thoughts from a threshold » of interest (links, recs)

Three things about community

Jenett — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:07:11 +0000

It’s been a really busy week or two for me.

I spent Thanksgiving with college friends, including one I hadn’t seen for at least a decade.

We had many late-night conversations rambling about all and everything, a lot of great food, and a lot of laughter. These are people I talk to fairly regularly online (LiveJournal and email are great ways for us to stay caught up with each other’s lives!) but seeing them in person, I’m always caught by both how much time has passed (a decade, since I graduated college) and how little.

We have changed, and yet, we remain the same.

Cycles and changes:
I got back from that, and was flung into a week of extremely busy preparations for various things. My boss has taken a new job (I’ve known this for a while – I’m sliding into his role for the spring semester, while the school I work for does their usual national search. I’ll be applying – and while I definitely hope they pick me, I also need to prepare for the possibility they won’t, so a lot of my focus this spring is going to be on my professional life.)

So, between reading resumes for hiring a replacement for what I’m doing now (and I’ll come back to this), I was also coming home and preparing for his farewell party on Friday. (He’s actually leaving in two weeks, but this was the best time for the party.)

One of the things I very much appreciate about my religious choices is that they have made me far better prepared for dealing with cycles. Not just the big shiny religious year cycles – much as I enjoy and need those. But it’s also taught me how to deal with the smaller life changes – like my boss and close co-worker of 8 years moving on to something else. (This is, mind you, 8/10ths of my professional life, and approaching half of his professional life at the school.

All of this meant that I spent two nights this week (along with other stuff I needed to do at home, like (very belated) winter insulation things like putting plastic on the windows) also making the incredibly decadent chocolate brownies for his party. (The recipe makes very large numbers of them, and it’s a 2-day process, so life is much happier if I only make them for substantial events.)

The party was fantastic – more than that, a substantial number of retired faculty showed up, which is, well, a sign that someone’s been doing things right. Everyone seems to have had a good time (and the speeches were lovely), and .. well, I’m going to miss my boss.

Saturday, I spent at a day long class on runes, taught by Donald Engstrom, husband to a dear friend and tradmate. I got to see several of my tradmates I haven’t seen much recently, some people I know slightly through the local community, and several people I didn’t previously know. It was a fabulous day, and I loved having the chance to immerse myself in this particular study, and to have wide ranging conversation during meals and at other breaks. Definitely an amazing way to spend a Saturday.

I love your blog

Jenett — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:15:00 +0000

Much thanks to Cat over at MetaPagan for including me on her list of favorites! The way this goes is:

Put the logo on your blog.
Link to the person from whom you received the award.
Nominate at least 7 other blogs.
Put links to those blogs on yours.
Leave a message on the blogs nominated.

I read a number of blogs. Several of those I’d otherwise include on this list – Pandora’s Bazaar, The Wild Hunt, and of course, MetaPagan itself – have already been tapped by this. So, here, a few others (in no particular order but my whim and the order I pulled tabs up.)

1) Dianne Sylvan’s Dancing Down the Moon. I’ve known Sylvan online for years now, and always love reading her stuff, no matter what she’s talking about. Her posts range from a current series on runes, to the struggles of life, to all sorts of other topics.

2) Sia over at Full Circle News does a great roundup of information and topics currently of interest to the Pagan community – I look forward to her thoughtful comments in my RSS reader.

3) Donald Engstrom’s It’s the Journey, not the Destination. Many people know Donald through his work as a teacher in Reclaiming, but I got to know him through his relationship (and now marriage) to one of my tradmates. I adore talking to him: even though there are things we don’t always agree on, I always come away having learned something, or seeing something differently. Also, I adore conversations with people who are passionate about what they’re doing – and Donald definitely qualifies!

4) Lupa’s Pagan Book Reviews provide great thoughts (and details) about the good and bad of Pagan books. (I like her other writings, too). She’s starting grad school, so her time to post may drop off a bit, but they’re worthwhile gems.

5) Dw3t-Hthr’s Letters from Gehenna: The World on a Slant . This blog, from a friend since college, always makes me think. She’s also hooked into different parts of the blogosphere (and from different angles) than I am, which I find very healthy for my perspective. As she says: “I do all my weird normally and all my normal strangely. My blog is a repository of a variety of pontifications, on a variety of subjects including, but not limited to, religion, sex, BDSM, gender, sociopolitical neepery, the hell is wrong with people nowadays, and the art of living in the world one wants to bring into being while acknowledging that we’re not there yet.” Good description.

