badstar

Last night, grove solstice ritual. I wouldn't call it my ideal ritual (No one's fault, really. while some have come much closer in the past, I would highly doubt that any collaboration would be. But it's a grove ritual, not mine.) but it wasn't bad. Maybe it was because I've been largely uninvolved since the fall, Or maybe it's me overall, or maybe somewhere in between, but it wasn't quite the same. I wasn't quite as in it as I've been in the past. There were some moments of annoyance (Kids in ritual not usually a big deal to me, but if they're not going to stay reasonably under control and make a whole lot of noise about it, it's probably best not to have them right in the middle of things. Kids do that, they make noise.)

All told, it went mostly well, but I just wasn't able to be in it spiritually. The only points where I was really wholly into it were when I made a quick offering to Apollo, and a little later on, a silent request. And that really wasn't so much being in the ritual as it was being in those moments (ha, how ironic, the ritual was about living in the moment....)

I did write a couple of off the cuff, short hymns for the ritual patrons, as well as a brief poem. Not my best work, but I wanted to have a few things prepared because it drives me crazy when a majority of the offerings in a ritual completely ignore the deities to be honored. I'll probably clean them up, maybe expand them a bit and post them. either way, they'll go into the book of hymns that I've slowly been writing to the gods, which I started "officially" as an offering to the Greek gods at the fall equinox. I read those, and sang a song that I had suddenly remembered from back in girl scouts that I had forgotten until just then.

At the moment, I'm feeling slightly blah and ambiguous about a lot of things, a whole lot of "I don't know"...but there is a lot that I've found of late that interests me greatly, so hopefully that won't last long....

For two and a half years now I've been involved with the grove. I've attended every ritual and almost every other gathering that's taken place. There's been one aspect that I've really appreciated from the beginning, but lately I've been having mixed feelings.

That is humor and silliness. This isn't to say that I no longer appreciate them, and the fact that this religion allows such possibility for humor. I'm starting to feel somewhat of an aversion to humor in ritual. I don't know why.

I've said this before...not here, but in conversations with some people. I think I'm a bit of a ritual junkie. I like writing ritual, leading them, just being part of them in general. It's a very sad thing me when I don't feel like I can be part for whatever reason. Imbolc was one of those.

As I've said, silliness is the other thing. The farther I go along, the less interested I am in silly rituals or silliness in ritual. I start to feel like I'm missing something. Sometimes I find it distracting but more than that, I think it's just not the type of religious experience that I need.

Why has this suddenly become an issue? I don't know. Well, it's not so sudden really. It's been creeping up on my mind from time to time for some months now. But...why? Have I suddenly reached a point where I'm past a general desire or need for humor in ritual? Is it related to the nature of the god I worship? (That brings to mind another thought for another musing...) Likely some combination of things. I'm not particularly worried about the why's. I just need to figure out how I'm going to work with/around this. There is the obvious celebrating of rituals on my own, but solitary ritual does not fill the same need as group ritual for me. One thing I've been thinking of and even talking about for some time is organizing rituals for festivals other than the 8 neopagan days. It's not like there aren't plenty to pick from.

That said, adapting Thargelia to ADF format is an interesting process. I think it will be a very good ritual. I didn't get to post my notes to the grove forum today like I had planned to, but I can do that tomorrow evening in between working on the other computer (The XP machine, the one that just got working again last night, apparently is missing some file now and has decided to take a memory dump every time I attempt to turn it on. Computers hate me, it's official.)

In other news, I've found out that the client at work is talking about taking some of us up to Massachusetts to visit one of their offices and may end up using some of us as backup field techs when people are deployed to install some of the more major equipment. I've also been finding that it seems that they are going to trust a lot more to our judgement than giving us crazy regulations for every little thing we do like most other clients seem to do. I've met two people from the company so far and I really like them, especially the guy that's in this week, he's the supervisors for the level two techs up in Massachusetts. Very cool, very laid back, very "ask anything you want to know, tell me how I can help you guys learn this stuff." Actually started out this morning with "Well, I've got a ton of stuff that I can throw at you this week, but seriously, what do you want to cover?" The client hasn't given us a lot of stuff yet because they're asking for feedback on what we want and need. So far, everything we've asked for, as far as I can tell- especially when it comes to information- has been given or is in the process of being found out. Except that I still don't have my computer in the training room. However, I'm a bit hopeful...the company used to have a tradition of every training class having a meeting with the company founder/president. This meeting was a chance to ask anything (the only question that remained unanswered was his salary), express any concerns and problems, and talk a bit. Very infomal and laid back. This ended when he resigned and went to work elsewhere in the wake of Apple going south. ( insert boring details here. ) So Steve, the site director/VP of finance has carried on that tradition and my training class had just that meeting today. One of my coworkers, also without a computer, decided to air that particular complaint to Steve who expressed some worry about this and made a point of writing it down in his little book (Yes, I actually saw this written down, I was sitting right next to him as he did so.)

And another coworker has decided that he's going to teach me to speak Portuguese.

Time to sleep.