Hearthside

I have been thinking about Canadian heathenry, and both the challenges and strengths to having a heathen worldview in the Canadian landscape, as well as abroad. It can be tricky to quite fit in with the dominant christian over-culture. There is certainly a lot of room for misunderstandings. Of course, being raised in that culture, it is possible to blend in unnoticed the majority of the time. All of that is what it is though, and we have to work within that framework. More interesting perhaps, is looking at how heathen worldview can actually be a strength in our interactions with other individuals and groups. I have been blessed in my life with many mothers. There is of course, my birth mother, who helped to shape me into the strong woman that I am today, but my heathen worldview has also led me to forge many reciprocal bonds with people of other cultural groups that are more familiar with bonds of reciprocity than mainstream Canadian culture. One such special bond that I formed was...

So I have been on a bit of a hiatus, but for an important reason. I was getting married. I have had the blog entry below already written but in need of some editing for months, but I have a lot of ideas in the works most of the time. Now was the right time to put it out there, because our marriage speaks further to the topic at hand. We were supposed to be married last July, but of course pandemic times put plans on hold. We were blessed this year to have a small gathering of 26 people, and then through the wonders of modern technology livestream to friends and family all over the world.  Our ceremony was a meaningful and moving combination of our faiths as well bringing in elements of our combined story and emphasizing the importance of family in all its unique forms. At first I wanted to keep faith out of our ceremony, but my spouse wanted his father to say a prayer, and I knew that this would be a very meaningful moment between father and son and that it must happen. As such I a...