Going radio silent for a few weeks.

  Dear Reader,

You may not be aware but I have been struggling with some ongoing mental health problems since last August that has severely impacted my life in a number of ways. I am taking the next few weeks to do some intensive therapy work to try to get that problem under control again so that I'm functional and I can get back to writing again. In the meantime, I will not be posting here because I expect I won't have the time due to the  plans for how to approach this therapy process. I hope to be back to post again and interact with everyone via my social media platforms soon. I just don't know how soon that is going to be.

Wish me luck.

The Rite of Sacrifice (Filianic)

 Full Wolf Moon (Age: 14 days)
Sign: Cancer
Weather: Winter Storm Izzy
Snow Pack: 1ft+
~*~*~*~*~*~*~

This is my interpretation of the Filianic Rite of Sacrifice. If you follow the link > here < , you will see a picture of the altar with the offerings on it. This is a monthly ritual held on every full moon. This ritual is very similar to the 'cakes and ale' portion of a Wiccan ritual.

Items needed:
Bread
Wine (if you can't partake of wine, it can be substituted with another beverage. I used water.*)
Incense
Candle

At your altar or shrine, light your candle for Déa with a prayer of your choice invoking her presence. Place the bread and wine on the altar/shrine. Light your incense. Then state the following prayer:

Dear Anna, you who sacrificed everything for the good of all, please accept this that I give you. Please keep [name/community/the world] in your care and heal them of all ills. As I cry, thus may it be.

Leave the bread and wine on the altar/shrine until the incense is fully consumed. The offerings can be considered accepted at this time. The bread and wine are now consecrated to Déa. You may consume them as a sacrament to bring you closer to her or ritually dispose of them as you would any other food offering. If this rite is being conducted for more than one participant, supply enough bread and wine to be shared with all and leaving a portion for Déa. The officiant of the rite is the person to distribute the consecrated food and the last person to partake of it.

* Clean drinking water is perhaps more precious than wine. It is a commodity that is scarce and in high demand around the world. It is also diabetic friendly. These are the two reasons why I chose it.

Godspousery Notes: 4 / 3 of 2022

I am currently depressed. Seasonal affective disorder is stupid and I hate it. I pulled a rune card out of my deck to use for this week's Rune Study post on my other blog and this is the one that popped up. My feelings were a bit bitter at first. Joy when you're depressed is kinda fleeting if not impossible some days. Still, this is the rune that popped up randomly.

I have been trying to find the humor in the absurd, which Loki always reminds me is happening everywhere if you look hard enough. Again, a bit of a bitter laugh but I'm fairly sure that Scar-Lip has been stealing my sleep masks. I've now gone through five and they are nowhere to be found. I go to bed with one on and wake up in the middle of the night to have it missing off my face. If Loki's slick enough to steal Freyja's necklace while she's sleeping, I know this would be like taking candy from a small child. It's as absurd as it is irritating.

Frey's been quiet this week. I'm not surprised given how bitterly cold it has been here. It makes it harder to make a connection with him off season.

Godspousery Notes: 3 / 2 of 2022

 Story time. Way back about two years before the pandemic hit, Freyr asked me to sacrifice my long hair to him. Now, at the time, my hair came down to my hips and was a lot darker. I attempted not too long before this request to dye my hair royal blue and nothing happened, it was a waste of time and money. The only place it showed up was in the witch's streak of white that I have over my left eyebrow and then it didn't show up that well. (I've had this streak of white hair since I was a kid. Got picked on about it. I literally laughed when I found out that they were called witch's streaks many years later.) I agreed, figuring it was hair. It'll grow back and it's not a big deal.

Cue two years where I couldn't stand the feeling of hair longer than my chin. Cue two years where I struggled to find a look that suited me. Last September, I found the perfect look. Then Freyr was asking me to wait a little bit on getting it cut. My hair barely came down to my shoulders and was frustrating me. I couldn't really do anything with it. It got in my eyes all the time but didn't work well with the different styles I had for scarves and veiling. And, the greatest insult, it was thinning and coming out because it was too long for the roots to do a good job of holding on to it. So, the last weekend of September, I got my hair cut.

