (I was asked if I was straight now by people who had personally and directly witnessed me as a mover and shaker of the local queer community. I also lost an important lesbian femme friend and mentor over the transness of my then-partner). When I stopped drinking and smoking I also was the only one who did neither in my circle of friends (which excluded me from all those bonding rituals over getting drunk together, cast me as a party-pooper, and eventually played a large role in my stopping to go out or organize events with them altogether). In my new circle of friends(?) I was the only one with lots of tattoos and piercings and emotional ties to punk and DIY queer culture.

Eventually, I got back to university where I was almost the only student in all of my classes who was already over thirty (which at best helped me take up an unofficial co-teacher role and at worst isolated me once again). I often was the only one who seemed genuinely interested in the subject matter, and who had read all the homework assignments (at least this time I proudly claimed an identity as a “Streberin” – which doesn’t have an English equivalent but roughly is a combination of nerd/geek and teacher’s pet – instead of letting people shame me for my interest in learning things and thinking deep thoughts and discussing them in class). By that time I had also learned that I was “highly gifted” with an IQ that placed me in a minority of 0.13% of the population. While that explained a lot, taught me immediate patience with my fellow human beings to a degree I had never felt before, it also meant I suddenly had an acute sense of how different I actually was in that area, and that I really didn’t have much of a choice about that, either.  So I joined the local chapter of Mensa, where I was the only one who was that queer (even though I was barely out about it) and found that I could have a nice, fun conversation with some of the people some of the time, we never really shared enough areas of interest to turn these conversations into actual friendships (not to mention the casual sexism, racism, and queer hate that seemed to be a part of many equally casual conversations, or the general disdain for anything spiritual). Perhaps needless to say, I’m not a Mensa member anymore.

About six years ago, I started exploring spirituality, initially by reading tarot. Once again, I was doing something that was definitely not considered good and worthwhile in the vague queer academic-activist culture I felt most connected to (when I finally started coming out about my interest, however, I discovered that there were indeed others, even though that still didn’t make a community). To this day, I haven’t told my mother or sister about my spiritual explorations (my father would also be on the list if he hadn’t died) because it’s just not something we do in our family. I found a good place to learn in the Aeclectic Tarot Forum, but I still was the odd one out whenever it came to things like sexual orientation (I was neither straight nor was I a lesbian or any other easily named queer identity), which impacted my readiness to even ask for relationship readings (especially after I once had a reader tell me that my transgender partner shouldn’t get surgery – and only admitted she hadn’t gotten that from the cards at all when I directly asked her about it, not to mention that I hadn’t asked about that at all). Nevertheless, it was nice to have a virtual environment where we could talk about a subject we were all interested in, where our identities didn’t matter that much. I met some really nice people there, including some who I now consider friends (and I don’t call anyone a friend easily).

However, my attempts at connecting with spiritually similarly-inclined people outside of the internet (e.g. at meet-ups or workshops) and at were not so successful. Neither have I found any spiritual path/tradition that I would have been able to adopt more or less as-is. The biggest part of this were issues around gender and queerness (about which I’ve written before (here, here, and here), so I won’t repeat all that.

After university, I started working my first full-time job (at the age of 36!) as one of two queer (but not out) employees of a small company of maybe thirty people. I was the only one who hadn’t studied what she was doing (so I lacked the cultural background of that discipline my coworkers and boss had), the only one with a decidedly crooked “career path.” I also was the only woman who wasn’t into fashion and who refused to conform with the femininity standard of that company. That excluded me from both the women and the men, and I think I was the only one who was never invited to a social get-together with my coworkers. My Beloved had by then decided to take some of the “official” steps that law and medicine offer for trans people in this country, so it became increasingly hard for me to even share my own queerness and that part of my life. Again, I was neither straight (and I think it showed), nor was I out as something people recognized.

