What Here is Untrue? ^_^

This is a rather silly post but blame it on my husband. He challenged me to do this when we were chatting awhile back. We were talking about the winding twists and turns our lives have taken in getting us to our Gods and the work we do now. I said, “People would never believe half the story if it were laid out for them.” He then challenged me to make a list, a baker’s dozen and let people guess which was incorrect– it’s good fun on a dreary, rainy day. There’s also a lesson here, believe it or not: We are writing a story, weaving a tapestry, creating a work of art for our Gods and that thing that we are creating is our life and how we choose to live it. We write our stories by the choices we make and the choices we choose not to make. Every step we take is one of formation and we can choose what that looks like within the scaffolding of our wyrd. We are not helpless. The question is, how do we learn to make the best choices? 

So, here’s my list. Which one is not true? Lol.   

1. I was a professional ballet dancer through my early twenties. 
2. I was ordained in 1995. 
3. I was offered a modeling contract when I was 18. 
4. I stabbed a man in the leg once. 
5. I have two Masters degrees. 
6. I was once briefly homeless. 
7. I used to have extensive cultus to the Goddess Fortuna. 
8. I once appeared on a television show reading tarot. 
9. I have sung tenor in a medieval performance group. 
10. I worked in finance for ten years. 
11. I studied glassblowing for many years
12. I’m a professional artist.
13. EDIT: (forgot to add the 13th to make a baker’s dozen): I taught Latin for almost ten years.

Finally, what in your life are you most proud of? Feel free to share in the comments. Our stories make us who we are after all. It’s good to explore them now and again. 

This is Proof We’re Living in Bizarro-World

I woke up this morning to find this article on my facebook feed. It’s something I never, ever, ever, ever, ever imagined I would see the fucking pope saying. First, go here and read the article. Watch the video there too, so you can make up your own mind.

Apparently Catholics no longer believe that Jesus is the unique redeemer – you know, like the New Testament says (it’s somewhere in John)  not to mention the entirety of their tradition. Now, all roads lead to the same goal. Now, I don’t believe squat about Jesus. I’m a sensible, educated, devout polytheist. I’m not deluded. They are and have been for two thousand years. That’s been the single defining characteristic of their tradition. Well, their Marxist pope just tossed that all to hell now, possibly by their theology, literally. I think this is the guy who abolished limbo after all. Not too many places for them left to go. 

Now, he has pretty much declared that there is no difference between any religion (except of course, for indigenous or polytheistic religions. We’re still fair game for evangelization). I was suspicious of this guy for a long time, especially when he kept making these social justice statements, that all of my Pagan and Polytheist friends were applauding. I wasn’t, because I saw this is just incipient Marxism and that inevitably leads to the subjugation of traditions. When it comes down to it, they’re always going to have to make a choice: which is more important, the religion or the politics and politics inevitably wins (when you’re a Marxist). That may be ok for a freshman in college, but maybe not the head of a world religion. The uniqueness or exclusivity of a tradition is part of the tradition (a lesson we as polytheists really need reminding of on occasion).

If this Pope decides to further water down Catholicism – you know, the tradition he is tasked with protecting and defending—into further nothingness, we are going to be left with the Protestant crackpots. Catholics, once they got over the whole inquisition thing, have pretty much been preservers of Western tradition, art, and values – all of which they stole from polytheism granted. Anglicans likewise have held this position. That’s not the case with the crazy Protestantisms: dominionists, end times fatalists, bible thumpers, etc. They want to bring down the world and remake it in the image of their repressive, life-hating pseudo-theology. Just like Muslims and SJWS. Oh hey, look: a new alliance is formed. Always mistrust the radical.

But on the plus side maybe all the SJWs in Paganism and Polytheism will flee into the Catholic Church and we won’t have to deal with them damaging our traditions anymore. Or, maybe we should start evangelizing these displaced Catholics. They already have the basics of piety and cultus down and their own Church has abandoned them. We just have to teach them to count beyond three.

Misc. Musings

I’ve been on the road most of today with my friend Allen. (My husband is cheerfully holding down the home front. I told him to enjoy the quiet. I return Saturday lol). We just got into MA where I will be teaching a series of workshops tomorrow and Saturday morning. There’s been a nice uptick in work lately and I”m looking forward to meeting all the students with whom I’ll be working over the next two days. 