In the top picture is what my hair looked like before I got the big cut. Freyr was worried that I was going to be distraught about losing my long locks. I was of a mind that this didn't count as long. After all, when I first had cut my hair for him, it came down to my hips. He really didn't want me to make a decision that I was going to regret. His anxiety over it all was sweet. 

I was frustrated with my hair and ready for a change. I was unhappy that I was having hair falling out. I didn't like the way it looked and the fact that I couldn't do anything with it but throw a kertchief on and hope it didn't get too annoying. It was barely long enough to put into a ponytail again. The change to my hair style was a matter of quality of life for me. It was a matter of doing my best to live authentically. I wasn't sure how it was going to change my veiling practices but I knew that I had to do something different. Loki was wildly excited about the new look I wanted and insisted it was perfect for me.

This lower picture is what I got done a few weeks later. For the first time in a long time, I was really ecstatic with my hair. Sure, the grey showed up a lot more. My head was chilly when the wind blew, but I felt like myself more than I had in a long time. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to manage veiling when I went out into public. I aside from the assortment of scarves, I have a good number of hats. Suddenly, my options were larger because I didn't have to worry about hair peeking out from beneath the hat if I decided to wear one out as my head covering.

I was also delighted because it further obscured my recognizability from people who had previously been in my life that I had cut out for sanity reasons. Between the faux hawk, the goth look, and a mask, they could be standing right beside me and not recognize me at all so long as I kept silent. The last time those people saw me, I didn't even have glasses. All good things in my opinion.

Today, I finally figured out how to make a blue and gold pashmina that I love work as a headscarf. It did wonders for keeping my head warm during this cold day. I was happy with it. I am struggling with depression but I'm working at getting better with self-care and being persistent in my effort to be authentic. Freyr came around on the hair style when he realized how happy I have remained with it. He was pleased when I managed to do this wrap, because it meant that I had figured out a way to veil with out getting frustrated with my hair.

I'm still getting used to my new bifocals. But, that's a story for another day. Loki is still insisting that I look 'kick ass' with the faux hawk. He's been trying to talk me into letting it grow out and become a real mohawk. He thinks that it would be awesome on me. I'm not quite convinced. But the fact that Beloved, Freyr, and Loki all agree that happiness looks good on me and (even with my current depressive episode) the joy that I have in this hair style is exactly what I needed.

Godspousery Notes No. 2 / 1 of 2022 : WTF is going on?

 So, my brain kinda went explody back in August and the fallout continues. It's been slowly going explody on this front for literally decades. Then, for some reason, August, my brain decides everything is safe enough to ratchet up the anxiety, the dissociation, and nightmares. And, on top of it, the feeling that my brain/psyche is fractured got to the point that I couldn't just ignore it and push forward.

I've been spinning my wheels trying to figure out how to approach the prospect that I have a dissociative identity disorder issue going on right now. As my psych explained it, there's a spectrum to trauma responses. DID (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) is at one extreme and mild panic attacks is at the other extreme. Lucky me, I get to experience the entire fucking spectrum. For a little while this had me questioning everything, like is my spiritual experiences *my* experiences or something my brain manufactured?

The All-Father sat me down and had a talk. He has been coaching me through the process of journaling to get these separate/not separate elements of my psyche to communicate. He explained to me that my trauma responses are valid and that the more I dive into them and work through them, the healthier I will be. When I say that Odin sat me down and had a talk, I should say it was more like Loki, Freyr, and Odin staged an intervention.

I was sitting there experiencing an existential crisis for the umpteenth time that day when the three of them just showed up. Loki on one side, Freyr on the other, and Odin in front of me. It was put to me that I had to stop being in denial about this element of my life, that it was getting detrimental to my health. The three of them assured me that I wasn't getting crazier. I was just recognizing what was always there and gaslit/taught to deny/punished for being that way. It was shortly after this discussion that I talked to my psych about this business. Cue the man being completely unsurprised and telling me that he had suspected it was a latent thing that I was repressing. That completely floored me.

