five topics meme, part 1
oursin and callmesandy were kind enough to give me 5 topics they associate with me back when that meme was going around, and to get back into posting, here's one topic.

oursin chose faeries, which wow, such a big topic, and one I don't really talk about with most people. Not everyone can hang with the idea that I talk to noncorporeal beings, and they talk back (bearfairie and I joke about our "imaginary friends"). But this is a huge part of my day to day existence and my spiritual practice, and I'm working on figuring out how to talk about this stuff with more people.

I work primarily with 2 faeries, one of whom I met when I was a young kid & is currently off on personal business, and one of whom I met not too long after my brother died. They help me with healing in a variety of ways (I met both of them in times of trauma, so at times this has been much needed), teach me how to interact with the spirit world safely and with something approximating appropriate etiquette (at least enough so I don't totally embarrass them), help me find other allies, take me on journeys, and work with me on various projects. & one of them or an ally of theirs is with me all the time, and while we don't talk constantly (I do manage to maintain a corporeal existence too), I'm totally baffled by the idea of being bored, cuz there's always someone there to talk to and things I can do. & now that I'm working more with my Ancestors, there's a lot of someones at times (not that Ancestors are faeries - in my cosmology according to what I've been taught, faeries were never and will never be in corporeal form).

The funniest part about all of this to me, is that I was an atheist for a very long time (well, for values of "very long" that fit into my 36 years) - I started consciously identifying as such at 12. I slid into agnosticism in my late 20s because really, I wasn't interested in working with deities and so it wasn't important to me whether they existed or not, and so the certainty of atheism just seemed like more effort than I wanted to expend. & now (as of the past few years), not only do I talk to spirits, I believe in reincarnation and that there is some eternal part of our spirits that does continue on after death, and I work with deities (and when I say work with, I largely mean direct communication, which I've only recently learned is not the way it works for all pagans - a downside of working largely with noncorporeals and only talking to a small number of other humans about this stuff is that I have a completely skewed view of the way this stuff works for other people. Or so I'm told.).

Orion Foxwood talks about how when one group dominates another, there's 2 ways the dominant group can get rid of the non-dominant group's traditions (I think there's also assimilation, but he may subsume that into one or both categories). There's vilification, like those witches who might do terrible things to you & so need to be run out of town or worse, or Satan who will steal your immortal soul. This is of course bad, but retains the idea that the vilified tradition/group has power. & then there's trivialization, which is what's been done with much of faerie traditions - when that gets reduced to tiny, cute Tinkerbell, not only has the tradition been suppressed, it's not even attributed any power. It's complicated, and I don't want to set up a hierarchy here - being labeled evil or trivial is a bad thing, and some things end up labeled both.

Some folks reverse engineer the mythology of faeries to try & figure out the beliefs they came from - today's emphasis on how small and cute faeries are might mean they're actually very large and powerful, for example. My geek mind finds this sort of thing very interesting, but my spiritual practice has been all about developing my intuitive side to balance out my overdeveloped logical side, so I tend to not go down that road. I don't mean I turn off my critical thinking (I'm not sure that's possible!), but I approach this stuff with an open mind and see what happens. I'm really an experiential learner, especially in this realm.

Anyway, as I said above, I haven't talked about this with many other people, and I'm looking to change that, so if you or someone you know does something in this realm & wants to chat about it, I'm open. & of course I'm happy to talk to the rest of you about it too (otherwise I wouldn't post my blatherings on the internet). I'm returning to my policy that all comments will be answered, so don't be dissuaded by my epic failure with the comments on my last post.