We had a bit of luck too on the way up. I’d forgotten about the Traveller’s Book Cafe in  Union, Ct…you can eat (very good food) and buy used books. I love this place. Every time I visit my friends in MA, it’s the highlight of the road journey. I just happened to remember it and mention it to Allen as we hit Union and we were able to stop there for lunch and i found *treasure*. Oh my Gods, I love books. I have since I was a child. They bring me such satisfaction and joy. Inner peace for me is a library. (well, my library. I”m not so much into giving books back. heh). I even found two new books by an author I used to read years ago, whom I thought had stopped writing. As i said: treasure. 

The hotel is better than I remember it (it’s been taken over by Hilton) and I have plenty of time to prepare. I made a quick update in my patreon supporter posts and I’ll have a few hours to work on the Eir novena booklet. It’s strange being here. So many important milestones in my spiritual life involved me straggling back to this hotel in various states of shock and awe. It feels, as these things so often do, like a lifetime ago. Maybe, in some weird way it was. 

I know I owe a pacel of you emails…I’m afraid I have to ask for a bit of patience. It was a rather rough week pain wise and I fell behind again. I shall, however, be catching up this weekend….and so it goes. 

Something’s Burning and I Think It’s My Mind!

There is a very shy man who occasionally comes into the gallery. He is interested in learning more about art but is very self-deprecating of his own experience and interests. He’ll hover in the background until it is only him and either me or my colleague in the shop and then ask all his questions and share his ideas and opinions on art, literature, music, film, etc. The conversations are always delightful and I do my best to be encouraging because it seems as though this is an entirely new world to him, so I do my best to encourage his bravery as he begins (and continues) to explore it. He is thoughtful and often quite insightful in his engagement with art. I enjoy our conversations.

Today I dropped by the shop and ran into him. He was just coming out and he mentioned that he’d bought a copy of my cento book. We talked about that for a bit and he had picked up some of the references to Greek epic in the poems, and he compared me to William Blake and Ezra Pound (which made me smile. I am a fan of both of these poets and that was quite a comparison) and then he said something that quite frankly made my week.

He had been assuring me that he was only scratching the surface, that he knew he wasn’t getting out of my centos what someone stepped in poetry would (and I was quick to say, that people respond to poetry based on their own experiences, that it speaks to each person differently). He finally paused and said, “I can only read a few lines and then I have to put it down and I carry those lines with me for days. It’s like…something’s burning and I think it’s my mind!”

I looked him right in the eye and said, “You understand my poetry perfectly.”

He told me that if he’d encountered my work in his twenties it would have destroyed his world, or set him on a totally different life path. He talked about books he’d read then: Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, etc. and how their work was like looking into a completely unique world, so incredibly different from his own and my work was like that too, that he’d read about people having these incredibly searing and intense experiences but it was like staring into a completely different universe from his own and then it struck me:

This is why purity is so important. This is why it’s so vitally crucial that we carefully choose what we read, what we watch, to what we expose ourselves (and it’s a choice we each have to make for ourselves, not one that should be dictated by any external authority). When we feed ourselves with words and art saturated with the Gods, it builds worlds in our minds. If we’re not careful, we can let in anything at all indiscriminately and that also builds worlds within our minds, polluted ones, rather than the worlds hospitable to our Gods and dead. These things matter and it’s an area that we alone control. What are we going to nourish in ourselves? What kind of landscape are we going to create within ourselves – one that nourishes the holy or one diametrically opposed to it? That is what religious purity is: creating worlds within ourselves hospitable to our Gods and spirits, and it’s important. 

 

Mommy, Is That a Boy or a Girl?

So, I get this question sometimes, like today, as my husband and I were leaving our local diner. A little kid waiting in line with its (I didn’t notice if it was a boy or girl, ironically) mother to use the toilet asked the mom about my gender just as I exited out the back door. I just laughed – I’m never offended by the question when it comes from a child. They’re working out their world and it’s not the first time that I’ve been asked by a child in the 4-8 age range where I fall on the gender spectrum. I almost went back in to have a conversation with the kid, but it is hot and I really wanted to go home. Maybe I should have gone back in because on the way home I started thinking about the incident.