With the decision of my partner to start living as a “man” full-time, I lost even more ties to the queer community because I just didn’t feel represented and invited anymore. Most of the time, there wasn’t even a label I would use for myself on any flyer that spoke to “lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, trans people, intersex individuals, and their friends” – I’m sorry but I’m way more than a “friend,” I’m very queer myself but my queerness doesn’t even have a name (especially not in German). I started living in a strange place that really belonged nowhere (which is both figuratively and literally true because our apartment is in exactly such a place), and that made it hard to feel at home anywhere except in my own room.

There was a brief time where I found a place where all those identity markers didn’t seem to matter much at all, and that was during my training to be a hospice volunteer. We were human beings there, and everything that usually is oh-so-important either came up only a long way into the training or not at all (I still don’t know everyone’s day jobs or family status, for example). That was astonishingly nice, and it made me realize that I have no space like that anywhere else in the world. And that’s not because I don’t want to belong, because I want to be different at all costs. I just don’t, and I just am. There are hardly any spaces at all that aren’t fraught with all kinds of stories that usually end up reaffirming that I’m not “normal,” that I’m always the exception and never the rule, that I don’t fit in easily, and certainly not painlessly.

Sometimes I wish I could be a round peg in a round hole, just once, so I get a break. Because being different is exhausting. It costs so much energy. You constantly have to provide a running commentary of the world where you have room, where you can exist, where you are okay. All the time. Every day. Year by year. And then you haven’t even started to look for others like yourself so that maybe, on some days, you can have someone else tell you these things because you’re too damn tired to do so yourself (and do the same for them on other days). And then you haven’t even started to speak up and do something about it. Which takes even more energy, because then you will have to explain yourself over and over again, to people whose idea of a good time is provoking you on purpose, to people who tell you that you should be grateful for all the good things you have (and look how bad it is for those people over there in that other country!), to people who end up hurting you over and over again while telling you they didn’t mean to and therefore you shouldn’t be upset.

However, whenever I think of that theoretical fairy and the wish she’d grant me, no questions asked, I never ask for being “normal.” Because I like being different, as hard as it often is. I like being able to see how things like norms work. I like constantly having at least one foot on the outside for the perspective that gets me. I like the creativity required by having to come up with alternative narratives of mainstream stories, or repurpose and remix existing cultural content to include my experiences (this is definitely one reason why I’m very much in love with the idea of (non-canon) fanfiction/slash).

And, to make this post at least somewhat complete, I need to admit that it completely ignores the areas of my life where I am indeed a round peg in a very comfortably fitting round hole. Where I am not at all “other” in a way that would put me at a disadvantage. For example, I am white, well-educated, carry a passport of the Western European country I’m living in, and have grown up speaking this country’s standard language without any strong dialect. I have easy access to good, affordable healthcare and clean water. I am healthy and able-bodied and feel mostly good about my body. I have access to the Internet and several local libraries and can read/speak/write/understand two languages, one of them being English. I have a solid roof over my head and enough money to cover all necessities and then some. My family has very few issues with my queerness. I am constantly read as a cisgendered person (there were a few exceptions earlier in my life but they’ve all been a long time ago), and I seem gender-conforming enough to not be in immediate danger of being beaten up, raped, or killed for my deviations from gender norms (at least that’s true for where I live). I have never experienced a war in my country, I’m free to vote and say pretty much everything I want without serious danger of life and limb. And these are just off the top of my head.

But that’s the thing about privileges (and all of these are privileges in the grand scheme of things, so let’s call them that): they are very hard to notice unless you don’t have them all the time.  It’s only when you lose a privilege you once had or when you gain one you didn’t have all along that you even notice the effects of your own privilege without having to make a conscious effort. (Personally, I found this computer-game analogy an awesome way to think about having privilege and what effects it has on those who have it. Note: It can easily be adapted to also work for people who are not straight white men but still benefit from the privilege that comes with being one or two of these things.)

Nevertheless, I  still consider “being different” a basic aspect of my life experience (if only because there simply aren’t many contexts in my everyday life where my otherness is entirely irrelevant and I experience pure “normalcy”/privilege, especially long-term). And yet, I wonder… What do I gain by repeating “I’m different” to myself over and over again? Is this nothing but special-snowflake syndrome and a case of first world problems? Would an increased awareness of my own privileges/”normalcy” (which I try to gain step by little step) eventually make me realize that my experiences of being different don’t really “count” compared to the lives of others? Why can’t I just see myself as belonging to the category of “human” instead of spending so much time focusing on what makes me different (I have been asked that and could only say that “human” is a much too large category to feel meaningful and provide me with a sense of belonging…)?

