Inside the Design: Sleep Well

So I've been thinking about other things I could write about in my blog that actually, you know, connect to the jewelry I'm making. Not that I disliked that giant religious/spiritual sidetrip. On the contrary, I plan on returning there often. However, since this is the blog about my jewelry, so I should talk about it too.

Enter the "Inside the Design" series. This will be a closer look at the stones I choose for the design (sort of a mini-Stonewise), why I picked them, and how I see them working together toward the specified goal. So here we go, let's see how this turns out.

I know some of this is already out there in other posts, so I'll try not to repeat myself too much.

Inside the Design: Sleep Well

The basic description of this pieces is, Sodalite and Blue Lace Agate help calm the mind, soothing you towards sleep, while Amethysts guard your dreams. A pair of Hematite empowers the Intention. And it's not a bad description, but when the average attention span of a web surfer is about 15 seconds, you don't get a lot of time for detail. So what does this really mean?

(Quick note...I put two pieces of Hematite in every bracelet, necklace and anklet that I make. It's become my signature. I do it because Hematite is a natural magickal amplifier, and so it doubles the strength of every other stone in the piece. So I usually won't mention the Hematite in a piece unless I use it somewhere else.)

Blue Lace Agate and Sodalite are both stones that calm emotions and promote balance and peace. However they are not the same, which is why I use them both. Blue Lace Agate I see working more on the surface. It is the cool shock that gets your attention and forces you to take that first deep breath. It works on the surface, easing tensions mentally, emotionally and physically. It lays the necessary ground work for the rest of the piece.

Sodalite is deep blue, like the very bottom of a clear lake. It is calm, tranquil, capable of sinking below the surface to work on the roots of the problems. There's something inexorable about Sodalite. You *will* calm down and you *will* like it. The two blue stones not only look beautiful next to each other, but I think their energies provide the potent double tap that makes this design so successful magickally.

However, there is no point in knocking you out if you're just going to have bad or unrestful dreams. This is what the Amethysts are for. The royal purple stones have been the guardians of dreams for a very long time, and it was a no brainer for me to add them to the design. Amethysts are also peaceful, calming, specifically connected to the spirit, and so it becomes another layer to the net of tranquility that I've built.

The resulting combination of stones has become my second most popular, and successful design (second only to Desire). I have had several people tell me that the bracelets have helped them go to sleep, stay asleep, take naps, change their sleeping patterns...I think the simplicity of the intention helps make this design one of my more powerful ones.

Sleep Well was the first design I put together, I did it specifically for my friend who suffers from migraines, but is violently allergic to nearly all migraine medications. She usually gets a shot of a heavy narcotic to put her out and hopefully sleep through the headache, but this time it hadn't work. I gave her the bracelet, and that night she slept 12 hours, successfully getting rid of the migraine.

As a side note...some of you might want to ask, "Do you really believe your jewelry made her fall asleep?" It doesn't matter what I believe really. The important part is that it worked. She slept and got rid of the headache. Was it magick? Was it autosuggestion? Mind over body? Truth is, don't care what the truth is. In whatever capacity my bracelet helped, which is my only purpose.

Well, I hope this was in some way entertaining and informative. I enjoyed doing it, so I will probably do more. :)

Till then, be well,

Red

When I Speak of Myself 4

Hello friends, and welcome back! I'm going to skip the apology this time around, since you know it by heart by now, and get right into the story. Everyone remember where we were?

I had ethics, I had magick, I had a basic understanding of what a religion is and what components go into a belief system. I also had the desire to be a part of something larger than myself. Something that helps fill the gaps in my days.

And then I had to take my truck to the shop. Hang on, how this fits into the larger picture is coming, don't you worry...

I ended up having to take the shuttle home, and since I was the furthest one away, I was last to be dropped off. Once I had moved into the front seat of the van and we were on the way, the elderly gentleman driving started talking to me... Now some of you might know my gaming habits, and so will only nod when I tell you that I only had a couple hours of sleep before getting up to take my truck in at the butt crack of dawn. Basically what I'm saying is that I don't remember most of our conversation, but I do remember how I felt about it, and what lines of thinking it got me into.

