Gender Jumper

I've absorbed a lot of concepts over the past few years about how significant the actions of belonging are to all kinds of communal activities, from religious worship to concerts to fandoms to family to professional athleticism... In many of these contexts (including religion), the acts of participation become ritual, and those rituals are as important (or sometimes more important) than the actual tenets of faith, understanding of art, or agreement between community members.

As someone who grew up with zero religion, a weak sense of family, and a strong sense of finding my own way, I've rarely had use for ritual. ( Ritual thinkies... )

Which raises questions: can those of us who have spent most of our lives mostly adrift from community ties solidify our ties when we do find them through some kind of ritual. Is it ethical to do so? Is it ethical NOT to? If we pursued this line of inquiry further, would it be more ethical to make up a meaning or borrow one, to turn meaning-making into the meaning, or to eschew meaning altogether, and how would that affect the hold the ritual keeps on participants?

(I guess I need to supply a theoretical foundation here, but the best I can offer is my own personal brand of "life-hacking": recognize the way the brain works and leverage that knowledge in the direction of becoming the person you most want to be.)

I'm not sure there's much to do for an eclipse other than stand around in awe, notice how the subtleties of the partial already change the animals and the shadows, etc. We've got intermittent clouds here today, so it's a bit more of a game and excitement, wondering how much we'll get to see and when (supposed to have totality in about 20 minutes.

I'm increasingly sensitive to another shift around me. My reading of time or chaos (are they even distinct?) leads me to believe we're within 6 months of a major shift, maybe less, but of course those things don't happen all at once. The eclipse may just be a coincidence, or maybe it'll affect some decision-makers... One can only hope.

During our conversation with eclecticwitches today, I was thinking about the tensions between colonialism, urbanity, and time. There was a time when most capital-P Pagans I knew seemed somewhat oblivious to the privileged and hegemonic approach they took to gathering practices and traditions, picking and choosing the parts they liked, and starting a practice without consulting the living, breathing practitioners of the present day. That time seems to have passed, fortunately, and people are a lot more thoughtful and respectful in how they find and engage traditions they did not inherit.

(A known struggle among immigrant communities is that migratory generations try to enforce their culture on their children while that culture has continued to develop and shift back home, leaving them to be strict about traditions and practices that are already changing elsewhere in the world. I see this with settler pagans who try to reassert ancestral traditions while those traditions may persist in a different form today.)

But there's still a bit of... pastoral nostalgia?... about it all that doesn't resonate for me. Everyone seems focused on trying to re-connect to the land, reconnect to the elements, reconnect to things lost or distorted by time, and I'm trying to connect to the here-and-now.

I've never lived in the countryside, I've been terminally online since adolescence, and building a coven over technology is less far-fetched to me than a woodland retreat or starlit meadow. All of the moments of my life where I felt magic around me have been socially and materially urban, so it makes sense to me to make more room in my practice for technological and postmodern sensibilities, not less.

I recall that a witch I dated about 15 years ago was perpetually losing things and had a knack for frying technology around her. It reminds me of the relationship I once had with time -- seemingly antagonistic, but really I was going against a resonant element instead of accepting it as a force of nature. I'd like to think my relationship with technology has only ever been as contentious as I forced it to be, either by not knowing myself and my vulnerabilities or by not knowing the tech and its vulnerabilities. Turns out we get along quite well when I align these in the same direction.

And I link this question with greater tensions such as being a settler in colonized lands. It is paternalistic and naïve to assume that giving land back to indigenous communities (for example, and BTW we should totally be doing this) would lead to no cities -- it would lead to different cities, or more likely a shift in the cities that already exist. Abandonment could still be toxic. Why not adapt? Aspiring toward balance instead of growth does not mean destroying what has been built, it means building less and repurposing what already exists. We cannot easily unmake urbanity, we can only redirect it in the future, learn from our mistakes, and adapt with more hope and forward-thinking, less capitalism and environmental antagonism.

According to my understanding of entropy and time-cycles, I don't think these particular eggs can be un-cracked. What is built in destruction is still built, and would be at least as destructive if we tried to break it all back down. So for me, at least some of my spiritual practice will need to be a recognition that technology only occludes our relationship with nature, the universe, the elements insofar as it has emerged in post-spiritual contexts, not that it is inherently anti-spiritual or even spirit-neutral. There's still magic there, I think, for those who are open to it.

The human mind wants some things to be perpetually true, even to the point of wanting to pause or reverse progress, despite the human nature of perpetual change. Accepting change so well that you can perceive and accept it is, to me, the heart of mindfulness and of time magic. So I will add to my long list of lofty spiritual goals to find ways to deepen my practice that work with technology, cityscapes, and urban living rather than against them.

Re: the title of this entry, if the term "techno-pagan" already exists and has meaningfully different connotations, I'll try to come up with something else. If it has not been developed at all, consider this me calling dibs.