I wrote the last page of the journal I started in February 2022 today, and when I was done, I wrote out the words that I always write out from the longer Homeric Hymn to Apollon, the lines about following the God up to the temple. My next journal is the Notes to Mindfulness one from Intelligent Change, as I want to try out a daily prompt style book to see if that tightens up my journaling time and bridles my thoughts a bit better.
It’s been a rocky seventeen-ish months in many ways, but with many small sweetnesses in between. While I fed my cats and prepped my delicious caffeinated beverage this morning, I listened to a story from NPR about Buddhist monastics in New Jersey and the community around them, ranging from frat house students to people from the tech layoff to those seeking meaning through grief. It was a good reminder of our own exegesis on this aspect of being embodied, what Proclus says in the Timaeus commentary about generation and the material world being warfare. It also made me acutely aware of the awareness and community infrastructure problems we have in Western polytheisms because I wish I could turn on the radio and hear specialists in polytheisms having these conversations. As it was, I had to rely on my mental glossing.
After my announcement that I’m stepping back from blogging as frequently, I saw R. M. McGrath‘s comment about it in the context of the widespread flight from blogs. I agree that blogging is important, namely because social media is transient, and blogging is from an earlier “stage” in Internet development and a bit more persistent and searchable. (It’s also easily scraped by generative AI, which is an advantage for us given how misrepresented and underrepresented we are in more traditional media, like books, magazines, and newspapers.) I applaud their decision to return to blogging and am excited to read what they have to say. I think that having more bloggers is very good, especially bloggers who are interested in exploring wicked questions and challenges. But it also made me wonder if I should be a bit more candid than I have been about some things that have been under the surface, especially since I’ve been asked privately by another blog reader if everything is OK.
One of the walls I’ve been hitting over the past few months, for example, is knowing that I am the absolute worst person to talk about community. For all of the research-backed improvements I’ve been making in my own life, my advice is never going to be as good as someone whose past is not broken jars. The dynamics within my family today have deep scars from my paternal grandfather’s alcoholism, scars that led my father to be the person he is — someone whom I gray-rock. I have a summer solstice card that is stamped and addressed and everything that I never sent to him because, after I wrote it, I started thinking about his impact on my younger siblings and some of the things he said to me as a child — that I was socially broken and unfixable, something he couldn’t figure out despite having a Ph.D. in psychology. You can imagine the impact that had on me if I’m still bringing it up today. It came up a lot in my head after the breakup, for example. Beyond problems at home, I was bullied in a small-population school. Most of what I’ve learned about friendship and romantic relationships and community is from peer-reviewed studies and evaluating embarrassing misunderstandings and gaffes about social situations once I was in college and trying the whole friendship thing out, although my childhood environment does allows me to keep my conversational cool while being mistreated by interlocutors and to listen for what is actually being said beneath bluster and abusive speech. That was very helpful in the hard conversations that got me to the concept of cultural reception and how to come into right relation with the Gods we are worshipping without escapism, and despite my gratitude for possessing this capacity, the way I learned those skills was very damaging and … wrong.
Our community (or communities, not sure if I should be using singular or plural here) desperately needs people who come from happy and satisfied familial and social environments to talk about community issues and opportunities and capacity-building from a polytheistic — and maybe Platonic or some other philosophical school’s — perspective. (If you feel like you had a decent childhood and want to become a pagan blogger, take this as words of encouragement. We need you.) There are other topics outside of that context that I’m likely just not thinking of because they’re not even on my radar — I’m doubly ignorant. The discomfort of knowing that most of what needs to be discussed at length lies in topics where my life experience renders me inadequate is a tough thing to say, but it’s intellectually and morally honest.
Taking a step back, for me, is about actually gaining the interpersonal experience I need to be and giving myself more margin — focusing on small-group conversations, for one, and on my cats and family and on the friendships I want to cultivate. Yoyo’s slow decline and death had a big impact on me because she was my childhood cat, as did the breakup and the confusing friendship I have with my ex now. My mom was just diagnosed with early-stage lymphoma, which is not unexpected for someone of her age group, but it’s still a worry — she’s having a lot of medical tests done over the next month and a half in order for her doctors to develop a treatment plan. Some things are just cyclical. We’re about to head into orientation season in my job, for example, which was dizzying even before the climate crisis made August and September too hot to handle. Autumn is always very busy.
This is all the kind of “too much” that requires really stepping back and focusing on doing what I can do to mitigate stress and take care of myself, as I don’t want shingles again (or worse — stress and elevated anxiety are very destructive to health), and I definitely don’t want to use this blog for venting or complaining just to keep posts happening. I’m going to do mitigation in the way that the peer-reviewed studies suggest: Focusing on high-quality interpersonal relationships, figuring out the whole community thing, and actually doing the foam rolling and breath work that my ideal self does (and that I keep telling myself that I will do when I journal through things). Spending my computer time diving deep into nourishing creative projects. Watching my cats do backflips on my bed as they chase a bug wand toy. Really getting honest with myself and leaning on a lot of Simplicius. And acknowledging that, in producing the creative works I’m putting out now — many of which have been on my hard drive in draft form for years, and it’s really time now to start singing out that hieropoeia — and in referring people to The Soul’s Inner Statues and to the long-read pieces I’ve written here in recent months, and in doing quiet collaborations and small-group activities, I’m showing up. Whether or not people encounter the spiritual primer or get anything out of reading my creative writing is not in my locus of control. I can only make options available.
So I hope that’s a bit more of a candid look at some things going on right now. As I hope is clear, I’m not 100% gone, and I’m still reading others’ blogs because I like getting out of my bubble, and my own head to boot. But life has a lot of seasons, and mine is shifting away from doing a ton of content here and towards a very different kind of harvest. Or a very different battle theater. Whichever metaphor we want to use.
KALLISTI 