Gender Agnosticism

There are very few things I know for sure.

This is true in all areas of my life, but right now I want to talk about just a few.

About gender, and the gods.

I don’t know what gender is. Not really. I have some thoughts — I think it’s a social construct, but unlike a lot of people who use that term, I don’t think that means it’s unimportant. Maybe someday we will do away with the social construct of gender and it will no longer matter, and we’ll probably have some other construct take its place. But I think that so long as it is a construct we use, it is important, because it does shape our lives.

Almost everything in human life is a social construct, after all. Doesn’t mean they don’t matter, and doesn’t mean you can wiggle your nose and make them disappear.

So when I say “gender is a social construct,” the end to that sentence is not “and that means your gender identity is meaningless.” Your gender identity does mean something. It means something to you, and it means something to humanity, in the way we think of and conceive gender, and working to change our perspective from something that is rigidly binarist to something more open-minded.

I also think that gender is a spectrum. Or maybe I don’t — maybe what I’m thinking of as being a spectrum is masculinity, femininity, and whatever is in the middle of those things. (I don’t want to use the term androgyny, because of the current connotations it has.) Maybe I do think gender is a spectrum, but not in a flat line; a spectrum within a 3D polygon. Infinite possibilities abound.

A picture of the Aurora Borealis. It is in shades of green and purple.
Pictured: gender. Or maybe not.

And I don’t know what the gods are, but I know how They present to me, I know how They interact with me — so while I’ll never know the totality of Their existence, I know some things about Them.

One thing I know is when I connect to Manannan mac Lir, my father, I get a sense of deep maleness. I don’t know how to describe it other than that — as a god, He comes across as very much id-ing as a man. A man who tried to steal my Mary-Janes when I went to the beach, a man who is gentle and loving and nurturing, a man who defies all the stereotypes we have about what “makes” a man.

When I connect to Brighid, I get a sense of deep femaleness. I get the sense that She identifies as a woman. A woman who works as a blacksmith, making weapons for battle. A woman who loves other women. A woman who will steal cows from the rich to give to the poor. A woman who is the flame, is the sun; who inspires creation, but is not to be trifled with. A woman who defies stereotypes of what “makes” a woman.

And finally, when I connect to the Morrigan, I get a sense of deep queerness. A sense of liminality, a sense of existing between genders, or maybe outside them. She is a genderqueer goddess, in my experience. And not because She’s traditionally seen as female but defies stereotypes; because when I connect to Her, that is the sense I get.

These feelings I have about the 3 gods who are central to my practice are not based in Their lore. I didn’t look at the myths of Brighid and go “Well, She’s about creation, so definitely female,” or look at the myths about Manannan and go “Well, pigs are one of His animals, so definitely male,” or look at the Morrigan and say “She defies female stereotypes, so She can’t be female.” It has nothing to do with the lore, and everything to do with my experiences of Them.

Is gender a social construct for the gods, too? Is it a different social construct from ours? Are They more welcoming of non-binary genders? Are They all trans?

Or are They, in Their purest, most whole forms, beyond gender? Is gender a dress They put on to interact with us so our heads don’t explode?

I do not know the answers to these questions. I will likely never know the answers to these questions, at least not while I’m still corporeal and walking about here on earth. What I do know is what I experience from the gods, and that is what I have to go on.

And I don’t know why I’m genderqueer, either. I don’t know except that when I read about non-binary genders in my 20s, I started crying, because it felt like I’d finally found something that fit. I spent 20 years not feeling right — not right in my body and not right in my head. I spent my childhood thinking I was bad at being a girl, so I should be a boy, instead — but I wasn’t any good at being a boy. Nothing felt right.

Since coming out, I went through a transition. Some non-binary people don’t identify as trans, because they feel they didn’t go through a transition. That’s not the case for me. I did change, inside and out. I stopped trying to be something I wasn’t; I stopped living a lie. I finally understood why I went through such intense hatred of my body, and while I can’t stop the dysphoria, knowing what it is helps me live with it, helps me cope.

I still have conditional privilege, which means I “pass” for a cis woman a lot of the time, and people think that’s what I am. The truth is, if you see me in a dress and with my hair covered, I am not presenting as female. I am presenting as what I am — genderqueer. Or genderfluid, as I also identify.

The idea that androgyny must do away with any traditionally feminine characteristics is part of the reason I have such an issue with the word. You can be androgynous and have prominent breasts, or a curvy figure. Androgyny shouldn’t mean “resembling an anime hero.”

My lack of a binder and packer (due to finances more than any other reason) doesn’t invalidate my genderqueerness. My being a femme doesn’t invalidate it either. Had I been assigned male at birth and gone through the same journey of self-discovery that I have in this life, I would be just as femme. It would just be more dangerous for me to exist that way.

People ask “well how do you know you’re genderqueer if you’re just going to look like a woman all the time anyway?”

All I can ask them is “how did you know you were the gender you are?” Because getting into a long explanation about how presentation doesn’t define someone’s gender for them isn’t something I often have spoons for.

I don’t think you can define “woman” or “man” or “genderqueer” (or “agender”) with a set of stereotypes. Someone isn’t a woman because they like to cook and clean; someone isn’t a man because they like to tinker on cars. You can’t define someone else’s gender for them. If they say they are a woman or a man or genderqueer or without gender, then they are. And if they discover that that term wasn’t right for them, and find a new one, that doesn’t invalidate their identity.

I don’t know how or why I’m genderqueer, all I know is that I am. I don’t know how or why the gods I interact with have identified as They have; all I know is They have, and it’s influenced the cosmology I’ve put together surrounding Them. Instead of being based on dualities, my cosmology is based on a triadic model. Land, sea, and sky. Birth, life, and death. Female, male, and non-binary. And no, these qualities are not necessarily associated with each other.

I don’t know if this model will ever work for anyone else. I know it works for me, and that I’m going to continue to build a religion based on it, and share what I can with the world.

I don’t know if my thoughts about gender and the gods are anywhere near correct. Maybe gender isn’t a spectrum. Maybe it’s not even a social construct — maybe there is an immutable Truth about gender out there, and we humans have fucked it all up, and actually there are 6 genders and they have nothing to do with supposed biology (we say our binary system is about biology, but people don’t assign gender based on a karyotyping of an infant — they assign it based on the appearance of the infant’s genitals). I don’t know.

What I do know is that if someone’s identity isn’t actually hurting anyone, or themselves, then we need to trust that they know themselves best and leave them the fuck alone.

Trans and non-binary identities don’t hurt other people. The idea that they do is a lie; anti-trans propaganda spread by people who are scared of living in a world that doesn’t accept a rigid binary system as law. The belief that the very existence of trans or non-binary folks will erase people of binary genders is wrong.

I may not know much about what gender is, or what the gods are, or even if I’m anywhere near right when I say I experience the gods as having gender identities. I may not know why I’m genderqueer. I may not know why gender is a Thing at all — why and how the hell did we come up with this stuff, anyway?

What I do know, despite all my gender agnosticism, is that people have a right to self-identify.

What I do know is that there is room in our world for multiple gender identities.

What I do know is that I have no interest in erasing women from existence. I have no interest in erasing their identities.

What I do know is that if you feel my identity as trans non-binary, or anyone else’s identity as trans, if you feel these identities erase yours — then the problem doesn’t lie with us. It lies with you, and your discomfort with your own identity.

I’m solid in my identity as genderqueer. If I met someone tomorrow who is exactly like me in almost every way, except they ID as a cis woman, it would not shake my comfort in identifying as genderqueer.

What does it say about people like Ruth Barrett or Cathy Brennan that the very existence of trans folks makes them so unsure of themselves, to the point where they need to declare war on us just to feel secure in their own identities?

What truth does that reflect back on them?