Somehow we got to talking about religion, and/or philosophy, and he asked me some questions. I answered them honestly, telling him some of the conclusions I'd come to over the last couple years. He started challenging me, trying to trap me in my own logic, and how it applies to a Christian world view. I wasn't firing on all thrusters, so I probably wasn't my most eloquent or coherent...but the important thing I remember was that I wasn't upset or threatened in any way.

After I got home and had a nap, I started asking myself why I reacted the way I did to our conversation. He really wanted to shove me off the rock of my conclusions, and I just wasn't bothered. So why was that?

Ok, quick flashback...cue music...

When I was going through Catholic school, I learned quite a bit about faith and belief. One had to have faith to believe in the Church's teachings. Uh...ok...I never much liked that, because it seemed pretty passive to me, regardless of how it is for others.

In jr. high I started reading a lot of fantasy novels. I found lots of stories where the characters come face to face with their deity(ies), and even in one a Catholic priest asks that if he can no longer have faith, what does he have? The answer he got was, "knowledge".

Ahh...I liked that. Knowledge and experience (with things outside oneself) seemed to be a step up from faith and belief. I decided that's what I wanted...

...and end flashback.

How does one go about getting knowledge and experience? Well, I dunno about others, but what I did was claim that I had it. Oh, I was reading a great deal, about philosophy, pagan and otherwise. I was learning critical ways of thinking, different ways of seeing the world. There are layers to the way I see things now. Take the moon for example. As a kid I knew that the Moon could go where the Sun could not, that made her more magickal. As an adult, I have studied astronomy, and understand that the sun is many, many times larger than the moon and that we move around it. I haven't lost my view of the Moon as magickal, and science hasn't destroyed it. I just have a literal way of looking at it, and a metaphorical way of looking at it. The metaphor is still important to me because it helps me to deal with some of my own character flaws.

So I was studying and gaining knowledge, I just needed the experience to go with it. At this time I was participating in a study group that also did rituals during the esbats (the full and dark moons of each month). It was here that I started collecting experience. There are moments when things happened that aren't scientifically explainable...yet. I also had experiences outside of ritual that added to my catalog of moments that might make your hair stand on end.

While I was considering why the shuttle driver didn't make me feel threatened, I realized that all the knowledge and experience that I claimed simply because I wanted it was suddenly real. I added up my memories and felt a moment of arrival, for the lack of a better word. I had attained my spiritual goal and I was very content with it. This was the beginning of my epiphany.

Over the next few months, I kept re-examining how I felt about the conversation with the shuttle driver, and how I would react to other such conversations down the road. I thought that having knowledge and experience, instead of belief and faith, was the end of it. It was the evolutionary step I needed to take and that I was now done with that part of my spiritual growth. Little did I know that there was a step past that, and realizing what it was is what gave me the key to understanding my lack of reaction to a direct challenge to my belief system.

It has been my experience that one of the reasons people defend their faith so violently (sometimes literally), is that they don't want to be revealed as a fool or a fraud. If science came out tomorrow with proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that god (any god) doesn't exist, how crushing would that be for people? Whole lifetimes of hard choices made in the name of religion would be made worthless. To some anyway.

I asked myself how I would feel. My answer was a shrug. Seriously. I shrugged and knew it wouldn't crush me. That's a pretty strong response to a very fundamental question and it made look to try and see why.

This is when I discovered the step beyond knowledge and experience. It's choice. Conscious, self aware, fully engaged choice. Every day I wake up and choose the spiritual path I am on. And because I choose, I am not ironbound into anything. If part of my belief system no longer serves to help me be a better person, then it needs to evolve into something that does.

I joke now that I have spiritually and philosophically become like the Borg, if I find something that I like, "I will add your distinctiveness to my own". With this point of view, the possibilities for evolution are nigh limitless. I will never be in the position where I feel the need to defend my beliefs. I also never feel the need to tell anyone my beliefs so that they come to believe the same as I do. If someone asks me to explain my belief system, then I will, but my goal is to simply inform, not to convert. If there's something in what I say that works for you, great. If not, that's ok too.

It's almost impossible to convey here what a fundamental moment it was for me when I discovered the power of choice. The reason why the shuttle driver couldn't shove me off the rock of my belief is because there wasn't one. My beliefs are water, or the wind, they shift and move and I move with them.

With the power of choice comes the strength of evolution. With evolution comes a sense of security that nothing, not even myself, can shake.

