Crafty Time!

Apparently Spring has me feeling crafty, since this is the second time I’ve posted a crafty post in early May. 

Lately I’ve been inspired by ReFashionista to make some of my old clothes new again.

It started when I was cleaning out my closet and came up with the perfect way to fix a dress that had been sadly sitting in my mending pile, but that was beyond saving, really. It’s this cute red and black polka dotted dress that has sentimental value because I wore it in one of my first modern dance shows ever. 

Here it is modeled by my lovely twin sister. I had already started when this picture was taken. The top of the dress didn’t originally have that black strip, but I put it there because the whole neckline and straps were ruined by an ugly edging the costume department had put on it. But, a t-shirt I was going to donate came to the rescue!

 

 

 

I liked the neckline and shoulders of the tshirt, but not the shape of the body. So I cut off the bow, which I used to edge the neckline of the dress, cut down the middle front, chopped it off, and did some stitching and finagling, and ended up with this dress which I wore to the Maypole this weekend: 

 

Next Up: My sister needed a jacket to wear with a peplum dress to a fancy fashion show. I said I could do it for super cheap. We went to our local thrift store, and bought this awful jacket for $4:

But I liked the collar. First thing I did was take in the sides and the sleeves, but it still didn’t fit right, so I added a seam straight down the back. Then I chopped off the bottom, hemmed it, and it was finished! Not bad for $4!

 

BUT! If you’ve ever been taught to sew, you know they tell you to keep your fingers away from the needles. KEEP YOUR FINGERS AWAY FROM THE NEEDLES!

Yesterday, I was taking some halter dresses of mine and making them into regular straps since I don’t like halters. And LOOK AT WHAT I DID:

Straight through my finger. So of course, we had to go to the ER, where they said I was their most interesting case of the day. They took an X-ray and found that the needle was broken, not bent (thank goodness!). So they numbed me up and pulled it out, gave me a tetanus shot, and sent me on my way. To be honest, the easiest ER visit of my life. And plus, I looked totally rad in my no-longer-a-halter dress:

 

And despite the (not really that bad, honest!) injury, I can’t wait for my finger to heal so I can get back to fixing up my clothes.

On Spiritual Change

I’ve been reading The Archdruid Report and other works by John Michael Greer lately, and it’s been giving me a lot of space for thought. Lately, he’s been discussing the Religion of Progress. Many of the problems our society is dealing with right now are a result of our ideas about progress, our belief that the future will always and everywhere be better than the present and the past. And I’ve been thinking about how pervasive this is.

I’ve been thinking especially about the meaning of “spiritual progress” and “growing spiritually.” I have to admit, I have no idea what this means from a pagan context. Other religions, sure—Buddhists grow in their understanding of the four noble truths and progress toward Enlightenment. Christians grow in their understanding of scripture and avoidance of sin. But what does it mean to pagans to make progress?

I ask this because I notice it’s something we talk about all the time. Our society in general seems to think that all change is progress toward some brighter future. But I’ve been thinking lately that maybe it’s important to pay closer attention to the difference between change and progress.

Sure, lots and lots of things have changed in the six and a half years or so that I’ve been a pagan: I’ve finished college, gotten married, made a life for myself. I’ve learned the ins and outs of Norse mythology and pagan theological concepts. I’ve begun to learn to garden, I have found an argument for dance, and I have had an article published in Hex Magazine. I have been diagnosed with alopecia and learned (mostly) to accept that. I have developed close relationships with at least two or three deities, have learned to listen to the natural world and its spirits, and have begun to develop a spiritual relationship with my ancestors.

But is any of that really progress? Or is it more like evolution, a natural aimless wandering and spreading of life, than like progress, an arrow shooting toward a goal? Few of these things have happened because they were goals I set out towards—graduating, getting married. But the rest of them were just change that comes from the passage of time.

When I first came into paganism, one thing I remember reading that made no sense to me at the time was that pagans see time as a circle, rather than as a line. It makes complete sense to me now. I’ve been reading back through old posts the past few days, and I realized that my life really has measured time more in circles than in lines. Look, and you will see that every spring I have a rash of posts about the spring and how I’m happy and feeling spiritual again. Every winter I turn inward and get sad and forget to be religious by the end. Even lives are circles that trace the path of the Grand Human Narrative—be born, learn some thing, fall in love, be heartbroken, experience loss, die. Is it really progress to learn things, when it’s really just the nature of humanity to learn most of those things?

