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badstar...not necessarily that one deity couldn't hande it all, just the idea of there being lots of 'em. There was that, and around the same time I became rather interested in the idea of an eteranly-existant earth, that it was never created, it simply always has been. I wasn't really sure about any of this, but it was starting to take hold in my mind. It was some time before I had figured out where I stood on questions of polytheism, how different religions coexist, etc and a bit less than a year after that one day, I found myself being shipped back to PA on a weeks notice when financial aide pulled a fast one on me. At some point a few weeks after that, I have no idea why anymore, but something my om had said really bugged me- I can't remember what it was but I do remember feeling that she was being extremely patronizing...all I remember was that it had to do with me really missing Alex and being extrmely upset about it, this was about 2 years after she died. I got really defensive and asked if she thought I was atheist or somehting- whatever she'd said, I was taking it as if she thought I didn't believe anything.
(For those of you who know nothing about my mom from having met or heard me talk about her, it may help to know that she was raised strictly Catholic, left the church when I was about 5 and at some point woumd up going to the Lancaster Christian Missionary Alliance Church...I attended from time to time- I lived with my grandparents at this time and they were against me going to any church besides the Lutheran church in their neghborhood...they were Lutehran strictly in name. I think half the issue with my Mom's church was simply the fact that it was where she went, nothing else. But family contentions are another story for another day. So yeah, the CMA church, which at the time was a small, semi-informal church. I didn't know til years later, but it is actually a very fundamentalist church and quite influential in politics in Lancaster county...it was no such thing way back when. I remember that much. Mom stoped attending altogether when she kicked out the boyfriend who introduced her to the church..he was quite abusive verbally and finally tried to attack her physically, anded him in jail pretty quickly. But I digress. Tried to go back to that church precisely once 4 or 5 years later...and found that it had lost everyhting that she'd once found there. Over time her beliefs seem to have changed greatly to somethng that I really can't categorize. She's a lot more interested in angels- I would *almost* say angel worship if I knew that that were not the case. the bad guys are demons. She believes that satan is the ultimate evil. I'm not entirely sure what she believes about god, and I'm *reasonably* sure that she doesn't believe in salvation through Jesus. Oh...and she believes in reincarnation. Amd it was after seeing that my mom was okay with tarot- she bought a deck for someone else as a gift- that I became interested in it myself.)
So anyway, I was extremely upset and feeling like I was being patronized. I was in a fairly delicate emotional state because I had just been ripped from the first place I had ever been happy, the first place I had really thought of as home, from all my friends, my classes, the fraternity, the house...I was feeling fairly hoplessly lost and here was my mom talking to me like I knew nothing. I was in an extremely defensive state, and it wasn't pretty. I think this was the only time I've ever seen my stepfather play referee. After calming us down, He asked me what I did believe, and with some difficulty I chocked it out. It was quite a shock to my mom. She didn't tell me that it was wrong or evil or that I would go to hell... but she kept saying I "needed to be careful" about what I believe. I still haven't figured out what exactly that's supposed to mean. For about 2 years or so I kinda drifted around, surfing the internet, looking for books, trying to find some direction though the search wasn't that deliberate and it was interspersed between me being fairly depressed for having been yanked out of my happy place.
Fomr some time, I just kinda dealt with what was going on in my life and occasionally pondered the interesting stuff...what do I believe? who do I believe in? Why the heck do I believe this? At this time, I was generally more interested in things like the idea of reincarnation, tarot, and dream interpretation. The other major point..which was pretty much a nothing at the time was that at some point around 2000-ish was when I first felt like I had a need to someday serve somehow in a clergical caacity...which I dismissed for years because...well, what the heck did I know? Besides, don't all new pagans have delusions of 3rd Degree Wiccan blabitty-bah grandeur? and then I was anti-organized religion, so what sense did that make? And then I just ignored it til it all came back to whomp me with the Cosmic Clue-By-Four late this past summer. But I digress.