I think I'll leave it at that today. There's some pretty nebulous ideas in this post, and I'm sure I'll have to do a "4a" at some point to answer questions. ^^; Thank you for wading through this post, I appreciate everyone who reads my words, whether or not they find value in them. Next time I'll lay out the particulars of my belief system as it stands now, and hopefully that'll complete the story I set out to write all those months ago.

Till next time, be well,

Red

When I Speak of Myself 3a

It seems lately that I always start with an apology for taking so long. You'd think I'd learn from this and, well, post more often. Ah well, we'll see how it goes.

And to be fair, my life has been more than interesting of late, what with car troubles, illness, temporary census jobs...so much so that when I sit at my puter at night, the last thing I want to do is try and be informative on my blog. You guys deserve, at the very least, coherent sentences. ;)

So I had quite the conversation happen after my last post (I have some awesome friends). A few questions were asked, and I thought I'd put them together here instead of trying to put them in the comments.

Diedre said:

"Maybe I'm overstepping here, but I couldn't quite grasp what you feel about this statement you have made about deity being beyond our experience. Do you feel comfort in this knowledge, or insignificance, or freedom, or simply satisfaction in being able to articulate the way you understand deity? Or something else? Anyway, I'm just curious how this makes you feel. Or perhaps the answer would contain spoilers for your next post..."

You're not overstepping at all, and it's a very good question. So good in fact that I had to seriously ask myself and try to hammer an answer together. Let's see if I can get it...

There's a part of me that reacts to it like I would a star going nova, or the Yellowstone Supervolcano, a detached awe. I cannot effect this in any way, so it is relegated to knowledge in the back of my head. When I do bring it forward to think about, it's scary, beautiful and humbling.

There's another part that reacts to it with hope. The human experience *now* isn't the same as it was 1000 years ago, and won't be the same as the one 1000 years from now. I have had experiences where I've touched something other, something greater than myself, and while I don't know what exactly it is, I like to think that it's some little facet of deity. As we look farther out and deeper within, we learn more about what's possible and we become capable of *more*. Hopefully a time will come when humanity grows past its infancy and becomes able to communicate more directly with whatever it is that's out there.

Then there's the sense of security. I have found a definition that fits me. I like it, it makes sense to me. This is a very basic and selfish part, as it's completely about what makes me feel best about my life and the events that have happened in it. It's also fluid and evolving, so I don't feel the need to defend my view when challenged.

And last, but not least, is an overwhelming sense of awe (not the same as the detached awe above) that I have touched or been touched by something so vast it defies comprehension. I feel that deity wants us to grow, learn, change...become the very best we are capable of, and will help us if we but become perceptive enough to notice. It is this connection that helps me put my feet on the floor on the bad days, and makes the good days all the brighter.

I hope that helps explain things...it did for me! ^^

Diedre then said:

"I googled "petrified religion" and didn't come up with any good explanations. I could wager a guess, but could you explain what you mean by this?"

A petrified religion is one that does not change with the society. A simple example of this is when the "Great Mother Goddess" became an agricultural deity after farming was invented. The religion and the deity(ies) involved changed as not only the culture, but as science did.

The Abrahamic faiths have been tied to their respective books for thousands of years, and each change that happens is often seen as a massive dogmatic shift that results in a sect breaking off to remain with the "good old days".

The books still say things like, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," (gee, thanks...), "Man shalt not lie with man as with a woman," there's all sorts of "shalt not's" that frankly have no place in this modern world. We shouldn't even be having the conversation about gay marriage, but because the book says, we are. There are people who believe that dinosaur bones were placed by Satan to trick us into believing the world is older than the Bible says it is. Really?

Not being able to reconcile what's in front of our faces with our spiritual systems of belief just leads to a lot of unhappy people.

Mr. One Eyebrow Priest says:

"And finally the resurrection completely ruined it for me. I think I may have asked my sunday school teacher about it. I don't remember the answer if there was one. I asked "If Jesus is God, then he can't really die, can he?" I remember at some point being told how wonderful it was that God was willing to experience death for us. But that didn't make any sense to me either. If you give your life to save mine, you do it for keeps. God wasn't playing for keeps, he got to take back any marbles he lost and go home. What is the meaning of sacrifice if nothing is lost?"

