Spring

So.  I was going to blog a post last week about Ostara, Alban Eiler, the Spring Equinox – my favourite festival in the entire pagan wheel of the year.  Fluffhead was very sick, so I couldn’t blog anything.  He begins to mend, so here I am again.

Most pagans I have ever spoken to seem to love the whole Samhain, Samhuinn (Halloween), or Litha, Alban Hefin (Midsummer), or Yule, Alban Arthan (before Christmas) best.  But I always loved Ostara best.  Maybe it’s the fact that I am always in a bit of downer in that strange nothingy period between January and May (Imbolc: the festival of lights at the start of February is my second favourite festival).  The fact that everyone is talking about spring while I am still freezing my imaginary bollocks off.   I don’t know.  The fact that of course, Ostara (from Oestre, Nordic goddess who runs fleet of foot over the land, sprouting greenery wherever she places her feet) is shortly afterward followed by that Chocolate Festie we all know as Easter.  Maybe the proximity to chocolate has something to do with it. 

I think it’s likeliest to be the colours: all that pastel pale yellow, the gentle pinks, the baby soft sky blues, gentle sprout of new shooting grass green.  It calms the eye, spreads soft over my yelling brain, and quiets it, for however long.  The images of hares dancing over a flowery meadow, all that stuff about new chicks and eggs and baby lambs…it’s a very fluffy, feathery hopeful period.  It makes me think of sunshine on my head.

I watch the laurel and the other brilliant unidentified tree outside the living room window.  The laurel’s fat leaves remain as ever they are, lush and wide.  The other tree has dropped everything over winter, but within the space of a week has budded and let out tiny new shoots all over itself.  Each day they open a bit more.  Today they are actually tiny leaves, all unfurling like a fist opening, more wrapped inside each one.  There’s going to be blossom or small flowers of some sort too, which I don’t remember  from last year.  I wait to see what colour.  I watch the green against the blue sky.  Yesterday the temperatures were as hot as June, after the endless cold.  (People keep saying what a mild winter it has been, which is really annoying me – I was damn well freezing, and my book room is growing a mouldy damp…as far as I am concerned the wind and the cold were quite sufficient in my little world.)

I change my altar to a pale green, add a small hazel wood pentacle disc, wooden painted statues of rabbits and hares, and a potted hyacinth that has become pinkish, lavenderish.  Small tealights for warmth.  Some sunflower seeds.

Finally I have managed to get the spirituality thing from my resolutions underway.  I was trying to think what can be done in 5 minutes a day that would really and truly make a difference.  Not something brainish (too easy for me to just think about things) – a Doing Thing.  It was so simple. Sit in the garden, no matter the weather, for 5 minutes every day at whatever time I can.  Usually, as soon as Fluffhead begins to sleep, before I start panicking about all the things I have to get done in a tiny timeframe.  Just sit.  Do NOT look at all the things that need going in the garden.  (Do not think of the mowing, the shiteload of weeding, the bulbs and herbs to be planted, the seeds to be germinated, the trees that are growing where according to our rental contract we must not let them be…None of that.)  It’s hard to sit there and not think – ‘blimey this garden is out of control…and I am supposed to be keeping it neat, its part of my job at home here, and it’s a stipulation in the rental contract that I do so…’  But I have been so tired lately, its become easier.  Just go out there, sit in the one plastic garden chair that I have placed far back on the concrete near the living room doors, so I can view the whole garden.  Those three tall and swaying firs.  The prickly pride of the holly, barely moving.  The sycamore chancers shooting up everywhere.  The cherry blossom in bud.  The buddleias that have gone insane and shot up 6 feet this year.  The tiny purple flowers all over the lawn.  I don’t know what they are, but they are truly lovely.

Just that 5 minutes.  The idea is to just watch and listen.  Watch for squirrels, as they do tend to run past, frilling their tails.  The odd (very rare) hedgehog that appears from behind the large woodpile and snuffles its way across the whole garden.  Occasionally a fox, moving low, tail down.  Sometimes the fox is in a bit of a state, a wounded side, or a manky looking bitten tail.  This one runs with a wariness and tautness to danger.  If I even breathe while he is around, he takes off immediately.  I have to be invisible and barely blink.  He runs very close to the back of the wall, as much under the shade of the firs and the hedge behind as he can.  Sometimes a much sleeker and shinier one runs through.  With a small cub.  They are more confident, and look at me, here and there.  The look cannot be properly described.  If that dad fox (I feel it’s the dad, I may be all wrong of course) were a human, then that look says: ‘don’t even think about it, possible food source, this land here is mine’.  It’s piercing, cold and there is pacing striding thought in there, if only I really did understand fox language.  The little one’s look just says, ‘oh!’ in a scattered sort of way, before running on.  They are usually going from the right to the left across the garden, but once they seemed to play chase and ran back and forth about 4 times, while I felt enormously lucky (and a bit irritated that my brain was also engaged in the direst wish to go for a pee, when I wanted my brain to be clear for the wonder of animal interaction).

