The Mandelbear's Musings

When I started -- more than a month ago -- to write a post about my spiritual beliefs and practices, I suddenly noticed that I was actually writing a chronological memoir. I changed course and prepended a fairly crisp summary of what I believe, then posted it separately. This is the remaining memoir. I tried several different verbs in the title, including staggering and stumbling, but, well, Yeats. There was never much uncertainty about the "destination" -- the concept of "awareness" comes from Reformed Druidism (which I'll get to in a few paragraphs). It is more ambiguous and has fewer connotations than "enlightenment" or "revelation". But in any case I don't claim to have arrived at it. I'm still journeying.

It's mostly about stories.

I'm not particularly happy about how this has turned out -- it's long, but leaves a lot out (meaning it may be too short), and it's somewhat disorganized. But I started it last month and haven't worked on it in the past week, so it's what it is.)

( Cut for length. Content warning: death (body count: four), and a little religion. )

From lysana, who contributed to it, comes this link to The CR FAQ -- An Introduction to Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism. If you prefer a brief, more narrative introduction, try this article.

I was particularly intrigued by the realization that the Reformed Druids of North America, founded at Carleton College in 1963, was mostly Celtic Reconstructionist at its roots, and very different from the neopaganism that many of its offshoots have become. (It differs from the CR family of faiths in being more like a pantheistic version of Unitarianism, and in Edit: not taking itself at all seriously being under no illusions about its lack of any continuity of tradition with the ancient Celts.) (See also Wikipedia: Neo-druidism.)

Note to self: self, you really need to update rdna.org. Aside to gmcdavid: hope you don't mind my ganking your icon.