Hearthside

So I have lots of bigger stuff underway for the blog but it just isn't quite ready yet. This has been weighing on me lately though, and I just needed a rant.  Canadian Heathenry. There are only 13 inclusive Heathen kindreds in Canada that I can confirm on my inclusive Heathen group list . (If you have another one please contact me on social media or by email to have it added.) That is 13 groups. We have 13 provinces and territories in Canada. These groups are not evenly dispersed across all of them. In fact, many of them are multiple kindreds within the same cities even. The result is that the Canadian Heathen landscape is very isolationist. If you aren't able to travel you might never meet another Heathen or if you are lucky enough to be a part of a kindred, you may never meet another kindred.  But wait... Didn't I just say many kindreds are in the same cities? Yeah. That is the point of this rant actually. This isn't about how isolationist Canadian Heathenry is, altho...

If you have been a Heathen for any length of time you probably are familiar with the concept of guilt culture vs. shame culture. The argument is that Christianity is a guilt culture, which means people internalize and self-regulate their behaviours based on whether or not they think they are living up to the standards of the broader community. (Even if their own assessment of this is not true.) The downfall of this is if you have any level of perfectionism or anxiety then you are beating yourself up a lot unnecessarily for things that everyone else probably doesn’t care about. Heathenry by contrast, is a shame culture, which means we rely on our community to tell us if we have misstepped and how to correct it. On the surface, you may think of public shaming as someone in stocks, getting rotten tomatoes thrown at them and this may seem unappealing. However, this is not how it is meant to be. The idea of shame culture is that it actually allows the individual a lot of extra freedom becau...