arche_apeiron

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." - ee cummings

So, I posted a piece of art I did today in a graphic design community for constructive criticism. The project was to bring light to veteran suicide.

A couple people said that it was so bad that it did an injustice to the cause, a couple people said that it looked like the soldier was taking a poop (which I can now not unsee, so I guess they were right on that account), and one guy said that all U.S. soldiers should kill themselves.

So yeah. That was a happy end to my work day.

Truth be told, I am not a great graphic artist. There are people out there who do amazing work. They are professionally trained and I am not.

That just drove home the fact that my skills are woefully inadequate. I could not in fact be a professional graphic designer.

I really wish I could go back to school for digital illustration, but I am 40 and financially that would be impossible and unreasonable.

Saying a matriarchy would function perfectly in comparison to the evil patriarchy isn't feminism. It is sexism. It is denying women the right to be human. It denies the reality that women can be nasty, toxic, and their own kind of manipulative and aggressive. It is creating the perfect condition for women to both deny their own demons while capitalizing on them or to feel shame at having them.

Painting women as white as snow, as Virgin Marys, is not feminism. It is buying into your own self-imposed sexism and does a disservice to both women and men.

I couldn't be a Christian because I don't believe in always loving your enemy.

The Greek for "enemy" in the NT texts referring to loving one's enemy is ἐχθροὺς (echthrous), which connotes that they hate you and desire to abuse you.

Sorry, no. I do not believe that everyone is deserving of love, nor do I think it is always beneficial to love someone in this state.

Now, I don't believe it is never useful or appropriate. I believe that in some instances loving one's enemy can create a great transformation in them or society. It can end years of strife to kill hateful, abusive people with kindness. This only works, however, if they have a conscience and if they are open to it.

Of course, the question remains: "What does it look like to love one's enemy?" You are not doing them any favors remaining their punching bag or footstool. And if you are of equal value to everyone else, then it is not loving yourself to allow them to do it.

The examples that Jesus gives for loving one's enemy is "turning the other cheek" and "giving them your cloak as well." These are, in fact, both acts of shaming the other person without resorting to violence. So, is Jesus saying we should love those who hate us by disrupting their anger through public shaming? Perhaps. I have no clue.

So, while in some cases, I do believe the best thing to do is indeed to love an enemy. Kill them with kindness. Stop their lashing out in wild frustration with acts of unconditional love (I even see this work in my own marriage). I think in some other cases, however, it is a very wrong, self-destructive, and socially irresponsible thing to do. And since his admonition to do so is spoken as being a universal, it becomes a problem.


I also couldn't be Christian because of its intense admonition against not being poor. Sorry, but I don't believe that I am any less good just because I want to enjoy the pleasures of life and have a large enough savings so that things don't go south. The world can have what is left of my middle class "riches" when I am dead. And indeed, since we have no children, we will leave what we have left -- if we have anything left after social security is destroyed and healthcare keeps getting more expensive -- to some charity.

There are a lot of wealthy Christians, so I am not sure how they get around the Gospel of Luke.

“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.

“Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.

“Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep."


Woe to me for not being hungry? No, thank you.

There is a lot in Christianity that I still very much have affection for, and perhaps there will be a time when what I have affection for will be enough and I will experience a reversion back to Christianity. But these two concepts -- loving your sociopathic, conscience-free abuser or molestor or unabashed manipulator; and always having to feel guilty for not being poor -- are the two biggest philosophical barriers between me and Christianity.

Does having a public journal even have a point?

If I am posting things that aren't being read or cared about, why don't I just write them in a notebook?

Having my thoughts and experience thrown out into the ether with no one returning the call is pointless.


I can't focus on my job. I want to be at home with the cats.



I am feeling emotionally burned out. Talking about emotions and having to engage the world and loved ones is getting to me. I can't do it anymore. I feel stretched thin. To paraphrase Bilbo, like butter spread too thin over bread. I can no longer be present to people in my life. I don't even want to see my friends anymore. I have no interest in checking in on them. I can't even be there for my husband, anymore, and he is sensing it. I keep saying the wrong things. Keep responding the wrong ways. Saying too much or not enough. Retreating from his need for comfort and a soft place to fall.