Yes, there will always be people who are a whole lot more different than I ever was or will be. Yes, they will usually also have a whole lot less privilege than I do. I definitely believe I need to work on at least acknowledging my “normalcy” privileges and then do my part in making things less unfair in general. I can’t just focus on my own minority aspects and ignore all the ways that place me in a position of undeserved and unequal power. But that doesn’t mean I have no negate my own experiences of being different and being shut out of the “center” and their emotional truths, nor do I have to beat up myself for having privilege that I mostly got completely by coincidence (no, I don’t believe in our souls choosing all these specifics of our life so that our souls can learn a certain lesson during yet another lifetime). Getting the balance right between the two is the real challenge here I think…

P.S. And now I’m wondering if this topic is “spiritual” enough to be posted on this blog and as part of the Pagan Blog Project… You know what? I don’t really care. Especially not since I have a hard time drawing a line between my politics, my everyday life, and my spirituality anyway. And why should I?

First, let’s get confused (Rune Cards)

Here’s my first reading with the Rune Cards.

—1—
2—–3

I’m going to look at the card image alone first and will then consult the little white book (LWB) that comes with the deck. I’m giving the Anglo-Saxon rune names first, followed by the Elder Futhark names (if applicable) in parenthesis, if only so I can learn all names. The images are borrowed from another website that I sadly haven’t bookmarked, so I can’t tell you the source.

1. Where am I in terms of my spirituality right now? — Aurochs / Ur (Uruz)

Two big drinking horns lie on a table, together with a die that has the rune of “ur” carved on it. One of the drinking horns has metal decorations at the rim and point, the other is left plain. A male aurochs stands in the background, facing the left and looking slightly to the front. (Actually, the animal looks more like a buffalo than an actual aurochs, but for now I’m willing to accept that as artistic license.)

The opening of the decorated drinking horn is facing the viewer, looking a bit like an entrance to a cave or something. That makes me think of the oft-quoted tunnel-like passage that many shamanic journeyers encounter at the beginnings of their journeys (particularly to the Lower World). From the outside, it’s just a drinking horn, but there’s no telling where the inside passage leads. The fact that there are two entrances also suggests that choosing one (the right one?) might be of importance here. And the die makes me think that consulting an oracle (or, if you prefer that view, making a choice by a random method) might just be the way to go.

The aurochs itself makes me think of wild cattle and the role they played for our ancestors (I’m only referring to what is now roughly considered European territory here because that’s the cultural background of the runes and the illustrations of this deck. That’s not supposed to suggest that aurochs or other wild cattle weren’t present elsewhere.). Aurochs were hunted (I assume that all parts of their bodies were used for food, clothing, and tools)  and paintings of them appear in several prehistoric caves, such as Lascaux or Chauvet. All in all, it makes me think of a very early time in human history, and different ways of connecting to that ancestry (such as shamanic journeying, experiential archeology, scientific research, etc.). And that suggests that there is always more than one method to reach the goal of connecting, and that most likely a combination of them will bring the best (= most useful, most reliable, most respectful) results.

The fact that the animal depicted on the card is not actually an aurochs makes me think that I need to keep checking the “facts” of whatever I’m told is the “truth” about any spiritual path. While a bison or buffalo is probably closer to an aurochs than a Holstein dairy cow, it’s still not the same, and the difference may indeed matter. So this is not about just believing everything, even if it comes from an “expert” but to do my own research and verification process to get confirmation of something.

So, let’s see what the LWB has to add to that. The rune poem given for Ur consists of four stanzas and centers on the value of strength and the will to fight, as well as on the need to temper it with courage, determination, wisdom and cunning. In other words, “Those who have strength but lack strategy will become the captive of others.”

The divinatory meanings mention assertive strength again (not necessarily physical strength, though) and also speak of the need to conserve strength, to rest and recuperate.

All in all, I would say this card is about allowing for some time until I actively go into that cave/tunnel again (that is, before I take any further steps, especially on a shamanic path). Instead, some reflection of whose values and “truths” I want to take on as mine seems to be in order. And that makes a lot of sense, because I’m still busy shedding all the expectations of my former workplace and related environments and reconnecting to my “roots” (mostly of my own life history for now).

2. What’s the next step for me? What should I do? — Weapon / Yr

This shows a scene of hands-on battle. There are a lot of helmets, swords, arrows, a few shields, and some faces contorted in yelling. Bolts of lighting strike down from the night sky, ravens (or crows) fly above the battlefield, and a big battle axe with the “yr” rune engraved on it is held up in the foreground of the picture.

I know that thunder(bolts) are associated with the hammer-wielding Northern god Thor, but I’m not sure that the ravens aren’t borrowed from Celtic/Irish mythology here (as related to the war goddesses Badb and Morrígan). However, Wikipedia tells me that “the word [for raven] was frequently used in combinations as a kenning for bloodshed and battle,” so I might be mistaken here.

The battle looks like a scene of much chaos, violence and fear to me, and it’s certainly not a scene that I’d happily enter. I’m in no way the type to engage in physical battle (although I believe I would be able to defend myself against a physical one-on-one attack), and even shy away from peaceful demonstrations or big concerts because I never trust “the masses” around me to be on my side when push comes to shove. However, the battle axe with the rune suggests a guiding principle which might just give structure (if not sense) to the chaos. The lightning bolts make me think of divine intervention, for better or worse, and suggest there might be a bigger plan to all of it, even if I can’t see it from my current point of view.

Besides the idea that finding my own guiding principles probably is a good idea before I enter any “battle” I’m not quite sure what this card is telling me to do.

Let’s see if the LWB can shed some light on this. The rune poem praises the use of the axe-hammer as a piece of war-gear and suggests it is a useful thing to have with you on a journey. The divinatory meanings for the card list several verbs that describe violent destruction of a thing or person and state that the “enemy could be an opponent or an illness, or anything that could be harmful to you.”

Right now, this seems to underline the wild aspect of the Ur card, so perhaps my reading of that as waiting some more before action takes place isn’t quite right? I hope the third card will clarify this matter some more!

3. What should I avoid? — Ing (Ingwaz)

A big fire burns upon an otherwise snow-covered hill surrounded by a forest in the night. Its flames merge with a Green Man-like face made of what looks like oak leaves.

The depiction of a god or land spirit (I think that Ing is another name of Freyr, but I need to check that later on) makes this card different from the other two that only used things that are on the more material side of things (or symbols for deities like the flashes of lightning). In terms of something not to do as my next step I would think this means I’m not supposed to attempt any direct spirit communication at this point.

Okay, let’s check Wikipedia first. Ing, or Yngvi, is indeed an older name for the god Freyr. From what little I already know about the Northern deities, Freyr is a Vanir god and embodies a fertile masculinity that is much tied to the land and to sunshine and prosperity. Thor, on the other hand, is an Aesir god who is associated more with battle, protection, and physical strength. In other words, there are two different kinds of masculinity that appear as “do” and “don’t” for me in this reading.

That alone is rather interesting, since masculinity has indeed been an issue for me in the more recent past. Not only has my partner transitioned into an everyday life as someone who is almost always read as a “man” (despite his remaining self-identification as a third-gender butch), I have also been read as an “unfeminine” woman, especially in work-related contexts (despite my remaining self-identification as a queer femme). I have struggled (and continue to do so) with how the way his gender is perceived now changes the way my gender is perceived by others (no matter that the changes of his gender as I perceive it away from the rest world have actually been minimal – although that kind of separation is of course an illusion possible only for the sake of the argument). As a result, I’ve come to the realization that outside perception plays a much bigger role in one’s gender reality than I initially thought, and that includes the perception of the gender of the people we’re with. While this is all really fascinating in an academic way, it still means that I’m rather unsure of how to deal with this in my practical life.

