I have a confession to make about 2023: I abandoned my yearly goal planning in late October or early November, just after reviewing it and realizing that this year has changed so significantly that even my areas of focus are no longer what they were going in. Instead, I opened up the worksheet I use (a template created by a popular productivity YouTuber, Rowena Tsai) and created a new 2024 one.
Yes. I decided that 2024 began in November.
Well, sort of — I decided to use the final two months of 2023 to gear up for where I want to be when the new calendar year starts.
A lot of this, to be honest, is going back to basics.
There are no fitness goals. That would be impossible, as I will be getting a minor procedure at some point in the next few months and will not be able to exercise or lift more than 10-15 pounds for at least 6 weeks because it could reopen the cuts. Having a fitness goal when I have an uncertain situation ahead of me would be folly. There are no job goals. That would also be impossible, as my team is both currently reorging and understaffed, the latter due to both retirements and several unsuccessful searches to fill a position left by a colleague who died tragically young in 2021. There are no relationship goals. It would take a literal act of God at this point for me to do anything there.
The areas I’ve picked are Virtue, Health, Community, Spirituality, and Writing Projects.
From a Virtue standpoint, I decided to revisit the stages in that Platonic theurgic practice document I put together, and I have been praying to the Muses for the past few months. It has been very good and grounding to center my prayers around them. One of the things I think that we, as religious people, need to do is to get a handle on when we are doing spiritual bypassing and when we are engaging in healthy spiritual behaviors.
I chanced upon a book called A Year in White by C. Lynn Carr (which I highly recommend) about the post-initiation year in Lucumí, when the initiate and the relationship with their God are still “cooking” and they are kept in a protective cocoon, with many prohibitions and conduct rules designed to support them as they realign towards what the ritual told them about themselves, their God, and what they need to do. I took a lot of notes, and my biggest conclusion was that I had been gifted a brief description of competent spiritual experience aftercare. I suddenly understood that most contemporary polytheism is fairly ill-equipped at that; it’s like having a surgery without any supportive recovery protocol or splints or anything while the person is still soft inside. No wonder so much often goes wrong afterward. It also reminded me of much of what Simplicius said about the needs of those “beginning to make progress” and the significant need to halt bypassing and (potentially) destructive coping behaviors while making progress, and it put Damascius’ report on why Proclus kicked that one guy out of his school for being unwilling to part with his concubine entourage into perspective. Reading that book — and a situation that happened on the full moon at the end of October — really underscored the gaps in my own foundational spiritual supports.
Fortunately, I have a good sense of who my leader in a Platonic sense is; this is something that I am drawing from when I think about the lens on virtue that I need to take to be my best self. To be less vague about what my plans are, I’m looking at both the document I created on the Platonic theurgic practice scaffolding and some reference tables on virtue created by Michael Griffin (the translator of the First Alcibiades commentary by Olympiodorus, which is now open access) and mapping what stress has revealed to be my weaker points. I’m now working on those weak points. Right now, I’m focusing on my habits and routine structures.
From a Health standpoint, I am focusing on self-care and mental health. I mentioned that I do need to interact with doctors soon. But it’s a lot easier to deal with uncertainty when one has slept and when one is eating a nutritious diet. I had had poor sleep since Yoyo’s death in the spring. Being given a night guard a few weeks ago changed my sleep dramatically for the better, and I’ve started falling asleep to loving-kindness guided meditations, which is also helping. In the commentary on Epictetus, Simplicius spends some time discussing diet, with the ideal of 1-2 meals per day. It seems similar to what the Buddhists do with the monastic Vinaya dawn-to-noon diet. I want to aim for two meals (and possibly a light evening snack), breakfast and lunch, because it’s very challenging to have food restrictions and go to social events, and I’m wondering if getting myself used to front-loading food like that will improve my stamina and reduce hunger in those situations as long as I ensure the food is nutritious, adequate-calorie, and slow-burning. Opting for a snack instead of a full meal for dinner can also improve sleep.
I will continue reducing my screen time because being on screens too much has started to give me nausea and dizziness, possibly from holding my breath when I read the news (but likely not just that … a lifetime of unsustainable screen time habits). Outside of work, the only things I should really be doing on lit screens are my bills, answering emails, appeasing an owl named Duo, starting/stopping music/audiobooks/podcasts/meditations, and writing. I have a Kobo ereader and a Supernote — an eink writing tablet that I love and which is designed for sustainability — that I can use for almost everything else. My Kobo can even take articles from Pocket and let me read them there.
Finally, I do want to continue focusing on mobility work. Something I have not yet done, but would like to do, is to do yin yoga while playing the Audible ebook recitation of Thomas Taylor’s translation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology. I think it would be nice to just chill and listen. Maybe add some scented candles and a subtle electronica playlist.
From a Community standpoint, I have some things that I have to work through for the next month so I can make a decision about what exactly I want to do next year.