I really just wanted to comment that most of Christianity shares echoes with religions of the past. There are dozens of "So In So's descent into the Underworld" stories from different cultures around the world. There are also a ton of sacrificed son/sun deity stories too. Most often the Son was the symbol of the eternal changing of the seasons, birth in spring, youth in summer, maturity in fall and death in winter to return again in the spring. My problem with the Jesus incarnation of the story is that it became a linear, one time event, instead of remaining cyclical.

(Please don't mistake my dissatisfaction with the Christ story with my feelings for Christ as a person, real or otherwise. As a teacher, he had some truly wise and amazing things to teach, and if more people truly strived to be Christ-like, meaning that they love one another as he loved us (as a god is capable of love), then the world would by necessity be a better place.)

Descent into the underworld stories always bring something to the deity that takes the journey. One of the most famous stories is that of Inanna from Sumer. She learned the "darker" side of her powers, which was probably a metaphor for the necessity of death to continue the life cycle of life/death/rebirth. Odin hung on the World Tree for nine days and returned with the runes of power for his people.

Jesus earned the ability for humans to go to heaven through his descent, reversing his Father's decision at the garden of Eden. The issues I have with this story stem from how petty and jealous Jehovah seems. He got mad when the first people gained the knowledge of good and evil (essentially becoming like him, which was three hims to many), and condemned the species to eternal damnation. Later, after drowning the world, smiting a bunch of people, pillars of salt, death of the first born, etc, etc, he decides that he'd rather give people the chance at salvation. So instead of just changing his mind, he goes through the complex process of making a part of himself human, then has himself killed.

Now humanity has the opportunity to go to heaven, but not only do we have to be good, but we also have to make sure we keep god appeased. In other stories about the underworld, a person simply had to live a good life, their relationship with their deity(ies) was separate. You did the dance, killed the chicken, lit the candles, yadda, yadda, yadda, you were good with them. In Christianity, even the "virtuous unbelievers" go to hell. I do not like that.

Well, that went on way longer than I expected, but it was fun, and I hope you enjoy reading it. I also promise to try to get to the rest of the stuff I promised a while ago (heh) sooner rather than later. And as always, thank you for reading, I appreciate it.

Till next time, be well,

Red

When I Speak of Myself 3

I think it is somehow fitting that I tell this part of the story on the Summer Solstice...the longest day of the year. We are drenched in light and heat (well, out here in the desert we are) and there aren't many shadows. Thank you all for stopping by.

You guys remember where we left off, right? So, I was Pagan (or was I?), I had a new understanding of ethics with which to view the world and my movement through it, and even if I didn't completely like my life, things were better and that was ok.

This next part will probably make more sense if I explain a couple more things from my childhood...cue the flashback music...

Somewhere in a history or religion class, I was taught that there was a natural evolution of religion. The primitive people of the past were polytheistic, meaning they had lots of gods, but the modern, enlightened people were monotheistic, and had only one god. In my young brain (the same one that thought the Moon was more powerful than the Sun, because She could go where He could not...) didn't like this concept. For one thing, thinking that one being could take care of *everything*, every single little thing...just didn't make sense. Heck, even at home there were things my Mother did, and other things my Father did. I also didn't care for the feeling that we were supposed to look down our noses at those poor, poor people who still thought there were multiple gods.

No matter how many times I ran across this concept during my school years, I never liked it. It wasn't like going from stone to metal...a natural technological change. Why couldn't people have more than one god? Specially since the other gods I was learning about seemed way cooler than the robed, bearded duder who seemed so far away.

((Just a side note here...it's not my intention to insult those who have a relationship with Jehova, or Yahweh...this is simply how I felt about Him at the time.))

...and end flashback...

Alrighty, so it was somewhere around this time that I learned about Deism. From the Wikipedia page it says, "Deism can be a belief in a deity absent of any doctrinal governance or precise definition of the nature of such a deity." I realize that this only one facet to Deism, but this is the one that I gravitated to and it ended up forming the core of my eventual belief system. It made sense to me that if there was a intelligence or intelligences out there that were capable of envisioning the entirety of the universe as we know it (and perhaps all the rest we haven't discovered too...), then it would be something so beyond our experience as a human being that we couldn't possibly be able to connect to it.

Enter Joseph Campbell. Through studying at home, and seeing his lectures in a couple anthropology classes, Joe has become one of the most influential people I have ever studied, right up there with ol' Aristotle.

