Last month, Pax declared June to be Pagan Values Blogging month. I’ve been thinking since that announcement about what I wanted to talk about. One of the obvious choices, given my professional interests, is the power of information.
And it’s not just information alone – I’m not talking about trivia here, information disconnected from action or change. But in any path that places a heavy consideration on personal responsibility (as many Pagan paths do in one form or another), information allows us to make choices that are based on more than personal preference at a given moment.
To make informed choices, we need information.
And, of course, the kind of information we need varies based on our goals, the topic, and our past level of experience. The information that’s going to be most helpful to one person may not make much difference to someone else.
We may need basics. Useful starting places, relevant safety considerations, ways to find support and community if that’s helpful or wanted – and directions to go as we want to learn more or deepen our understanding. We also need to make sure the basics are in context – that they don’t leave out entire areas of a topic.
Helpful information includes:
- Resources that have helped other people – and how. Not just a list of books or websites, but some commentary on why someone liked them, recommends them, or found them helpful with specific questions.
- Ways to connect with broad resources, both locally and online. One risk when someone’s getting started is that they find only a tiny subsection of what’s out there. Participating in broad community settings (a large and active online forum, a local community event that attracts people from many paths) helps avoid that.
- Context – exactly how a specific practice or idea fits with other ideas (or doesn’t, as the case may be.) If there’s a ritual shared, what’s the background for this ritual? What do you need to know to get more out of it, or adapt it to your particular needs?
We need information to help us understand the risks and benefits. While outright persecution or discrimination is relatively rare for Pagans these days (and there are good support systems in place in many cases), it’s probably no surprise to anyone reading this that there are some risks and considerations. Learning more – gaining information – about what that looks like for other people helps us make better choices for ourselves.
Helpful information in this area might include:
- How other people navigate talking about their religion with family, friends, and with work or casual acquaintances. Our circumstances are unique, but many types of situation have come up before, and knowing how these went can help us make more informed decisions in our own life.
- Accurate and appropriate information about effects of various things – whether that’s herbs, specific practices, or anything else. Many things in Pagan practice have a lot of benefits, but some of them are not things to try for the first time the day before an important presentation at work – as they can have lingering effects. (and some can have serious health considerations.)
- Experiences other people have had with specific practices, tools, or other things that impact not only what we do, but how we do it. Again, these help us decide for ourselves what we should explore in more depth – and how to plan for that experience.
We need information that helps us avoid reinventing the wheel. There are lots of different groups and individuals out there, many trying to do similar things. While we should continue to explore that amazing diversity and range of goals, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel every time. A little research or a conversation about something can help us avoid common prior problems – and save us time and energy so we can go further with our goals.
There are lots of examples here, but a few that spring to mind:
- Group dynamics – how to avoid the most common problems in group settings. Group drama can eat a tremendous amount of time, momentum, and energy, leading to nothing useful getting done. Knowing how to avoid the drama and deal with different preferences or opinions effectively can make a huge difference.
- Ritual planning for a particular group size. For example, there are some things that have been found to work reliably and well in large groups, and some things that regularly fail. Knowing those in advance of ritual planning helps create better rituals!
- Scale – what works for an individual is often different than what works in a group of 5-10 people, or what works in a group of 20, 50, or a few hundred.
We need information that directly impacts our choices. What we do. Who we do it with. How to figure out the where, how, when, and why that sing to our souls (barring things like legality issues, of course.) We need to learn to ask questions that help us figure these things out. Our answers may not be like anyone else’s specific answers – but we need to figure out the places we do overlap, and when cooperation, learning, or sharing resources are truly helpful
Related to that, we need to value choice.
There are many, many people out there. Many paths. Many practices. Many beliefs and philosophies and worldviews. There’s no way that any single person has the ability to do everything, know everything, or be part of everything that’s out there. On a purely practical level, we only get 24 hours in a day, and we have a number of things to do during those hours – sleep, work, taking care of our household chores – before we get into any optional activities.
