Life, Writing, Weirdness

I’ve been contemplating adding the word ‘pagan’ to how I describe my religious/spiritual beliefs. Or general lack of them, really, since the two words I currently use are an exercise in intellectual honesty. What they are, how I come by them, and why I consider them intellectually honest are all discussions for other days.

Why pagan? Not because I’m at all interested in putting up a shrine to one or more members of one of the pantheons that some any of my ancestors might have paid homage to before Christianity did its best to stomp out all evidence of earlier religions (although many of those have things to teach us about the cultures that gave them form). It’s more that I feel a deeper connection to the seasons than anything our culture seems to want to put on the calendar. In particularly, the changing lengths of days, the shortest and longest, and the balanced moments halfway between.

We just had one of those, the longest day of the year in terms of seconds of daylight. In my time zone, the Summer Solstice was 450pm yesterday. The earliest sunrise was actually a few days ago and the latest sunset will be a few days from now, but the difference is tiny over that handful of days and not noticeable on a human scale until the differences start to get a little bigger. Just now, sunrise is before 530am and sunset is almost nine o’clock a night and it will take a little while to be noticeably different, but from here, we’re half a year from the shortest day and I get to watch the changes in nature as the wheel continues turning.

Summer Solstice was somewhere in the back of my mind all day yesterday, and still is today. Current heat dome notwithstanding, I’m aware that there are the most daylit moments to get things done outside right now even if I’m mostly choosing not to use them. I’m aware of the pulse of life all around me and the almost frantic pace some of it is proceeding at.

I haven’t done so yet, but I’m open to something marking what was once considered midsummer. Various traditions seem to call for a bonfire and a party, good food, good drink, good friends. Sounds reasonable in my mind.

The other three cardinal points are a bit different. The equinoxes are more something that I’m aware of than things to be celebrated. They appeal to my sense of balance.

As for the Winter Solstice, my family has been doing its own version of Yule for the last few years in place of Christmas. (I actually hate Christmas, but that’s another discussion for another day.) We borrow bits and pieces of traditions we like from ancestries my wife and I can trace. It’s important to have your own traditions. Yule runs for 12 days and it’s all about family and friends. We cook special things, have special drinks, and just try to decompress at the end of the year.

Wrapping back around to why I’m considering the word ‘pagan’ is that the connection to the seasons is the thing that always seems to stand out about those older religions, and while it’s something that the neo-pagans have certainly adopted, it doesn’t have to have a particular religious significance any more than the word pagan does. The seasons and the observing of the cardinal points of the year are a human connection running back to neolithic times, at least, and spreading out in the present to touch every living creature on the planet.

So no, I’m not sacrificing anything to any mythological being, but I’m more aware of the wheel turning every year.

Be well, everyone.