I am not there for my mother, either. All the requests to hang things and get things and fix things and move things and wash things were getting to me. And my mother knew it and so she got extra help through the Department of Aging. I am relieved, and yet it makes me feel like shit because it reminds me that I have failed yet another person to be there for them in the way that they need.

I feel spiritually burned out, too. Religious expression in all its forms and functions are grating on me something fierce. 

And here I am a member of a religious community, and I really don't want to keep going through the motions. Even though I like the people and do get emotional fulfillment from the fellowship and friendships, spiritually I don't believe in it. But since we are such a small kindred and one member is dead and another has decided to indefinitely take a break, I feel an even greater obligation to stick around and do what I said I would do. I fear I will lose the friendships with two of the members that I made through it. But, man, it hasn't felt completely right to me. If my husband weren't really invested in it, I would have walked away months ago, just as I walked away from Christianity.

I am drawn toward secular Buddhism, too, because of its promises to alleviate the suffering that comes with expectations, but Buddhism is wrought with religiosity and problem people. Online Buddhists are annoying as fuck. 

I feel stuck. I have no one to talk to about such things because a lot of it is just too private. Or simply there are no words for it. 

Actually, I don't WANT to talk to anyone about my feelings. I'm sick of talking about feelings. I'm sick of always having to talk about "what is wrong." Yes, I have an eating disorder, yes I have depression and anxiety and self-esteem issues and chronic pain and my body is falling apart and there is nothing I can do to stop the slow and inevitable decline into being disabled like my mother. Yes I don't make much money, and every time my husband's job starts getting to him I am yet again reminded of how I failed him in another way. And then I have to also be emotionally and physically present for others? 

I'm just selfish, I guess. I am no longer dependable. I am resentful, absent, uninterested in other people's struggles. I am a shitty wife, a shitty daughter, a shitty friend. 

I would just love a really long break -- months, maybe years -- from the slings and arrows of these things we call emotions. I fantasize about just dropping everything and doing something completely drastic. Like, stupidly contradictory fantasies of either going to a Buddhist monastery and eating vegan in pure silence or joining the military to go shoot up terrorists. So, I essentially want to either kill my selfhood through Buddhism or kill other people through combat. I'm weird. And neither one is reasonable in the slightest. And it isn't like my emotions wouldn't follow me. They would be exacerbated, I think, by either of these experiences.

I think I'll go home now.

 I need to learn who I am and what I believe.

I had a session with my therapist the other day, and she asked me what I liked to do. I told her "I really don't have any interests. I like learning about things, but I don't have any interest in doing much of anything. I used to."

She said that people who say they have no interests tend to be people who don't know who they are. They don't have a strong sense of identity.

As an empathic person, an anxious person, a fearer of conflict, a desirer of belonging, a desirer of meaning, an American, a citizen of the world, a human being, an employee, a daughter, a wife -- what I am and what I believe are contingent on these other roles. These different me's. 

These different me's are not necessarily me but merely the me that arises due to contingencies.

MAJOR LIGHT BULB BUDDHISTY MOMENT.

I have repeatedly revisited Buddhism as a spiritual path for me. But I tend to leave it because, aside from not believing all of its teachings, because, a, it is hard, and b, because of other people. The people who tend to follow Buddhism grate on my nerves something fierce. And possibly because the way I think and feel are so easily influenced by those around me.

Buddhism speaks a truth about contingency -- our selfhoods are contingent states of being. So, what draws me to Buddhism is its truth about contingency, and what repels me away from it is my contingent nature. Since I am a social being, my experience of Buddhism is contingent on interacting with others, which inevitably makes me walk away in disgust. There are a lot of pedantic, self-important, insistently clever, "I'm-so-happy-clappy-enlightened-what-a-pity-you're-not" type of people.  

I have become culturally embedded in Heathenry, but I do not believe as most Heathens do. I am ultimately an atheist. I do not believe any of the gods are real in any way. I see them as psychological constructs. Perhaps mimetic thought forms. They can be tools to speak about certain concepts, but I do not believe in divine beings (or in land spirits).