One thing I’ve found critical in my own path is valuing discernment. Between a demanding job and coven commitments, and other things I want to do, I simply can’t be at every public Pagan event in the Twin Cities (there are lots and lots!), or welcome every person who expresses interest into my coven, or answer every question in an online forum that comes my way. I need to set some limits and make choices in order to honor and value my other commitments (to my profession, to my friends, to my own well-being).
Instead, I use information – about my own needs, about what’s out there, about what might be most helpful to others, about what it will take to improve skills I want to get better at – to make informed choices about where and how I spend my time. When one of those things changes, I adjust. (For example, I’m about to go on summer break, which changes all my schedules from my school-year life. I can stay up later, do things during the day, work on a single project for hours at a time, and so on – but I also need to make sure I’ll be able to go back to work in August fully recharged for a demanding year!)
Some of that information is clear-cut: I’m already committed to be at something that Saturday, and can’t be in two places at once. But some is less concrete. Whether I think a person is a potential fit for my coven, or for a role in a particular project can be somewhat nebulous. I personally use a combination of past experience, my knowledge of myself and the things I can work best with, a dollop of ‘what’s going to stretch me, my skills, or my interactions without being either overwhelming or miserable’, and my intuition – but it’s definitely an art, not a science.Knowing myself, though, is pretty critical.
Informed choice is also about balance.
And that means balance between work and home (or hobbies and home, if someone doesn’t work), religious life and practical needs (cooking, cleaning, kids, etc.), and recognising the choices we make and their consequences.
We can’t truly begin to balance these things (and many more) unless we know what they mean – how much time and energy they require to do well, how often we want to do them, what they mean for our interactions with family, friends, or the broader community. There are places in my life I’ve made different choices because my personal preference would affect friends in way I didn’t like – or change my relationships with tradition mates. I value those relationships, so I found new ways to handle that issue. However, the only way I *could* figure out that I needed to do that is by being informed about what was at stake – and what my options were.
I suspect I’m going to be coming back to balance a lot in the coming year: one of my obvious big challenges this next work year is to balance a demanding job (which requires a lot of specific skills and attention to detail) with a religious life that requires some of the same – but also the ability to turn that off, fall into the experience, and be open to very different possibilities. Yet, I also know that it’s that balance (and dynamic balance, in particular) that’s going to save me, and make doing more of what I want possible.
Phoenix Song, my coven, has had several inquiries over the spring from people interested in learning more about us (and possibly joining us.) This is always a tricky process, but we’ve been through the initial stage enough times now that I want to talk about it here – and why we picked the initial process we did.
Our process is described over here and our introductory letter information is here, if you’d like to see specifically what we talk about.
So, why email?
There are a number of reasons I wanted to start with email. While I recognise that it’s not a perfect communications tool (and that some people will be more familiar with it and comfortable with it than others), I felt that the advantages more than make up for that.
I touched on some of this in my post about my new job – but I wanted to come back to it.
I’m a librarian, an infovore, and I consider being able to manage information one of the greatest forms of power. This means I’m on and around computers all day – and that I tend to build in little tiny pieces of ways to redirect my attention where I can. Here’s some of my ongoing and recent ones.
(I’ll note here that I use a Mac at home – in this case, a shiny new MacBook, which is why I’ve been thinking about this. I use a PC running XP at work, and work requires 5 different sets of passwords for various things.)
Music:
I create playlists in my iTunes for all sorts of different things: sabbats and elements, but also for particular kinds of working. For the long-term job ones, I used songs that were about things important to me. (Love of learning, sharing information, giving people tools to make informed choices, connection in community, etc.)
Desktop images:
I pick images for my computer desktop that reflect what I want in my world at the moment. (Right now, they’re very simple blue backgrounds from Marmalade Moon because I wanted something simple, but I’m also very fond of the art at Digital Blasphemy . I pick them based on my focus, on what I’m using that computer for, and on something that reminds me of beauty and attention to detail whenever I look at it.