It was around the 2000-2001ish time frame that I decided that a somewhat elemental view of the world made the most sense to me. Not that there were no gods, but the elements were forces unto themselves, in a scope of existance similar to gods...but not quite...ah...an exact explaination escapes me...
This elemental perspective stil colors my views of things, but not quite in the same way, though lately I do think I'm coming back to the idea of earth/air/fire/water as major forces, in the obvious literal ways, as well as in not so obvious, not so literal ways.
Sometime at the end of August/begining of September '01 (just before the 11th), I bought my pentacle...yes, The Glass Pentacle, for those of you who have seen te occasional post in my journal to the interesting things that people have said to me, and the source for the heading of "Bad Star" on this journal. It was a piece of glass and metal, formed into a symbol that at the time I grabbed onto because...well, it made sense to me. The symbol, what it stands for, all that...also didn't hurt that it was shiny and pretty :-)
I wore it constantly til maybe a year and a half ago, when I took it off one night to take a shower...and then I didn't put it on for a few months...and then I wore it randomly on and off. When i finally did take it off for that long, I'd finaly felt some actual certainty and security in what I believed and felt like I didn't need it anymore because it was just a physical symbol. Not saying that wearing a necklace was what I believed in, but it was...well, I felt like I needed to have this reminder.
One fact that has always been very important to me...I've never worn it inside my shirt. It's not that I wore it outside for the purpose of drawing attention to it. I simply refused to hide it. There have been a number of times where I would wear other jewlery that drew much more attention to itself. There have been times, as most of you know, that it was noticed and called out in various, colorful ways. I accepted that such things might happen, and most of the instances have been a great source of humor for me, or in one or two cases, great bewilderment. The "Bad Star" instance was a sad one. The worst was when I amost got fired from my job at Corning-Revere- that was actually BEFORE I had the pentacle, because of a book that someone caught a glimpse of in my backpack. I quit sometime later, but went back to work there as a seasonal part-timer in December '01 and that was when the bitching directy about the necklace came about...and that was the time when my boss came up to me in front of customers with no warning, grabbed the necklace, dropped it inside the collar of my shirt and told me that I couldn't have it showing. That was somewhat apalling.
So back to the timeline..I'm not going to get into the whole September 11th mess because that's a dissertation in and of itself and honestly, it didn't really have a lot of impact on the formation of my beliefs.
(For those of you who know nothing about my mom from having met or heard me talk about her, it may help to know that she was raised strictly Catholic, left the church when I was about 5 and at some point woumd up going to the Lancaster Christian Missionary Alliance Church...I attended from time to time- I lived with my grandparents at this time and they were against me going to any church besides the Lutheran church in their neghborhood...they were Lutehran strictly in name. I think half the issue with my Mom's church was simply the fact that it was where she went, nothing else. But family contentions are another story for another day. So yeah, the CMA church, which at the time was a small, semi-informal church. I didn't know til years later, but it is actually a very fundamentalist church and quite influential in politics in Lancaster county...it was no such thing way back when. I remember that much. Mom stoped attending altogether when she kicked out the boyfriend who introduced her to the church..he was quite abusive verbally and finally tried to attack her physically, anded him in jail pretty quickly. But I digress. Tried to go back to that church precisely once 4 or 5 years later...and found that it had lost everyhting that she'd once found there. Over time her beliefs seem to have changed greatly to somethng that I really can't categorize. She's a lot more interested in angels- I would *almost* say angel worship if I knew that that were not the case. the bad guys are demons. She believes that satan is the ultimate evil. I'm not entirely sure what she believes about god, and I'm *reasonably* sure that she doesn't believe in salvation through Jesus. Oh...and she believes in reincarnation. Amd it was after seeing that my mom was okay with tarot- she bought a deck for someone else as a gift- that I became interested in it myself.)