Had the child never seen a woman with short hair? I once asked a friend if I really read that “masculine” and that friend said ‘you’re clipped, to the point, and assertive. In this culture, yes.” And we both agreed that was utterly pathetic because really, what is it teaching women but to be soft, pliant, indecisive, and stupid? I should mention that I purposely tend to reign in my body language when I’m out and about – if I don’t curb it, if I just allow myself to walk and move naturally, I find that women often become frightened. I move with strength and purpose (and find myself incredibly annoyed by those who don’t. figure out what you’re doing and where you’re going and do it or get the fuck out of the way). It really brings home the message of weakness and compliance that young girls are taught in this country. My friend went on to say, “you want to know what most people expect of women look at fox news.” I almost barfed. I am too fucking intelligent to behave that way. Sorry, folks, just can’t dumb myself down enough. How unfeminine of me, I know. *sarcasm*

Another friend of mine came over after breakfast – he is doing a bit of a repair job for me at my house—and when I told him what happened he made an offhand comment that he wondered if I’d start seeing more of this questioning as people get crazier and crazier over bathrooms and gender. I told him I already have. While no one has yet approached or harassed me, I’ve been given the definite stink eye by a couple of older gentlemen when I used the ladies room at a local art exhibit. I find myself more aware of those around me when I’m going to the toilet (and I have OAB – I go to the toilet a lot so I have quite a bit of time to contemplate the bathroom insanity in this country). It’s not lost on me that not only are those bathroom laws transphobic, but they also force feminization on women, a very particular 1950s brand presentation. It’s utter bullshit. (And let me tell you, the first person to accost me for using the ladies room is going to get the crudest, grossest, rudest response I can muster – and they’d better hope I’m not menstruating at the time—such bigotry deserves no less and I can be amazingly crude when the situation calls for it).

I have been accosted in the past because people have assumed I was gay. The most egregious occasion occurred in Europe. I was walking arm in arm with my mother. We both have short hair and apparently that’s all that’s needed for a certain type of small-minded bigot to make assumptions. We were nearly attacked. I stood my ground against the three attackers while my mother went to get the police and fortunately they backed down but it was very close and I never again went out with her without keeping one eye peeled for potential violence. That changed the way that I look at all of this.

These bathroom laws are about forcing a specific gender compliance, nothing more. It’s not only trans folk who are being harassed, but there have also been cases of women with short hair (longer than mine, I might add), and cancer patients having been harassed too. This is about forcing men and women to dress and comport themselves in a certain way, a way that the fundamentalist Christian right finds appropriate. Well, fuck them. THEY are the problem, not trans people who need to pee.

We have radical Islamic terrorists shooting up gay clubs, imams preaching that to kill LGBTQ people is the “compassionate choice” (I wish I could find the podcast where I learned about this…it happened at a mosque 45 mins outside of Orlando), we have Republicans making laws ostensibly to protect the children…unless those children are gay or trans or bi (or poor, or African-American, or, or, or…). We’re no longer the ‘land of the free and home of the brave,” instead we’re the land of ignorant, small-minded, frightened bigots and we should be better than that. Maybe we should grow up as a country and stop using “the children” as an excuse for our bigotry. In the meantime, this heterosexual cis-gendered woman stands gladly with the LGBTQ community.

Defending Courage

Two weeks ago as I was driving home, I saw something seemingly innocuous but in reality very disturbing that has stuck with me since. I wasn’t going to write about it but I can’t get it out of my mind and I think it highlights something important in what we’re teaching our kids. Let me first describe what I saw and then I’ll tell you why it so disturbs and even angers me.

I live about a quarter mile from an elementary school. Driving home as parents were picking up their children, I saw two kids, at most maybe five years old, one boy and one girl playing on what passes for monkey bars these days. An anxious father was there holding his arms out under the girl in case she should fall. That’s all and I can’t stop thinking about it.

He’s teaching his daughter to limit her world, to be afraid. He’s teaching her that she can’t get hurt and get up again and conquer. He’s teaching her to not be bold or curious or adventurous, not to push herself to her limits and beyond. He’s teaching her that she needs a man to rely upon in scary situations, that she can’t problem solve, and he’s teaching that boy that the girl is so much more important, that he is expendable in relation to his sister (and if you don’t think that message has a part to play in man on woman violence, think again).

Years ago I read a psych article that posited that by age five a child has learned whether the world is a good place, or whether it is a scary and dangerous place and that whatever message they have internalized is almost impossible to fully unlearn later. The message the father was sending his children is clear and I understand a parent wanting to protect a child from hurt but as hard as it is sometimes those children need to be allowed to fall.

It is not a gift to a child to teach them that their world needs to be limited by fear, that they cannot cope, that stumbling or hurt or injury is the end of the world, a catastrophe from which they cannot possibly hope to have the internal resources to overcome. We do them no favors by instilling not just caution (which would be sensible) but anxiety, fear, and dependence.