The computer name.
I name my technology. (For people who think this is silly, I’ll say that I’ve had tremendously good luck with hardware over the last nearly 25 years I’ve been using computers. Stuff has occasionally failed, but it’s always been recoverable and I’ve had plenty of warning. Whether or not the two are related is hard to determine, but it doesn’t seem to hurt.)
I name my car, my iPod (a bad pun: her name is Polyhymnia, and she contains mostly Pagan chants and other related music much of the time), my computer. I pick names that reflect my hopes for the use: my previous computer is Esoterica, and my new laptop is musica humana (the term for the human music, the harmony between human spirit and the music of the universe, as opposed to musica mundana/musica universalis (the music of the spheres) or musica instrumentalis (instrumental music, a step away from that union, and considered more ‘mechanical’ in classical theory.)
Yes, it’s music-geeky, but it’s also a constant reminder to myself of where I want my focus to be. (In this stage of my life, using the music as a springboard for everything else I want to do. Everything comes back to the Song and the heartbeat.)
Passwords:
Speaking of typing all the time, my personal passwords generally reflect a current goal or interest. So, for example, when I was really hoping that the job would work out in my favor, I used ‘fruition’ for several passwords. (It is no longer any of my passwords, I rush to say.) It’s a great use for passwords that need to change every couple of months – I found that picking a related term helps me remember them.
You can do the same thing with an affirmation or a favorite line of poetry. Take the first letter of every word, change a few for numbers or symbols, and you have a great (and very strong) password. For example, if I were to use the following:
I am capable and competent and love my job
I might condense that first to: IACACALMJ
If I wanted to make it more secure, I might do: !AC&C&LMJ
Easy for me to remember if I say the phrase to myself – but hard for someone else to guess.
On Friday, I got to hear the words I’d been hoping for for months – a job offer at the school I’ve been working at for nearly 9 years.
This school has seen me transition from being a paraprofessional to adding a lot of services to the library, to finishing my Master’s degree in Library/Information Science, to now hiring me to be the Teacher Librarian. My former boss left for a new position (which he’s very much enjoying) in January: I’ve been the interim librarian ever since, but with no certainty that I’d actually have a job after June. It’s been a long and drawn out process – it was almost appropriate that the meeting on Friday that I knew I’d be getting the news in got postponed 3 times.
And now, I’m waking up in a new world. I spent Friday night going “EEEEEEEEE!” a lot, and Saturday dancing around my home at intervals, for the sheer joy and relief of it.
You see, this job search thing has been going on for a while.
I won’t go into the depths of details – but the library job market was lousy before the current economy meant that most libraries went into a serious state of hiring freeze. I started job hunting for a professional library job in January of 2007 (and got my degree that August). Since that time, I’ve had 2 serious interviews, one call I turned down – and a whole lot of non-replies. (And one short term job that got me some great experience.)
There’s another part: I’ve been dealing with substantial financial instability since early 2005 – as I’ve mentioned, divorce was not kind to my finances. The new job means an end of that. Librarianship is not the most highly paid profession – but it’s definitely sufficient for my needs and a large number of desires. (Also, it’s hard to beat a school year contract for time to travel and pursue other interests while having a stable income.)
I haven’t been talking about my job stuff because I didn’t want to jinx it or bias it or anything – but now that it’s settled, I want to talk about two things: first, the kinds of magical and ritual work I did and didn’t do. And second, how my religious choices and commitments have affected my job hunt (and there were both benefits and challenges.)
Now, this doesn’t mean my work is over.
The job is a challenging one, involving keeping track of a whole lot of different pieces. I’ve been specfically asked to focus on two things that came up in the interview – including working on engagement with students (I’m an introvert, so this is going to be real work). Doing that while also doing the tasks that require focus and concentration takes real juggling skills.
