Welcome, 2016

2015 was a kind of crazy year for me. WordPress was kind enough to do the 2015 blogging report for this blog, because I have Jetpack enabled, and I found it reminded me to actually post something here. If you want to see Everyday Magic’s blogging year in review, you can do so here. What …

World Suicide Prevention Day 2015

I don’t know. There was a big post I wanted to do about my Oma and my mom and my aunt and how suicide/suicidal ideation/suicide attempts runs in our family, at least on the female/FAAB side, and how Oma would have appreciated that her birthday is also World Suicide Prevention Day, and how Mom and …

Places where the gods are NOT

So I was thinking about my wording in my post from the other day, about how my faith has helped me in difficult times: In my faith I’m well aware that the gods are not omnipotent, nor omniscient. (Omnipresent? maybe, but not in the way it’s usually meant when speaking of any particular deity, I …

30 Days of Paganism: Places of spiritual significance

There are two types of “place” that I’m going to talk about here. One is a general type of place. The other is a specific spot in the world that I’d like to make pilgrimage to. General types of places Rivers Why: A few main reasons. Rivers are associated not only with Brighid and (tangentially) Manannan …

30 Days of Paganism: The future of Paganism

I want there to be more for onion-hoers. I want there to be more polytheist/pagan community centres, where people of all pagan stripes can rent rooms for classes, hold weekly get togethers, do ritual, meet for coffee, drop their kids off for religious education…the list goes on. I want frameworks put together for general eclectic …

30 Days of Paganism: One misconception about Paganism you’d like to clear up

IT’S NOT WICCA. Seriously, though, that is a BIG misconception out there — that “paganism” is just another word for “Wicca.” It’s really really not! Using the definition I’m most comfortable with, paganism is a big, umbrella term to refer to any religion that is not Abrahamic and self-identifies as pagan. The self-identity thing is …

30 Days of Paganism: How your faith has helped you in difficult times

It helps about as much as anything else, I guess. Or maybe I’m not defining “difficult times” properly, here. See I tend to think of most of my life as “difficult times”, even when things are good, because I suffer from mental illness and spend much of my time locked in depression and anxiety. So …

30 Days of Paganism: Any “secular” pastimes with religious significance, and why

I do have some secular pastimes that have, over time, acquired religious significance. Knitting/Crochet For the longest time it was just a way for me to carry on family traditions, and I loved doing it. At some point I got the lightbulb that it was Brighidine work, and it turned out I’m not the only …

For Me, Internet Paganism IS Paganism (so maybe speak for yourself)

Sweet Dionysos I have had it with this fucking bullshit. John Halstead, self-described humanistic pagan, has written yet another blog post wherein he tries to be a gatekeeper of paganism, continuing on his awesome roll of hurting other pagans by acting like an asshole. (I’m not linking it. He doesn’t get traffic from me. You …

30 Days of Paganism: Priest? Clergy? One or both? Neither?

I tend to differentiate between ‘priest’ and ‘clergy’. There’s a venn diagram where they overlap, but I do think they are different roles. Priest/ess For me a priest or priestess is either someone who has been called by the gods (or whatever) to serve Them/dedicated themselves to serving the gods in some capacity or has …