I got several comments after my last post in various places about how I hadn’t talked about the emotional part of leaving a group. And they’re all right, I didn’t.
There’s a couple of reasons for that.
One is that I come from a stereotypically British family: talking about emotions at all, never mind mine in specific, is something I pretty much had to learn as an adult and proto-adult. (How I learned is an interesting story not relevant to this post). It’s still usually not the first thing I think of when talking about a subject.
But there’s another reason: I believe, quite strongly, that we can’t fundamentally control our emotions, but that we can (and often should) control what we do about them, or how we act based on them. So, when it comes to something like leaving a group – where we generally have advance warning – we do have some chances to decide how we’re going to act.
Besides, my idea of witchcraft – and magical practice in general – is that each choice shapes our future possibilities. That means we sometimes have to stop and not act purely in the moment, in order to give us more options down the road.
Several conversations have come up recently about what it means to properly part from a group. I think that introspection, clear communication, and some attention to practical issues can make this easier – and possibly even helpful – for everyone, as well as leave the most possible options open in the long run. . . . → Read More: Leaving a group
I just made a post elsewhere online I wanted to share here. I’d talked about how we’d lost a lot, as a culture, when we had mass-accessible written material (sometime after the printing press: I tend to think it’s around 1600-1650, when you start getting lots more broadsheets and other materials that are inexpensive . . . → Read More: On what we’ve lost, and what we’ve gained
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.
So, my day job as a librarian has a certain amount of spillover into how I priestess – I’m very committed to connecting people to information they care about, and this goes just as much for the coven setting as for the library.
But how to do it? Sitting this week at a library technology conference, I realised I really wanted to talk about some of the great resources out there, and how they can be used to make group work a little easier.