6) PostSecret is pretty widely known, but I didn’t start reading it until around this time last year. PostSecret is an art project wherein people send in postcards with a secret on them – which are then posted in the blog (and sometimes included in the printed books.) I read every Sunday, because there’s such a huge range of perspectives and stories out there, even when some of them are very painful.

7) Finally, for a professional note, The Feel Good Librarian is a rarely updated blog these days, but well worth the archives. It’s written by a librarian at a public library – and she talks about why we do what we do, and what kind of difference it makes for people. I reread it to remind myself why my job is a good thing, and also that what I think is a single, simple act can have a huge effect on someone else.

Friday Recs

Jenett — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:48:36 +0000

My rec for this week is not explicitly Pagan, but I do think it has a lot to say about how we view the world, how we treat other people, and how all of that fits together and how we develop community – and family. It’s also the reason I was too busy to post last Friday. [1]

Early this year, a group of immensely talented people (Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, and Will Shetterly, along with Amanda Downum) launched an online fiction project called Shadow Unit. Its official description is “Fanfic for a TV Show that never was”. What it really is is the stories of episodes on a show in a very slightly different universe from ours. (Go read Emma’s description here: she does it immensely better than I could.)

Season one finished right after Memorial Day. There will be a Season Two (and beyond that:they have a five year arc planned.) Right now is a good time to catch up.

All of it’s free – but they are doing this as donation-supported work, so if you like it, please throw a few dollars at the donation options. The authors appreciate it! There’s also a forum, a wiki, and other cool tools to help you sort through things. (I recommend checking the wiki for easter eggs and DVD extra content links.)

[1] Four of the five (everyone except Amanda) were at the Fourth Street convention I was at. Saturday’s panel that focused on Shadow Unit was fantastic.

Friday Recs and some happy news

Jenett — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:03:54 +0000

(People reading my LiveJournal already know this one): I finished some great conversations yesterday with the head of the school I work for, where we have found a way for me to earn enough more money I can afford to stop looking for a new job. This is very good, because the library job market right now is miserable, and this gives me some time to continue to build some specific skills and do more professional projects. (And continue working at a place I very much like, which is no small thing.)

The other side the good news is that this means I’m not moving any time soon, and thus, can truly make longer-term plans about the coven. This means I should probably start calling it by name, and note a few upcoming things.

Name: The shiny new coven’s name is Phoenix Song (my home tradition has a particular focus on the phoenix imagery), and I wanted a name that would bring together that focus with the group’s heavy focus on music and arts in ritual.

What’s coming: I do plan to have a very small website (elsewhere on this domain) by early fall. I’ll have a few more details up in a post soon about some of the structure and other choices (summarising much of what I’ve been talking about here.) We have plans to opening to considering new members sometime this fall, but exactly how is still in process, and we intend to proceed very slowly and gently.

Expect to see lots of discussion here, not so much about what we’ve chosen to do (though I’ll use it as an example) but as what I’m thinking about as I move forward with this, and what matters to me.

Friday rec:

Since I spent Monday making a new kind of bread, a bread recommendation.

I stumbled across The Fresh Loaf site a while back, and used the pita bread recipe linked from the right column of the main page with great success. They’ve got all sorts of great articles and comments and ideas for all levels of home baking. (well, not bread machines, maybe. But everything else.) Also many really nifty recipes, many of which have photos and other commentary.

Bread is one of the most magical and nifty things I do. First, the whole process of baking bread is about transformation and change and getting something new, nourishing, and powerful out of some pretty minimal ingredients.

But more than that, it’s such a sensory process. There’s the dusting of the flour on your hands, the sweetness of the honey, the feel of the dough as you knead it, the delight of hands in warm olive-oil rich dough in the winter. I take a great joy in having fresh, homemade bread, for ritual, too.

If you’re at all interested in making your own bread, go check them out.

Lots of updates

Jenett — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:08:39 +0000

I finally finished (to the point I feel they should be posted) two long essays I was working on. They are:

Finding Others: Where to start looking:
This essay is based on a post I did a short while ago, when someone was frustrated by a group search: I’d been meaning to pull together a large portion of my standard advice when group seeking. It’s focused more on finding smaller groups or those focused on a specific defined path, but there’s useful ideas in there for most people seeking group Pagan interaction.

Questions when searching for a group:
Related to the above post, this is a list of questions (practical, practices, approaches, etc.) that might be useful for people who are looking for a group, but not quite sure what they’re looking for.

Please let me know if anything’s confusing or if you have other comments/things to include.

They’re both linked from the ‘pages’ tab at the top of the page, as well.