Hearthside

I should probably be sleeping, but instead I am writing a new blog. (Nevermind all the ones in draft that have been sitting there for weeks because I am not satisfied with them yet.) I was adding nutrients and other ingredients to my mead tonight, and that is a fairly meditative task. It got me thinking a lot about community in heathenry.  Community is such a big deal to heathenry and vital to heathen worldview. Despite this, how we see people in our heathen communities is so different from how the elder heathens would’ve seen people in their communities. There is so much division between modern people. It is the western mindset to be individuals and to think about self first. That wasn’t the case in heathenry historically. And it isn’t the case in many cultures around the world still today. In North America the idea of individuality is taken to a whole new extreme in mainstream culture. And even within heathenry, although it is more community-minded, it is difficult to shake off that

Okay, this might be a bit out there, but I have too much time on my commute to let my mind wander. I was thinking about religion in media. I mean books, television, and film. This might not be the same everywhere, but here the predominant culture has a heavy christian influence in media since it is the religion of the majority of people in Canada. Of course our media is also heavily influenced by America and also by England. This isn’t a rant about that though. I am much more interested in what makes media religious. Obviously, the Bible is a religious text. I don’t know if I would think of it as media, but I guess technically it is. So that is some sort of baseline for what is definitely religious in the form of a book. Other media is very intentionally and overtly religious as well. Let’s see…. Jesus Christ Superstar. The Shack. Noah. … I am blanking, but there are lots. (This is going somewhere, I promise.) After that it is a sliding scale of what is religious in media. For example

  Spring is working its magic and I feel the need to turn outwards again after a long pandemic winter. I have quite a few things I am working on for this blog that are in some stage of editing, but I just cannot motivate myself to sit that long. The woods are calling… Every new bud and leaf is like a song. Every dew drop captures rainbows. Birds are scurrying about the forest floor looking for things to build nests with. The deer are making themselves scarce now that there is more food, but I still see their footprints in the mud. The forest is starting to wake up. I want to spend each sunny day outside in the woods or preparing my garden. But I am not convinced that winter has had its final say.  Let me first say that I see Spring as a scientific designation, not a religious one. From the perspective of Heathenry I recognize only Summer and Winter as seasons, but I find myself switching in my brain between these two modalities of understanding in order to relate to people in the broad