From Joe I learned what a religion is, and what a system of belief needs to do in order to be considered a religion. I learned what a metaphor is, separate from the literary device, and how it applies to a belief system. It was the first time I'd heard the phrase, "petrified religion", and it changed the way I looked at the Abrahamic faiths.

He said that believing the words of a book to be the absolute word of any deity was like going to a restaurant and eating the menu, instead of using it as a metaphor for the food you could order.

Woah...wait, let's see if I have this straight...

Ok, so on one hand, I have the idea that the nature of deity is undefinable. And on the other, I have the idea that metaphor is the language with which we communicate to deity.

Which deity? I dunno, it seems that it doesn't really matter...since the intelligence that created the universe is so much more vast than my human understanding.

What metaphors? Well, it also seems that there are so many out there, and most of them have some really good points, so it seems like it doesn't quite matter.

Now hold on a minute here, this is sounding like you're saying that because the nature of deity is unnamed and unknown, the metaphors that we use to communicate with it can be our choice?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Oh...woah...really?

Yup.

And that's exactly what I did.

With that, I think I'm going to stop here today. I have a feeling that I raised more questions than I answered, and I really want to be able to go into my epiphany that I have been promising for like a month now, without feeling like you guys are gunna get to the point where it's all "tl:dr".

So I wish each of you a blessed Solstice, and as always, thank you for reading.

Till next time, be well,

Red

When I Speak of Myself 2

Well hello there! I'm finally getting to the next part of my story, and I'm glad you're here.

So to recap a little, we've covered my religious upbringing, the death of my Mother and how that shaped my ideas of the afterlife, and my transition into Paganism. Now today, I'm going to talk a little bit about magick, ethics and that promised epiphany that took a year. You guys all buckled in? Alrighty then, let's get to it!

I think it's important to note that three years or so before my Mother died I started studying magick. Ardriana was studying (she said it was research for a book...*snickergiggles*...a book...*ahem* that's her story tell anyway...) ...and she was bringing it home to us. The reason this is important is because from the very beginning, magick was the practice of the manipulation of energy to a desired result, and had nothing to do with religion. So yes, in this system, you could be a "good Christian/Muslim/Buddhist/Athiest" and practice magick.

Even today the "work" of magick, while tied into my spirituality and belief system, can easily be separated from it completely. Though to be fair, the step from magick to Paganism isn't very far, and it was a contributing factor in my transformation...specially since magick is generally frowned upon in the Catholic Church. (Hi Red...understatement much?)

So then, I was Pagan...now what? My life pretty much still sucked, but I felt better about it, I guess. Or perhaps I had better tools with which to survive it. In any case, once I'd graduated High School, I was given the option of college or a job. I took college. And promptly withdrew from most of my classes and generally did nothing. This went on for a couple three years until one day I decided to stop wasting my Dad's money. I stopped signing up for morning classes, because I just slept through them. I stopped taking five at a time, because I am generally lazy and wouldn't focus on the ones I didn't like. In short, I tricked myself into actually getting an education in college, and found the class that changed my life.

Since I was picking my classes by time frame, I took whatever professors came up that fit my criteria...class didn't start before 11AM. I was *very* lucky, and met several professors that challenged me in ways that still inform my life. But I think that it was my Philosophy prof that had the most profound impact...

It was an Introduction into Ethics class, using a brand new translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as the text book. Good gods...I finally understood the phrase, "blew my mind wide open", I could literally feel my consciousness expanding, my internals shifting and my view of the world around me changing.

I understood for the first time what being a good person meant and entailed. I was given a step by step process that I could internalize and begin using as a metric for my daily life. Good and bad had real world definitions, and were no longer divinely inspired abstracts that I just simply had to accept. I learned that circumstance changed the amount of blame or praise you lay on someone for their actions. I understood responsibility, accountability and what it meant to be a person living in a civilization with laws.

And even as I stared uphill at the path that lay before me. A path with no handrails, no safety net, and no divinely inspired forgiveness should I mess up, I knew I'd go anyway. I couldn't not. The rewards, freedom, responsibility (how is that a reward?) and understanding far outweighed the work and other costs that this system of behavior came with.

That class was an oasis for three hours, twice a week, and I gulped down the concepts like a starving man gulps down food. I was fundamentally changed by the class...and then Aristotle said that the gods had no place in a system of ethics...