If it’s true that pagans believe that time is circular, as many say do, then language about our own spiritual progress is detrimental to that grand narrative that could change the world. Now, please, don’t get me wrong and think I’m saying that paganism is uniquely suited to bring humanity to a new and brighter future. I’m not (because then I’d be contributing to the narrative of progress!). But dismantling the religion of progress is helpful in allowing us to grapple with and handle the predicaments we find ourselves in. Climate change, for example, cannot be solved by people who desperately believe that the world always and everywhere moves from worse to better. We have to be able to see that things can get much worse, or we are blind to our own problems.

Believing that time is circular can bring useful change. If time is circular, we are no longer the pinnacle of history. We are merely the pinnacle of this current round of history, of civilizations rising and falling through time. And just as every other time in history, what goes up must come down.

Language is so central to how we understand the world. What would happen if we stopped talking about our spiritual progress and began focusing more on our spiritual cycles? Or on the fact that most of the time, change simply is change, not with any greater meaning of positives and negatives? Perhaps we aren’t making progress, but are simply spinning through the cycles of a human life, of our feelings in regards to how long the sun shines on any given day, of rainfall and the growth and dieback (and sometimes regrowth from the shrunken core) of our relationships and life experiences.

Growth is not forever—the harvest comes, and then the winter.

A Dream

I’ve just woken up from one of the deeper, more memorable dreams I’ve had in quite some time. For background information, Husband and I have gone to a druid group lately (Yule and Imbolc. We skipped the Equinox), which  featured in this dream. Also my alopecia has been getting worse again.

We are at the Grove house, and redecorating. The house is surrounded by mossy trees, and one seems to be crossing the living room. I am crawling up and down it as I help decide on upholstery fabrics and wallpapers for the house. I go outside, and get on a rocket with my husband and my sister, and fly to outer space. I am looking out the window of the spacecraft, looking down at the Earth, and it doesn’t look like a blue marble like everyone says it does. It looks like an eye, the way when you look deep into someone’s eyes they no longer look glassy and smooth, but there are ridges and valleys in the irises, and the pupil really looks like a hole. I’m looking down at the Earth my home and am surprised by it’s depths. The way the land spikes up with tall trees, and the whole thing is capped in beautiful swirling clouds. The Earth is deeper than I had imagined. On the spacecraft is a gym, where a dance performance is going on. I go to watch. Toward the end of the piece, each member of the audience is asked to stand and face the wall, and dancers come to dance around us. But as the dancers get to me, I find another giant bald spot on my head, and so when the dancers dance around me, instead of dancing with them, I just curl in a ball on the floor and sob. When the piece is over, one of my old dance teachers from college, who is a witch, appears to critique the dancers. She tells me that I am too far inside myself.

It’s been a long time since I’ve awoken from a dream like that. One that begs to be understood. But I guess what it’s saying is that I can see the depth of the world through a religious community, and that focusing just on myself and dancing and crying about my alopecia isn’t helping. I’m going to keep going to the grove. I need a religious community to push me outside of myself, that can help me see the Earth for what it is.

The Dreaded Climate Change Depression

I’ve been spending way too much time this week reading terrifying news articles about how it’s too late for climate change. 

There are only two more years until there is predicted no ice in the Arctic in summer, and the news story there is that it’s opening new lines for shipping.

All the governments of the world claim they want to have 2 degrees of warming, but scientists are already thinking we’ll be well past that by mid-century.

The permafrost is melting, which is releasing all kinds of its own greenhouse gases, which we can’t put back.

I’m feeling depressed about it. And mad. I want to do something, but what can really be done at this point? Our entire society needs to be completely dismantled. Yesterday.

Ugh. I’m doing my little parts, but I don’t know how to do anything radical enough to approach the problem. I’m getting my food from a local farmstand, learning to grow vegetables in my windows, walking home from work, taking public transit. But still, I rely so heavily on the systems that are the problem, and I can’t extricate myself from them, and they are showing no sign of changing.

Window Garden!

The whole time Friendly Gentleman and I were planning our wedding, I wanted to start a window garden and worm composter in our apartment. But I never had the time to get to it. And now that the wedding is over and we’ve recovered from all the excitement, we’ve been working hard on our little garden.

The garden is in the two windows of our living room. The three purple pots on the right are for the snap peas, and the other window has garlic an onions in the large white pots and spinach and lettuce in the small silver pots.

Our windows have I-beams at the top of them because our apartment is a factory conversion. We clamped C-clamps to the edge of the I-Beam, and then hung the pots off strings we tied to the clamps. For the snap peas, we tied C-clamps and then used the strings that hang down to make the trellis.

It’s a baby garlic! A friend of ours cooked some food at our house, and left a couple of cloves that had sprouted. So we planted them, and they seem pretty happy!

Baby spinaches! Except the garlic, we got all of our seeds from the local seed savers exchange.