I mentioned that something really awful happened at the end of October. Unbeknownst to anyone at the yoga studio where Full Moon yoga happens, it was also the afternoon/evening of the Halloween bar crawl downtown. So all of the clubs were open and there was open drinking and the streets. I had no idea until I started trying to make my way to the studio from the bus stop. The studio was closed, so I had to make my way back out. (Hours later, I learned that they had to relocate to one of the parks, but I never received a text message, and I wonder if it’s because I’m an Android user, and I know that sometimes there’s a weird delay with iPhone users who have that wifi iMessage thing enabled.) The streets were covered in Gods know what liquid, there was too much noise, there were too many erratic people, and something about it reminded me of a dance in eighth grade (yes, 24 years ago) where I was sexually harassed by a group of boys. So. I completely mentally shut down and got so dizzy that I almost fainted. The ground looked like it was coming up to meet me, and the only things that kept me upright were knowing that nobody would care because everyone around me was either drunk or a cop, and falling would also mean touching whatever that liquid was. Eventually, I got out of those streets. On the way home, I decided to walk past the downtown center that was once a cemetery and where the bodies still are buried beneath the unmarked grass, where I never walk, and from there I decided to just walk across several neighborhoods back home because I wasn’t sure if I could deal with the mental noise of the bus and it wasn’t due to arrive, even, for another half hour. The sun had not yet set. The walk would clear my head and be less stimulating. The breeze was calm. I focused on my breathing.
My inner monologue was a rant about how f–ed up it is that the only thing that even resembles the community I had as a kid growing up is a spiritual-but-not-religious full moon yoga class, and maybe it wasn’t for me because it still wasn’t exactly on target for what I wanted. People offering runes and spell candles for the full moon cycle without acknowledging the Gods. People making popup shrines in the corner without actually having those shrines incorporated in any way. The fact that a community ritual, while it might have an entrance fee, would have a different rationale and logistical apparatus behind the fund distribution than the facilitator fee plus studio fee that is presumably behind the price of full moon yoga. The fact that most people outside of high pagan population centers likely have no idea what paganism was like before it became a TikTok curse-the-moon trend and a Sephora ritual kit because social media led to the shriveling and death of many pagan groups. The fact that I’m an odd-person-out because I don’t do spells or witchcraft or hexes and am only a second-gen who likes praying and who gets nostalgic for the solstices and full moon ceremonies of my childhood. I thought about the pagan event I had attempted to go to over the summer that had included some kind of steampunk dinner, and while I support others’ hobbies because hobbies are important for mental well-being, steampunk dinners … aren’t … religious. It had given the whole event a very geek con vibe, which would have been fine had it been one, but it wasn’t. Thinking about that brought up what one of my sisters had told me she saw when she joined a Facebook group about the Norse Gods. It was just fur, horns, and metal band garb. Merch. Yes. It was a rough inner monologue. I need to work on reducing the amount of profanity I use in my headspace.
The full moon started rising over the buildings, and it and the Gods upon it are so beautiful, wise, and good. Beautiful, wise, and good enough to be visible like light through fog because my inner monologue had degraded to the chant it’s all f–ed up at that point interwoven with the strong, strong desire to take a long shower. Which is exactly what I did immediately after walking in my door. And then I meditated to calm down.
As a counterpoint, I do have really good Zoom community that I am grateful for. I just wish there were enough polytheists in my area with Celiac, severe gluten sensitivity, or a wheat allergy that we could, like, bake GF sugar cookies together and/or be a food alliance cohort at events that are actually focused on ritual for the Gods. One can dream. Paganism and polytheism are now increasingly about solo individualized marketing stuff and not about community or being with others or intergenerational persistence, and while in-person communities in the 90s and early 00s weren’t always a bed of roses, people need people, and the death of such spaces is part of why we have a loneliness epidemic and a crisis of diseases of despair nowadays. So people do, in fact, need to get out there, and not just in an episodic way. Myself included. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. This realization is part of what led me to prioritize self-care and health in 2024. It would be way easier if I didn’t have the convictions I do about the Gods based on UPG experience and what I have learned in Platonism because a lot of the community structures I crave are actually present in American Buddhism, except once you know(?) about Henads you can’t unknow(?).
Do I still want to go to those full moon yoga things? I have no idea. I didn’t go to the one earlier this week. I did miss the ritualistic aspect. So … maybe. What I hope this section conveys is my general confusion and frustration. Clearly, I have a lot to work on.
Spirituality. Let’s talk about what’s working. I want to do an epithet meditation every week and have already done some of the prework for setting that up: picking a day of the week (Saturdays) and selecting 52 epithets of the God. The epithet selection, surprisingly, is something that Bing AI is good at because one can tell it which websites to search in the query, and it can generate a list that cuts down the amount of synthesis work to proofreading. I’m comfortable using it that way because it is not actually replacing the act of contemplating the epithets, and I think there is a serendipity to not knowing which it will pull forth from the sources I recommend to it. (I think this SHWEP episode was very interesting, along that line.) At some point in the new year — hopefully January 1, but it’s contingent upon when the surgery happens because I want it to be a continuous amount of time — I will start praying to Dionysos a bit more heavily, similar to what I am doing now for the Muses, and do that for about two months.
Otherwise, I like my prayer and ritual structure. It’s a good structure. Apollon and Eir are amazing. So is Hestia. All of the Gods are good. Praying at dawn is a beautiful practice at this time of year.
