Greetings to all and sundry.
So I spent the August Long Weekend (which handily corresponds to the “First Harvest” festival in the Wiccan calendar) socializing in a completely non-pagan context (as far as I know) and completely not having Religion on the brain. (See quotation, below, for details).
I have a… weird(?) relationship to the Wheel of the Year. A big part of that is that I’m a solitary practitioner with pretty damn personal take on my practice. (If you look at the Pagan blogroll in the sidebar, you’ll see a fair amount of hedge witchery and/or animism in that list). I don’t ID as a practitioner of Wicca or any of the other “Major” Pagan religions (even my Goddess Spirituality hinges far less on 2nd Wave Feminist Essentialism and the work of Marija Gimbutas – much as I love Godddess Jewelry and the use of Menstrual Blood as a ritual substance – than it does on the particular deities and spirits I’m most likely to want to hang out with). Consequently, I don’t associate the Wheel Days with big community events (well, other than KG, which I tend to avoid due to Too Many People), so much as “If I want something to happen, I need to do it myself, and I need to make it low-key enough that the various faiths of people I want to spend time with will all blend nicely”. Which means that I tend to go Secular, by and large, with whatever Thing I throw together. Which means I’m also okay with letting someone else do the Throwing.
What does this rambling intro have to do with anything?
A friend of mine was talking about how, these days, she looks at a date like August First and doesn’t go “Personally relevant religious feast day” but, rather, goes “Ack! So little time! So much to do before my deadline!” What I wrote in response was this:
My Ghost was saying today how, even though our leathergirls aren’t necessarily all that religious (and remarkably few of them are even nominally Pagan of any stream), we sure do hit the holidays, don’t we?
Case in point: A bunch of us spent this weekend being sensual and eating mad amounts of local food while naked at a campground with a big spring-fed lake.
Totally forgot what day it was until someone mentioned it this morning.
But that’s how it tends to go.
I asked myself why I think it tends to go this way. And a big part of it is that the people I hang out with in general, Pagan or not, are far and away very rooted in their bodies, prone to sensuality, sex positive, and supportive of environmentalism, small-scale agriculture, and seasonal eating. Basically a perfect combination to lead us to pay attention to what’s growing locally and what our bodies want, as well as a tendency towards enjoying all the fleshly things that get Pagans a bad rap with folks of a more ascetic (or maybe just more puritanical?) turn of mind.
Anyone else run into this? Thoughts? Theories? Drop me a note. 🙂
– TTFN,
– Meliad the Birch Maiden
Urban Meliad 