I get a lot out of the friendships that I have formed in being part of the kindred. I also very much enjoy learning about Norse Pagan religion and culture, and yes, about vikings, too. I enjoy debating history and theology just as much as I enjoyed debating history and theology when I was in seminary, even though I wasn't a Christian. I even enjoy planning rituals, even if I ultimately dislike personally executing them. And I don't enjoy the beginning and ending of a blot because we are essentially calling on beings that I don't believe exist and I feel like a fraud. It is viscerally unpleasant.

I do enjoy the second and third passing of the horn, though. I notice the very powerful emotional tool that the blot is for people. They are tools of catharsis. Outside of that space, people are restrained, busy, frenetic, they keep their feelings at bay. Enter into the ritual dance of the blot, and suddenly people are free to cry and speak their truth and share their deepest feelings, girded up by the mythopoetic language that Heathenry provides. Such an intimate experience bonds you to people in a very powerful way.

But I still need to figure out what I believe, spiritually and ethically. And being so embedded in this religion is influencing me just as much as when I was embedded in Christianity -- I take on the mythopoetic and psychospiritual language around me, nay, embrace it and enjoy it, which in the end influences what I believe, what I do, where I hang my hat.

I am an officer of the kindred because no one else stepped up for the job and I am The Little Helper. I think this above all is what has consistently made me uncomfortable. I am an officer for a religion that I don't fully buy into, and I do not wish to step down because I made a promise to our chief and friend. I don't want to leave the kindred, but right now I also don't want to be as emotionally invested in it as I have been. We are a fledgling kindred. Only a year old. And we wish to make it grow, make it stronger, do outreach and connect with other Heathens. That is even MORE embedding of my time and energy and identity into Heathenry. 

And on top of this, my husband is a very committed Heathen -- metaphysically and ethically -- and this is a religious endeavor that we can do together as a couple, a spiritual language we can use to discuss what we think and believe about the world. This adds another complication to it. If I were, by chance, to leave Heathenry altogether, that will cause a barrier between us, emotionally or linguistically or whathaveyou. I believe it could even cause conflict between us.

Maybe Heathenry is the best place for me, spiritually. But maybe it isn't. Maybe in the end I will have to complement my involvement with another religious tradition (and Buddhism is always the one that comes up because it adds another layer of compassion for the broken self and the broken stranger that I think is less emphasized in Heathenry). I don't know right now. I think I have been spinning my wheels about spiritual identity for most of my adult life due to in part my contingent way of being in the world. 

Apparently, according to a certain subset of men on the internet, women can only be virgins, asexual, or whores.

And it is these men's duty to call women whores when they sense that she is neither a virgin or asexual.

This is kind of scary to me.


I mentioned in frivolity and joining in on the banter about men liking it when their female friends hug them because they can feel their breasts. I said I feel the same thing, only when my physical therapist works on me.

I got called a whore for it.


I don't know why I am letting some dude on the internet get to me so much, but I am having trouble not crying. He made me feel ashamed, and I am so angry that just some man I don't know and who has no place in my life has that much control over how I feel about my body and sexuality.

I am chewing on the differences in the metaphysical foci of Wicca vs. Heathenry:

Wicca, through its focus on the Mother Goddess and her Consort, teaches the inherent balance of nature. The goal is to become one with that balance, avoiding the extremes at either end. It ultimately is pantheistic in its relationality.

Heathenry, OTOH, focuses on the threat of chaos -- the chaos that once was and will be again in the universe -- and the balance that is created only through struggling against the chaos. The goal is to find peace and balance in the face of the chaos and in spite of the chaos, a chaos that we are ultimately fated to succumb to, anyway.

So, I see Wicca as a spiritual path of unification. Of finding the soft place to fall in the center.

I see Heathenry as a spiritual path of struggle against opposites. Of finding your soft place to fall in the "innangard."

Which is strange, since Wicca spends more time "warding off" bad spirits with things like salt and closed circles, but Heathenry does not seem to focus on this so much. So, I am wondering if I am missing an ingredient here.

Obviously this is simplified, as there is chaos addressed in Wicca and unification addressed in Heathenry. I am just thinking of foci.