Falkabarn

I started taking myself seriously as a Heathen blogger about four years ago, with my February 2018 post “The Geology of Ragnarok.” I don’t know for sure if I still stand by that post, especially now knowing that Fimbulvintr probably described a volcanic winter rather than an ice age, but it did show the very early inklings of a Heathen practice that would strongly emphasize the carbon cycle–and the disruption thereof.

When I made my pledge and then started taking myself more seriously as a Heathen, in general, I spent more time with the text than the emotional aspect. And then, as an admin in a Lokean group and trying to handle that relentless shitshow, being curious about the thought processes and motivations for why they kept fucking happening. This is probably where I started to have a recognizable niche, because these posts performed ridiculously well and one of my search term hits is “tumblr Loki Lokeans.” Ironically, most of the teachable moments came specifically from the Facebook group. If I was critiquing behavior on Tumblr, it was probably limited to spongecakegate, astral babies, or I was using it for window dressing.

For some reason, the founder of that group referred to my blog as “useful,” which to me reflects a frightening lack of self awareness. Which is the number one most annoying behavioral tendency I’ve seen in Lokean groups.

Anyway.

As I took up an interest in anarchist theory–or maybe began to recognize I was sort of on the way there anyway, and decided to actively cultivate that outcome–I fancied myself an essayist for a minute or two. My writings about Heathenry became more longform, more critical, more interested in making a case for how Heathenry might create a freer, safer world–but mostly tearing into it for the way it was failing to do so because “inclusive” Heathenry would rather rest on its laurels.

This is the number one reason that Heathens and anarchists both annoy me, which is a nuisance, because I am still a Heathen anarchist. It turns out “you’re doing it wrong, you’re not the boss of me” is a pretty reliable tendency in both categories and it’s a small wonder they overlap.

Why even blog about Heathenry?

I can’t shut up. I love to complain, way too much. Maybe it’s a culture thing I picked up from my family. Talk about the plight of a distant cousin over some Yuenglings. Talk about the most terrible thing you saw on the news, over some Yuenglings. Bitch and moan. Yuenglings optional.

Usually I would have a can of seltzer nearby while writing, anyway.

But I also grew up getting yelled at for complaining a lot, and I don’t know if it was unfair judgement of a really sad kid (because I was a really sad kid) or if I really was that whiny. So when I feel the urge to complain, I reflexively try to connect it to a broader context, as if I am trying to justify why I take issue. I know, rationally, that I can just not like things, or behaviors, or people. But as you might imagine, I’m on the defensive by default.

And often, the behavior that troubles me is maybe normalized in the particular setting where it’s showing up, but it’s just so goddamn unhealthy and obnoxious that I don’t feel like I can get away with simply Not Liking It. If the behavior is driving clever and promising people away, if it’s exhausting, if it enables oppression, if it doesn’t help anyone but the person misbehaving, it’s bad behavior.

So I try to make my complaining…helpful. And it seems, by and large, that people have found those kinds of posts helpful. Which is nice to know.

But it got really tiresome after a while. And so, even when I had the time, I was constantly getting stuck on posts. I have no shortage of ideas, I have 55 drafts at the time of this writing (which naturally includes this post). But I couldn’t finish one to save my life. I felt like I had lost the ability to stick to the expectations that I had created. I figured that either what I did publish would be overlooked (a realistic fear, because that repeatedly happens), or it was at risk of being nitpicked at. I felt like I had peaked. And maybe I have, because changing the blog name certainly didn’t do me any favors.

Once or twice I would dig out an old post that I felt didn’t fit, and would publish it anyway because it was still ready to go, and at least it was something. And it doesn’t feel great because I have gotten accustomed to taking myself seriously. Which is a little weird for a Lokean.

Although I do wonder now and then if I still can or should call myself a Lokean. While Loki is officially one of my primary deities, and he’s the only one I have any active sworn responsibilities to…I do very little. And I mean, very little. I am technically in violation of my pledge more often than not because I can hardly claim to be helping my community or pursuing ordination to the best of my ability. I am, however, being very good about making sure my shrines are cleaned off once a month. Because if I don’t, they will collect dust for months.

The thing about the pledge is it was kind of like having a baby to save a marriage. (Not an actual marriage, by the way. I am not a godspouse.) I was slacking really badly at the time that I made it, and I thought it might help light a fire under my ass. And I was right, initially. I threw myself hardcore into lore research and various volunteer opportunities. That’s a big part of why the nature of my blog shifted the way it did.

And then I very predictably got unfocused again. I initially typed “lazy,” but this was in the context of The Plague coinciding with me starting a steady job, which became a steady but horribly destabilizing job. The worst period of my life was age 16, but the first year of covid is a very close second. I am not “lazy” for becoming unproductive under these circumstances. But it did mean that my level of compliance dropped sharply.

I want to believe that it’s been politely overlooked, given the various situations. But it has become one more thing I tell myself I’m not doing well enough.

And anyway, my practice has expanded to the point that Loki is still central but definitely does not enjoy the degree of emphasis that he was probably accustomed to.

I keep announcing that I want to be less serious, as if this is an effective way to talk myself into it (it is not!), and my therapist has been trying to urge me to loosen up to the best of my ability for three years. And it’s not like I haven’t made progress, but it’s not like I’m making the progress that I would like to make, either.

I feel like almost every paragraph here starts with “I.” Something that I find terribly embarrassing. Maybe unreasonably so. If I’m the person who makes all the content (and I am), and if this blog was always supposed to be about my practice and my opinions and values (and it is), I might have to reach the conclusion that it’s only reasonable if I focus on myself and admit to doing it.

I guess.

Speaking of being self-centered, you’ll notice that there’s a Ko-Fi button at the bottom of most posts now. This links to my tip jar. In addition to blogging, I also write rituals for the public, which takes time and sometimes money. Tips help me justify the fact that I do this.

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.