campaign season
Jun. 27th, 2013 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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bullmoonhearthAs Alisa likes to remind me, the Roman summertime was campaign season, hence her gearing up of Mars devotions and outward-turning Conquest of Obstacles during the summer months. While she has so far resisted the urge to conquer and subjugate the barbarian in her living room (that's me! hello!), the Hearth is definitely experiencing a mobilization of our energetic legions.
The theme is civic engagement over on Alisa's end (she keeps turning up those Kings of Wands). She's been a regular at Moral Monday protests, although she has so far resisted my every attempt to goad her into getting arrested. People's Durham, a small but very cool local group, has a strong investment in public education but a staff that's fairly overextended, so Alisa (who is a former education reporter and now works for an education nonprofit) is helping them out by evaluating some recent local initiatives to reverse NC's traumatic pitch forward into widening the school-to-prison pipeline, to see if there's any way that People's Durham can be of service. I'll let her be the one to post more about the connection between her experience of Roman paganism and her commitment to voting rights and the democratic process, but it's definitely work that she and I are both supporting on the spiritual and esoteric levels as well as through her direct action.
As usual, I'm holding down the more mystic side of our little universe while Alisa is being organized and productive. After spending a couple of years in "I really ought to write a book" space, I'm actually starting to do it. The book is untitled, but it'll be on the subject of what I'm calling, for lack of a better term, "feminist druidry," mining the intersection of my backgrounds in polytheist/reconstructionist-derived paganism and goddess spirituality, and hopefully proving thoroughly obnoxious only to *almost* everyone in both camps rather than *absolutely* everyone. Right now I'm in the outlining phase while I bang away at the final chapters of my first novel, and we'll see what happens from there.
There's more in the fermentation stage, as we're conspiring with some other local pagans to create some networks here in Durham. This is an incredibly progressive, environmentalist community with a huge amount of energetic bounce and sizzle, and yet pagans here are relatively isolated, all doing their own things without much contact as a community. My hometown, which is less than half the size of Durham alone (never mind Chapel Hill and other adjacent townships) *and also in Missouri* has a fantastic community resource that's been around for over a decade (not sure how much over; their current bylaws were adopted in 2006, but I was involved with them before I moved away in 2001, so they're at least that old). Hearthfires is very much a model for what I'd like to see Durham have, although obviously it'll develop its own character and mission that's relevant to the needs of the land and community here.
The theme is civic engagement over on Alisa's end (she keeps turning up those Kings of Wands). She's been a regular at Moral Monday protests, although she has so far resisted my every attempt to goad her into getting arrested. People's Durham, a small but very cool local group, has a strong investment in public education but a staff that's fairly overextended, so Alisa (who is a former education reporter and now works for an education nonprofit) is helping them out by evaluating some recent local initiatives to reverse NC's traumatic pitch forward into widening the school-to-prison pipeline, to see if there's any way that People's Durham can be of service. I'll let her be the one to post more about the connection between her experience of Roman paganism and her commitment to voting rights and the democratic process, but it's definitely work that she and I are both supporting on the spiritual and esoteric levels as well as through her direct action.
As usual, I'm holding down the more mystic side of our little universe while Alisa is being organized and productive. After spending a couple of years in "I really ought to write a book" space, I'm actually starting to do it. The book is untitled, but it'll be on the subject of what I'm calling, for lack of a better term, "feminist druidry," mining the intersection of my backgrounds in polytheist/reconstructionist-derived paganism and goddess spirituality, and hopefully proving thoroughly obnoxious only to *almost* everyone in both camps rather than *absolutely* everyone. Right now I'm in the outlining phase while I bang away at the final chapters of my first novel, and we'll see what happens from there.
There's more in the fermentation stage, as we're conspiring with some other local pagans to create some networks here in Durham. This is an incredibly progressive, environmentalist community with a huge amount of energetic bounce and sizzle, and yet pagans here are relatively isolated, all doing their own things without much contact as a community. My hometown, which is less than half the size of Durham alone (never mind Chapel Hill and other adjacent townships) *and also in Missouri* has a fantastic community resource that's been around for over a decade (not sure how much over; their current bylaws were adopted in 2006, but I was involved with them before I moved away in 2001, so they're at least that old). Hearthfires is very much a model for what I'd like to see Durham have, although obviously it'll develop its own character and mission that's relevant to the needs of the land and community here.