Fear should not be what defines a girl or a woman. Fear should not be what defines any human being.

The past two months, I’ve read at least half a dozen articles of parents who had child protective services called because they let their children play unsupervised in their own back yards, let them walk home alone from a local park close to their home, and so on and so forth. Barely a week goes by where I don’t read something similar, parents harassed because they are raising independent children.

The result of this helicopter parenting? We have children who need trigger warnings whenever they encounter an idea with which they disagree. We’re harming our children by stifling and over-protecting them. We’re raising children who lack emotional resiliency (sooner or later we all fail, we all get hurt, we are all confronted by ideas that offend us, we all have to learn to pick up the pieces and get on with things without being utterly crushed when life doesn’t go our way). We’re raising children who can’t handle differing opinions and ideas sanely. We’re raising children who lack the baseline ability to thrive in a diverse and often divisive world. We’re raising children who will be crushed by life. That’s what I fear the most: that in wanting to protect our kids from everything that might ever hurt them (I get that. I don’t have kids but I have a god daughter whom I love dearly, and a pacel of nieces and nephews and I would give my right arm to spare them pain, but when I pray for them, I pray that they be given only the amount of suffering needed to make them capable and compassionate human beings) we are in reality crippling them.

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking About Devotion Tonight

Thinking of my mom tonight. I found my common book, a collection of quotes and musings and helpful things that she inspired me to keep. I had thought the book lost. She was often my lifeline through the difficulties of devotion and when I was most discouraged, and tired, and frustrated, when the Gods seemed so very far away, her wisdom often helped me to find my way back to Them, or at least to open up again to the sense of Their Presence. It is so very easy, after all, for the poison of this world to close us off.

I was contemplating devotion tonight. It’s been a long, hard haul since her death in 2010. Even a shaman can get angry at the Gods –irrationally so, i will admit–for the death of a parent. I redid my altar tonight, my working space and it is stark, as I often feel inside when thinking of how much I miss her. My dead have been very present today. They sustain me in so many ways.

I was thinking of all the tools and techniques that I used for so many years to strengthen and nourish my devotional work, and my connection to Odin. It’s always funny for me, when a cherished technique no longer works. I’ve moved on from those first faltering steps but that does not mean I don’t falter. Sometimes, He prompts me to find new ways of connecting because it is never, ever good to grow complacent in one’s relationship with the Gods. I know that much: it is not a thing to ever take for granted. We must work to make it anew, again and again and again, to keep it vibrant and ever-changing. We are ever spinning that thread of connection. It’s never a set thing, a done deal. Thinking of all the currents that have carried me through and forward in my work, there has always been one necessary constant: getting myself out of the way.

As I was thinking of this tonight, i happened to snatch up my common book and I opened to a page with a quote, something my mother said so many years ago. I want to share it with you, my readers, tonight:

“You have to be as still and empty of yourself as a reed-flute — only then will the Gods play you.” -Fuensanta Plaza

She is right of course. She is so very right and the grief and anger that has taken root in my heart for so long, the pain of missing her, has filled up too many spaces that were once empty for Them. Time to shatter myself again, break myself open, give myself up as fruit to the winepress to begin anew in walking with Odin. Even when I hate this process so, it is much like coming home to an old friend. I want to share too, for all of you who struggle with your communities, with your families, with everything that devotion to the Gods can demand, another quote from my journal, something my mother Fuensanta gave me, a quote this time by Ida Goerres. I don’t know where she found it, but it has helped me in the past to consider and considering has filled me with a ferocity to proceed and endure. The only context I was given for this quote is that it is about those called and claimed by the Gods:

“Those who receive such a call, and answer it, are not inhuman. They are marked souls who must call forth in us fear an awe, reverence, and perhaps painful sympathy. And if they offend us also what does it matter? Everything that exceeds average humanity offends those who cannot understand it.”  -I. Goerres

So that is all I have tonight. Keep to your practices. When it is difficult know that there are those of us who have stumbled over the same broken and bloody rocks. You are not alone in your barren places. Those places echo with the tears and cries of all who have passed before you. Let us sustain each other in between the moments of blinding joy that true devotion brings.

Discrimination in the Workplace — thoughtful article at WildHunt

WildHunt has an interesting article about discrimination in the workplace here. It’s worth a read. I’ve always chosen to be out as a polytheist. I don’t ever want to be in the position where I can be blackmailed about it, nor do I see it as something to hide. There’s also a didactic function inherent in being out, even if only very quietly so. Still, I’ve been discriminated against on the basis of my religion at work many times: I’ve had bibles left piled up all over my office, I’ve had my office vandalized. Both times I knew it was a fundy christian working at the same department. They were not disciplined by management at all and I was told to forget about it.  I’ve been isolated and alienated from social functions at work. I’ve had verbal harassment. I’m pretty sure it cost me a job. I know it impacted my salary and let’s just say I never made ‘friends’ at work.

When I worked in ballet, it was a non-issue. It only became a problem when I moved into retail (Barnes and Noble, where the two acts of office vandalism and what I would now term a massively hostile work environment occurred, was the worst including having a manager call me aside and wanting, quite aggressively, to know how many Pagans were in the department. I refused to answer as there were four or five of us) and then corporate. Ironically now in academia I’ve had no problems at all (so far). The worst I can say is certain journals refuse to publish my religious studies articles on the grounds I couldn’t possibly be unbiased being polytheist –regardless of how well researched these articles are, or sometimes on the grounds that I’m more a theologian than an anthropologist. I’ve never had a problem in my fairly conservative department and I don’t hide my identity as a polytheist at all. hell, all anyone would have to do is a simple Google search. It may become an issue when I attain my PhD and have to find a job, especially if I intend to teach high school, which is a relevant option for Classicists. That remains to be seen.

For those outside the US reading this, and possibly wondering why religion would even come up in the workplace, allow me to clarify. American workplaces are infested with the same obsession with religion, specifically Christianity, that you see in the media and our political arena. While I find talking about one’s personal life at all at work obnoxious, many Americans find nothing wrong with assuming one to be Christian and/or asking about it in a workplace setting. We have laws against this when it’s coming from management, but not so much when it’s another co-worker. It’s like being married or having children: office mates will pry and if you don’t openly disclose sooner or later they’ll try actively to sniff it out. This is one of the things i loathed about corporate: what i term the office bell jar effect.

When I was working in Human Resources for a major American bank, we had a case where two brokers were fighting. One was a practitioner of Vodou and the other kept accusing this person of putting hexes on her, and complained to management about it, every time something went wrong in her life. HR wanted to laugh it off until I pointed out the immensely hostile workplace this was creating for the Voudoussaint, and the potential for a pending lawsuit. It got resolved pretty quickly but the fact that it even escalated to the point of coming to HR is significant. There’s little respect in this country given to non-Abrahamic religions. Last year, though the ruling was quickly overturned, a judge even ordered a Wiccan mother to put her child in Christian education. We have a very long way to go before we break the back of the Christian right in this country, and an even longer way to go before our religion becomes a non-inssue in the world of social commerce.

When Someone’s Spiritual Practices Turn Your Stomach—Literally

In my medieval studies class this week, amongst other writing, we had to read through “Memorial” by 13th century Italian female mystic Angela of Foligno. I don’t particularly care for her work, for a number of reasons, many of them centering around issues of translation (as well as a certain distaste for Franciscan spirituality in general) but I gained a valuable insight nonetheless. This was the first time that reading an account of someone’s spiritual practices actually made me throw up…and I’m ok with that. Bear with me.

About half way through her narrative, which her confessor bade her to share with him (1), she is discussing charity as an ascent into divine joy. On Maundy Thursday, she suggests to her companion that they go to the hospital to “find Christ there among the poor, the suffering, and the afflicted.” (2) Her narrative continues thusly:

And after we had distributed all that we had, we washed the feet of the women and the hands of the men, and especially those of one of the lepers which were festering and in an advanced stage of decomposition. Then we drank the very water with which we had washed him. And the drink was so sweet that, all the way home, we tasted of its sweetness and it was as if we had received Holy Communion. As a small scale of the leper’s sores was stuck in my throat, I tried to swallow it. My conscience would not let me spit it out, just as if I had received Holy Communion. I really did not want to spit it out but simply to detach it from my throat. (3)

I find this utterly repugnant and disgusting. I cannot articulate the level to which this sickens me. I am so profoundly glad that my own spirituality does not involve anything quite so revolting. To me. Revolting to me. Because I also realize, that for Angela of Foligno, this was a moment of profound connection to her God, something that gave her tremendous joy, something that was a deeply powerful expression of her devotion and faith. She saw Christ in those lepers and the skin was essentially, for her, the Eucharist and there’s a deep Eucharistic piety echoing through much of her work. Moreover, she doesn’t recount this in order to exhort others to do it, she is responding to her confessor’s difficulty with the idea that connecting with Christ through sharing his cup (the metaphor the narrative uses) could be sweet. He had apparently asked for examples and she provided him with one. He chose to record it and give it a place in the finished narrative.