Since November, I've been struggling with trying to do the journal work. I've got a lot of emotional trauma that I've been working through and Loki keeps nudging me over to Freyr when it gets too much for me to handle. It's less 'not my department' and more 'he's going to do a better job supporting you right now.' I've been having nightmares, a lot of them. I am medicated to the point that I shouldn't be remembering my nightmares, but that particular medication wears off about 4 am and then they hit and either I am stuck in a nightmare or I wake up in a panic and wander the apartment not entirely sure where/when I am but that I have to check to make sure that my family is ok.

HappyFunBall!Loki has been trying to cheer me up since the seasonal depression hit. The sheer volume of dirty jokes that he can come up with is impressive. Somedays, however, he puts aside that demeanor and just sits with me, telling me that I've lived through the worst of it and I can get through this. I have gotten the distinct impression that Loki is keeping a close eye on me right now and that he may actually be worried, though he hasn't said it.

Freyr has just been quietly doing things like reminding me to take my medications and engage in self-care. He's been gently prodding me to start doing more physical exercise again. He also was the one who told me to stop eating the shrimp when my mouth and throat began to itch and call the pharmacist RIGHT NOW! The pharmacist was like 'That's an allergic reaction, take some Benadryl and if it doesn't go away, call you doctor immediately.' So, now I'm allergic to shellfish. Freyr was also the one who told me to put baking soda on my hands after I had a reaction to latex dish washing gloves. My reaction felt like a mild chemical burn and the baking soda stopped it so that it was just itchy and not feeling like my hands were on fire. They were bright red for a little while but then that passed. Of course, both of these things happened one day after the other. And, because trouble comes in threes, Freyr caught on that I was beginning to have an allergic reaction to Aleve similar to the one that I have when I have taken ibuprofen. So, the only thing I can take for my migraines is Tylenol, which is bullshit and useless for a migraine.

Freyr has also been talking me down out of panic attacks that have started hitting me at random when I'm trying to go to sleep after Beloved and I are done cuddling for the evening. Just last night, I was beginning to wind up and Loki told me to look at Freyr. So, I did the trance thing and looked at Freyr and Gullinbursti. That boar is frigging huge. Freyr was just sitting there leaning against him. We talked a bit and I got to give the boar some pets, which I think he liked. I don't know. I don't understand boars, hogs, or pigs. I grew up on a grain farm. They didn't start raising hogs until after I had gone off to college. (And that venture is going really badly, as in there are hogs dying of malnutrition and disease because of neglect.)

I've only recently really started doing the journal work. It took me about three months to work up to it because of all the emotional baggage that Odin, Loki, and Freyr talked me through. I'm not enjoying this journal work, it feels wrong. But so does self-care when you were gaslighted for 20 years that you are not worthy of such a thing and that your very existence should be apologized for. 

My parents are real winners. I haven't had anything to do with them in literally years. I don't intend to do so in the future either because of how toxic they are. My children don't know them. They know of my parents, but they don't know my history or anything else about them. Fortunately, they did get the opportunity to get to know their Great-grandparents (my paternal Grandparents, the ones who were not crazy) before they died. As I have said before in other places and on other platforms, the next time I intend to see my parents are when they're dead and then it'll be to make sure that they actually are deceased and it's not some elaborate mindfuck.

Obviously, Odin has strong opinions on how I was raised and the reverberations from it. He's basically stepped in and said "I'm your Dad now." It's been an interesting experience but also a hell of a lot more healthy than any of my experiences with my parents. He's generally been pretty laid back about a lot of things, but he does get a bit cranky when I start to do stuff like forget to take care of myself. Cranky Dad!Odin is an experience. I get the glare of disapproval and the "Haven't we talked about this?" speech. Then I go, "Yeah, you're right. I really should do XYZ. I'm sorry." To which he almost always responds, "Don't be sorry, just do better. You deserve it."

And then there's the times where Dad!Odin and Loki get going on the cheezy jokes. It's hilariously awful. For example when my Beloved was reading a Dr. Seuss book to one of the boys and there was the line 'and you'll never find a pet wetter than that', Dad!Odin said dryly "They've obviously never met a fish." Loki then supplied, "Well of course not, they're in tanks. You don't want to mess with a tank."

But, that's wtf has been going on and is going on right now. Things are crunchy, weird, and uncomfortable. My PTSD has been acting up a fair amount and I've been having them talk me through flashbacks. It's been an experience.