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Wednesday, September 16, 2020

My spiritual life is weird. And getting weirder.

 I keep a separate blog for my spiritual writings and such. It's not really a full reflection of the weirdness of my spiritual life but there are elements that I don't share there because I am trying to cultivate a professional life through that blog. As I am dealing with perimenopause, my emotions are all over the place. I'm upset because I was promised something like a rite of passage when I hit this stage of my life and there's nothing because that promise was a lie. I was promised rites of passage as I hit the ages where they'd happen and they didn't happen. Or at least, they weren't treated as special days.

When I turned sixteen, my parents humiliated me when my aunts attempted to make the rather pathetic 'celebration' more special by brigning out a cake that looked like a woman in an evening gown. My engagement party was rolled together in with my college graduation party and my parents tried to down play the engagement because they wanted to bask in the prestiege that I graduated college from Notre Dame of Maryland. They tried to sabotage my wedding and repeatedly told me that it wasn't about me but them. They were forced to put on their company manners and act like they wanted to be there because about half the guest list showed up. Mom still managed to humiliate me by wearing black. The only reason why there was a baby shower for my first child was because Beloved's mother arranged it. There was no baby shower for my second child. And I could go on with the list of things promised and either executed deliberately badly or not at all from my parents.

Now, one may wonder what in hell this has to do with my spiritual life. Well, at sixteen, the aunt who was high priestess of the coven I was in gave me a sickle. This indicated that I had completed my spiritual education and I was ready to lead a coven of my own. At college, I began to act as an unofficial Wiccian liason to the campus ministry in the wake of the terrorist attacks September of 2001. I was a spiritual advisor to other students who were not affiliated with Christianity. I continued this manner of work on a sporadic basis after college.

At the same time, from age fourteen on, I began experiencing mystical things. I didn't talk about them because of my parents repeated threats to have me insitutionalized for being a normal teen. There were times, however, that I'd come into the houe after having sat outside on the hill meditating and my mother bitched about how I stank of roses (I wasn't wearing perfume that day). I would spend time with one foot in the 'real' world and one foot in the spirit world on a regular basis. It was a safe place that I could retreat to when the abuse I was livign with got to be too much. I could "zone out" and be where I had allies who comforted me and reassured me that the gaslighting wasn't the truth and I was going to eventually be out of that house.

The mystical experiences were potent and helped to keep me sane. They have continued up until this day. Precognitive dreams happened more before I developed bipolar. I can still read a tarot deck like nobody's business. I have the infamous 'godphone' going on which allows me to communicate more clearly with the deities in my life. It is like stepping sideways of 'reality' and interacting with them. It is pretty much the same skill that I taught myself but focused on deities. About in 2014, I was told that Freyr wanted me to be a godspouse by someone who was in a deep devotional relationship with him. I was intimidated at first and basically did everything I could to avoid him.

He made a point of being present and doing his best to court me. I suddenly went from having plants dying on me (with the exception of the unkillable snake plant my paternal grandmother gave me and the spiderplant she gave me) to having a thriving indoor garden. He came to me in dreams and visions. He was always kind and, at the same time, hesitant. At one point, Freyja spoke to me through one of her priestesses and chastised me for stringing her brother along. I confessed my fear that all of this was madness. Freyja told me that it was my upbringing talking, my experiences were real, and I should just embrace Freyr. I discussed things with Freyr and basically treated it like arraning ground rules for how a poly relationship in meat space was going to work. He agreed. And then Loki ... well, Loki decided that my attraction to him was mutual after years of going "Yer cute" and said that the arrangement I worked out with Freyr sounded fine to him. So, I went to Beloved and dicussed this whole business of being a pagan nun (which is basically what godspousery is).

After some serious discussion, I took up Freyr and Loki on their proposals. That was when life became more interesting. Things that I had been working on in the past began accelerating forward. We avoided sure disasters in odd ways. Storms of trouble just went around us. I made huge strides in my efforts to heal from the trauma of the past. To the point that I can write about it with out being completely terrified (most of the time). It was also at this time that the Goddess who I oathed myself to as a priestess when I was fourteen and had my first vision of her fully revealed herself. 

Now that I've told most of my story, I am going to begin posting things on here that pertain to my spiritual life as well as my 'regular' life. I know it is going to look weird. It is weird. Beloved and I don't talk about it alot because we tend to take the approach that our relationships with metamours is our relationships. We may discuss details on occasion but we tend to keep the relationships separate and when we interact with the metamours of our partner be as friendly as possible, because they're someone that our partner cares about deeply.

The spiritual relationships doesn't make a big impact on the relationship I have with Beloved. That's for two reasons. It's been made clear in the spiritual relationships that Beloved is my primary partner. That makes my relationship with him take precedence over my relationships with them. I told them this was a hard limit. I don't have too many hard limits, but that's one of them. They were shocked by the implication that either Freyr or Loki would demand that I give up my marriage to Beloved for them. Freyr was especially scandalized by this. Loki wanted to know whose knees he needed to take out that dared to say that I would have had to give up such an obviously healthy and beneficial relationship. 

The second reason the spiritual relationships don't make a big impact on the relationship I have with Beloved is because both Freyr and Loki would drop the spiritual relationship if it came close to causing problems in the marriage I have or my relationship with my children. They have made a point of giving me advice on how to improve my communication with Beloved when I'm in a bad headspace. They've made a point of doing their best to support us. At one point, Loki and Freyr both said, "What kind of gods would we be if we didn't help you and your family?" That help shows up in odd ways at times, like disasters being narrowly averted by the quirk of luck. But they make a point of doing their best to help us. Part of that help is respecting the dynamic that Beloved and I have on the polyamoury front. While Loki and Freyr discuss things and such, they focus on me and my relationship with them.

This is a long, rambling post. It wasn't entirely what I intended it to be. At the same time, it covers most of the bases. I had a point and just lost it as I was writing. Sorry if it makes so little sense.

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