Personal Visions

When I think of all the reasons people come to find a pagan path one theme has kept coming up, dissatisfaction. It is the sense of something in each of our lives that is wrong, does not fit, does not make sense, or has caused harm in a way that brings us to a breaking point. Because Neo-Pagan paths are generally still young by the standards of other religions and dissatisfaction with what came before tends to be one of our major driving forces as we search for a new way to tread.

Before we can start to address how dissatisfaction effects our faith we need to understand some of the sources. For any given person there may be a mix of reasons and many times those reasons are not immediately clear. Below is a list in no special order of things which I found to be brought up in many different pieces of literature as the most common sources of our personal dissatisfaction.

• Personal appearance
• Social Relationships
• Career
• Not meeting personal Goals
• Spiritual
• Personal loss
• Mental state
• Sexual

Any of the individual items above do not hold the exclusive rights to our not being content or satisfied, however they may be bound up with each in knot that spites our best efforts to untangle. It is these knots or these wall that both lead use to look for spiritual answers and provide barriers in finding those answers. Just looking at the list it is apparent to me that each could be a complete post of its own but for now lets look in general at how Pagans deal with these issues.

Many pagan paths identify with being part of a larger whole, we do not take ourselves outside of the cycles of the seasons or the various stages of life but immerse ourselves. This contrasts heavily with the independent nature of many of the pagans that I have met who fiercely defend their particular beliefs. When we hold this contrast up in the light of those items of dissatisfaction above we can begin to see one of the barriers we have set for ourselves as a community. If we truly believe that we are part of a whole then using our last breath to stand out is acting a bit like a cancer cell does in our individual bodies. If we make but one small perceptual but conscious choice to understand that there are many ways to achieve the same goal then diversity becomes an asset and not a barrier. Lets look for a moment at our social relationships as an example. If we give ourselves the permission to be active listeners, to be compassionate in our feedback and actions in spite of whatever the other person does we gain from spiritual growth. Understanding that we can not change the other person but can only provide a positive example leads us directly to a greater sense of contentment.

One of the next things that brings many of use to one of the pagan ways is the need to act in the now. Some of us do this by changes in our life style, living “greener” being one of the most common. Others take up magical practice to influence the world around them to help create the conditions for personal success. This belief and trust in the now is one of our biggest strengths because we do not defer our consequences to the after life or exclusively to a God or a Goddess. However the trap of “power” can lead us to stop short of the spiritual transformation we seek or lead us to believe that we have done “enough”. These two traps perpetuate our dissatisfaction instead of free us from it. The only way to balance these traps out is to embrace honesty within ourselves. Laying out the harsh truth of our own flaws and past mistakes lays the foundation to forgive ourselves and to acknowledge that honesty frees us to move forward.

To end this posting on dissatifaction we come to the core idea that the divine is manifest within ourselves, that each of us holds part of the Gods within us and are infact inseperable. This belief is fundemental in helping to banish our dissatifaction with our lives. If you truely stop and think and then take in that you are the well spring of change, that to create the reality that you envision is a matter of freeing your trust to act divinily and to make it your personal work to manifest your vision. It may not be easy and it may take a life time but it is each foot step that matters. Make the choice to be content but not complacent and happiness will follow.

My Pagan Practice

Pagan Faith Practices Survey created by Otherworld Apothecary
Full Results:
http://www.otherworld-apothecary.com/quiz/results.php?score=_-1.14_-0.84_0.44

Just a couple of quick notes on this my second favorite Sacred Day. Tomorrow I will write a bit more.

“On the night itself, hundreds of performers lead a fire-lit procession around [Calton Hill]. They move through a fire gate and round points representing earth, air, water and fire. The festivities reach a climax when the Green Man, a symbol of the first growth of summer, arrives and is crowned by the May Queen.” - Martin Couper, The Edinburgh Evening News

“Beltane, meaning bright fire, is one of the four Celtic cross-quarter festivals celebrating the changing of seasons. ‘People have, as far as we can tell, [always] celebrated the changing of the seasons,’ Dr. Robin Larsen, co-founder and director of the Center for Symbolic Studies says. Beltane, an ancient festival typically celebrated on the last two days of April and the first two days of May is a time to awaken the earth’s spirit to get ready for spring. ‘March doesn’t feel so spring like,’ Larsen says. ‘When you get to the end of April you’re really there and you know summer is coming.’” - Tara Quealy, Chronogram Magazine

Ok, I am finally going to put my green pagan environmentalist thumb squarely in eyes of all of you that work for a living in and office setting. Many times when we walk in the door of our employer we feel like we leave some of the personal responsibility for the world at outside. Some times we also feel like its not our place to stand out or to rock the boat etc. However, we can all be green at work and we can spread the “fashion” in small ways by making the arguments based on cost savings. Even if its just in your small department there is a budget that someone is watching and if you show the material benefits then not only will you gain credit but everyone will benefit. Below is a document to help get you started. Need more ideas? Google it, there are tons out there.

Earth-Day

I was planning on celebrating Earth Day today with talk about what we can do to help at least slow the decay of our environment and to bring us the knowledge that as Pagans and just plain people we did a little bit of good. Well I may still post later in the day my thoughts on our environment but right now I want in my small way help spread the word to help save our children. There is a saying and I forget where it comes from that we borrow the future from our children, this is something I do believe in, was taught by all the hippy teachers I had in school was that we can only rent our place in the world and we had damn well make sure that its as least as good as when we arrived. I have also learned in the years since school that we have to make up for those that came before us in ignorance, arrogance, and greed. So in this light I want to make you all aware of the National Day of Silence.

All the information you need can be found at this website http://www.dayofsilence.org. Let me briefly entice you to go to this site by telling you our children are dieing both literally and emotionally from the abuse they get everyday in school, out with peers, and of course in the home.  This abuse is sanctioned by some religious and political leaders and by even more adults to turn a blind eye or give permission to their children by lack of action to perpetrate abuse. The personally heretical part of this abuse is that it even occurs within our greater pagan community. We, those that celebrate the earth, life, magick, and many forms of divinity; even claim that divinity is manifest within ourselves and our actions let any child be abused or murdered.

So take the time to talk to your children, or any young person about why it is wrong to abuse someone on the basis of their sexual orientation, their gender identity, their spiritual beliefs, hell why its just wrong period. Then take your place next to them and take your own vow of silence on 04.25.08 and show support those that are young yet suffer so deeply.