pantheist? non-theist? atheist?

"But as I continue developing my spiritual practice, the feelings it evokes reminds me that I am engaging in this ritual, in this reverence, for the very reason that I am not entirely an atheist. For me, I feel the Cosmos to be divine. I feel a divinity in its mystery, its vastness, its connectedness, in the very fact of its being. But I have yet to define for myself what this concept of the divine really means for me – and if the reverence and connectedness I feel can be called theism of any kind." Áine W., The Spinning of the Wheel

For such a long time I've identified with the term pantheism.  If you don't know, pantheism is the idea that the Divine is in everything, everything is Divine.  God or Deity or Whomever can be found in rocks, trees, stars, plastics, buildings, shoes.  Everything.  So I always said I was a pantheist.  Or I thought it, at the very least.  God, for me, was never personal, which is a large part of why I didn't continue with Christopaganism, or whatever I may have been calling it at the start of this blog.  The Christian god is supposed to be personal. And even in Paganism, with polytheism abound, choosing pantheons or choosing fitting gods from one culture or another always seemed like a large part of celebrating the Divine.  Gods have personalities; it makes them personable.  

But I never felt that.  Praying to Gaia felt no different than praying to Cernunnos. So when I stumbled across this term, pantheism, I ran with it.  It was awesome.  I felt... comfortable with the Divine, although I think the word comfortable is wrong here.  It felt sensible to me, at any rate.

As the years went by and I stepped away from the Pagan path (not to any other particular path except maybe secularism), I began losing pantheism.  It became muddied in my mind.  I would laughingly joke that I was an atheist pagan because god, for me, was all and nothing at the same time.  Could I really claim to be a pagan if my view of god was so broad that I lost any sense of the divine?  

I always hated trying to define my beliefs, because it always came down to, "Well, I'm a Pagan... kinda.  Maybe I'm an atheist... but not really.  It's complicated."  And it is complicated. Like Áine, in the quote above, I am still hammering out my definition of what god is and means to me.  It's something I'll probably still be hammering away at when I am on my deathbed, if I am still lucid.  But I like what Áine says, that the divinity of existence is in its vastness and (inter)connectedness.  

So. Pantheist? Non-theist? Atheist?

I'm a Pagan, and I view god through pantheist eyes.  God is the energy that moves the universe and moves through the universe.  God is impersonal, despite the fact that I sometimes give it a face and a name for my own comfort.  I feel the Divine whether I am lighting incense and saying a prayer, cleaning a stream, or hugging a tree, because the Divine is in all there is.  The Wiccan Goddess saying "all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals" describes my view of god, because the energy moving through the universe is love and acts of love bring us closer to experiencing the Divine.

Great assignment

I want to teach elementary music. Unfortunately, I'm going to a school that tends to cater more towards high school band directors. Which means I have to take some classes that will, in all likelihood, be completely useless to me. One of these is a class on marching band techniques. But despite that fact, I rather enjoy the class. Largely in part, because Pete is helping us to find our "style" with very non-musical assignments. Our first was "What car would you be?" (I chose an orange Dodge Charger. One of the older variety, not one of the newer ones.) But the one that I really liked was "design your logo." A logo for a letterhead, website, etc. A pictorial representation of ourselves.

This is what I came up with:


The mother/child are self explanatory, I think. The spiral is a less in-your-face symbol of paganism than a pentacle would have been. The dandelion is for whimsy and child-like abandon. And the fact that the seed-heads are music notes... well, that's just an amazing coincidence. (All these images are very much stolen and likely copy-righted. Oops)

I spent maybe a grand total of 45 minutes on this assignment. The majority of that time was spent looking for the images, with about five minutes for putting them together and making the spiral blue. Despite the small amount of time I spent on this project, I feel a connection with it. Because I think it DOES accurately portray who I am. I don't think a person could look at it and go "That's Sydnii." without knowing what it is. But I think, if I said, "This is my logo." the person would GET it.

So the moral, I guess, is that I should be glad for taking classes that teach me nothing useful as a teacher, and instead help me grow in my understanding of myself. :)

What I've learned this day

Today, I learned a very important lesson. One that I'm surprised isn't brought up, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, if you are planning on doing a knot spell that requires you to untie the knots to release the energy...

Don't be a dummy and tie the knots so tight you can't untie them.

... We shall see if cutting the knots with ceremonial sewing scissors releases the energies just as well. lol