Sometimes no animals show themselves.  Sometimes I can just hear the birds.  The tiniest birds often make the largest sounds.  The magpies (everywhere around here) fly low over the garden and come and sit on the roof of the outhouse strutting noisily about.  Reminding me of the massive seagulls that sit on my mother’s flat roof down by the sea and can wake her at 4 in the morning.  Sometimes I hear seagulls here, and always I instantly feel a sensation of sunlight and salty sea walks, a sensation of spaciousness and clarity.  If Fluffhead is with me outside at any time of day, he really responds to these particular bird sounds, always raising his hands in an imperious Emperor type pointy gesture at them.  As I say, some days I don’t see them at all.  I just listen to the wind in the trees, and hear them from around the house or the next door’s garden.  I listen to the grass and the leaves move.

I get very annoyed when next door (the neighbour’s I really dislike on the left hand side) are in the garden.  They are one of those families who can’t be anywhere without musical accompaniment.  Always the radio, the boombox, the mobile phone with them.  They do their gardening chores or bounce on their ridiculously large trampoline listening to loud Capital Radio (if it’s the mum), or loud hip-hop, modern so called-R&B (if it’s the teenage daughter). Metal if it’s the son.  I object to the metal the least; I like the energy of it pounding.  It’s the sort of noise you want turned up, so you can be irritated at proper volume; and then ask what was that song called?  The others though…bloody talking on the radio, argh.    And modern so called R&B…whatever.  If they are out there I go away and attempt to come back later.  I want to hear the garden, not them, screeching and playing music that I didn’t even pick!

The other sounds I get uncomfortable listening to is the school nearby.  The sound of that human jungle arises often when I am out there: break time, lunchtime, whichever.  That is the true meaning of screeching, schools.  It’s a weird saturated sound: it’s far enough away that it plays in and out on the wind; but close enough that sometimes I hear individual voices within the cacophony.  Instant flashback of complete alienation in the face of that environment of running about and shrieking and being so intensely pack-ish.  Memories of skulking to the edge, hiding in shade.  (No wonder I always want to hug the wounded fox when I see him; and I never will be able to of course.)  I used to engineer it to get given tasks indoors at breaktimes as often as possible, or tasks in other outside parts of the school, stacking chairs, putting away the outside gym mats etc.  Anything to keep me away from the pack, and let me think, watch and listen in peace.  After all those years, so loooooooooooong now; still I feel the dislocation of those times.  Every time I hear the playground.

So sometimes I try and go away and come back then also.  And then other times, I just sit quietly and try to listen to that too.  It’s far enough away, I say to myself.  It’s gone.  You are here; this is your garden you share with the birds and the creatures, the trees and the grass.  You are safe within these bounds.

I have managed this small and oddly significant spiritual practice for over a month now.  Just watching.  Listening.  Sitting.  Being there.  I miss it when I don’t do it.

It’s made me want to engage more with the garden too.  Though I am not thinking of the chores, I can still see them.  And it’s made me want to care for it so much more – to have a proper relationship with it.  And of course, this season of Ostara, when all wakes up and seeds will begin to grow: this is the time to reintroduce myself to my garden that I let alone all winter as it was Definitely So Cold.

So, today, when I have an amazing 3 hours of babysitting, I am going to stop talking to you now.  I am going to sit in the sun, and be there.  Then I may have a word with the borage and green alkanet, in the Strongest Possible Terms (as in: dudes, you aren’t just being here, you are hogging here, and some of you have got to go, ok?).  I will wave a trowel at them and do terrible things.

Then I will plant some sunflower seeds.  Grow a happy garden, grow a happy me.  Fleet of foot over the land, sending up new shoots wherever I place my feet.  Helping spring.

Personal Notions

After that rather dodgy story I fed you last post, here is a return to my general waffling.  I said I’d have a later post about my idea of ‘Notions’.  So here it is. 