As we were discussing this text in class tonight it struck me powerfully that I was responding to this woman’s spiritual practices (which are, in the end, between her and her god) with the same type of narrow-minded hostility and disgust with which some people respond to any mention of ordeal work.

I’ve never understood the deeply visceral and negative response some people have toward the idea of ordeal when a) they’ve never seen or participated in one, b) they’re not being asked to participate, nor are they being told that it’s something that everyone must do and c) it’s only one part of my and other ordeal worker’s spiritual practice, in some cases not even a particularly large part. I mean, if you aren’t called to it, don’t do it. It seems a pretty simple rubric (and it is, but our senses are not so simple or always accommodating). I can sympathize a bit better now with the cognitive struggle that some people must go through when faced with something so alien to their own approach to their Gods.

Here’s the thing though, my gut-clenching response to Angela and her lepers was my response. It had nothing at all to do with her, her expression of her devotion to Christ, the work that she did, the act she performed that so revolted me, or the integrity of her practice. My response had to do with me and my own personal aesthetics. I think it’s important when something affects us that instantaneously, that viscerally (and when we’re talking about consenting adults) that we step back and really do a little soul searching as to why. I think all too often we as a species tend to foist our own mental and emotional baggage onto others, blaming them for our own responses rather than owning up and owning our shit.

Without that honest self examination, the impulse that led me to express revulsion over a woman’s spiritual practice (not feel it—i don’t think it’s wrong to feel a particular gut response — no pun intended here—but rather it’s unwise not to examine our responses and bitterly small-minded to project them onto others), the impulse that leads Heathen John or Jane to condemn ordeal workers out of hand as perverts is the same impulse that at its very worst, has led to things like a grown woman cyber-bullying a teen-age girl until the latter committed suicide. At the very worst, ti’s the self-same impulse that leads a bigot on the street to bash a young gay or trans person to death. At its very worst it grows not just into narrow-mindedness but into an egregious lack of humanity and compassion.

I think it’s important to take care what seeds we nourish in our characters. We become that which we feed.

 
Notes:

1. He asked her to share with him her experiences and recorded them, eventually preparing two redactions of the text.
2. Angela of Foligno. Complete Works. trans. Paul Lachance. New York, NY: Paulist Press, p. 162.
3. ibid, p. 163

March Projects and “Stuff”

In addition to holding the Minerva and Apollo agon jointly with Lykeia (folks can send me their submissions now — I just won’t post them until March 1), I also have a couple of personal project starting in March. I want to share them here, partly because this is my blog and where I talk about such things and partly because I’d be very interested in hearing from others who have done a similar project as I”m thinking about with the Norse Healing Goddesses.

We have a number of Healing Deities in Heathenry. The most well-known is Eir, named by Snorri as Divine physician. Looking through the lore, there is also Mengloth, and a number of much lesser known Deities that I tend to refer to as the healing retinue. I have very little devotional relationship with any of Them. That’s something that over the next year or so, I would like to change.

So, to do that, I intend to take one Deity a month, starting with Eir and research Her, make offerings, develop a prayer and devotional practice to Her and work hard to start incorporating the veneration of an entire group of little reverenced Deities into my regular cultus. I’m open to wherever this might lead. I know that this has been done with Frigga and Her retinue, but I”m very curious if anyone has done this with the healing retinue.

At any rate, I’ll probably be talking about this on and off and as I work through this process. I’ll share some of the relevant pieces here as i go.

I am still fundraising for my prayer card project (thank you to everyone, a huge thank you, who stepped up to donate money, art, and to sponsor cards, as well as to those of you who purchased some of the Sigyn devotional cards. it’s been a huge help!).

i still have quite a few 5×7 of the Sigyn cards left for purchase. once they’re gone, they’re gone. I will not be printing this size again. All the money goes toward more prayer cards. This month, I’m putting another card up for sale, also 5×7. I have a small stash of devotional cards for Eir. They are also $10/each and perfect for framing or for an altar. All proceeds will go toward the creation of more prayer cards (paying the artists, paying printing costs). Please contact me at krasskova at gmail.com if you are interested in purchasing one of these (or any of the other cards).

This is a 5×7 card of Eir by Grace Palmer. Size: 5×7, price: $10.

I still welcome sponsorship of cards. I will do a separate post shortly explaining which cards are up next and which still need sponsors.