It’s sometimes still annoying to me how rushed I feel on weekdays. I really enjoyed having leisurely, 30-minute morning prayer sessions at shrine during lockdown. Being contracted back into the 10-15 minute range by the constraints of my commute and my unwillingness to wake up at 5:30 AM doesn’t feel like enough now that I have tasted that sweetness, even if I do also pray for a few minutes before bed. But it does make my Saturday prayer time feel so much sweeter because I have the time to linger. Perhaps the contrast is good for me.
As far as Writing goes, I used a chart to prioritize my projects based on their impact, complexity, and the amount of joy I get out of them. This has given me a much clearer direction for what I will do moving forward than I have had for the past few years, which is a game-changer for managing my attention and energy. This includes both creative writing and things I want to write for KALLISTI. Clarity does wonders.
So … yes, 2023 is dead to me. So much happened, at such a pace, and with so much change that it really deserved to be multiple years, to be honest. December is an opportunity for me to refine my goals and develop clarity over the murky spots before the new year formally begins.
But a lot of great things happened this year. I published The Village of Strong Branches, a speculative fiction novella. That was a long time coming, and I’m happy it’s out there in the world. I hit 500 days of consistent meditation in the Calm app. I hit a 500-day Duolingo streak with Modern Greek and just learned how to say toothpaste. I finished my Goodreads challenge. I got to support a ton of really cool things at work and witness people have an unexpected moment of “wow he’s so relatable” joy with a first-edition Kepler. I went to a sound bath meditation … thing … and possibly fell asleep, but tried something new. Instead of avoiding Thanksgiving Week sales to stick it to hyper-consumerism, I bought better vacuums that are doing a far better job of helping me control dust mite allergens than my old one, and I definitely got a great deal on tools that have already improved my quality of life. Just this week, I learned how to replace a spray nozzle on my kitchen sink even though I hated every minute of it and was terrified of touching pipes even to turn them off. I adopted two cats from a rescue who have really been coming out of their shells, and it’s a joy to be responsible for them and to come home to them at the end of the day. I switched my morning alarm to be a lyre composition ode to dawn. I’ve had many great remote conversations with people on similar spiritual and religious trajectories.
Throughout every less-than-ideal thing that has happened, I’ve been forced to confront parts of my habitual cocoon that I really need to work on, which means that my prayer to all of the Gods to accept whatever comes as teachings and for the Gods to grant me the resourcefulness I need to succeed, guiding me to whatever is most good is being heard.
Have a great rest of your 2023 and a blessed solstice.
KALLISTI 
While my own particulars and goals are a bit different than yours, much you write here resonates deeply with me–so, thank you for writing this!
Unfortunately, regarding “Community,” my experiences are very similar. Back in the Summer of 1995, I wrote a letter to my Mysticism and Ethics professor (the very best class I ever had in college was also one of the first, unfortunately!), who was a Zen priest and excellent theologian, on my upsets with the “pagan community” as I had experienced it thus far at that point. I had been wanting to have an actual community after I became a polytheist in late ’91, and looked forward to college as a time and place where I might be able to have it, and instead found a lot of people doing a lot of things that were very different from what I was, and some of them doing things that weren’t “good” (in the sense of useful, productive, virtue-building, or edifying in any way) in their practices…and still others that I ended up identifying as essentially indistinguishable from hobbyists of various kinds (due to what I knew best at the time, I compared them to Trekkies!). Mr. Glass did not have any earth-shattering advice for me, but his conversation on and engagement with me was at least helpful, and much appreciated. But, all these years, two groups co-founded and abandoned, many others joined and either disbanded or left, and many attempts to do things that will last and be good but which have failed or never began, I find that there’s still some of these same issues. While the level of engagement and seriousness of many of the people involved has become better over the years, the inability to actually do the things that form a community, and an often deliberate and stated unwillingness to do them, is a major part of it. And, all of the online stuff doesn’t exactly help, either.
I think that the thing some social media, and many (but far from all) blogs can and have done and could continue to do that is useful, is to provide a space for communal theological commentary, as I think I’ve said in a few places before. But as for forming actual community, it’s really almost impossible to do without regular in-person meetings, shared values, shared practices, and a genuine feeling of the good of the group being worth sacrificing for (in every sense of the term). Because so many of us have bad experiences with religious communities (and social groups, including things like SteamPunk groups–which, as much as I liked it, I absolutely hated that there was a strongly-enforced gender binarism, amongst other things), we tend to opt out of them as fast as our opinions differ on something, which is understandable, but which is also why none of these things ever last, I think. Part of the reason they did last in the past was because, to some extent, religious communities had to come together and mutually support each other because it meant the difference between survival and its opposite, as it were; now, no one is under the impression that their survival is on the line when they decide to join or separate from any group. This is good because of what it says about how people can live now, certainly; but it isn’t good for what it says about how people choose to live now, and how those choices have lead to almost all the problems we experience in the wider world, including political fragmentation, social isolation and loneliness, and any number of other things, alas.
Anyway…much food for thought, and I appreciate that you share these things so freely here! So, thank you for that, and for much else besides! 🙂
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