instead of writing.
Obviously.
There's great sturm und drang in the Pagan communities right now over a number of things. Most are being played out here, in one place or another. Rancor, condemnation, hurt, fear...the standard variations that come back to bite us on our collective butts again and again.
Some of my thinks about it included--
my community is full of idiots
my community has too much time on its hands
my community loves to fight and argue
my community should be about the business of our various spiritual systems and notions of divinity
my community--wtf
My community--which is made up of an impossible-to-know number of subsets--is like barely interlocking rings in a disordered chaos of time and space. We are humans, for the most part, and we like to put ourselves and each other in tidy boxes, so that we are easier to understand and to interact with. The problem is the boxes don't fit exactly and then I'm in a box and you're in another box and then we get territorial about our boxes.
And because we are often a minority within a minority group, we get a little hinky about our prospects for being heard, for being respected, for being safe. Sure, we've peed in all the corners of our own box but what's that I smell? Have you peed on the corner of my box? How dare you.
For my sins, I am a Pisces with Moon in Scorpio and Scorpio on the Ascendant. Before I knew much about astrology (and please understand, I still know next-to-nothing about it), I got the whole Pisces Sun thing. Mystic, intuitive, creative, empathic. But what I didn't get was the Scorpio interface. See, I'd be all Piscean--soft and mystical ad nauseum--and someone would hurt my feelings. Really deeply, because I'm a Pisces--I have lots of feelings.
When that happened (let's be real here--when that happens), there was an interesting thing that occurred hard on the heels of the aforementioned hurt. I wanted vengeance. Big time. Now that I know about the Scorpio thing, I describe it this way--someone hurts my big gooey Piscean feelings and that double Scorpio comes out on either side, like velociraptors. Someone has hurt us. They will be destroyed.
My community--you and you and you and yes, even him--reacts in much the same way. We either keep on keeping on, doing what we know we need to do, whether it is worship or growing food or reading tarot cards. Or we get our feelings hurt and go hide in a corner and vow to never interact with Those People ever again. Or we lash out and defend our territory and our honor and our beliefs. And we renew peeing in the corners of our boxes and know we have triumphed.
Or we do a combo of all of the above.
And we are acting out of ancient human patterns that have come down through our Ancestors, riding the double helix of our DNA. It is encoded and it takes effort to break the code, even if we choose to...and I'm not suggesting that we do. What I am suggesting is that my community is mostly the fringes of the dominant and dominating culture and we have patterns that grow from that position within the larger culture. As we grapple with notions of territory and hierarchy--when we peer from the bottom rung of the ladder--we grab on to tried-and-true ways of scrambling to the top, often treading on the tired hands of the people most like us.
Perhaps it is time for, us as we mature (or not) in these wonderful spiritual systems, to remember our collective history and find ways to let all paths lead the walker to the envisioned destination, to mind our own business and practice the ancient ritual of hospitality.
I'm sure you'll let me know if I'm mistaken about any--or all--of this.