Showing posts with label Viking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Viking. Show all posts

Monday, 19 January 2015

Post No. 641 - Reading

Enjoy :)

G'day, hello, howdy, hi, zdravstvujtye (some of my work colleagues are Russian, including an absolutely invaluable administrator who has recently taken maternity leave - may she and young one and family be blest), guten tag (where I have connection owing to a recent past life), sveiki, czesc (I have friends, not just colleagues, at work who are Polish), bonjour (colleagues at a former workplace were French, and we practised and tried to extend my woeful and limited range of this language), selamat pagi (one of the best junior engineers I ever worked with was Malaysian, and she taught me a few words), annyeonghaseyo, pryvit, bitaem, como vai (a friend of mine a few years ago, although not Brazilian, had Portuguese ancestry), ¡Hola (a former work colleague and friend, a VERY talented artist - with a Mexican sensibility to her artwork, particularly around the Day of the Dead - used to teach me Mexican Spanish), Selamat pagi, ni hao (ah, my work trips to Asia, and the many wonderful, wonderful people I have met there - and some excellent work colleagues and friends here, as well), bongiorno (my current home city of Melbourne has lots of Greeks and Italians, who have made our culture far richer - and made us coffee snobs :) ), hoschakal, hejsan, ciao, jo napolt kivanu, chào bà, chào ông, yiassou (from the city which has, I understand, the largest collection of Greek people outside of Greece), ceau, salam wa aleikum, sawas dee ka, dia duit, hoi, hei, namaste, marhaba, dobry den.


On other matters:


[1] BPLF = Balanced Positive (spiritual) Light Forces. See here and here for more on this.

[2] Please see here and my post "The Death of Wikipedia" for the reasons I now recommend caution when using Wikipedia. I'm also exploring use of h2g2, although that doesn't appear to be as extensive (h2g2 is intended - rather engagingly - to be the Earth edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy").

Love, light, hugs and blessings


Gnwmythr, Wéofodthegn 
(pronounced "new-MYTH-ear"; ... aka Bellatrix Lux … aka Morinehtar … Would-be drýicgan or maga ... )

My "blogiography" (list of all posts and guide as to how to best use this site) is here, and my glossary/index is here.

I started this blog to cover karmic regression-rescue (see here and here), and it grew ... See here for my group mind project, here and here for my "Pagans for Peace" project (and join me at 9 PM on Sunday, wherever you are, to meditate for peace), and here for my bindrune kit-bag. I also strongly recommend learning how to flame, ground and shield, do alternate nostril breathing, work with colour, and see also here and be flexible. 

I am a Walker upon the Path of Balanced Positivity, seeking Spiritual Maturity.
  • neither eloquence nor inarticulateness inherently indicates correctness, but, as words can kill, the right to freedom of speech comes with a DUTY to be as well-informed, objective and balanced as you can be.
  • Gnwmythr's Stropping Strap: Occam's Razor only works if  the simplest solution is actually recognised as being the simplest, rather than the one that best fits one's bigotries being labelled 'simplest'.
  • Our entire life experience, with all the many wondrous and varied people, places and events in it, is too small a sample for statistical reliability about Life. 
  • May the world of commerce and business be recognised to be a servant, not a master, of the lives of people.
  • Being accustomed to interacting via certain rules makes those rules neither right nor universal.
  • Like fire to the physical, emotions to the soul make a good servant, and a bad master.
  • The means shape the end.
  • My favourite action movie of all time is "Gandhi", although I've recently come across "Invictus" and might put that one in to that category. However, I loathe the stereotypical action movie - and, for similar reasons, I loathe many dramas, which are often emotionally violent, more so in some cases than many war films.
  • All of the above - and this blog - could be wrong, or subject to context, perspective, or state of spiritual evolution ...

Human dignity is the inherently cumulative holistic combination of human rights, wellbeing and potential, and all actions or interaction which promote, realise or facilitate same. The converse also applies: whatever degrades, diminishes or robs humans of dignity, is inherently undignified.
Gnwmythr

The “purpose” of spiritual evolution is not the attainment of “spiritual perfection” - not in the sense of not having to evolve further, at any rate, since there is no such thing. We need to evolve in order to grow - but we can take rest breaks (hopefully well earned :) ) along the way. No, the “purpose” of evolution is, rather, to perfect our ability to learn, and thus grow.
Gnwmythr

Our greatest struggle with, to borrow from pop culture, the Jedi-Sith scale, is not with the Sith, whether they are hiding or not: it is with the annoying, snotty-nosed, heroine/hero-worshipping little kid who keeps intruding, stopping us from being cool enough to be with our heroines/heroes, the big kids ...
Gnwmythr
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Females, get over 'cute'. Get competent. Get trained. Get capable. Get over 'cute'. And those of you who are called Patty and Debby and Suzy, get over that. Because we use those names to infantalise females – we keep females in their 'little girl' state by the names we use for them. Get over it. If you want to be taken seriously, get serious.
Jane Elliott