So anyway, I was extremely upset and feeling like I was being patronized. I was in a fairly delicate emotional state because I had just been ripped from the first place I had ever been happy, the first place I had really thought of as home, from all my friends, my classes, the fraternity, the house...I was feeling fairly hoplessly lost and here was my mom talking to me like I knew nothing. I was in an extremely defensive state, and it wasn't pretty. I think this was the only time I've ever seen my stepfather play referee. After calming us down, He asked me what I did believe, and with some difficulty I chocked it out. It was quite a shock to my mom. She didn't tell me that it was wrong or evil or that I would go to hell... but she kept saying I "needed to be careful" about what I believe. I still haven't figured out what exactly that's supposed to mean. For about 2 years or so I kinda drifted around, surfing the internet, looking for books, trying to find some direction though the search wasn't that deliberate and it was interspersed between me being fairly depressed for having been yanked out of my happy place.
Fomr some time, I just kinda dealt with what was going on in my life and occasionally pondered the interesting stuff...what do I believe? who do I believe in? Why the heck do I believe this? At this time, I was generally more interested in things like the idea of reincarnation, tarot, and dream interpretation. The other major point..which was pretty much a nothing at the time was that at some point around 2000-ish was when I first felt like I had a need to someday serve somehow in a clergical caacity...which I dismissed for years because...well, what the heck did I know? Besides, don't all new pagans have delusions of 3rd Degree Wiccan blabitty-bah grandeur? and then I was anti-organized religion, so what sense did that make? And then I just ignored it til it all came back to whomp me with the Cosmic Clue-By-Four late this past summer. But I digress.
It was around the 2000-2001ish time frame that I decided that a somewhat elemental view of the world made the most sense to me. Not that there were no gods, but the elements were forces unto themselves, in a scope of existance similar to gods...but not quite...ah...an exact explaination escapes me...
This elemental perspective stil colors my views of things, but not quite in the same way, though lately I do think I'm coming back to the idea of earth/air/fire/water as major forces, in the obvious literal ways, as well as in not so obvious, not so literal ways.
Sometime at the end of August/begining of September '01 (just before the 11th), I bought my pentacle...yes, The Glass Pentacle, for those of you who have seen te occasional post in my journal to the interesting things that people have said to me, and the source for the heading of "Bad Star" on this journal. It was a piece of glass and metal, formed into a symbol that at the time I grabbed onto because...well, it made sense to me. The symbol, what it stands for, all that...also didn't hurt that it was shiny and pretty :-)
I wore it constantly til maybe a year and a half ago, when I took it off one night to take a shower...and then I didn't put it on for a few months...and then I wore it randomly on and off. When i finally did take it off for that long, I'd finaly felt some actual certainty and security in what I believed and felt like I didn't need it anymore because it was just a physical symbol. Not saying that wearing a necklace was what I believed in, but it was...well, I felt like I needed to have this reminder.
One fact that has always been very important to me...I've never worn it inside my shirt. It's not that I wore it outside for the purpose of drawing attention to it. I simply refused to hide it. There have been a number of times where I would wear other jewlery that drew much more attention to itself. There have been times, as most of you know, that it was noticed and called out in various, colorful ways. I accepted that such things might happen, and most of the instances have been a great source of humor for me, or in one or two cases, great bewilderment. The "Bad Star" instance was a sad one. The worst was when I amost got fired from my job at Corning-Revere- that was actually BEFORE I had the pentacle, because of a book that someone caught a glimpse of in my backpack. I quit sometime later, but went back to work there as a seasonal part-timer in December '01 and that was when the bitching directy about the necklace came about...and that was the time when my boss came up to me in front of customers with no warning, grabbed the necklace, dropped it inside the collar of my shirt and told me that I couldn't have it showing. That was somewhat apalling.
So back to the timeline..I'm not going to get into the whole September 11th mess because that's a dissertation in and of itself and honestly, it didn't really have a lot of impact on the formation of my beliefs.
