Category: General

I finally started hitting the local trails, now that I was somewhere that trails existed again. And while going through a dedicated tree identification loop on the trail I was struck by something.

I envy the resilience of the beech tree.

Or perhaps not the resilience, but rather, the chance at having resilience and the sense of home.

The beech tree is situated in a network of others of its kind, connected by roots and symbiotic fungus which transmit information and nutrients. I envy how trees in the shadow of their parents are protected, growing slowly for decades until the parent tree collapses and surrenders its sunlight.

I am very quick to recommend The Secret Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, and perhaps this is why I am zeroing in on beech when I go hiking, when I am not spotting hornbeams so quickly it feels like they’re flagging me down. Because these were the examples I got to see exemplifying things that I was approaching, but had not reached.

Trees raise their children. They feed their neighbors. But it’s not because trees are Just Like Us. Rather, we were once trees and we were forced to forget.

And I wish we remembered more, especially when I see how, despite nearly being wiped out by disease, beech have managed to reclaim woodland that was once cleared at the rate of an acre a day to feed a furnace. And in their shade the undergrowth is rich with ferns and moss, and lush with leaf litter, their repayment to the land that holds them in place as they reach skyward. They are in community with maples and oaks and the occasional pine. And if you successfully get deep enough into the forest, the wind in the leaves feels like watching waves flutter from below.

This is the closest I can find to a place where I feel safe, even as the silence around me implies the presence of a predator–probably me.

Beeches, and other trees in forests, have a literal rootedness that I do not, cannot ever have. That I can only seek out a substitute for. Which I will always be frustrated by.

If I am lucky, I wonder if I will grow to be the tree at the trail entrance that is scarred with carved initials and profanities, marked by someone’s desire to express a sense of ownership.

In June I left the house where I had lived for 27 years. When my parents bought their new house in December of 2020 I stayed behind as a caretaker, not wanting to leave my job that was barely paying for itself and having gotten sick to death of living with them. This ended up being perfect timing because I was exposed to covid at work just a few weeks later. I marked the solstice with a massive pineapple and anchovy pizza and explaining to the delivery guy, through the glass door, on the phone, that I could not open the door.

As I’m writing this it’s almost Christmas again. A holiday that I do not celebrate. A holiday that I successfully, completely avoided for the first time last year because I could not take visitors. The holiday I now cannot avoid because everyone else I live with celebrates it.

I do suppose, however, that it is super fucking recon of me to give in to my mother’s insistence on buying me things I need but cannot currently afford, because Christmas. I am back in circumstances where I am able to receive assistance and care that I have needed but kept putting off.

But I do not feel rooted.

I felt exposed in the city. I did not realize the extent of my emotional attachment to ambient plant and animal life until it was reduced to pigeons, badly behaved pandemic puppies, baby trees choking in pavement and the stubborn sycamores further south that simply ripped their way through decades ago. And I admired those sycamores because they had something I didn’t. I am stubborn and I am resilient, but unlike with sycamores, these are not pushed along by a will to live.

And what little I had was rapidly deteriorating in the city, where I felt constantly overstimulated with no way of turning away from anything. Sometimes Rob would have to scoop me up and take me out to the graveyard, or to East Earl, where at least the absence of trees was compensated for by farmland.

Now I am in a new location with a painful sense of being right back where I started. I don’t know how much of this inability to settle is self-inflicted bullshit, versus honestly earned suspicion.

But at least there are trees. There is at least one place where my shoulders can drop and I can catch a breath.

When last we met our protagonist, it was December of 2019, before a plague hit the world and made life really fucking difficult.

Thankfully I just got my booster for the vaccine against that plague, so things will be marginally less difficult.

I had originally taken a sudden hiatus to focus on landing a job, write some more rituals (there was a Seasons of Transition III planned), and write blogs regularly again once I had gotten my rhythm back. The county shut down, my workload drastically increased, my friendship with my co-author ended, and I was under the worst stress of my life.

And then I quit my job that was supposed to be better than the last job and failed me yet again, moved out of a house I had lived in for 27 years, had a mental health crisis related to moving, got told to move out, MOVED AGAIN, and now finally have something vaguely resembling stability. Or at least familiar instability. Which was the environment I was writing in to begin with, so I guess it won’t be a hindrance.

Or I hope not.

I kind of backed myself into a corner for a while with my writing, because I was getting very used to ~teachable moments~ type shit and essays where I was trying to prove a point. And I don’t necessarily regret writing any of it because I stand by most of it, but at the end of the day I was getting sick of myself, and also ineffectually trying to impress people.