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.
(based on writing by) Edmund Burke

We didn't inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we only borrowed it from our children
Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
John F. Kennedy

Tags: attitudes, coming events, discrimination, elements, ethics, magick, myths, reading, society, Viking,
First published: Manadagr, 19th January, 2015
Last edited (excluding fixing typo's and other minor matters): Monday, 19th January, 2015
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Thursday, 29 April 2010

Post No. 109 - The upside of being neo-Pagan


Let me begin by saying that I consider being called neo-Pagan an insult: it has overtones implying that identifying as pagan is lacking in intellectual rigour, on the grounds that one has not meticulously researched and slavishly adhered to a form of paganism as it was in it's heyday.

Well, things change - in fact, I would dare to suggest (timidly, from a position cowering behind the couch, being disdainfully sneered at by 2 out of our 4 cats - who are here for no good reason that I can see) that sometimes the greater intellectual rigour may be required to take something from the past and make it relevant to the present.

This is a struggle that many Christians, a group too often treated dismissively by pagans (in my experience), are familiar with. The Christian's struggle is often splashed about by the media (e.g. the various Anglican crises over the years [I was raised as an Anglican]), which possibly makes it easier to be cynical and dismissive, but many of them are quite genuinely trying to do their best to adapt their faith to a world that IS different now (there is, for instance, the little matter of scientific knowledge, beginning with the Renaissance, which has irrevocably changed how we view the world [Note 1]; then there was the Reformation ...). In fact, the reasons that there are differences between the original forms of Christianity and what we see now (including the Catholic church!) are why I have proposed referring to Christianity as neo-Christianity.

Well, there is an upside to all this neo business.

Much as the Christians no longer have to follow the dictates of the Old Testament (you know, the ones about selling relatives into slavery, raping widows and acting in ways that generally could reasonably be considered homophobic [see various bits of Leviticus]), which is, of course, largely due to some bloke known as Jesus who brought a New Testament (I don't see Jesus as being any more - or less - Divine than the rest of us: I see Jesus as a gifted, spiritually advanced person - who probably DID perform the miracles attributed to Him, but a man nevertheless), us pagans no longer have to follow those bits of paganism such as human and animal sacrifice (the Celts are pretty widely suspected to have had a bit of a thing going about head hunting).

We can take advantage of several thousand years of evolution since the time of the Celts, and be gentler and more inclusive - without losing anything as a result, in my opinion.

This train of thought was stimulated by an article at the "Viking Answer Lady" an interesting site for anyone who is interested in history, such as myself - and this is the sort of site I would consult if I was ever to actually get around to joining the SCA) on homosexuality in Viking society, which:
(a) showed how misogynistic BY MODERN STANDARDS they were, and
(b) how fundamentally different thinking is now compared to those times.

I am a lesbian: I am glad I live in an age and a nation where I have some inherent rights as a lesbian (there is still discrimination, and some nations are still appalling in their treatment of various minorities - but they are slowly becoming fewer). I am a woman: I don't want to go back to an age where there were so many constraints on what I could do or be.

This current age is not perfect - far from it, especially given the glib attitudes of too many people in developed nations towards under-developed and undeveloped nations, and to socially dispossessed people (such as the homeless) in their own society, but it is still better than the world was hundreds or thousands of years ago.

It is, believe it or not, less violent (see here, here and here), and health care is generally potentially better (I am a diabetic: if I was living more than a few years ago, I would be in serious problems, and quite probably dead).

If it means acknowledging those imperfect improvements, and to practice my faith in a way that is gentler and more inclusive, then I will say I am neo-Pagan.

Love, light, hugs and blessings


Gnwmythr

PS - if saying I'm neo-Pagan means pandering to intellectual arrogance and elitism, then I won't :)

Note 1 - if I am ill, I will use both "complementary", or "alternative" medicine, AND "conventional medicine. I know about the theory of germ causation of disease I work with that in my day job), but I also know about the importance of the psyche, and feeling good about oneself, and having good energies about oneself. In a sense, I blend old and new - I CANNOT use only old ways - to do so would not be true to myself.

This post's photo is from Pambula, on the NSW south coast.

Tags:moral relativism, perceptions, about me, arrogance, change, learning from mistakes, science, evolution, angst, Christianity, Celts, head hunting, sacrifice, Viking,

First published: Thursday 29th April, 2010

Last edited: Thursday 29th April, 2010
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