It’s pretty clear to me that my next stage – professionally and religiously – is integrating tools and techniques. Getting out of my office, but using tools like deliberate aura and shielding changes to help me be more open to casual interaction without overstressing me. Being able to relax a little into the role and truly make it mine – but doing so in a way that’s friendly and welcoming to others. Creating a space that feels warm and comfortable and alive. (I foresee more indoor plants in my future.) Using what I’ve learned about being sensitive to intuition to help me have more meaningful conversations, and be open to hearing what people truly need, even if I was just focusing on something else.
And because it’s partly an administrative role (and I’m at least 5 years, and often 10-15 years, at a guess) younger than many of the other administrators, figuring out how to make that work to everyone’s benefit. (For example, I’m a *vastly* different technology user than most of the other administrators, due to both inclination and age.)
And there’s the other part of this new world:
I graduated from college in 1998. I’ve spent half the time since then (and almost all of the past 5 years) in a constant state of low-grade stress. Stress over money, over not being sure where I’d be in a few months, of having to edge every project I wanted to help with with “Sure, as long as job stuff doesn’t interfere” – because I knew that the library job I wanted and yearned for might not be local. And just the practical stuff – at one point, I moved 3 times in 18 months, and my furniture choices remain portable and more limited than I’d like.
I coped.
But now, I’ve got another question. What do my body, my appetite, my sleep, my emotions, my dreams, my music, my magic and ritual feel like when I’m coming from a known and long-term foundation without those stresses? I have no idea anymore. Far too much has changed in my life since the last time I was in this place.
I look forward to finding out – but I bet there’re going to be a few bumps on the way. (Got one already: the tension headache this morning from release of stress was not exactly a surprise.)
Fortunately, there’re a few things to help – thanks to a gift and loan, I’m able to get a new computer (my first laptop in 5 years) now, rather than at the end of the summer – meaning I can start getting out and about more easily now, and start getting things better integrated and together. I’m really looking forward to that. (Also, I found the most suitable ever decorative/protective thing – personally meaningful without being too overtly Pagan. More on that in a sec too.)
On seeking a job:
Now, being a witch and all, some people might think this section would be all about how I did just the right spell, and the job just fell into my lap. Not so much.
In reality, while I did a good deal of ritual work on some related topics, I did very little work about specific jobs. That’s because I wanted to be sure of a few things. I wanted to make sure that the job was due to my professional skills and talents, not a manipulation of them to best effect. (Otherwise, I’d be sunk when it came to *doing* the job.) I wanted to make sure I wasn’t forcing the situation in a direction that wasn’t actually right (for me or the people making the decision.) And I had a bunch of other choices that sometimes left me feeling very conflicted. (I’ll be coming back to this.)
Instead, I focused on other things.
- Discernment: was a particular job a good fit for me and where I want to be in the near and distant future? What would it allow me to do? What would it be hard to do? Were there things in the ad that were particularly important hints of what that job might hold?
- Clarity: how could I best present myself? How could I write a cover letter and resume that truly reflected me and my personal style/energy/view of the world and what I could bring to a given position?
- Integration: what job would let me use all of my skills, not just some of them.
- Prosperity: enough to keep me going – and somehow, something always turned up. (I’m also eternally grateful for the friends who treated me to dinner, had me over, and helped me with little things over the years. It made a huge difference.)
One thing that was quite curious here: I had a very hard time stressing about not getting this job (well, right until the last couple of weeks, anyway). I kept taking that as a good sign – but there was an element of “What if I’m just so out of cope I can’t work up the energy” in there that I couldn’t ignore.
Some of what I did was spell work or divination work – but I also did a lot of smaller things like building a professional shrine (I honor Hypatia, popularly considered the last librarian at the Great Library of Alexandria as an ancestor of profession), or wearing jewelry or light perfume (natural oils) to help keep me in the right mindset. Things like that.
On Craft and profession:
I’m in a rather interesting place. I consider my work – helping others find, use, and understand information that makes a meaningful difference in their life – to be very much a vocation that’s interwoven with my religious life. But at the same time, religion and work are tricky.