You know when people say: ‘I believe in…God/Christianity/mermaids, etc’?  You know how they often ‘passionately believe in [whatever]’ – especially politicians, they love to use the passionately prefix?  It really annoys me.

It really annoys me, because people usually mean, when they say they believe in something, that they had some information a long while ago, liked it, it felt right (note I’m not saying they thought about it a lot, though they may have, its true).  Then they decided that this bit of information on this particular subject was it.  The last word.  The only other bits of information that would subsequently be given air time, were those that supported (in whatever way) the original information that led to the believing.  Other information would be rejected/attacked/mocked/ignored.  It isn’t always the case that this is how things go.  But it is quite often.  If you speak to anyone much who is habitually of the inclination to say they ‘believe’ in things…the chances are, you are speaking to someone who hasn’t thought any of these things through at length, for possibly quite some time.

This is how the Cambridge British English Dictionary online defines belief:

the feeling of being certain that something exists or is true:

E.G. All non-violent religious and political beliefs should be respected equally.

E.G. [+ that ] It is my (firm) belief that nuclear weapons are immoral.

E.G. His belief in God gave him hope during difficult times.

E.G. Recent revelations about corruption have shaken many people's belief in (= caused people to have doubts about) the police.

E.G. He called at her house in the belief that (= confident that) she would lend him the money.

That’s all fair enough, right?  Being certain that something exists or is true?  I don’t think it is, when it comes to non-checkable things.  I can check why the sky is blue; I can check why it rains and when its likely to.  I can check lots of material world things.  A lot of other things – matters of religion, of conscience, of political slant, of like or dislike – all these things are matters of opinion, cultural bias/input and personal taste.

So, when we disagree about the Good Thingness of puffball skirts, or that fashion for wearing your jeans halfway down your arse, for teenage men; we can feel free to disagree about their merits, as we know it’s a matter of opinion – we aren’t going to end up hearing on the news about a stabbing that occurred over in St Martins College of Fashion that happened because a disagreement over whether the colour shade deep fuchsia pink goes with the other shade hot orange got out of hand.  I hope.  (I think it does, by the way; very nice sunset type combination.)

On the other hand, when people disagree about politics and especially religion, it tends to get violent sooner or later.  Because despite God, or god or goddesses being an uncheckable thing, and therefore in the realms of opinion, people forget that opinion isn’t fact.  Or they forget that belief is only opinion.  (And therefore just personal to them.)  People start to want to apply their personal opinions about which they are FEELING so CERTAIN, to everyone else.  The opinions clash.  There is trouble.  My parents met in missionary school.  I was shocked when my mother told me this, when I was 12 or so.  She had always told me about the importance of good manners and being polite.  And yet…she and my father were training to Go and Be Really Rude, Globally, by charging about and telling far away peoples that their way of life and opinions were all wrong, and should be replaced with my parents’ views[1].  This was when I really started thinking about belief, and what a dangerous thing I thought it was.  What a divisive thing, often used like a weapon.

The thing is, I quite liked to believe in things.  I crave certainty, like everyone else.  Every thing less I have to think about is a bit more room for my brain to feel mellow, right?  True.  But it’s a sacrifice of good brain cells.  Over the years I have realised that I have started to react really strongly to the word ‘belief’.  I try never to use it, except about purely personal things (‘I believe my back would improve again if I could go back to the osteopath’).  Even then, I’ve realised these things can be equally substituted for the word ‘think’.  I don’t adopt anything much without thinking it through, and like I said in an earlier post – things don’t remain adopted indefinitely (remember the poor Loch Ness Monster and the evil Stanley?!).  (So: ‘I think my back would get better if I could go to the osteopath regularly again, for a while; because when I did last time, and I had exactly the same trouble, it did improve.’  Better thought, more thought out – but it’s a thought, not a belief.)

This isn’t a Things That Really Annoy Me post, because I sorted out my own personal solution to this.  I really liked the Loch Ness Monster, remember?  I have Notions now.  ‘I have a Notion that the Loch Ness Monster is a ghost of a dinosaur’, I told you before.  Yes!  I like that idea.  That’s what a notion is, to me.  Own personal terminology: A Notion is an Idea.  (I heard an Irish comedian use the word notion in this way ages ago and never forgot it, though very annoyingly indeed, I clean forgot who the comedian was, or what he was talking about – but that’s where I got this idea of using Notion in purely this way.)  But an Idea is all it is. 

