We're guest blogging over at The Wild Hunt today. Come see!
(Note: there were so many thought provoking comments in response to this post that it generated a second-round of ideas. You can read the follow-up post here .) I have a confession to make. I want to be famous. Well, sort of. I don't want to be famous, famous, and ride around in a limousine and have to hire security and that sort of thing. I just want to write a book, have it published by somebody other than my mother, and bought and read by somebody other than my mother, and maybe even sign a couple of autographs along the way. Mom can have one autographed, too, if she wants. It has to be a spiritual book. A really moving and truthful book, that makes people want to look deep inside themselves, and then they come up to me and say something like, "It was all because of that book you wrote! It changed my life!" And I would say, no, no, really, you did all that, you and God/the gods --I'm a little fuzzy on whether the life-changing book is for Pagans or for Quake
Comments
I was to have attended another private Pagan retreat week this coming week--the first in about two years--but the closing on the house conflicts with it! Still, I hope to go next year, and perhaps organize a morning meeting for worship among that tribe. :-)
I miss spending more time with my Pagan community. But I got to keep the lessons they taught me, and the friendships, and I still love to spend time there when I can.
I should write more about that, I think. I go through waves of intense fear and anxiety, almost to the point of paranoia, when I try to fully enter a new community for the first time. Thus far, it has always been worth it--though I've been burned, and badly, more than once.
Souris--the bit about betrayal by other humans in community as a bug and not a feature has been hard won. I did not feel this way once upon a time. Certainly, my becoming Quaker has intensified my sense that forgiveness is both harder than we like to believe and more essential to living fully and freely and in the Spirit... but I was growing into that knowledge anyway.
Probably the place I've written about that process the most clearly is in my spiritual journey series, especially in parts 8 through 12. It is still something I wrestle with constantly: I am by nature judgmental, at least a teensy bit arrogant, and quick to anger.
Happily, I think I'm also quick to love, and relatively quick to let go of anger. But this process of learning that, pitiful as human beings are, it is my job, as another human, to learn to love and forgive them... it has been both difficult and rich. And I'm not done yet!
Thank you for your comments. Blessed be.