Sunset tomorrow is the end of Jólablót, so I set things on fire and drank a little bit tonight.
I had meant to make a goat to burn out of grass in the yard back in December and keep that goat around until Jól, but between work and weather it ended up not happening. I resorted to making it out of cattails from the edge of the pond.
I could have gone up the hill to use the grass that’s growing up there, but we’re having coyotes showing up in the yard and I didn’t want to deal with that shit.
Cattails, as it turns out, are both too thin (if they’re flexible) and too brittle (if they’re thick) to make into good yule goats. His left hind leg snapped clean off and had to be shoved back into his torso. Just. Jammed right in there.
At least he doesn’t have feelings.
This also reminds me of a song I’ve had stuck in my head every year because of what I torched in Jól of 2019, and which I’ve had on a humorous playlist for the Gävle goat for a few years.
I was at work on day two and have nothing to report. Here’s what’s on my yule playlist.
For the harshness of winter:
For the midway mark:
For a good year and peace:
I don’t feel informed or articulate anymore, and I feel like an atrophied husk when I try to psych myself up to be helpful, or even just useful. I forgot how to be human because I was putting it off until I had the energy (and the funds, and the social and emotional safety) to be human. I forget where I got the energy.
Turns out some of it can come from letting myself enjoy “useless” things and re-train the metaphorical muscle.
It’s a balmy 18 fahrenheit after single digits at night where a man who propositioned me grumpily texts me that he’d rather be in Alaska. (Fair enough, as it was 7° here, 14° there.) I’ve just hacked away a ~2″ layer of iced snow to sweep away the foot of powder underneath so I can have a cigarette on the balcony, on a spot just big enough to sit cross-legged. Somehow the cold is worse when I’m standing outside at ground level on shoveled brick. I don’t think hard enough about physics and chemistry to want to sort that out.
At least the weather is appropriate. When the sun goes down it will be the first night of Jólablót and I get to sit down to a rare extravagant dinner. I sat quietly through the fuss of Xmas and noncommittally helped myself to antipasto that my brother in law brought over, and a bûche de Noël made by my sister in law and humored My mother’s requests for decor opinions while she put together three different trees.
My only yule decoration is a plastic garland of iridescent snowflakes I bought in the post-Xmas sales, and I have no idea where to put it. I had ideas about wrapping it around a tension rod to jam in the deep windowsill where I have Loki’s altar, but couldn’t find one small enough and didn’t have the energy to locate one that wasn’t holding up a very dead, dried out kokedama that I’m not ready to talk myself into composting.
Turns out having a cryptic mood disorder (cryptic because it might not actually be a mood disorder) and trying to cultivate moss that needs regular dunking are not a good mix. Who would have thought Apparently not me.
I want to be excited because this means it’s finally my turn to have a holiday, but mostly I just feel more of the same dragging isolation that I’ve been feeling for months on end.
Common sense dictates that this should be treated and managed as a Me problem. Growing up I saw plenty of movies where some curmudgeonly noncooperator abstains from Xmas or resents it, but through the magic of community and lazily secularized wonder they realize they’re in the wrong and join in. At this point I’d like to see a movie where the protagonist learns there’s other people in the world who do shit differently, managing to be fully realized humans without someone else’s holidays and they experience joy and wonder about that. Because as an adult, and as a Heathen, it seems like I still can’t catch a fucking break because I don’t do anything for the solstice and people get bizarrely defensive about it.
The only deviation from that kind of response so far was a friend saying, “oh, you’re like, hardcore about it” when I mentioned sticking to lunisolar dates instead of solstices and equinoxes. Not even snarky. Mostly just surprised to encounter it in the wild.
Certainly, using a lunisolar calendar is a choice. Not the shady Twitterspeak “A Choice,” but just one option out of several available. Turns out the explanation is as simple as trying it out one year and finding it felt like it made more sense since it properly feels like winter when you do it well after the solstice. (And then properly feels like spring, and then summer, and then fall, etc.).
Leaving an increasingly dysfunctional group and losing a lot of extended community, also a choice. But it’s not like there were viable alternatives.