I Grew Up in the Goddess Movement, but it is no longer home

I talk sometimes about how I was raised pagan; sometimes about how I was raised Buddhist. Both are true. My mother is Buddhist and taught me about Tara, played the 21 Praises of Tara and Wind Horses in the car for me, taught me the Om Mani Padme Om meditation with my very own mala…but she also introduced me to a range of religious and cultural traditions, including Judaism, Mexican syncreticized Christian+indigenous practices (Dia de Muertos), and the Goddess Movement.

My mother’s involvement in the Goddess Movement wasn’t really direct; instead, it was via her good friend, my “Auntie”, that she and I were part of it. (I have lots of people who are family members to me, though they are not related by blood.)

I spent a good portion of my childhood going to Goddess Movement events and learning how to read oracle cards and do energetic cleansings of auras from my Auntie. I learned drumming, and smoke-cleansing with bundles of sage, and Goddess chants from the women at these events. I learned that my body was sacred, that I was sacred, that I was not worthless like I kept on being told I was. I learned about love and sisterhood, and the women I was surrounded by were like mothers and aunts to me.

It was a much needed balm for me. It was empowering, and was in large part the basis for my religious path-seeking leading me to paganism. And for the longest time, I have felt safe among women who are members of the Goddess Movement, or who remind me of the women I grew up surrounded by.

This is no longer true.

Recently a bunch of people put together an IndieGogo campaign for an anthology called Female Erasure. It’s an anthology of radical feminist “essays” about how dangerous us trans folks are.

The people who are putting this together are some well-known anti-trans radical feminists, Dianics, and members of the Goddess Movement. I’ve been reading various things about this for a few days; it occurred to me I didn’t know who Ruth Barrett was. So I clicked on her name on FB, to learn more about her.

There’s a picture of her wearing a purple caftan-type thing with Celtic knot designs, holding a drum. She has wavy white hair.

She looks just like the women I grew up around. The same women who taught me I was sacred, I was worthy. The same women I came to view as a village of mothers and aunties, there to support my single mom in raising a fierce daughter.

The same women who now will likely reject me, tell me I am trash, I am not worthy, I am a liar and a perpetrator of violence against women. Simply because I started living my truth.

I started crying when I saw her picture. It was too much. Here I was sitting in chat with friends, discussing this load of crap, reading up on it, seeing yet another thing from the radfem/Dianic/Goddess Movement crowd that is promoting violence against me and people like me…and it’s being spearheaded by a woman who looks safe to me. Who looks like a woman I could have trusted when I was 10 years old.

When Gee Whatapest was doing her anti-trans song and dance, it didn’t feel like much of a personal betrayal to me, because she had never been terribly important to me, personally, in my journey, and there’s enough space between the Dianics and the Goddess Movement as a whole that I didn’t really feel any personal connection between them.

But I guess I have to face up that the Goddess Movement is not the safe place I thought it was. That the women who are part of it are not safe people for me to be around. That to them, I am not sacred. I am not worthy. I never have been.

And that is a betrayal. It cuts deep. I have started crying again while writing this post, and I don’t know how to even finish it off coherently.

It’s starting to feel like every single thing I ever thought was safe…isn’t. And I have nothing more to retreat to; if I want safe haven, I must build it myself.

I am so tired, and building safe haven takes so much work. I don’t know if I can do it.

Please, if you can, report the IndieGogo campaign for promoting violence. This is anti-trans bigotry. It’s a manifesto of hate. They want to erase us from existence. They want us dead.

And if you don’t feel safe getting involved, I understand. I honestly don’t feel safe writing this; the organizers have talked of their plans to doxx trans activists. I don’t even know if I’ll post it. Certainly others have said things better, and more coherently, than I am right now.

But it’s personal to me, so maybe that’s exactly the reason I should post it.

I’ve been kicked out of home. There is no place for me to return to. I can only go forward, and build myself a new home out of whatever I find on the road I am on.

Ebooks, Disability, and the Morrigan

You may have seen my Twitter rant the other week (later c&ped to my FB page in chronological order, for easier reading), when I started talking about how pagan booksellers need to provide ebooks, or they’re contributing to (dis)ableism within the greater pagan community. Here’s an expansion on that.

Ableism (disableism across the pond) is already alive and well in the pagan community. The majority of public events and rituals are held in non-accessible spaces, and not much thought is given to disabilities — and certainly not to “invisible” ones. If you’re not actually in a wheelchair 24/7, the community basically doesn’t see you. (And even then, good luck finding an event you can be part of.)

I was lucky to be part of an outlier in this regard with my first real local pagan community — one of the long-term members was in a wheelchair, so most public rituals and events were accessible to them, and lots of thought was given to accessibility for wheelchair-users. Still, there were other areas where disability wasn’t thought of, because it wasn’t realized to exist.

This problem is widespread, because it’s widespread in our larger society. Pagandom is comprised of people from that larger society who have shook off some assumptions from that society, but by no means all of them.

Ebooks (and audiobooks, to a somewhat lesser extent, because some ebook readers do have software that will read aloud books to you so that need is partially covered) are necessary for many disabled individuals to be able to read books at all. There are people with sight impairment who can’t read physical books. There are people with neurological issues who can’t read physical books. There are people who physically cannot hold physical books and need something on a light ereader. (Physical books can be fucking heavy. My Kindle is a feather by comparison.)

Yet in pagandom, there is a resistance to making ebooks available to the public. Some pagan authors say they don’t want to put out ebooks because they don’t want their books to be pirated — and think that somehow, refusing an ebook at all will stop piracy. While I can understand how much it sucks to be pirated (been there, done that), they’re flat out wrong in their assessment.

Refusing to put out ebooks doesn’t stop piracy; if anything, it encourages it. There are tons of books available for downloading that have not been put into ebook form; people *will* take the time to scan the physical books and turn them into PDFs. So by refusing to put out ebooks, you’re not actually stopping pirates; you’re just hurting potential customers. (And yourself, by extension.)

Not only that, you have to accept one simple truth if you want to be an author in today’s world: you will never 100% stop piracy of your work. Period. You must accept that your books will be pirated. And that really sucks. It does. There are plenty of things you can do to mitigate piracy, but stopping it outright would mean changing humanity on a fundamental level, and good luck there buddy. There will always be people who pirate ebooks and who will never pay you for them, who will keep on putting your books up on site after site after countless takedown demands. And there will always be people who feel they are forced into piracy for various reasons.

You can’t stop the first; you can stop the second. Here’s how: get your books into libraries. Don’t know how? Figure it out. Have a publisher? Bug them to do it. But getting your books into library systems means expanding access — and I can tell you that a lot of people who pirate ebooks won’t if the book is available to borrow from their library.

The second way to mitigate piracy: make your ebooks cheap. I’m serious. If your ebook costs more than 10-12 dollars, you deserve to be pirated, ffs. That’s highway robbery. Find a price below ten bucks that you are satisfied with, and stick to it. (Also, be realistic — your 30-page chapbook better not cost more than 2.99, and then that price only if you’re a big name that people will buy anyway.) The only time you should be charging over ten dollars for an ebook is if it’s a box set of several different books, or, possibly, a really massive tome that is super academic and will take people years to read. Then a higher price tag is forgivable. But if your ebook is more expensive than copies of your physical book (which is common for trad-published books out there)? There is a serious problem.

And just like that we’re back to disability. Here’s the thing about disability — often, disabled people are poor. We don’t have a lot to spend on things like books that will help us religiously because even if we do get assistance, there’s very little in the way of it. Where I live, I can’t get assistance because I’m not “disabled enough” — but I can’t work outside the home, either, and the last time I tried it disabled me further (I now have tendinitis in both wrists, and yet somehow am still blogging. Glutton for punishment I suppose). I am very much fucked, financially as well as physically. So no, I don’t have an extra 16 dollars for your masterpiece on NeoWicca and especially not for a digital file where I’m not also paying for printing costs. Lower the price. (Not to mention, many ebooks bought through big retailers you’re not actually paying for the file; you’re paying for the right to have the file. Amazon can take away your ebooks at any time.)

Where disability and class intersect is also another reason many disabled people might not be able to do physical books: lack of space.

I have 1,000+ books in my house (800+ are mine; the rest are the Ogre’s). I accumulated most of them before becoming disabled, but I still have an issue with library sales or books for donation. I tend to bring more home. And regardless the ecstatic joy I feel in being surrounded by so many books, I need to stop, because here’s the thing: I don’t have space for them. I’m poor and disabled; all I can afford is a tiny little 2-bedroom basement suite with my spouse, and there really is not enough room for more books. Nor is there enough physical strength between the two of us to move them when it comes time to leave this place, whenever that is. I’m just hoping that we’re able to save up to pay for actual movers to do it this time, because all the last times I moved took years off the end of my life.

So, while I’d like to be able to buy a huge hardcover physical book about my favourite goddess, I can’t. I don’t have the space and can’t justify the extra volume. And that’s true for lots of other disabled people too.

This rant isn’t coming out of thin air. None of my rants really do. I’ve been chatting with a friend about their attempts to get ahold of an ebook related to their practice — it’s a book they really feel would help with their path, but there’s no ebook, and without an ebook my friend can’t read it.

Said friend contacted the author and asked about the ebook, specifically why it wasn’t available when it was a donor perk for the book’s IndieGogo campaign. The author said it was up to the publisher, and that they would know more.

So my friend contacted the publisher to ask. And the publisher said they weren’t planning on doing an ebook, because it “degraded hardcopy sales”.

This is the part where Morag blows up.

That is the biggest pile of bullshit I have ever heard in my life. Ebook sales don’t degrade hardcopy sales and even if they did, oh noes, we made more money from selling a book we didn’t need to print and ship! THE HUMANITY!

Look, if you want to be a publisher in this day and age, you better be willing to put out ebooks. And look, I get it — ebooks that aren’t straight, normally-formatted text can be harder to put out. I struggle to create poetry ebooks very often. But harder doesn’t mean impossible, and if you’re not willing to put out ebooks because you think it might degrade your hardcopy sales…well, I don’t know where you learned how to be a publisher, but you are seriously ignorant.

Disabled pagans deserve access to pagan materials. By refusing to put out ebooks, you are refusing them access. You are saying they are not worthy. (A message we get far too often.) And I don’t care if that’s not what you meant to say; it’s what you’re saying. Intent isn’t magic.

I’m really pissed off by this whole thing — not only because my friend is unable to get a hold of a book that they really want to read for their path building; not only because disableism is so bloody rampant in pagandom — but also because the book is about the Morrigan.

Something related to the Morrigan that can’t be accessed by her disabled followers.

Yeah, that doesn’t sound familiar at all, does it? Surely no one has ever tried to exclude disabled followers of tM from anything regarding her. Surely no one has ever espoused the idea that tM doesn’t want broken people, because broken people can’t be warriors. Right?

I’m not saying this is intentional — I’m not saying they’re refusing to put out an ebook on the Morrigan because they are actively trying to tell disabled followers we’re not welcome — but it is the message that comes across.

When you sign up with a publisher and do a crowdfunding campaign for your book on tM; when you make enough money not only to sit around and write the book, but also to travel out of the country on your book tour; when your name has been put on the map of tM people; when you become synonymous with tM to many pagans…you owe something to Her followers.

Even us disabled ones.

And that fact that you didn’t sit down with the publisher and make absolutely sure that this book would be accessible to all of tM’s followers really says to me that you don’t see us. You don’t see the disabled and poor followers of tM. We don’t count to you.

Which shouldn’t even be a surprise to me at this point, but I guess I really hoped this time would be different.

Signed,
a disabled, broken, fat follower of the Morrigan who hasn’t been rejected by Her yet — just Her other followers.

The Sacred Triad and the Wheel of the Year

Note: this post is written from the perspective of someone living in the Northern Hemisphere on the West Coast of North America. Also it is full of my headcanon about the gods. You shouldn’t take anything here as necessarily backed up by the lore or even other polytheists. 

Since deciding on the four fire festivals and how they worked with the three main gods of my practice, I’ve been struggling to find a way to fit in the solstices and equinoxes with the same cosmology. The 8 holidays of the NeoPagan Wheel of the Year are important to me — I have always loved the solstices and the equinoxes, and the four fire festivals balance out the year for me. I like the symmetry of having 8 holidays throughout the year that tell some sort of story about my cosmology.

The problem has been figuring out what that cosmology is, and how They fit into it.

A roaring fire upon logs in a brick fireplace.
Most of them involve fire in some way, though.

Imbolc is Brighid’s time, because, well, traditionally it is, and it also just is, in my experience, nevermind what tradition says. Brighid is birth and newness and spring and lambing and the start of all things; Imbolc is a fitting time for Her.

Where people might cock an eyebrow is where I assign Samhain to Manannan and Beltane to the Morrigan. A sex holiday to a war goddess? Lolwut?

But it’s a sovereignty holiday too, because sex and sovereignty are always together; and it’s a thinning of the veil and She is the queen of the fairies, the phantom ruler of the liminal spaces we fear. It’s International Workers’ Day, a day of revolution and the rights of labourers. And it’s the true start of Summer, and to me the Morrigan is not death, but life — the moments between when we breath our first and our last. She is what cuts off that life, but She is not on the other side. Life is the most liminal state one can be in; She is hot blood pumping in the veins; the thrill of the hunt; the ecstasy of sex; all the beauty and horror that comes with a life fully lived.

M’Lord Manannan is gentle, and loving, and death. He is the deeps of the ocean, the underworld; He is there to guide us to the land beyond living. When we step beyond the veil, it’s His hand we take in our own. It’s His embrace that tells us everything is okay. Where the Morrigan is life, and the moments leading up to death, and the decision to end life itself, Manannan is death Himself. They are in partnership and opposition.

He is also the rain and the mist, and here in BC October is notoriously rainy. It might not always be; the climate changes rapidly these days and I don’t know what kind of future we’re recklessly wreaking, but in my childhood memories fall is full of rainy days and puddles and changing leaves and the smell of woodsmoke, and my favourite holiday, Halloween. The holiday that makes me feel at home, that makes me feel safe; so is it any wonder that it’s sacred to my Father?

The August fire festival I had the most trouble with, as it’s normally referred to as Lughnasadh, and, well, Lugh has no spot in my practice. I’ve encountered Him before. He’s nice, but He’s not part of this. So I searched for a new word for the holiday, for a way to incorporate all of the Three into it, to make it a holiday for all of Them. Finally I settled upon Loafmass, and decided it would be a time of baking bread and gathering berries. Birth, life, and death are all represented in agriculture, in the processes of making foods, of gathering foods to eat. The beginning of August is too early to gather blackberries, but I consider them part of that season as well, part of the rituals of the Three, of our harvests, of the food that sustains us in its death.

I have yet to make bread, for many reasons that getting into now would make this post much too long. Suffice it to say I am determined to make bread for Loafmass at some point in the next few years; I am hoping that if it is not this year, it is next year.

So the four fire festivals sorted, even if I haven’t fully figured out what to do for them — I have the cosmology more or less nailed down. What about the other four holidays? I already knew that Summer Solstice had to be for Manannan, which I was trying to reconcile — His time was Samhain, the time of the ancestors, of death, but somehow it was also the Summer Solstice? What dates did Brighid and the Morrigan have? And how did I divide them up evenly?

Finally, last night it hit me. I drew out the months in a diagram and drew lines from holiday to holiday, to try and visually map it out, and suddenly it was clear: Manannan is death, and Brighid is re/birth, and the Morrigan is the liminal spaces in between.

On the Summer Solstice we have the Longest Day; it is the herald of the long march into dark. It is the Dying of the Light. It is the day that signals our march towards Winter, towards the dark, towards the long sleep of the earth. So of course it would make sense that it’s His day; He is joyful and full of mirth, and He signals the end of things, the long sleep in his arms.

Conversely, the Winter Solstice is the Longest Night, the herald of the return of the sun (Brighid). It is the Rebirth of the Light. It is sacred to Brighid, who is a midwife to all, including Herself. It is the beginning of things; we may not be fully awake yet, but every day we get a little closer to warmth and light.

And They are each present in each other’s solstice; during the Summer Solstice Brighid is the Sun, and at the end of the day She relinquishes Her rule over that half of the year to Him, lets Him take us to the dark — and during Longest Night He is the warmth in the darkness, the flickering on the edge of the fire, and with dawn’s light He returns rule to Brighid, lets Her lead us back to summer. And so it cycles.

Which leaves us with the equinoxes, vernal and autumnal, and who better to rule over the liminal times, the midpoints between solstices, than the Morrigan? When the Longest Night makes us question if we’ll ever see the sun again; when Longest Day makes us go nutty with lack of sleep, the equinoxes remind us that life goes on. Life is in balance. We only need to be patient, and we might yet grasp at some of it yet.

And now that I have a working cosmology, it’s time to figure out what rituals I plan on actually doing to celebrate these days and the Three. Especially as one is coming up fairly soon.

~Morag

Anger

i am not an angry girl
but it seems like i’ve got everyone fooled
every time i say something they find hard to hear
they chalk it up to my anger
and never to their own fear

ani difranco, not a pretty girl

I get accused of being angry a lot.

Technically, this isn’t incorrect. I have a deep well of anger within me; much like Terry Pratchett, I am an angry person, because I live in this world with all its injustices.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people’s tendency to dismiss what I say because I’m “angry”; to say I’m not worth listening to until I “calm down”.

My husband has this problem too, though I don’t know if his translates to online interactions as mine does. In person, we are both loud people, with loud voices. I’m actually louder than he is, but because he’s 6’6” and very broad-shouldered, people tend to associate more loudness with him than is factual.

If we each had a dime for the time someone has told us to “stop yelling” or to “calm down” because we’re “angry”, we’d have enough money to buy a house in the GVRD.

We’re both big, loud, people, who are angry on the inside but so very rarely let it actually show. Yet people are telling us, constantly, that we’re angry; disbelieving us when we calmly state “No, not angry, maybe a bit irritated”; continually telling us “You’re so angry” until, yeah, well, I’m fucking angry now, because you won’t fucking listen to me and keep telling me what I am.

It kinda feels like being Bruce Banner, or at least I’d imagine it does. Bruce Banner sighs in frustration; people around him gasp and flee and cower. Bruce Banner raises his voice a tiny bit; people trip over themselves to get away from him. Bruce Banner acts like a normal human being and people are like “Why are you HULKING OUT, man?”

People are constantly accusing me and my husband of hulking out when we’re no where near that level of anger. Trust me — it’s hard to miss us yelling. It’s hard to miss us actually displaying anger in person. It’s very fucking obvious.

Online, it seems to be a slightly different issue. I’ve noticed that people in meat-life who tell me I’m angry, or condescendingly tell me to calm down, are often women. Men are more likely not to see my meat-life anger as anger, and instead make fun of me, because apparently it’s “cute”. (Those men get hexed.)

However, online, about 99.9% of the people who accuse me of being “angry” when I’m not (ranting doesn’t actually equate to anger; at most, it means irritation — and if I am ranting out of anger, I usually state that very clearly in my post) are men. Those same men then proceed to indicate that whatever I say when I’m angry is invalid, because my anger makes me stupid and dense and unable to look at other points of view. Or something similar; the arguments they make are different, but equate to the same: don’t talk to me, woman, until you are calmer and more appropriately mannered to speak to your betters.

Being angry when you’re a marginalized person means your argument is invalid, see. This is a rule of the internet.

All of this is to say: if you read my last post and the only thing you got out of it was that I’m angry, you’re wrong, and your reading comprehension is sorely lacking. I wasn’t angry when I ranted about being religious, not spiritual. I was sort of irritated, because, yeah, this is a thing that irritates me, but that’s not the same as anger. That’s not the same as letting the deep well of anger within my being out for a breather. It’s a vent of steam, not a lava flow.

Having a deep well of anger within your being can be exhausting. It can also be empowering; it can fire me up and keep me going when nothing else can. But yes, often it is tiring. I have people who know about this deep well of anger ask me if it isn’t exhausting to be angry all the time.

Well, sometimes. But what, by far, is more exhausting? Having people tell me that what I say doesn’t matter because my emotions are uncomfortable for them. That is far more tiring than carrying legitimate anger for how completely messed up the world is.

I’m a Millennial who’s gotten screwed over, whose future children are going to be screwed over, who looks around and sees a shit-ton of injustice and very little I can personally do about it; of course I’m angry. That doesn’t mean that when I swear, I’m blowing up; it doesn’t mean that my rants are examples of my hulking out, and it certainly doesn’t mean that my arguments aren’t worth listening to.

Stop mistaking steam vents for flows of lava. Stop thinking a rumble means I’m blowing my top. Use the critical thinking skills the gods gave you, find your courage, and stop using emotions you’re uncomfortable with as an excuse to twist my words or say they’re worthless.

If you can’t do that, find another blog to read. One that doesn’t challenge you.

I’m religious, not spiritual.

I used to be fond of the phrase “I’m spiritual, not religious.” It seemed like a good way to indicate that I was interested in spirituality, but not Christianity specifically.

At a certain point, I realized it was a huge problem for me to use that phrase, or to use “religion” to refer to Christianity solely. So I stopped doing it, and started being more precise with my words.

Of course, realizing something you were doing was a problem and quitting means that when other people continue to do that same thing, it rubs you the wrong way even harder. You want to scream NO, THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS, I LEARNED, WHY CAN’T YOU?

Shouting that really doesn’t work, though. It just makes people hate you because you’re a meanie poo-poo head who cares about accuracy.

But, okay, let’s talk about all some of the problems with the very idea that religion=Christianity/Organized Religion(TM) and spirituality=literally anything else.

(First, let me define Organized Religion(TM): when talking about this specific phenomenon, of pitting spirituality and religion against each other in a false dichotomy, people often use the term “organized religion” as a shorthand for “any big religion we don’t like.” Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are the usual victims, here, though the last one least often, in my experience. However, this is inaccurate, as organized religion actually refers to way more religions than The Big Three — it means any religion “in which belief systems and rituals are systematically arranged and formally established.” [1] Hence, I am using Organized Religion(TM) to differentiate between the actual definition and the “it’s big and we don’t like it” definition.)

  • Mentioned above, but being mentioned again: it creates a false dichotomy between religion and spirituality that posits the superiority of one over the other. Which one is superior depends on who you’re talking to.
  • Following that: when you set up spirituality as superior to religion, you make it impossible for non-Christian religious people to talk about their practices without being denigrated by people who should be their peers.
  • …and when you set up religion as superior to spirituality, you make it impossible for people who don’t consider themselves religious to talk about their spirituality without being treated like crap.
  • Codifying religion as Christianity erases the existence of religious non-Christians, and means they must constantly explain themselves for other people’s satisfaction.
  • Furthermore, codifying religion as Christianity means that discourse is impossible, as people feel free to say “These are the things I don’t like about religion!” before listing off a bunch of Christianity-specific items, and when they are corrected by religious non-Christian people that those things are not inherently part of religion, they will reply that said non-Christian person obviously doesn’t know their own religion very well.
  • …which, needless to say, is a dick move and leads to lots of anger and hatred.
  • There’s not actually anything wrong with considering yourself spiritual, but not religious — what it really means is that you’re interested in matters of the spirit, matters that are often covered by religion, but that you don’t necessarily follow any specific tradition or system.
  • …but when “I’m spiritual, not religious” is backed up by the belief that “religious” means “Christian” and “spiritual” means anything else, including other religions, and what’s more that being spiritual is better than being religious, because religion is icky! — then it’s a problem. It’s inaccurate to say you’re spiritual, not religious, if you follow a religious tradition. It gives power to the idea that religion is always bad, as well as giving power to the idea that people who aren’t religious are better or more enlightened than people who are. It also gives power to the idea that Abrahamic religions are the only real religions, which is a problem regardless if you see religion as a good or bad force in the world.
  • It perpetuates religious illiteracy.

Also, the complete non-understanding of the words “religion” and “spirituality” leads to bullshit memes like this:

A picture of the ocean with the text "Spirituality is a personal relationship with the Divine. Religion is crowd control."

Things that are wrong with this meme:

  • spirituality (and religion!) are not necessarily theistic, nor is there necessarily any understanding of “the Divine” within them.
  • spirituality is not necessarily about a personal relationship with anyone.
  • religion is not “crowd control” and saying it is is fucking offensive to people who are religious.
  • religion is a set of practices and/or beliefs that people follow that may be personal or institutionalized. it may be theistic. it might not be. it is a broad term referring to many different traditions.
  • religion is not Organized Religion(TM).

The ocean is pretty, though.

Here’s another bullshit meme on this topic:

A picture of a young child wearing a straw hat is overlaid with the text "Religion is belief in someone else's experience. Spirituality is having your own experience.", attributed to Deepak Chopra.
Man, the bullshit is strong with this one.

Things that are wrong with this meme:

  • religion is not belief. Religion is a set of beliefs and/or practices that one can follow in one’s daily life.
  • having your own experience is not limited to non-religious spiritualities. you can have your own experience in religion. it is not all relying on what other people say they felt. sometimes it’s informed by others’ experiences, but not always.

And the picture is an odd choice. Random landscapes I can understand for religion vs. spirituality memes. I don’t understand what the young child with the dove has to do with this. But anyway.

Why does this stuff bug me so much? Because it means I never feel comfortable discussing my practices or beliefs in many, many, MANY pagan groups. People are always sharing memes like this one, followed by a bunch of other people crowing in agreement. What does that tell me? It tells me if I talk about my religious practices or beliefs, I will be seen as a brainwashed sheep who needs to be saved.

Well, let me tell you, sometimes your brain needs a good scrubbing after the crap people fling at you. And sheep are awesome.

I’m not spiritual beyond the fact that, y’know, I have a spirit and I do work with spirits. Beyond that the word “spiritual” is kinda meaningless to refer to my life and practices, or at least redundant. While “spirituality” really refers to matters of the spirit and religious matters, I don’t really like to use it for my practices — hence the title of this post — because I find it too vague and, well, redundant. “I’m a spirit-worker who’s spiritual!” No shit, Sherlock. However, when I’m talking about religion, I’m also talking about spirituality, because again, spirituality refers to things that are related to religious matters — so that’s why I have a tag on this blog called “Religion and Spirituality.” I might not use the term “spiritual” to refer to myself, but that doesn’t mean that religion and spirituality aren’t connected.

I am religious, in several different ways. I have the religion I’m in the process of building based around worship/work with the Sacred Triad (Brighid, the Morrigan, Manannan); it’s unnamed, but that doesn’t make it less of a religion. And it might branch out to connect to my Hellenic polytheism, or my Hellenic polytheism might branch out to become more eclectic. I don’t know yet. I’m part of the Otherfaith. I’m working on creating my own version of D’Angeline Recon. I have connections to Feri and Reclaiming. I go to the ATC’s parties.

None of these are really organized religions, except the ATC, but they are religions. And there’s nothing wrong with that. They aren’t crowd control. They’re sets of beliefs and practices that you can follow. They have real-world and real-life implications (and any religion that doesn’t deal with your real, mundane life is pretty useless).

I have lost a lot of my patience for these types of memes and ideas being shared, and my irritation has been building around this for a while, which is what created this post. I was hoping to be less ranty and more coherent, but work has been eating my face for a week and a half and I am seriously low on spoons right now. So I apologize if any of this is less than sensical; I’m pissy and very, very tired.

Bottom line, spirituality vs. religion is a false dichotomy that only serves to hurt people, create a false sense of superiority, and perpetuate religious illiteracy and it would be really nice if we could stop with it, thanks.

~Morag

[1]. Definition from Wikipedia, which has its issues but is a pretty good place to jump off from.

What I learned this month (about hymn-writing, mostly)

Note: this post contains animated gifs.

Setting out to write 30 hymns in 30 days didn’t feel like a super-ambitious goal, initially. I mean, it was a bit daunting, because I’d never written hymns specifically before, but the idea of writing something every day wasn’t scary (even if it was poetry). I figured it wouldn’t be easy, but also that I shouldn’t have any real big problems accomplishing it.

Maybe I shouldn’t have done it in a month with dental surgery?

I think, though, the recovery from surgery is only part of why I’m so behind on my hymns. I didn’t realize how much these hymns were going to take out of me. I didn’t realize how much work I was going to have to put into them.

Chuck the prophet from Supernatural saying "Writing is Hard."

It’s day 29/30, and I’ve written 11/30 hymns. I’ve gone in order*, at least, but still. I’m ridiculously behind. When I first fell behind I tried to catch up by setting out to write 3 hymns/day, which just shows that I was really not aware how much energy I need to put into these hymns.

I’m not beating myself up, though. Reading this blog post helped me with being okay with not living up to this commitment in the way I had envisioned. And as my friend Mary says, there are no unrealistic goals — just unrealistic timelines.

I’m human, and my writing style is pretty slow.

Ross Gellar tries to move a couch up stairs, screaming PIVOT!
Pictured: me.

So, I need to pivot, which is what I’m doing. I’m continuing on with the project, but I’m committing to one day a week to write hymns. I think probably Friday. I will set myself a minimum of one hymn on that day, and a maximum of 3. That means if I’m feeling the buzz of creative spiritual energy, if I feel like I should do more than one, I can, but if I’m only energetic for one, then I’m still making my goals. Of course, doing them once a week, between 1 to 3 hymns at a time, means I can’t tell when the project will be done. I’m just going to continue to do it until it is.

And, keeping in with the original project, I will post round-ups here of the hymns that have been published on the blog shrines.

On that note, here are the ones that are currently up that I haven’t linked to in a roundup post (previous roundup post here). I’ve yet to type up the last two I’ve done, so they’re not published yet.

Hymn #2: Brighid, queer lady love
Hymn #3: Brighid, protection

Hymn #12: the Morrigan, blood
Hymn #13: the Morrigan, fairy

Hymn #22: Manannan, the land of the dead
Hymn #23: Manannan, travel/passage

*Well, theoretically, as the “sex” hymn for the Morrigan ended up being more “sovereignty” related. The two are connected, so I’m not totally surprised, though it did sort of point out that maybe I’ve got more issues in that arena to work out than I originally thought. Also, now I need to decide what to do about that hymn and writing another one.

~

(Content note for the rest of this post: mention of mental illness & eating disorders)

I think I learned some other things this month. I learned I am terrible at building up good habits (I’m not talking about the hymns and falling behind; that’s really just a case of misjudging things). Or terrible at adulting. I mean, I guess I knew this already, but this month drove it home again. Dental surgery + recovery basically destroyed the whole month for me. Part of this is because I’m disabled, yes, and never have enough spoons, but a good chunk is also because I have zero discipline and spent way too many hours this month playing Civ 5 (which screwed up my sleep schedule, because I don’t get tired while playing Civ 5).

I keep trying to set out to have some balance in my life, to attend to my responsibilities as well as letting myself have time to play, and this works for a few weeks but inevitably it crumbles into me bingeing on something to the point of it being detrimental to my life. Maybe it’s a symptom of my depression — actually, likely it is. But I can’t help but feel that I’m better than my urges. I’ve managed, through many years of hard work and self-love, to get a handle on my Binge Eating Disorder — so why can’t I get a handle on my other binges?

And why don’t I ever binge on, I don’t know, writing, or working enough hours to pay rent, or cleaning the house? Things that would at least have a positive effect on my life?