The school I work for is an independent school with no religious affiliation. (We have students from a number of varieties of Christianity, a range of Judaism, and a smattering of other beliefs, including Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism.) When I started there, I was considering my religious options: I started studying with the group I trained with my second fall there. This job has also encompassed my growth from a new seeker to a 3rd degree in the tradition, hiving off to form my own coven.
I’ve been quietly more out about my beliefs in the intervening time. First, a conversation with the school counsellor in case it would be of help with specific situations, then with my now-former boss, and finally this year, quietly and in some specific situations with students. I spoke in October and November to our diversity club, and to the comparative religions class. (Both were excellent conversations – as I’d anticipated, they were respectful and thoughtful. Working with great kids is one of the reasons I really like the school.)
On the other hand, I can’t deny that my religion has really limited some of my job options. Among schools and colleges, there’s a wide variety. Some are non-religious – no problem here!
Some have a religious affiliation but fairly open hiring requirements. For example, at St. Kate’s, where I got my degree and worked briefly, they expect everyone to support the school’s mission as a Catholic institution and spell out what that they mean – none of which I had any problem with, as they’re really quite sensible about it and have a strong interest in social justice issues.
But I do live in the Midwest. A noticeable number of schools require a creedal agreement, references from members of clergy in the school’s religious affiliation or other explicit statements of (Christian) religious beliefs and practices. A couple significantly limit what you can do outside of work. (It’s legal, and appropriate in private religious institutions. But it limits the number of places I’m going to be able to work.)
I thought hard before doing becoming more open with students about my Paganism – because then, I knew my boss would be leaving. On the other hand, the school has a focus on integrity and courage in having conversations that go deeper, and I finally reached a place where being that much more open (again, in appropriate places: it’s not something I’d bring up with a random student out of nowhere) made more sense – and seemed like a necessary step in integration. And because, I decided, if I got the job long-term, I wanted to do it *before* I got hired, not after. There’s also a part here about how to have meaningful connections you have to be somewhat open (especially in a setting like a school: it’s not like working in an office, because we’re already talking regularly about other areas of worldview.)
But that interweaving of vocation has also left me feeling more than a little conflicted at times.
The internal conflicts:
You see, I have a number of local ties these days. I live in Minnesota because I fell in love with the state on a visit in 1998 and I didn’t want to leave. There’s my coven, close friends, our parent group (who I’m still fond of), my work on Twin Cities Pagan Pride, and a number of other things.
And yet, the library job market here has never been fantastic: there’s a library school in town (where I did my degree) which means there tends to be a good bit of competition for positions. I knew from the start that finding a job might mean moving – maybe within driving distance, but maybe far enough I could come back for the occasional visit, but not much more. (And my friends back in Boston kept trying to lure me back there, which tempted me at moments. Though, as I say, I really don’t miss either Boston’s traffic or the average rental prices…)
But how to handle this? One thing I wanted to do was get my 3rd degree close to the time I finished my graduate work – that way, if I *had* to move, at least I’d be able to start a new group in the tradition wherever I landed, and continue the specific tradition I love within the context of a group. That worked out fine, fortunately. (Because while I might be capable of it, I’d really rather do it working with my covenmate, and with the support of local friends and tradmates when I get stuck on something. I try not to make things harder for myself than I have to.)
And then there was time when I thought I at least had time to wait for a job in the area to be the right fit – until my former boss (the previous librarian) got an offer of a job with an old friend. In the meantime, I’d started the new coven. And so, wanted to continue with it – but realised that we should be really careful about considering students until I was sure I’d still be around in a year or two. (The fact that two new prospective students showed up in the last two months also made me hopeful about getting the job, mind you…)
So, it’s been a whole lot of juggling sometimes competing demands and needs. Tricky!