I’m also wondering if this emphasis on traditionally “masculine” aspects is just a feature of this reading, or if it is part and parcel of Northern Tradition Paganism as such. I have touched on my own gender issues before, so I’ll just say here that it would be a problem for me if femininity and masculinity in Northern Tradition Paganism were divided along the same old lines of warrior and homemaker/caretaker.

But before I continue to draw the different parts of the reading together to make sense of them all, let’s see what the LWB has to say about the Ing card. Once again, I’m not sure how “purely” Northern the story of the Lord (Ing) and Lady (his sister Eostre) and Ing going to sleep over winter and being roused again by burning holly is (Wikipedia says that Freyr’s sister is Freya, not Eostre, and a superficial Google search finds no relation of Freyr to holly). In fact, the whole “Lord and Lady” business sounds awfully Wiccan to me (although, admittedly, Freyr and Freya actually mean Lord and Lady), and holly is mostly mentioned in relation to the twice-yearly fight of the Holly King and Oak King. At any rate, the LWB rune poem mentions Ing as a hero, and someone who traveled over water. It also lists a lot of positive associations along the lines of hope, optimism, fertility, rebirth, etc.

Well, that doesn’t help me much, I’m afraid. I think I shall continue with my own takes for now.

So let’s go back to whats actually on the cards. One thing that stands out to me is the very similar shape of the Ur and Yr runes. Yr looks like Ur with an extra line down. If I leave everything aside that I have read about the runes/cards during the assembly of this reading, I would say that it could be an extra grounding line. In that metaphor, Ur is the idea, the potential and Yr is the application, the manifestation of it. Nevertheless, the Yr and Ing cards are similar in how they show mostly sky (and spirit) and only a little bit of the earth/ground…

Well.

I think we can safely say that I’ve successfully managed to confuse myself to the point of wanting to scratch the reading in its entirety. I guess that what happens when I mix up research and divination to a point that goes beyond checking a fact that I already have in the back of my mind or looking up the translation of an idiom. The part that confuses me most is the battle scene of Yr as my “do” of this reading because I really can’t relate to that imagery at this point in my life. I don’t want to jump headfirst into any kind of battle, but I want to reflect and heal and go slowly instead.

I did learn a few things about this deck and about the runes as such during this reading, though, and that’s always a good thing. I realized that my usual way of reading cards (or other oracles) probably isn’t working very well with this deck as long as I want to use it to learn the runes as such, because what I see in the images is not what I read about the runes and what I would associate with the rune names, the respective stanzas of the rune poem translations, or the rune shapes themselves. I’m not giving up on the approach of doing both things at the same time (reading with this deck and learning the runes as such) just yet, but if future readings turn out to be equally confusing, I might have to do just that. In that case, I might have to decide whether to take this deck as a paper version of the runes (and ignore the images – which would beg the question why I would then use an illustrated deck) or to use the deck as I use my other oracle decks (and ignore the runes – which would lead me to wonder if it’s possible to learn the runes in some other way and still not get distracted by their presence in this oracle).

For now, I’d be grateful for any input on this reading by any of you. Maybe you know more about the runes and can give me some useful pointers about how to interpret what I drew here? Or maybe you see something in the card images that has escaped my attention? All reading methods are welcome!

New Deck (this time for reals!): Rune Cards

I have been neglecting my tarot practice these past weeks, and I want to get back into it. So I’m once again picking a new deck, even though I haven’t done much with the World Spirit Tarot.

These are the random number-generated suggestions:

• Medicine Cards – by David Carson and Jamie Sams
• Druid Animal Oracle – by Stephanie Carr-Gomm, Philip Carr-Gomm and Will Worthington (trimmed)
• Rune Cards – by Brian Partridge and Tony Linsell

Looks like I’m supposed to go for an oracle, no matter what! And since I decided against the Rune Cards last week, I’m picking them for this week. So far, I have very little clue about and no experience at all with runes. I bought the cards hoping the images would make it easier for me to learn their shapes, names, and basic concepts (plus, they’re beautiful).

