About half an hour ago, I finished the major work I wanted to do for this year’s Samhain.
It reminded me of one of the powers of tradition. In my tradition, the Samhain ritual has been one we’ve done in much the same way for my time in the tradition (ten years and a bit). Of course, it’s been adapted – for number of people present, for number of people to take roles, for overall energy.
This year, I’m 1500 miles away from others in the tradition. (And in fact, I’ve been in Maine for 13 weeks.) And I’m working by myself, so many of the pieces of my tradition’s practice are simply not going to happen.
And yet, there are ways in which I stepped into ritual tonight, and all the chords of all those rituals were right there with me.
I hear certain music, in the dark, in the midst of ritual, and there is no space but the space of the circle, no time but those shared moments of dark and remembered grief, and yet hope for the coming year, mingled and echoing across the years.
Bites of food in ritual remind me of how amazing ritual foods taste – there is nothing in the world like the first bite of pomegranate on Samhain night, or even of the meat pie that’s been my contribution to ancestor feasts for those ten years. [1]
Still working around to getting enough brain to do a substantial post (or more than that, really) but I’m slowly getting there. (And I have real plans to do one of the meaty posts this weekend.)
The thing I want to talk about right now, though is that I’ve been mulling over my inertia . . . → Read More: Floating, not falling
About ten years (and two weeks) ago, I went to the first Seeker class with the group I would later join. It met in the back room of a coffee shop that isn’t there anymore, and several of the teachers left the group a few months later for various reasons.
A conversation else-Net has me thinking about the topic of groups and unpleasant experiences. Like so many other things I talk about, I think it’s more complicated than This Group Good, That Group Bad. The long and short of it is that people are complicated, and groups of people are even more so, and that there’s a bunch of things that go into the interactions.
A friend on Dreamwidth posted an interesting Pagan meme that I thought was particularly timely: I’m coming up on the 10 year anniversary of seeking out the group I trained with and worked with until early 2008, when I hived off. Seems like a good time for a “What I’m doing now” moment, plus a nice introduction to link to in various blog places.
(Below, I’m speaking for myself, rather than the trad as a whole, which seems worth making clear right about now.)