There are the other complications – I feel a strong pull, on par with other religion-related callings – to be in education, in specific, rather than other library roles. This helps some things, but in a lot of college and university settings, you may end up working some evening or weekend hours regularly, which can complicate a coven schedule. (Ok, so one of the few reliable perks of being HPS of a group is getting to determine when the rituals are going to happen – but it’s no fun to juggle that kind of schedule around other people who are free in the evenings and weekends.)
(And this also, obviously meant that looking for jobs that would use the MLIS skills, but were not in education might earn me an income – but might not be satisfying long-term. I tend to build relationships slowly over time, so the idea of having to do that twice – once for a MLIS job, and once to get back into education sometime in the future – was a bit daunting)
And I knew I needed a job that would challenge me (or I’d get bored – never good!) but that would also leave me with enough time and energy and mental focus to be a good coven leader. This winter and spring have been hard (I’ve been working flat-out for 50-60 hour weeks a lot) but I’m coping okay with it – and it’s been getting easier, as I get more familiar with some purely mechanical things like handing the budget and other paperwork. I’m pretty sure it’ll all work, though I continue to look at how to make it work better.
Fortunately, it all worked out. I have no idea what the future’s going to bring. I’m pretty confident the school will continue to be around (strong history and thoughtful leadership), and I’m pretty sure there will continue to be a role I can play. It’s possible I’d want to be there for the rest of my career (we have more than a couple of teachers who’ve been there 30+ years) but it’s also possible I’d eventually look elsewhere if situations change. For the time being, though, I’m delighted to have a place with roots and potential and all sorts of possibilities.
There’s a lot of things going on right now for me. Still waiting to hear if my current job is going to hire me for the long-term position. (I really hope so, and should know within the next week.)
But we’ve got two people possibly interested in joining Phoenix Song, which is exciting. One of them we’re meeting at the end of April (as I’m busy next weekend, L is busy the weekend after, and our weeknights are already fairly booked.) The other, we met near the end of February, and had our first discussion evening with on Tuesday.
(If you were to guess from this that we are absurdly busy people, you would guess right, though this spring is more complicated for me than I think it will be in the future, and I’m being careful to schedule sufficient ‘down time’ into my week. More accurately, April is complicated because L and I are totally booked or out of town on different weekends, which cuts into the month a lot.)
Now, the way we’re doing this is there’s some advance reading – and then, our hope is to spend the time together actually talking about it, and what we do, and how it works. Some interesting things came up, and worked very much the way I was hoping it would.
We’re consciously trying to make space to not only say “What do you do?” but “Here’s what we do.” For example, we talked a little about personal practice on Tuesday, and asked her what her current work looks like. And then we talked about what we do, beyond the coven stuff we’ve already talked some about.
We talked about modeling different choices. I am, for example, frankly envious of L’s house (which I love visiting) but for a number of very good reasons, I’m going to be doing more of the hosting for a bit. I live in the tiny little house (400 square feet), and while I’m working on furniture, and more storage options, and so on, it’s not where I want it to be yet.
And we talked about how this is human – we’re all going to do stuff a little differently as individuals, and I’ve got reasons for the choices I’m making in where I live and how I spend my time, and some of my options are different than L’s (as well as some of my choices, and some of my habits.)
This lead to discussion of the problems of pedestals, and why they are uncomfortable places to live, even less fun to fall off, and how we’d like to avoid some of those issues as much as we can. And part of that is my being up front and honest about at least some of the things I think about, and struggle with, and try to do better with.
For example: horrifically busy since January: there’s stuff I’m doing less than I want to be in my personal practice. That’s ok. It doesn’t make me a bad priestess, or a bad coven leader, or a bad human – just means there’s some stuff I want to adjust, maybe.
I’d be a bad coven leader if I wasn’t doing the coven stuff competently or making sure it got done, or wasn’t needed. Or if I didn’t have a personal practice at all.
But I do, I’m just not doing all the stuff I would want to do in an ideal world where I had more time and energy. And I’m glad to have started by talking about that – because I believe very firmly that it’s easier to begin as you mean to go on.
Just stuff I’m thinking about.