A bolt of lightning speared me through the head. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but that's what it felt like. My whole view of the world and how to move through it *shifted*. I was a different person after I read that line, and the world was never the same. If the responsibility ethical behavior lay with me because I wanted to live within the society I found myself in, and I did good because it was simply the right thing to do, and not because of some hope of reward or fear of punishment...then why did I need religion at all?

I didn't.

Oh, but that opened a can of worms didn't it? And I think this is where I'm going to leave this post for now. I suppose I was overly ambitious when I thought I could tell this story in only two chunks. I really should know better...I am Irish after all.

Thank you for continuing to read, and I promise to try to have the next installment sooner rather than later.

Till next time, be well,

Red

Adventures in Jewelry Wearing

Ok, first...having a day job is the sux. I did not miss it at all. Those of you working lame day jobs, you have my sympathy and admiration. ./salute

Second, I blame the above mentioned day job for my lack of updates! I've been so tired in the evenings when I get done, I just haven't had the brains for much of anything but messing around on the intarwebs. However, I'm gunna try to get back into some sort of schedule here soon.

And now...on with the show!

Adventures in jewelry wearing? Yeah, that's right...something very funny happened last First Friday, and it needed to be set down to share.

So, the beautiful and insanely talented Teresa Maharaj-Williams, (and this site just has her graphite work...she's been working in oils and they're pretty amazing so far!), was wearing one of my new Chain style Desire bracelets...

Pretty huh? ^^

...and all night she was being followed around by men who appeared *totally* interested in her art work (as they should be!), but would rapidly lose interest after she would say something about her husband and kids. It was pretty comical. One elderly gentleman followed her across the street into another gallery, then came back to Damned Ink Studios with her! I watched them talk about art, and his place in Florida for about 20 mins. Then she mentioned she was married...he handed her his card and left. Just like that.

Now, First Friday is always super busy in DiS, always lots of bodies in the gallery. I stay at the back desk at the register, leaving other people free to wander the room, pimp the art and talk. So I don't alway see what's going on by the door, which is where Teresa spent most of the night, near her work.

About 9:30 or so, she comes charging up to me saying, "Take this thing off. Take it off!" She's agitated, though it looks like she wants to laugh too. "It's working to well!" she says, "I just had a guy show me his nipple!"

Wait...what?

After I was done laughing...apparently she was talking to a somewhat inebriated gentleman, and he was complimenting her on her ability to paint certain parts of the human anatomy (read: he liked how she pained nipples), and was offering her a model for her next work. This was the last in a line of about 6 or 8 guys who had seriously hit on her during the night...

So she puts her bracelet in her pocket, and I can see that she's still agitated, so I start looking through my box of supplies to see if I can't find a Water (Desire being a fire piece...) piece for her to borrow to help calm down. Luckily I had one, and she was able to keep it on, even though it was to big for her...she did immediately settled down, and didn't have any more trouble with strange guys the rest of the night.

My favorite part was when her husband stopped by, and we told him the story of the nipple flasher...his face...so priceless...she was so red! I wish I had had a camera!

In any case, Teresa is gorgeous, and it's not uncommon for her to be hit on by guys, specially on a First Friday, but that night was different. She was flustered because the guys were trying much harder than they usual. She's also usually somewhat oblivious to the attention, but that night she noticed! (Like, how could you miss the nipple thing...right?)

Hmm...the event's funnier in my memory than I've managed convey here, though still, it's worth noting that while she wore the Desire bracelet, she kept getting attention for things other than her art. Once she put the Water piece on, it stopped.

Interesting, no?

Anyroad, I'm going to try and get the next part of my personal story done this weekend, so if you made it this far through the post, thank you, and I hope you return to read my other ramblings.

Till next time, be well,

Red

When I Speak of Myself part 1

Oh, you thought I'd forgotten about this huh? Suckers...

I think it's about time to get a little more personal in this whole conversation, to give people an greater understanding on where I get some of my ideas from.

Let's start with the basics...I was raised Irish Catholic. The cultural modifier is important, because for as pagan as Roman Catholicism appears, it ain't got nothin' on the Irish. Mima got to actually visit Ireland when she was younger, and while on a train ride she asked another woman if she believed in the "Little People". The woman responded, "Tsk, I'm a modern woman I am! Of course I don't believe in the Little People...but they're there just the same."