(I know the answer to this question; I’m just frustrated.)

I have slowly gotten better over the years at self-discipline, but it’s such slow progress as to be nearly invisible — like progress in those clicker games like Cookie Clicker or Kittens Game. Except in real life, I can’t put in JavaScript into the console that will make me Adult Automatically. (Though who knows, that might be possible in the far off future.)

So this month has been another exercise in learning this same lesson that I’ve learned a bunch of times over but can’t seem to do anything about, no matter how hard I try.

I’m not saying I want to be perfect; gods know no one is. I just want to be better than what I am, which is, frankly, a hot mess.

Ralph Wiggum comes out of a room with his onesie on upside down. "I dress myself!" he proclaims.
True story.

So. On that thoroughly depressing note (sorry y’all), I’m going to log off and go do some more cleaning stints on the kitchen to try and get it ready to cook dinner tonight.

~Morag

30 Days of Hymns, Day 9: hymn round-up and reflection on my progress

Let’s start with the reflection. It didn’t take long for me to fuck this up in some way.

The first three days were great. I got up, got coffee, and made my first priority writing the hymn of the day. I did well, as those prompts were easy for me to get into. Day 4, however, I ran into a snag. I have associated queer lady love with Brighid for a while now, but didn’t really have any idea how to put that into a hymn. So I sat staring at a blank piece of paper for a while, then tried to write something, which was awful, and stared at that even longer before saying “Fuck it” and putting my concerns into Google. Google gave me this post, which I quickly read, and which gave me the inspiration I needed for the hymn.

However, I wasn’t very happy with the hymn as written. I didn’t feel it was as good as the others, so I delayed in typing it up. (I’ve been hand writing and then typing later; often edits are performed while typing it up. The handwritten version is my first draft. This is how I accomplish most creative — ie, fiction or poetry — writing.)

So I decided to sit on it until the next day. The next day, February 5th, I had a dentist appointment in the morning so I didn’t have time to sit and write a hymn before rushing out the door; we usually go to bed very late on Thursday nights and I got about 3 hours of sleep total before heading off to get jabbed in the mouth.

The dentists was supposed to be a couple of fillings, but we both felt it was more urgent to extract the remains of the broken tooth that’s been sitting in my mouth for about 4 years now. (My tooth broke while I was eating chips and there has been a hole in my mouth with jagged tooth-remains in the bottom for a while. I have not had the money to take care of it until now, as I’m now on my husband’s insurance. Marriage can be a great problem solver in some respects.) (No, Canadians do not get dental covered by our “universal” healthcare.)

Extracting the roots of this tooth actually counts as dental surgery, though it was not so involved as when I got my wisdom teeth out, so I sort of felt it wouldn’t be a big deal. I was wrong. It wiped me out. Probably a combination of the extraction and the epinephrine from the freezing, but when I got home I quickly fell asleep on the recliner and stayed like that for several hours. (Mr. Morag went and napped in the bedroom.)

I planned on writing the blood hymn for the Morrigan that day, I really did, and it would have been so appropriate because my mouth was bleeding from surgery and continued to do so until the next day. But it didn’t happen.

So on Saturday I was only a day behind, and planned to catch up. Didn’t get to it in the morning, but I figured I could do it that evening while Mr. Morag was out being a scary clown in gold lamé shorts. (He does stuff with a local burlesque troupe from time to time.) I did not. I vegged instead, because I was still out of it with my tooth.

Sunday was a wash for anything I wanted to do. I slept in too late to get up early and do things before Mr. Morag woke up and turned on the Superb Owl, so most of my day was full of football. My dream is that someday we have a house where my office is secluded enough that I can get whatever I need to get done on days when the TV is on while I need to work. Our basement suite is just too small to allow for that, unfortunately.

Of course, by this point the guilt spiral set in. I felt guilty for not doing the hymns for the past few days, which made it even harder to attempt to do them. It was easier to pretend they weren’t there than to actually tackle them and face my guilt. Not to mention, because the last one I’d written I wasn’t entirely happy with, my confidence in even writing more hymns was shot.

So Monday passed without me writing any hymns, too, and now I was 4 days behind.

Today I would have been 5 days behind but I finally put my butt in chair and wrote the next 2 hymns: blood for the Morrigan and the land of the dead for Manannan. I also made myself type up queer lady love (as well as the next 2 hymns) and I’ve found that now it’s typed, it’s much better than it was. Still not as good as I wish it were, but I’m trying not to let perfect become the enemy of good, here. I strive for perfection, which is both great and awful. It makes me work hard to do good things, but it also means I am never satisfied with anything. So I have to learn to let go.

I might try to tackle the next three hymns (Sunday’s, Monday’s, and today’s) tonight, as I’ll be up for a while (my sleep is totally messed up), or I might leave them until tomorrow. To be honest, the land of the dead wiped me out. It’s the longest one I’ve written yet, about double the length of the other ones. Most have been clocking in ~150 words; the land of the dead is ~330. Also the subject matter I found a bit taxing.

At any rate, the guilt spiral has been put away for now, so I’m feeling much better. My confidence is up as well. I fucked up in this project, but I’m recovering. There needs to be room for forgiveness for me messing up because dental surgery threw me out of whack.

(Speaking of, holy hell my mouth still hurts. I thought there would be relief when this tooth came out and there is, to a certain extent, but jesus my jaw is fucking killing me. Also I will not be surprised if I get dry socket, as I did when I got my wisdom teeth out.)

And writing this reflection has made me think I might eventually need to come up with better titles for these hymns rather than the prompt names. Something to ponder.

On to the round up!

Week 1 Hymns Round-Up

Only three hymns have been posted so far; I’ve typed up the other three but have not yet put them on the blogs. That will be happening today.

Hymn #1: Brighid, birth.

Hymn #11: the Morrigan, soil.

Hymn #21: Manannan Mac Lir, apples.

(The hymns are each numbered 1 on their respective sites, but within the whole scope of the project these are their appropriate numbers.)

Now, I’m off to finish cooking dinner for myself and Mr. Morag, and probably watch some TV with him or something.

~Morag

Imbolc and the 30 Days of Hymns project

A candle, lit, in a lantern is in the background. In the foreground, matches are arranged to make the shape of a house.
I associate candles in lanterns especially with Brighid and Imbolc.

Happy Imbolc, or Lughnasdh/Lammas if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere! I finished up Imbolc Advent last night before I went to sleep (so, 10:30am), and tonight I’ve got a few Imbolc projects I want to tackle. 1, writing on this blog and my Brighid blog-shrine. 2, cleaning the kitchen. (It’s yikes!ariffic.) 3, changing the hearth altar over from winter to spring, and leaving some things there for Brighid to bless tonight. I can’t leave things outside this year, because of where I live, so I am doing it at the hearth instead. (The hearth being our gas fireplace that we never turn on so I can actually keep stuff on top of it.)

I’ve felt really reenergized in my practice this past month, and it’s thanks in part to Erin Lund Johnson’s Imbolc Advent posts over at Her Eternal Flame. They’ve helped me renew my connection and create meaningful practice. Also, during Imbolc Advent I read the life-changing magic of tidying up by Marie Kondo, and I’m thinking that Imbolc Season is a great time to try to implement parts of KonMari into my life. It needs to be adapted for my life, but I still think it’ll work.

Spring is traditionally associated with cleaning; we call it “spring cleaning”, after all. It’s a time to open our doors after the long cold winter and shake out the dust, metaphorically (or literally) speaking. As the land outside wakes up after its slumber and renews itself, it makes sense to turn to a sleeping house and help it wake up by cleaning it up and out.

This is especially pertinent for me this year as we are still reeling from the renovations that started in our basement suite the week before our wedding, when we came home after Thanksgiving to find our house partially flooded. (Did I mention 2015 was a bucket of stress?) We were very lucky our belongings survived, but our house was in shambles from renos until December. I then spent a few weeks out of town taking care of family issues, and didn’t get back until the day before Christmas.

So the house is, needless to say, still in shambles. I am working very slowly on putting things to rights and reorganizing, and I have made some progress, but it is depressing as hell. I want this place to be clean and neat and organized and welcoming. I want to be able to have friends over at some point. I want to not feel depressed every time I look at things.

And this is why I’m going to try to implement KonMari, at least partially. I have to make adaptations because of things like mental illness, physical disability, and our current living situation, but I still think that even doing it partially will help a lot.

So Imbolc season promises to be busy for me, with cleaning and Brighidine activities and my current project, which had me writing a hymn in honor of Brighid today.

I mentioned on this blog at some point (can’t remember the exact place I did, or I’d link to it) that I wanted to try to do a 30 days of hymns project, inspired by Merri-Todd’s 31 hymns for Antinous over at Antinous for Everybody. I wanted to do 30 days of hymns, with prompts for each day, and I wanted to share the prompts so if anyone else wanted to do it, they could.

I then went silent on it because I was developing the (first) prompts list. I finished that a while ago and decided I wanted to start doing this project this month — February, starting on Imbolc Eve, the 1st. It’s a leap year, so the last day will be March 1st. Unlike other “30 days” challenges or similar, I’m not letting myself do this one as I feel like it. I’m committing to doing 30 days straight, because this is an act of devotion, and a test of my resilience — can I write 30 poems in a row? We shall see.

This set of hymns is for the Sacred Triad — Brighid, the Morrigan, and Manannan. I have 10 prompts for each god. My plan is to cycle through them, in that order — today is the 1st so I wrote a hymn for Brighid. Tomorrow one for the Morrigan, and on the 3rd one for Manannan. Etc, so on and so forth. I plan on making other sets of prompts for other gods in my life, but I wanted to start here, with the main 3.

I will be posting the hymns, but not here at Everyday Magic. They’ll be going up on my blog shrines: Milk, Honey, and Fire; Reclaiming Sovereignty; Loved by the Rain, Embraced by the Mist. They’ll go either into a category or tag called 30 Hymns in 30 Days, and I don’t promise to post them the day I write them. (It might be the next day.) The main reason for my organizing it this way is I have plans for other posts here this month and I don’t want to inundate you with posts. Also, I’ve been trying to find more ways to use my blog shrines, and this seemed a good idea.

However, if you don’t want to follow more blogs but want to keep abreast of this project, I will be posting a weekly wrap-up of posted hymns here at Everyday Magic.

Also, I’m calling this 30 Hymns in 30 Days, but hymns might not be the most accurate term. I’m writing poetry in honor of the gods and I’m trying to follow a sort of hymn-ish pattern with them, but not following a set formula. (Not that I’ve been able to find a set formula for writing hymns, so maybe that’s a moot point.)

Now, onto the prompts.

These prompts are intended to be used by whoever feels the need. Heck, if you like some of them but think others should be different, please feel free to edit the list for your own project. (Just, you know, credit me for the prompts I did write, if you’re going to post it publicly.)

Also, some of them might seem silly. This does not indicate a lack of reverence on my part, nor that I’m not taking this seriously. I am. But the fact is, serious and solemn are not equatable. One can be perfectly serious — and reverent! — while being silly. A lot of people don’t understand that, which is basically the main reason I’m solitary.

Anyway. I’m a little silly, the gods are a little silly, so a few of the prompts are a little silly. And who knows? Maybe some hymns will be a little silly.

30 Days of Hymns: The Sacred Triad

Brighid
  1.  birth
  2.  queer lady love
  3.  protection
  4.  prophecy
  5.  fibre arts
  6.  BEEZ
  7.  forging
  8.  keeping the fire alive
  9.  domesticity
  10.  quiet magic
the Morrigan
  1. soil
  2. blood
  3. fairy
  4. sex
  5. revolution
  6. cutting away what does not belong no matter the pain
  7. boundaries
  8. taking your fucking cows back
  9. sovereignty
  10. genderfluidity
Manannan
  1.  apples
  2.  land of the dead
  3.  travel/passage
  4.  family
  5.  laughter
  6.  cranes
  7.  oceans
  8.  storms
  9.  keeping your promises
  10.  feasting

So, there you have it. Imbolc and hymns. I’ll be posting the prompts on a page somewhere on this blog, and as mentioned, doing weekly wrap-ups.

I hope your Imbolc or Lughnasadh is beautiful, bright, and full of blessings.

Be well,

~Morag

Veiling: a 4-ish month retrospective

As many of you know, I started veiling in August of 2015. I’ve been intending to do a post about my experiences veiling, why I chose to veil, and basically anything I can think of relating to it for…well, a few weeks now. I just haven’t had the energy.

I have more energy now so I’m going to try to tackle it. This is by no means a complete overview of veiling; it’s just my perspective and experience based on the past 4-ish months of my doing it. I’m going to try to explain everything as clearly as I can; if anything I write here is confusing please feel free to ask me questions in the comments! Oh, also, the style of this post will be as follows: in conversation with imagined blog audience members and what I think their questions would be.

So, let’s start with the basics.

What is veiling anyway?

When I talk about “veiling” I’m referring to religious veiling, which is the practice of covering one’s head or hair, either fully or partially, with some sort of cloth (or even a hat). There are many examples in many religions of religious head coverings, and they’re not limited to women, though often when using the word “veiling” people generally mean women.

This is not such a weird thing. When my mom was a child, for example, it was common for women to wear hats to church, and religious head coverings for women are many and varied in many different Christian or Christian-offshoot traditions. Muslim women also often cover their hair or heads in a variety of ways, and many Jewish women do as well. And yes, now (and in ancient times) pagan women do it too. (These are just the 4 main examples I’m using for this post; there are many more out there.)

As for the reasons behind covering one’s hair, they are many, varied, and cannot be summed up in any general form. So when I set out to define what I mean by “veiling,” I am stating what can be summed up generally: a form of religious head or hair covering. I can’t add more qualifiers to the definition without running the risk of excluding people who veil.

Ok, but…why?

This is the part of the post where I stop talking about generalities and move into my personal experience and reasons. I cannot speak for any other person who veils. There are many reasons why someone may choose to wear a head-covering religiously and I can’t possibly list them all.

For me, well, it started 4 years ago when I first participated in Covered in Light. Covered in Light was a day where many women and people socially classed as such (henceforth written as (psca)women) covered their hair in a show of solidarity and to bring awareness to the practice of headcovering not just in Abrahamic religions but in others as well. In an increasingly-Islamophobic Western world, we wanted to help educate people in the vast variety and diversity of veiling out there, in the hopes of defusing some of the hate. It’s much easier to hate a group when they do something that you don’t think anyone like you would ever do; when you learn that, say, Christians also veil, it’s a bit harder to justify that hate.

Covered in Light fell apart, sadly, because the intense backlash caused too much stress for the organizer. (What intense backlash? I’ll get to that in a minute.) However, I still participated, covering my hair for a day and going about my normal routine.

I felt…different, that day, and I couldn’t place it, couldn’t figure out why. I still didn’t think that veiling full-time was for me, but I allowed myself to consider the possibility that it might be, at some point in the future. Or even part time.

Fast forward to this past summer, and I’m reading and studying up about the Otherfaith, sort of thinking, yeah, I think I’m probably an Other person. I got nudges from the Ophelia, very subtle ones, but I got the distinct impression she wanted me to start veiling. So I did, part time at first. I didn’t want to do it at work to start, so I wore bandanas as a compromise. Eventually I found the courage and confidence to do full veiling at work, though I still sometimes wore bandanas, depending on the day. The rest of the time, if I left the house, I veiled.

At first I couldn’t articulate why veiling was important to me, or even really understand the reasons the Ophelia wanted me to do it. I just knew that it had quickly become a very important part of my life, and I didn’t want to stop doing it.

It wasn’t until recently that I was able to really articulate it. See, for me, the veiling is not about covering my hair. It’s about covering my head. When I veil, it’s like…extra shielding.

I’m an empath. When I go out into public I am drowning in people’s emotions. Probably where my social anxiety developed, to be honest. I shield as much as I can but sometimes it’s not enough; sometimes I don’t have the energy to remember to do it properly.

The veil is a physical shield. It keeps my brains from falling out and other people’s crap from falling in. Not only am I able to keep other people’s stray emotions at bay, I’m able to keep my stray emotions from rampaging. When I veil, I feel more adult, more composed, better able to handle my responsibilities and duties. I feel like a grown genderqueer person.

Which is why the Ophelia wanted me to veil, I realize now. She’s a god of many things, but among those things are duty, responsibility, composure. There’s a regal air about her, and she sometimes appears veiled, too.

There’s a power in the veil. A power I choose to put on.

What about that intense backlash you mentioned? Tell us about that.

I did cover this, briefly, in my original post on Covered in Light; however I think it should be covered again.

Basically, there are 2 main reasons people who veil (and the people involved in Covered in Light) receive backlash: Islamophobia and ~*~feminism~*~.

The Islamophobia is well known and documented and unfortunately still going strong. I hoped that things would get better; they only seemed to get worse. Especially up here in Canada. Last year, in the run up to the election, our last PM Stephen Harper made a big fucking deal out of a woman who wanted to take her oath of citizenship while wearing the niqab. He also set up a “barbaric cultural practices” tipline and basically just vomited anti-Muslim sentiment all over the country.

The result? Well, he lost the election, but not before women were attacked and had their niqabs ripped off them. It was horrifying. All over a woman who wanted to become a citizen of our country without having to betray her religious choices.

The climate in Canada has certainly worsened over the past 4 years, and while a lot of blame for that can be laid at Harper’s feet, that doesn’t mean it magically goes away now that he has, too. We’re still a pretty Islamophobic country, and nothing but hard work is going to change that.

Islamophobia was one of the reasons there was backlash against Covered in Light. I don’t think I need to go into detail about how it manifested; if you’ve lived in the West for the past several years you’ve probably seen it enough to know it well.

The other was ~*~feminism~*~. I write it that way, with the ~*~ on either end, because it’s not actually feminism. Not the feminism that I practice, and still believe in, though I have left the community. The ~*~ on either side are meant to convey that the word is stressed in an almost sarcastic way, with maybe a lot of “ooooohs” dripping with scorn said out loud, and a waving of the hands.

People who practice ~*~feminism~*~ are all about women’s lib…unless women want to actually have agency and live their lives in a way that goes against the view point of said ~*~feminists~*~. If a ~*~feminist~*~ says something is sexist and you disagree, then you are just allowing your internalized misogyny to speak for you, and you don’t really know any better, but it’s okay, because this ~*~feminist~*~ is fighting for you, you poor unknowledgable creature, and will help save you (from a thing you don’t wish to be saved from).

That was the form a lot of the backlash that Covered in Light took back in 2012, and (psca)women who veil still have to put up with it. The belief is that head-covering itself is always sexist, no ifs ands or buts about it, that there is NO WAY a (psca)woman could possibly CHOOSE to veil (because remember, ~*~feminists~*~ don’t actually support or believe in (psca)women’s agency; we’re all too brainwashed to know better), and (psca)women must all be saved from the evil headscarves of Teh Patriarchy ™.

Let me put it bluntly: clothing does not oppress people. Lack of clothing does not oppress people. What oppresses people is oppression.

The problem is not the headcovering; the problem is if someone has been coerced into wearing it. The problem is when it is no longer a choice.

The problem is when countries pass laws to outlaw religious headcoverings in the name of freedom for women. The problem is when Prime Ministers attack the niqab and say it’s because they care “so much” about women, while slashing funding for women’s issues and ignoring the thousands of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, because they’re not the right sort of women. The problem is when women are attacked or condemned for their choice of clothing — no matter what that choice is.

You can’t march in Slut Walk and then turn around and say a headcovering is sexist and should be outlawed.

Well, ok, you can, but it just makes you the biggest fucking hypocrite on the face of the planet.

The problem is not the headcovering; the problem is the coercion, whether that coercion is to put (psca)women into headcoverings or to take them out of them.

But ~*~feminism~*~ doesn’t understand that, so when you cover for religious reasons or just…at all, you face that backlash. That’s what Covered in Light faced in 2012, and I don’t blame the organizer for not being able to take the stress of it. It’s awful to deal with.

…ok, I went into a bit of a rant there, which I really need to start expecting from myself. Any more questions before I wrap this up?

Have you personally received any backlash? Any attacks?

Nothing overt. Actually I’ve noticed regional differences. When I was working outside the house it was in a fairly rural, farmland-ish area, so I actually expected some negative backlash. I didn’t calculate into my assumption that that area is also Mennonite country, so people just figured I was Mennonite (one customer asked me if I was). I never got any crap about it. The most I’ve gotten living where I do is an odd look or too, but generally what I get more often are compliments on my scarves. (They are quite pretty.)

However, when I was staying at my mom’s place for 2 weeks in December, the tenor of my social interactions changed. Again, mostly people were cool, but I noticed a definite uptick in very dirty looks from older white people, of the sort of dirty look that only old white people can give. It was almost nostalgic for me; I remember my Oma & Opa giving those looks to people or ideas.

No one said anything, though one woman looked as if she might. She glared at my headcovering, and at me, and shook her head in disgust.

But yeah, nothing overt, though I think it’s probably a matter of time. No doubt part of what’s keeping me safe from attacks is the color of my skin. I pass for white, so most people aren’t going to assume Muslim when they see me, because for most people Muslim = brown skin (incorrect, and a good look at how Islamophobia often manifests itself as racism, which is why we need to talk about racism when we talk about it, even if Islam isn’t a race), and I tend to think that most attacks are likely to be Islamophobia-based.

Though it’s also possible I get attacked by the ~*~feminist~*~ crowd, in which case I’ll either be accused of being a shieldmaiden for the patriarchy OR culturally appropriating. Or both!

However, one thing I actually do worry about is what might happen if I get pulled over, or otherwise have my ID checked by a police officer. See, they changed the rules for BC driver’s licenses. Back when I got my first pic taken, I had a headband in. It was quite obvious in the picture. But in the current climate of “EEK MUSLIMS”, they changed the policy. They say it’s to keep people like Pastafarians from “abusing the system,” but that’s patently bullshit. Also, ICBC, you don’t actually get to be the judge of who is serious in their religion.

Basically, you cannot wear something on your head or in your hair of ANY SORT unless you can demonstrate that your religion is abusive. There is no room for religious choice when it comes to BC DL pictures — or even personal choice. There are people who have been wearing things on their heads for personal reasons for years and had no problem with their DL pictures until recently.

I didn’t have the energy to fight this battle when it came up in August last year, and I ended up going back to ICBC three different times to get my DL sorted out. Because I couldn’t demonstrate that I would suffer real harm in my religious community if I took off the veil, I was forced to take my picture without it.

I honestly felt like crying when they made me take it off. Taking it off in front of everyone, when they knew I had to because my religion wasn’t considered good enough, because I wasn’t religious enough…gods, it felt like I was being forced to take all my clothes off, like I was being looked at and judged, and found wanting; like they were laughing at me.

(The individuals I dealt with at ICBC were very nice, and a few of them were quite sympathetic, but this didn’t change the fact that I felt like everyone in that room — employees, other people waiting for their number to come up, the head honchos watching through the security cameras — was watching me and judging me. It was awful.)

And now I have a DL that has a picture of me without my veil, but I still veil every day. What do you think will happen if a police officer asks me to remove my veil and I (rightfully) refuse?

Yeah, I don’t really want to imagine it either.

Ok, I think this post has become long enough. There’s still more I can talk about with regards to veiling, probably, but for now I think this will do. Please, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments section!

~Morag