I mean, I was getting the response I wanted from certain people, but also, no, I wasn’t. The lack of self-awareness I was criticizing ran so deep that people I was literally describing were recommending my blog. And I cannot begin to tell you the kind of emotional exhaustion that left me with. It was very clear that nothing I was doing mattered and I no longer valued whether people liked it.

Also, a much pettier complaint, apparently you cannot make a case for why cute people should people fall in love with you by being smart. You have to be their type, and also actually tell them you like them. It’s so fucking complicated.

To try and resolve that sense of constriction, I’m going to give myself permission to be a lot more casual about my writing. I used to have content ready to go every week, or every other week, but it was because I had more free time and I wasn’t freakishly stringent about what I was putting out. And I am realizing being stringent was completely unnecessary, because I am running a pagan blog, where the formula for success is “confidence, irrespective of accuracy.”

That, I cannot get myself to do, but it means that the margin for error is far wider than I was willing to occupy. I am a hardass to myself first and foremost.

It’s not the worst tendency in the world, because a lot more people could stand to be much more self-critical. But I’m an anxious dumbass and was intensifying that behavior every time I got frustrated with people I thought should be more self-critical. Like I thought it would trickle down or something.

That is absurd.

We’ll see what happens. For now, I’m seeing how I adjust to this move.

Finally have a post ready. Quality isn’t guaranteed.

Staring at the sky listening to a woman mourn her twenties, and thinking about reaching out to someone I have been nursing a very abrupt and intense crush on. Unsure of whether this would be their scene, because I’ve never seen any indication that they go for folk music like I do, let alone country soul. The breeze is nice, this is my home, more so than the nearby house I grew up in.

I didn’t get a good look at this singer at first and thought she was artfully draped in gold lamé, and I suspect it was because of her singing about walking through fire after telling a humorous tale of having literally lit herself on fire. It ended up being a standard 70s inspired maxi dress, but it suits her anyway.

It feels good to lie on the compacted mud beneath me, even with the waterproof blanket between us there’s a sense of relief. It has felt like it wanted to be touched. I’m not supposed to have my shoes off, it’s a safety thing, because people never check where their glass is going here. I don’t care. I’ve been going barefoot and letting the swordgrass and dry stiff straw and baby Rosa multiflora sprouts scratch my soles so the land can take whatever it wants from me.

When I left my now ex I was terrified that I was never going to have any semblance of humanity again, which was a terrible illusion created by the expectation that I whittle myself down into a more user-friendly instrument. Too much. Too little. Go away. Where’d you go?

Well, I’m fucking gone and doing an awful lot better than I had let myself believe I was going to be.

The air no longer feels smothering. The first hints of fall. When everyone leaves, the leaves start dropping. A sudden withdrawal, I guess, from the abundant accidental offerings of chili dogs and funnel cakes and fair trade single origin coffee and ice cream and all manner of booze and, ahem, burnt offerings. Though the Landvættir could surely live without the glow sticks and forgotten air mattresses. Bought only to be thrown in the trash, by someone else. Because it will always be somebody else’s problem, I suppose.

Look how well that’s turning out for us.

“If you’re in love, you have nothing but work to do.”

Heartening.

Perhaps the necessary struggle to tolerate being on my own is the easier route. But she’s not wrong.

The fact that the dog days are finally over and there’s the vague suggestion of a chill in the air and night has fallen and it’s too dark to spin yarn anymore has me thinking of the Yuul spinning Verbots. And so, by extension, Yuulsege.

When I left my ex I was lucky enough to be able to fall into the arms of my community. The series of events slowly working up to this brought people I could lean on to the forefront. Options were visible. I was not going to be alone and suffering in the ways I had spent many years fearing. I had, in a social sense, a home to come to.

And that was vital.

And yet, while writing this, I’ve bailed on writing blog posts and am avoiding social media because Hell is Other People and I don’t know how to act. I want to be alone. I want to be invisible. And so therefore the solution, apparently, was to go to work. And then go to music festivals where I had freebie tickets, and be politely ignored, which is what humans do in large numbers and close proximity. Despite our collecting in a hay field, city etiquette kicks in.

I am sure that all of this is entirely because I am starting to feel like a product, like I am too much, too close, go away, where’d you go? I am afraid of being an instrument again. Or continuing to be one, because I’m not sure I’ve ever not been one.

I catch myself leaning in to be engulfed, and then pulling back and aggressively flagging my interests, my identity, stepping back from testing the waters because I don’t know who I am. I’ve never been a real person before. And it leaked into the way I interact with the rest of the community, ramping up with every tactically beneficial acquaintance.

Like a muscle knot, if left for too long without being broken apart, more will catch and tangle. And eventually the forgettable bundle of angry muscle deep in your shoulder blades is sending pains shooting up your neck into your eyes, radiating around the front and threatening to crush your chest.

A simile I hope nobody else can relate to.

I am frightened and resentful when people see potential in me, and then expend resources trying to get it realized. I give up easily, I become exhausted and run away, and am often too scared, too ashamed, too frustrated to get back on track.

Trothmoot spelled networking spelled the looming threat of success, and my first instinct is to sabotage it all for the sake of familiarity and the perception of safety and missing the comfort of being sad.

And that habit will have to be broken.

I disappeared for a bit there because, according to my therapist, I “overwork myself” and “need to practice self-compassion.” Whatever that means. Anyway, the blog was one of the first things that got cut because there were no oaths or responsibilities attached to it which made it very low priority if things got hard to manage. I’m getting a little better now.

So, update.

I left a group I was on the mod team for. It was toxic for multiple reasons, as most Lokean groups online inevitably are. Most of the mods left. I had to take a break from basically any relevant things online (other than being openly very salty) because I’d get wigged out and very annoyed. I’m getting back to an acceptable baseline.

By the time this is posted, I’m going to be on a plane headed for Seattle to go to Trothmoot. Babby’s first Trothmoot. First Trothmoot since the end of the Verboten Jotunn Blotin’ policy. (Remember that discourse?) I am very paranoid that people will not like me. There are more important things, at least in theory, than people not liking me. I am still deeply concerned about this possibility.

Also planes. Also allergies. Also not sleeping right. Also being cold “Travel” and “travail” were once the exact same word. Go figure. I have packed a lot of snacks and my comfort hoodie.

Work is being done on our next trans empowerment blot/Sege. Our first one was in early April at Baltimore Witchfest. We were indoors, with a closed room, a small enough crowd to be no pressure, and access to a workshop called Drum Church where I had the opportunity to space out on purpose and then grab lunch before doing the thing.

This time around we don’t have the benefit of having a venue handed to us. And venues are expensive. So we are doing the thing outdoors. So we are contending with the possibility of the local hate preachers. Or some local wingnut starting something. Or worse.

No pressure.

There’s a lot of coordinating and meetings and planning and filling of forms to be done in relation to all of this. I have an activist background (…and, like, foreground I guess, since developing and hosting these rituals is activism) but none of that has involved the actual organization aspect. I am treading new water.

Hopefully I float!

And, like, you know? I have these aspirations towards serving the community as clergy, especially in terms of providing spiritual care for incarcerated Heathens. And I figured–again with the splitting connotational meanings of identical words–that with clerical work and clerical work, there was a lot of form-filling and filing and such to be done. And some meetings.

But you guys there are so many. I’m not even ordained yet. I’m not able to get into the Troth’s clergy program yet. I’m really hoping the tedious stuff is a big part of the training. Because, from what I hear of the clergy I know personally, and from what I’m seeing, there’s so much more of that than marryings, buryings and baby blessings.

Though there’s that, too! Baby blessings are something that inevitably spark a ton of debate, but they’re really incredible to witness in person.

So my last update here is going to be some boring housekeeping.

When I hoarded this username it was just supposed to be a placeholder. I had some weird idea about an online shadow work journal. And then never got around to it, because, uh. The shadow is the shadow for a reason. You don’t go publicizing that stuff unless you have really, really bad boundary issues. I ended up sticking with a trained professional.

The name was just a goblin-themed pun on the idea of a “sparkle pony,” aka, someone who will probably die in a puddle of their own body glitter if left to their own devices at any kind of Burner event.

Since I went on a rant about snacks and Trothmoot I’m, very obviously, not actually a sparkle pony. I got this, even though my anxiety is very certain of terrible things happening.

Again. Trained professional in my corner for a lot of very good reasons.

So what I’m getting at is that I am, in addition to hopefully getting back on a schedule, changing my blog name. Rebranding a tiny bit, and maybe changing up my content a bit because I fell into a niche of info posts, and that was getting constricting. Maybe I’ll include a little more of a ~lifestyle~ bent here. While I haven’t officially linked my legal identity with this blog, I’ve definitely left enough crumbs for anyone who cared to figure it out.

I was kind of officially out of the broom closet as a result of presenting at Witchfest, so.

I’m going to be focusing July on getting our ritual for PTWC set up, and then maybe queueing new content.. My Halloween store job comes back this summer and, while the routine and income certainly help, it is time and energy spent.

My goal is to get back on my old fornightly schedule as of August 1st.

Which is a Thursday. Remember when I used to post every single Thursday? Whew. Would be nice, but I don’t see that happening soon. Biweekly was usually manageable.

So. Tidbits and crumbs for now. Back to big posts in August!