When the deck initially came to me, one card was there twice (Water/Lagu), and another one was missing (Riding/Rad). But I immediately got a copy of the missing card from the deck’s publisher after I wrote to them, so that’s taken care of.

I do know that the cards depict the 29 Anglo-Saxon or Futhorc runes, which have five more runes and slightly different names than the more commonly used Elder Futhark set. The deck also has an extra card called “wyrd” to signify a blank rune, but I won’t use that one (from what I read, it has been an invention of a modern author of a rune book).

I’ve also already collected a few links about the Anglo-Saxon runes in general which I’ll now go and add to the Decks & Resources page.

And now I’m really curious about my first draw!

N is for Nothing

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project (PBP). It’s the first one for the letter N (it’s actually the second N week already, but apparently I’m slow with the catching up I said I’d do).

I’m not quite sure how or why it happened, but after being almost obsessed with tarot and other aspects of spirituality for at least three quarters of a year (and possibly more), I suddenly don’t feel a pull towards any of these things anymore.

Maybe I’m just exhausted after the last three years that brought a lot of changes to my life that I didn’t choose (plus some that I did choose) and need to give myself a break. Maybe I just need to adjust to my new voluntarily jobless life a bit longer and be patient with myself. Maybe this is just another one of these phases where my attention turns elsewhere for a while, as it does with practically everything. Maybe there’s no reason to worry.

But I do worry. How serious can my spiritual inclinations be if I’m able to shut them off so completely all of a sudden? Isn’t this just laziness and a lack of discipline? After all, it’s not like I couldn’t do more. But apparently, I decide over and over again not to. I decide to watch one of my favorite TV series instead of reading tarot or writing on this blog. Even when I know I actually have stuff to read about. In fact, there are several aspects of my life that could bear some closer examination (after all, having the time to do that was the main reason for quitting my job). But I just don’t seem to have the energy to deal with any of that right now. So I do other things like help a friend renovate their room and exchange thoughts about racism, critical whiteness, queerness, and passing, and the desire to do things our own ways. Or I hear lectures at the university, or go to the first concert I’ve been to in years. I also hang out with people who seem to like my company, even if I’m not entirely sure why, and reconnect to some neglected parts of my life and get to know some nice people a little bit better.

As I do all these worthwhile things (yes, that includes re-watching old episodes of Glee), however, spirituality seems to have fallen by the wayside. There is a big stack of books I was looking forward to read with more focus than working 40 hours a week left me, but they remain slightly dusty and untouched. There are several blog post ideas ambling around in my head that I was looking forward to writing when I had the time and headspace to do so, but they remain (at best) scribbled notes on scraps of paper somewhere in a small heap over there in that ignored corner of my floor.

And I’m undecided what to think of this. A part of me just wants to reaffirm that this is just the way I work: bouts of obsession-like focus on some topic, followed by near-complete disinterest in the same topic a while later (with “a while” ranging anywhere from a few days to a few years). And after another while, a return to the topic, full of renewed interest and passion. Rinse and repeat. It works for me, so what if it’s not the accepted ideal of how these things are supposed to happen?

Another part of me, however, is very busy looking down on that kind of behavior as yet another expression of my utter laziness, my obvious inability to follow through with anything after things get difficult, and my complete lack of discipline at anything but getting up to pee every day (at some point). Not that this is an accurate assessment, as a calm and grown-up part of my mind would like to note. Devouring heaps and heaps of information and opinions on a topic over a period of several weeks (and often months or even years), pondering them in my conversations with other people or here on my blog (or elsewhere in writing), and often finding new connections that make sense to me can hardly be considered lazy. Nor can my stubbornness at bringing up a topic that I consider neglected in a broader discourse until I feel it has been at least recognized, even if it doesn’t make me especially popular with people who’d rather like things to stay the way they were before I spoke up, seriously be called “being a quitter.” And while I may not exhibit a lot of the kind of discipline that always does the same things at the same time the same way, I’m still able to do many things quite regularly, and not just when they are great fun.

