Hearthside

  One thing I have noticed with Heathens, and Pagans more generally, is that they do things as a labour of love. (I mean… coughs …. Look at this blog. Don’t worry, I get the irony. Even though this blog is often just as much for me as my readers I could definitely monetize it if I wanted the headache.I don’t wish to stick to a schedule for posting for Patreon support though, and I don’t like the added paperwork at tax time.) I am thinking more of physical goods and events though, in this case. One of the members of my Kindred was asking how much they could sell an item for that they were making and we were happy to help them set a fair price, which allowed for people trying to negotiate them down as well. It was much higher than what they thought they could get for that work, despite their skill and quality techniques and materials.  I am thinking on an even larger scale though, like Pagan events. I am surprised what events are free or by donation, that have a huge overhead co...

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...