See:  I have current religious and philosophical  Notions I like to live with.  (Despite  also living with an atheist and reading lots of science books, I would irritate Mr Dawkins with my desire to have it all and the fairies at the end of the garden too.  He was being sarcastic about the fairies.)  I think, and like the Notion of modern neo-paganism.  I like lots of things about it, and a few of the things clash, and it’s all very hard to explain as its more or less dogma free.  I can’t quote you a Bible of ‘the movement’ as there isn’t one.  If there becomes one in the future, I may well leave. 

I like the notion of Animism.  I like the Notion of Pantheism.  I like the Notion of Reincarnation.  I like the general pluralism of Gods/Goddesses; the duality of the Female/Male principle.  I love the Notion of Balance as a major goal.  I like the Notion of Magic (and have experienced it for myself, so am on board with this concept also – go ahead and laugh, its really quite ok).   I like the Notions of Personal Responsibility and taking care of others I find in paganism.  I love the Notion of honouring, reverencing and taking care of Earth as much as we can (I’ll unhippify that for you: don’t shit where you eat – sound more sensical now?).  I’m no particular neo-pagan strand, I’m drawn to several.  I like the Notions of many different strands in paganism, and I unselfconsciously read lots about each thing and take from them what I find useful and leave the rest to anyone else who may find it useful for them instead.  I’m eclectic and unashamed of this.  I have personal truths for now, and they may stay, they may change.  I have personal morality, and that moves too, dependent on experience and further learning. 

There are Creator myths in paganism, plenty of them - but I adopt none of them, and I am so utterly unfussed about the Notion of Who Created All This I can't quite express it to you.  I feel its completely irrelevant to how we live our lives here.  Lets try and do some good, have some fun, learn some things.  I also find the Big Bang a perfectly reasonable explanation; I have no argument with science at all.  Science people tend to argue with me, till they realise I am quite agreeing with them about having no proof for anything I Notion about, and these things are purely for me to think with, act with, experiment with.  I tend to look at science as finding out the processes, and labelling things for which I have Notions about [E.G. - this!].  Sometimes my views change altogether after reading or talking some Science.   Treehugger and Proud of it (but not loud about it, generally).

The most important thing about any of it, is that absolutely no one has to agree with me.  No one has to come and join with me and have my Notions.  It doesn’t bother me at all.  This is all quite personal to me.  (Note me not going into great detail about my Notions – if you ask, and you’re interested, I’d tell you and we’d talk about it – till then, why would I talk about it uninvited, and at great length?  A lot of the trouble we have with people’s 'beliefs' is that they think everyone should hear, at any time, what moves them to do what they do how they do it.  They don’t ask if people are interested; they stridently assume the role of teacher and by extension: corrector.  How presumptuous.  Arrogant.  Rude.) 

Note: I would stand up for my right to have the free speech to say any of my Notions should I want to, to not be persecuted for having these Notions and being public about them (as I am here).  Also, I would stand up for the right to gather with others who thought similarly and talk or act with them (the funny thing with the pagans I’ve met and talked to, corresponded with, is they think similarly but never really the same, so endless disagreements prevail and are accepted as the norm – and very healthy too, I think). 

So if you hear me say I have a Notion unicorns may well be real but in another dimension which we rarely get access to – you feel free to laugh if you want.  Totally your right.  (Of course, having Notions which other people find funny is ANNOYING, don’t get me wrong.  I’m a sensitive flower, and being laughed at hurts my feelings.  I wish people wouldn’t mock; but they do.  I wish my mother wouldn’t think I may well be going to Hell [it’s rude of her!], but she does, so that’s that.)  And I will laugh at your views if I find them equally outlandish. 

What – you think there’s only one way to enlightenment, and despite all the varied experiences of people over thousands of years, only this one way and one God exists????  Everyone else is doomed, and damned…?  That makes no sense to me.  I do not hold with this unfriendly and oddly childlike Notion.   

And that’s all it is; an uncheckable personal Notion that got out of its box and started bullying other Notions.   

Actually, not funny.  Worrying.

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[1] (A form of evangelical Christianity, unnamed in father’s case: he was a bit of a backward-looking maverick in terms of belief, he never found a church that felt right for him, he wanted to run his own, I think; my mother was brought up strongly Pentecostal and rebelled down to a gentler from of C of E, where she remains very happy).