Maybe I need to re-read Star Foster’s article on “Slacker Paganism” a friend recently pointed out to me? And then apply the wisdom therein to my own practice, of course. Because I’m secretly pretty sure this is really just one of these things where the hardest part is getting started. And perhaps there is some fundamental value for me in learning how to do things less-than-perfectly without beating myself up for it. If only the practice of that was so easy to arrive at as the theory! (Any tips for how to deal with one’s perfectionism when and where it’s not helpful?)

And I’m pretty sure that my own ideal state (or rather, flow) of things lies somewhere between total randomness and doing things only when I feel a strong, positive urge to do them, and total discipline and doing the exact same thing at the exact same time over and over again like clockwork, no matter what. Perhaps I could use a new mental image to think about regularity, too. Something like “happens easily and organically and is influenced by surroundings, weather, degree of nourishment, etc. and includes dormant times every now and then” instead of this robotic machine-thing that completely ignores that any kind of structure (for me) needs to be flexible or it will break down as soon as life interferes. Seems like the challenge (once again) is to find my own personal middle ground, even if it’s likely to be anywhere but in the exact middle of all this. Perhaps I need to think about ways to queer* the idea of discipline without losing its good and useful aspects…

* Not necessarily in the sense of spoiling it, and even less in the sense of making it homosexual, but rather in the sense of twisting and turning the general idea of “discipline,” prodding and stretching it until it starts to make sense again.

New Deck: World Spirit Tarot

As announced a short while ago, it’s finally time for a new deck. I promise I’ll actually be using it, too.

The random number generator suggests these:

• Rune Cards – by Brian Partridge & Tony Linsell
• DruidCraft Tarot – by Stephanie Carr-Gomm & Philip Carr-Gomm & Will Worthington (my copy is trimmed)
• World Spirit Tarot – by Jessica Godino & Lauren O’Leary (also trimmed)

The Rune Cards are new (to me), beautiful, still completely unused, and I’m curious to work with them. But I think I’ll still skip them this week and pick one of the tarots to get back into things.

The World Spirit Tarot was the deck I bought to reconnect with tarot about five and a half years ago (after spending several nights looking through the entire AT collection). It remains one of my favorite and most-recommended decks, even though I haven’t used it in quite a while. However, I made scans of the card images into screensaver images for my Kindle (my first hack!), so black-and-grey versions of the images are still a presence in my daily life. But it would be nice to look at the boldly colored versions again!

The DruidCraft Tarot also was among the first three decks I bought after the intial reconnection. I used it a lot in the past, but haven’t read with it for a very long time now (mostly due to its Wiccan influences). I still love the artwork, though (including the big feet), and vastly prefer it to Will Worthington’s newest creation, the Wildwood Tarot (which is wrongly and misleadingly marketed as a re-drawing of the Greenwood Tarot – but that’s a rant for another day).

Soo… I think I will go back to the roots and work with the World Spirit Tarot this week and probably next week, too, because this week is already half over (assuming it starts on Saturday, my usual deck-picking day). My copy is trimmed to the colored frames of the images because I found the amount of black around the image too dominant and the card titles too distracting when I first started to read “intuitively.” It’s still fairly easy to recognize the cards, though, because they have the appropriate number of suit symbols integrated into the linocuts. You’ll see.

I think I’m back…

My last post is almost a month old?! Wow. I certainly didn’t plan to drop out of blogging for that long…

But now that some things in my life that distracted me from blogging have been wrapped up for good, I want to get back into the swing of things here.

Here’s the plan.

I eventually want to catch up on the Pagan Blog Project letters I missed. That would be K, L, and M. I also want to continue with the PBP more or less on schedule, so the missed letter posts will appear among the new ones I write. I’m saying this even though I know that spirituality and tarot have moved from their front and center position in my mind a while ago, and I’m not sure when they will return there. But since I have a lot more time now, I hope to still be able to come up with a spirituality-related topic per week to think about in writing.

I’m also continuing the Deck of the Week project because there are still many tarot decks and some oracles in my collection that have never been used so far. I’ll be picking a new deck in my next post now…