That second one is the kicker for me. Holidays take fucking work. The food doesn’t cook itself and any ceremony doesn’t hold itself. I remember a Twitter reply that pissed me off because some stranger scolded me for saying as much, because “honoring the gods isn’t that hard.”
Girl, whatever. Perhaps I want something nice that provides some sense of completion. Perhaps, getting no fucking help with that makes it hard. I am no longer in a situation where I can tap someone for an extra set of hands.
Partway through writing this I take a break to scoop away more snow and realize that I had stashed the lid of a $5 hardware store bucket on the balcony. My very own find of a sitteunderlag. How recon. The bloggable, inspiring metaphor here is some bullshit about having the power within myself all along. I put up the damn garland.
It’s not as sparkly as I was anticipating. But the disco ball garland I was eyeing wouldn’t have made sense anyway, and I am still in the habit of avoiding shiny things because it used to annoy my dog, even though he’s been dead for almost a year. So whatever.
Eventually I realize I’m mad about my hair being greasy and take a shower. My alarm alerting me I have ~20 minutes before sunset goes off while I’m rinsing and I throw dinner together with wet hair.
The one consistent thing I do for Jólablót is splurge on an entire side of sockeye salmon and try to pair it with vegetables that are locally available at this time of year, because to me, the seasonality is kind of the whole point.
Halfway through my plate I realize I’ve managed to become 80% less mad at everything because the problem solving involved in making food made me feel like a real person again.
I am still 20% bitter bitch but at least I’m full of salmon.
Chronic pain makes me tired. Hormone therapy makes me tired. Work makes me tired. The Bullshitskrieg of global democratic backsliding, and living in the US, and being too poor and ~medically burdensome~ to move anywhere else and too principled to leave if I had the means, makes me tired.
I am digging through my drafts trying to either find or make something publishable, but nothing is really there.
Between the bullshit that led to me shutting down most of my online presence, stepping back from the majority of my social circle, a massive increase in my day to day pain that has become periodically disabling (I finally broke down and started using a cane, I had to change jobs, and am looking down the barrel of doing it again because my workplace is fighting me over accomodations), major financial issues, and the prolonged illness and eventual death of my dog, I’m more exhausted than I was a few years ago when I genuinely thought it couldn’t get worse.
Maybe I was tempting fate. Whatever.
I think I have to just sit (or lay down, which is easier on my hips and back anyway) with the fact that I am not the same person I was when I could write here consistently. Unfortunately that, and all the circumstances surrounding that, also mean accepting that a lot of the external trappings I relied on as a frame of reference for who (or at least what) I am as a person are gone, and I have to reevaluate.
I don’t like that. It’s a lot of work. And pain and distress literally shrink your brain. It gets better when those get better. (Hooray for neuroplasticity.) But I have no idea what kind of timeline I’m on for getting better in a way that’s load bearing.
I didn’t want to talk about any of that because I didn’t want to grant that kind of satisfaction to people who I know would enjoy learning that I’m struggling. I don’t place a lot of trust in the likelihood of something stirring their conscience. I didn’t want to show weakness.
On the personal level I also resented my own weakness due to how abruptly I went from being a physically powerful, capable person to someone who can’t stand for more than a few hours on some days.
But giving into that, making concessions that go beyond my actual limitations, is just obeying people whose opinion isn’t actually that valuable. It’s letting other people run my life. I’ve had enough of that shit.
The weather is cooling off now and this was the time of year where I was starting on my very goofy path towards Heathenry. It is a little weird to think about how a religion I got into by accident ended up having such a deep (and unfortunately somewhat destructive) impact on my life. I feel a little more alive and hopeful. My body tolerated recent farm chores better than I anticipated, though I’m watching my physical state closely to make sure I don’t overdo it and get stuck in another flare.
Maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe not. Still not a fan of uncertainty. But I’m trying to let myself at least enjoy feeling something good.
Since I don’t have any active social media tied to this blog anymore (the Facebook page still exists, but is deactivated and unviewable)…here. An altar cleaned after sitting half-dead for a year, minus one hammer because I’m willing to wear it again.
Don’t get too excited, my offline life mattered more than my online life. This blog mostly still exists because I forgot I had my hosting costs on autopay.
Don’t ask me what’s up with the Jord devotional, though. I don’t know either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Falkabarn 