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Joy is sacred, He said, and I didn’t understand. Isn’t all of this serious stuff? Shouldn’t I be in awe and terror of You?

Do you respect Me? Do you take Me seriously when I need you do that?

Recently I had a friend ask me what it was like to write with Loki. I've been mentally chewing on this for a bit, simply because I don't know if I can describe it as a process - I've had people ask me for years "where do you get the ideas from?" and my answer is that I have no idea; they just show up.

Loki, as His shell character, just showed up. I didn't spend any time making a character worksheet for Him. I didn't have to ask Him any of His likes, dislikes, fears, desires, or strengths; I just knew them. I knew Him, and that knowing was so completely natural that I didn't even question it.

Mercury retrograde is a time for introspection and examination. This MR, I decided to take this to heart, and experiment with deepening my practice. I know that sounds hoity toity and whatnot, but in reality what it means to me is that I’m looking at how to deal with my PTSD and how it affects my practice. Symptoms come and go, but when it’s bad, I have avoidance symptoms, particularly emotional numbing. If you’re unfamiliar with the terms, avoidance symptoms are the mind’s way of avoiding the emotions involved in the trauma; emotional numbing is exactly what it sounds like; you feel distance, not happy, not sad, just…nothing. It’s not “meh” either, because it’s not indifferent, unless you’d count “well I haven’t engaged in self-mutilation, that’s good, right?” as meh. Mild depression might be a better descriptor.

I have bouts of this off and on, some more severe than others. December 2014 was bad; I had two major deaths in the family that year. My grandmother I expected, because her dementia had been worsening for several years. My father – he had PTSD himself, and he disappeared a year before he died, so there was no goodbye, there was just him, gone who knows where, a stranger on the phone telling me that they had my Daddy at the morgue. So vacillating between depression, mourning, and emotional numbing is how I spent my holidays. Not that it was all bad – Loki’s been very patient with me. For all that people talk about Him, chaos, blah blah, He is a God Who understands grief. I get the impression that sometimes people think if you’re involved with a Deity that your life will be perfect and you’ll never have any problems. No one’s life is problem-free, and being involved with a God does mean that I have better tools to deal with my issues than I’d have on my own. I’m grateful for that.

Although they are only breath, words which I command are immortal --Sappho

When I was a younger woman, I wanted to be a Writer; I wanted to be an Author, and I wanted to write literary fiction and poetry. In 2002, that changed dramatically, because my Muse sidled up to me and suggested a romance story. I'd never done that sort of thing before, and while I wasn't morally against it, I wasn't sure if I could do a good job of it. And it didn't particularly match my mental map of myself - I dabbled in romance reading, mostly well-written historical romances, but the genre blending of speculative romance was in its infancy then.

But I jumped in and found that I loved writing romance. There are people who think that writing to that genre is easy and formulaic; I think they should try it themselves and see how "easy" it is to write to the guidelines while making the characters and situations fresh, fun, and invigorating. There's also more than a little whiff of sexism about those who are dismissive of romance entirely; romance is a genre that concerns itself with women's desires and inner lives.

After some prodding by Himself and some encouragement from friends, I'm taking a stab at the Pagan Experience Project. I'm not necessarily going to do every prompt all the time, but if the prompt elicits good thinky thoughts, I'll share them. I've decided to start with week two's prompt on personal practices.

Loki's not a terribly formal Deity, and and so many of my practices are not either; I share morning coffee with Him every day; I meditate once a day; ideally I do yoga, but that practice is a work in progress.

(Image of Loki by Astral Eventide, commissioned by me in 2011)

The prompt for Week 3 of the Pagan Experience is to blog about Deity - Those Who guide you. Considering the fact that this blog is pretty much The Loki Show, it's probably redundant to introduce Him here; if you read my blog, you're familiar with His work.

Language shapes our perception of reality, and multiple words for a concept reflect the nuances of that concept. The typical example that most people have heard is that Inuit people have multiple words for snow, because their lives depend on it; its presence in different forms affects their lives in different ways. In English, we just have snow.

And this is not the only word that we only have one word for that another culture has multiple words to express, which brings me to love. English has one word for love, and while I love Loki, I love my child, and I love tacos, each one of those loves is a very different type of love. Ancient Greek had multiple variations on love; bhakti has different types: