Changes...

The last few years of my life have brought about some pretty dramatic changes. When my husband and I discovered that we were expecting another child, we decided to do everything we could to give him the sort of childhood I always wished I could have given my older children: a stay at home mother dedicated to his care and early education and fresh, home grown, homemade food and plenty of fresh air to grow on. So, I left my full time job shortly before my son was born and now only work on the weekends and we made the move North from suburban Detroit to a much more rural area. 

Obviously, the subtitle of my blog, A Diary of a Suburban Kitchen Witch, is no longer appropriate. I'm thinking "Homesteading Hearth Witch" instead. 

Just a few years ago I was the mother of teenagers. I had two dogs. I lived in the suburbs with my delightful husband. We had two cars and a tiny house and a postage-stamp sized yard. My husband and I both worked full time. While were weren't wealthy by any means, we had enough cash to occasionally dine out, have date nights, go to the movies, have annual memberships to the local museum and zoo and go on vacation annually. 

Now we have a bigger house, a big yard, one car, one job (and a quarter) and no extra money for fun stuff. I'm a little worried about how Yule is going to turn out. Somehow I thought I'd have extra time when I left my day job. I thought I'd make all my Yuletide gifts. I thought I would write more, maybe finally write that book I've been thinking about since I was 8. This was naive. It hasn't turned out that way at all. All of my time is spent keeping the house together and preventing my extremely active little Sunshine from injuring himself, incurring the wrath of the cat, or burning down the house. (Wow I can't wait for preschool next year.)

My plan to supplement our income by growing the majority of our food is put on hold until next spring since we didn't manage to get possession of the house we put an offer on in May until the middle of September. Painful tendinitis in my arm has made swinging a hammer, turning a screw, raking and shoveling agony. So my chicken coop goes unbuilt, my beds go unturned. I. Am. So. Frustrated. I can't help it, I'm a Gemini.

Do not for a minute thing that all this complaining means I'm unhappy. When is a Gemini happy when she doesn't have something to complain about? Something to change, to fix, to fantasize about making better?

This too will pass. This time next year I will have hens giving me eggs, lovely greens sitting in a coldframe, a cellar full of root veggies and jars of tomatoes and sauces and this blog will be full of my journey. I know that I am not the only one going through this. I know a lot of folks out there who grew up in the suburbs or cities who are trying to make a more natural life for their families close to the land. And I know its an adjustment. I know because I read their blogs to find out how they do stuff I am trying to figure out how to do.

Historically, I have tried in my writing to be as generic and impersonal as possible but, you know, this is pointless in a blog. I can do impersonal at the Witchipedia. Here and at Sacred Hearth it's personal. After all, this blog claims to be a diary. Yet I sometimes refrain from writing things because they are too personal, why do folks want to hear about that? I am not so interesting. But why not? After all, who else am I going to talk to stuck in the house with a baby out in the middle of nowhere?

So, changes have happened and changes are coming. And I am going to try to write more. It's good for me. And maybe, as I struggle to be a homesteader and a writer and a stay at home mom and homemaker extraordinaire and all that stuff I always wanted to be, you will find something to help you out with your own struggles. 

I Believe...

Posting about fluffy bunnies and the comments I have received has made me think about beliefs. One of the things that people throw out the fluffy bunny phrase over is belief. Either you believe too much, or not enough. As in, those who believe in pixies, unicorns and instant karma verses those who don't really believe in spirits as entities with their own personalities and who scoff at the idea that your magical actions can come back to bite you in the ass. Either one of these can be labeled fluffy bunny and the two of them might just point fingers at each other.

Which leads me to the question, what do I believe?

And, of course, that answer isn't simple.

You see, I haven't led the most traditional life as an adult. I was already divorced with kids when I started college and graduated at the age of 30. I had already experienced my fluffy bunny days and had thought a lot about my beliefs and values and was somewhat set in my ways. I majored in Anthropology and minored in Biology. If you have ever spent any time in academia, especially in the sciences, you know that the cattiness of that community makes witch wars look like the Three Stooges. One thing I had a problem with was belief. That is, what you were expected to believe if you were a scientist and the idea that if you did not believe appropriately, you could not be objective.

In the Social Sciences, the idea is that if you believe too strongly in your religion, your beliefs will cloud your view of the culture you are studying. (Never mind that we've got a ton of really good information about pre-conversion cultures from the Jesuits.) This idea has given license to your various rabid atheists to tear into anyone who is anything but contemptuous of any and all of what they call "superstition".

(The Biology corner had its own annoying rules about beliefs, but it doesn't really come to bear on this discussion so I won't go into it at this time. )

So the time came came that I felt I needed to make a decision. If I was going to pursue a career in science, could I be an atheist? There was no way. I simply did not want to live in a world without magic. I can't believe that all of it doesn't exist. After all belief has a profound effect on societies and the way they interact with the world. To say that people are only affected psychologically- that it is the fear of a spell is the only reason for its effectiveness, for example, that causes its effects, seems awfully disrespectful to me and ignores evidence to the  contrary. After all, haven't I cast spells on people without telling them and haven't those spells been effective?

As a student of science I was taught to base my view of the world on evidence. So how does dismissing things out of hand fit in with the scientific method? And so I decided I would believe in everything, unless I encountered proof that it wasn't real.

So do I believe in Gods? Sure. There's lots of evidence that Gods exist. How bout the Christian God, Jehovah? Sure there's at least as much evidence for him as the rest. I don't think anybody's got it right. Spells? Yep, lots of evidence.

One day my daughter asked me if pixies were real. The very idea of believing in pixies seems incredibly fluffy to me. But was a scientist, right? So I said, "I have never seen a pixie, but I have no reason to believe they aren't real."

Yea. Total cop out. But those four years of college had to count for something, right?

I didn't become a scientist. I became a dog trainer. But my kids might, and I'd like to see the next generation of scientists have minds a little more open then some of the last.

Hello Gaia

Before you continue, I am going to drop a SPOILER ALERT for Rick Riordan's The Son of Neptune, though if you read The Lost Hero, I don't think I've revealed anything you didn't get from that book.

As I was reading The Son of Neptune to my infant son (he's not into pictures yet, so he's just as happy to hear my voice go on about Percy Jackson as the Runaway Bunny) my husband asked me "Wow, is Gaia really that mean?" and it got me thinking about the nature of Gaia.

First let me say that I've never been 100% happy with the way Rick Riordan portrays the Gods in his books, but hey, it's fiction and I'm not going to gripe. But back to Gaia.

Mr. Riordan has a few things right, or at least we agree on a few things. Gaia is a sleeping Goddess. She is not a Goddess who spends time worrying about what mortals are doing. Gaia is a primordial Goddess, born of Chaos. The children she created are forces of Nature. She had her husband castrated in order to release them. Then the second generation, the Gods of Civilization, rose up and subjugated them and She created more children to defeat them, and they failed. Then Gaia slept. Meanwhile, civilization grew under the Gods of Olympus.

So, if Mr. Riordan wants to portray her as vengeful, releasing primordial forces in an effort to destroy Civilization and the Olympians, well, I don't see that as so far fetched. Is She evil? No, of course not. She's just Nature and, frankly, Nature would be a lot better off without humans and civilization.

I do, however, think it's kind of far fetched that Gaia would open the gates of Death. (Although I realize it was necessary to release Her children trapped in Tartarus.) Death is necessary to maintain the balance of Nature and I would think that bringing and end to Death would only make matters worse.

So... the answer to my husband's question (from my point of view) is Yes and No. If Gaia awoke, people would die, hell yea. But I don't think Gaia would take a personal interest in who was dying and she likely wouldn't try to use any individuals to accomplish her goals. No, I think she'd simply shake us off like so many fleas and whoever managed to hold on would hold on and whoever didn't, well, that would be it.

Feeling Philosophical

Lately, I am feeling rather philosophical. It could be that I, having run out of reading material, picked up one of my partner's philosophy books from college and have been reading that in the bathtub. I didn't take philosophy in college. I had a really hard time with it, because so much of philosophy is based on the monotheistic viewpoint. I am reading, for instance, about all these arguments about whether or not God exists and I'm thinking to myself, well this is stupid. If you realize there's more than one God, you know that this particular issue isn't an issue at all. When I took Sociology of Religion in college and World Religions, I also had a hard time. Sociology, it seems to me, is all about deviance. What's normal, and what's not. That's why I am generally irritated by "therapists" as they tend to be Sociology majors and they have that whole "normal" attitude instead of just allowing people to work through what's right for them.
*sigh*
School isn't for polytheists, I think.
I would love to start a private school for Pagan kids. That will be one of the things I will do when Hermes grants me lottery luck.