This pretty much exemplifies the Irish, at least as far as I was raised. I went to Catholic school, and was given all the liturgy and dogma, I learned the "stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight" pattern to the mass, sang the songs, did the dance...blah, blah, blah...and at home, when I asked my parents if animals went to heaven, because teacher said they didn't, I was told, "Of course they do."

I was also taught to make a wish on the New Moon over my left shoulder, to throw spilled salt over my shoulder, and that my Godmother and Mima could do magick.

I loved Yahweh, as my child's mind separated him from Jehova (who was kinda a douche, with all the plagues and smiting...), and loved Jesus cuz he seemed a really cool guy. But then there was the Blessed Mother...(you can prolly see where this is goin'... ;) )

Then I was told that I couldn't be an alter girl, like my worshiped older brother. That was pretty much the beginning of the end. I got the High School and read the Epic of Gilgamesh (in my freshman religion class...no, I'm not sure how that works either, but that teacher only lasted a year...), and generally realized that I didn't much like the god of the bible. I was reading a lot of mythology and fantasy and was *really* liking this whole "goddess" idea.

And then my Mother died.

I say without exaggeration that this single event has more impact on my life than any other. The ramifications continue to inform my decisions and probably will for the rest of my days.

While I was struggling with the anger and grief of not only the event, but with how my family shattered because of it, I discovered that I did not like the idea of my Mother in some distant heaven, so far removed and untouchable to me. And I sure wasn't even going to imagine that there was *any* remote possibility of a hell. F' that.

It was right around that time I discovered some books on Celtic mythology and learned about Tir nAn Og, or the Summerlands, the Land of Youth. Souls would rest and review their lives, learning their lessons and awaiting their beloveds so they could be born again together. Something in me wanted this so badly that I simply couldn't conceive of anything else.

Being a teen, I was pretty angry. Being a teen that had lost a Mother, had a crazy Father and Sister...I was raging. It bothered me that I was so angry all the time, so when my school gave us an opportunity to go to confession, I went, hoping that the priest could give me some idea of how to deal with myself. Looking back, I can say that I feel sorry for the priest...he simply didn't know what to do with me. I hadn't sinned, and he wasn't a psychologist. I don't blame him for the lack of solace I received from confession.

Walking back to class I went through a grassy patch. It had been watered and the cool sprinkles tickled my ankles...and I felt better. I don't know how to explain it other than all the anger I carried at that moment wooshed out of me through my feet and into the ground. the back to back events and how reacted to them remain a turning point in the development of my spirituality.

Later that year I dedicated myself to the Goddess under a Full Moon. I was 15 and wanted something other than what I had been taught in church growing up. I wanted a place where woman were not only not discriminated against, but were held in high esteem. I wanted magick to not only be possible, but expected every day. I wanted the ground beneath my feet to be sacred and not something to just be dominated. I wanted animals to have souls, and babies not to have to worry about "original sin" (I poked a badger with a spoon!). I wanted joy and love and laughter again. These I all received, like gifts, along with all the cool toys! (I got rocks and candles, beautiful smelling oils and incense, a rockin' awesome dagger for my athame, cloaks and robes, goblets and eventually a teeny, tiny baby cauldron...and then the metric ton of beautiful jewelry.)

I also, finally, got the sense that there was something else out there. Something that loved me, looked out for me, and wanted me to be bigger than I was, as big as I could be. It connected me to the earth beneath my feet and the vast universe above. Connected me to every living thing on the planet. It was a very good start.

When I was 18, I went to my Baccalaureate Mass (the last Mass you go to before graduating High School and become an adult) conscious of the fact that I was no longer Christian. It was my formal good bye.

It's been 20 years now since that night under the Full Moon and I am more comfortable now within my spirit than I was so long ago. Everything that I looked for I am still finding, and I choose consciously, everyday, to continue down the moonlit path. I can only hope that everyone finds this same sense of peace and joy in their spirit...it is a wonder indeed.

Well, I think I've rambled about myself for long enough. Next time I'll talk about the evolution of my ethics, and how they tie into my spirituality, and the epiphany I had over the course of a year. And *then* I think I'll go back and respond to my good friend's response to my response to her response of my post which was a response to her response of my post...woah...dizzy...

Thank you for reading, I am honored.

Till next time...Goddess bless,

Red ;)