Hello again, friends!
I'm finally moved in and settled into the new house. It took a few weeks to get everything unpacked and in its proper home, but now I feel like I can just live my life rather than work at getting it organized again.
Moving out of a small city has already been doing wonders for my re-connection to my practice; I hadn't noticed the slow but complete withering of my soul until I made my way here, back amongst the trees and away from the constant brightness and chatter of urban life. I have a stream, I have privacy in the backyard, I have a vision of greenery every which way I look.
Since feeling reinvigorated to practice again, I'm now faced with a lot of choices around how I want to practice. I had quite a hodge-podge of altars, deities, and rituals in our previous living space, but I wonder if that was more out of desperation than engagement. I think I've just spend the past 3 years searching for something that made me feel like I felt before we lived there, and it resulted in me trying to go in too many directions at once.
My brain and my soul feel much quieter now, and I'm starting to think about what kind of path I really want to be following now that nature is in such easy reach again. I've started working through The Crooked Path by Kelden, and it's speaking to me in ways now that I didn't the first time I read it and breezed past all the exercises. On the whole, the idea of a structured but less ceremonial practice is really appealing to me right now, though the tools and rituals are taking some getting used to after I've spent so long internalizing a lot of Wiccan practices (but all the while refusing to identify as Wiccan) or going entirely rogue and eclectic in a frenzied way that didn't really offer me any true direction.
So I'm seeing where this will lead me. While I've tried to connect with a lot of different deities in the past few years, right now what I'm feeling drawn to are Hecate and an unspecified antlered god. My goal is to devote fall and winter to connecting to them and seeing how we all feel about it.
Past that, though, I'm wondering where to direct my path. I've had a lot going through my brain recently about what it means to be pagan in America, and how I can respectfully honor a land that Europeans haven't inhabited that long, in the grand scheme of things. I'm really into the idea of genius loci, but what is the best way to honor local spirits when I can't be sure that I'm not somehow appropriating spirits that aren't of my culture? I feel like I am either assuming reverence of native spirits that I don't feel I have a right to, or I'm assuming that European spirits came over with my ancestors and have misplaced those who were already here. Either way, I'm not comfortable with it.
Mainly I want to foster a uniquely New England style in my practice, but what does that actually mean? Again, is it something I can even lay claim to given my ancestors were among the first to steal this land?
For now, I will start with figuring out what the folk traditions were of early New England settlers. I've yet to pinpoint exactly what those were, but I don't mind taking the time to unravel that. I know that New England has its own traditions and folklores, but I need to do more research around the things that are uniquely New England that haven't been borrowed from native traditions.
Overall I guess I just feel like so many of the practices I've been trying to fit into my life for the past decade revolve around Celtic traditions, which I really don't connect with at all. I want to be able to honor my ancestry, my local roots, and my current location in a way that is respectful to practices that were here thousands of years prior to European colonization. This sense of starting over from scratch is a little bit daunting, but also very exciting. I'll be chronicling this journey here, for sure.