The lettuce is of the Green Oakleaf variety, which was known as Philadelphia Oakleaf in the 1880s. So we know it will grow well in the Philadelphia climate. (Though I guess the question is if it will grow as well in the Philadelphia apartment climate. It seems quite happy in fact, as do all the plants.)

Except maybe the onions. I’m a little worried the window doesn’t get enough sunlight for them. Only one of the seeds sprouted, and it’s just so tiny. I’m hoping it hits a growth spurt here soon. They are Yellow Boretanna onions, which we chose for their small bulbs. And finally, my favorite, the Amish Snap peas! When I first went to see Friendly Gentleman’s farm, he took me to the garden, fed me a snap pea, and told me they were his favorite thing in the garden. I agreed, so when we decided to grow a vegetable garden, I wanted to devote and entire window to the snap peas. It’s going to be great to just walk over to the window and have them fresh. And they are in the middle of a huge growth spurt in the last few days. They’ve grown maybe four inches in two days. It’s crazy!

We also have a little olive tree going. A coworker of mine gave it to me during our company’s Secret Santa. I’m not sure it’s so happy. It keeps dropping leaves, and I’m not really sure what to do about it. But for the time being, it makes me happy. If it dies, I will probably put something else in that pot, though. Maybe some aloe, which is the only herbal medicine I grew up using.

And we have a peace lily. It was the first plant we got for our apartment because they are very difficult to kill. Every once in a while, it will look completely droopy and sad, and as soon as you water it, it pops back up to health.

And that’s my worm bin! The worms live in the plastic bin with the airholes. The bottom bin is to collect excess moisture in case it gets too wet. Wouldn’t want the wormies to drown! The brown box on top has strips of newspaper to get wet and use to bury food scraps, and then there are tools for digging around to see what they are up to. I’m SO EXCITED about my worm bin, for a lot of reasons. I don’t feel so bad about food waste and peelings and scraps as I did before, and it’s a good place to put organic offerings. The worms seem happy, and I’m happy to be helping along an ecosystem, and it will be good food for my little food plants.

It feels really good to finally get this project underway and to have it going so well. Looking at my plants and watching them grow gives me so much peace and joy. It makes me feel like an active participant in my life.

The Honeymoon, or Maybe We’re Both Druids Now?

For our honeymoon, husband and I did a two week trip to Europe. We went to London, Paris, and Wales. London was nice, I was surprised to find I hated Paris, and Wales was THE BEST.

Okay, in order, here goes:

London: We pretty much just did regular tourist things in London. We stayed in a really nice hotel while we were there. London was a lovely city, with a pace that seemed like it would be nice to live in.

My husband, being adorable with some snugglebears:

Obligatory London phone booth photo:

Did I mention my husband is adorable?

One of the things I really liked about London, and Europe in general was walking around a corner and discovering some ancient relic. This was the rosary from a medieval Great Hall in a castle.

One of the few pictures of both of us from the honeymoon, at Trafalgar Square. 

Paris:

At the recommendation of one of my coworkers, we went to La Refuge des Fondues. They serve you wine in baby bottles. They say it’s to avoid a tax on wine by the glass, because then they sell it as wine by the bottle. Ba dum ching! I don’t think that’s really it. I think it’s just a gimmick. But it was fun, and there was a couple from Seattle next to us we had a great time talking to.

Later that night, I was drunk from all the baby bottles of wine, and we decided to mix some juice and sprite so we could hydrate. What follows is my drunken midnight time of going around the apartment with the juice saying “Je suis dangereuse!”

And the obligatory Eiffel Tower picture. 

My favorite piece of art we saw. It was at the Musee de Quai Branly. It’s called “L’Aurore” by Dennis Pierre Puech. It was in an exhibit on hair and its cultural meanings.

We had lunch with our high school French teacher, who was flabbergasted we had married each other. We were already dating when we were in her class together. 

And I danced in front of the Paris Opera just because I’m still upset that I didn’t get to study abroad there in college due to my school’s policy of discouraging study abroad.

Our last day in Paris, we went just outside the city to La Defense. We saw the Grande Arche. La Defense was actually my favorite thing in Paris. There was so much interesting and new architecture, and the people spoke slower than the Parisians. 

Wales:

Wales was the BEST. We left London on a Virgin train then transferred to a Welsh local train and were surprised to see all of the signs on the train in both Welsh and English. And then the train ride over, we joked about all the silly ways that he conductor’s announcements of cities sounded absolutely nothing like how the stops names were spelled. When we got to Wales, our hosts were very nice, and told us a bit about the local history. Turned out we were staying near a lake of Lady of the Lake fame, and mountains were Merlin was said to have lived. We of course went to see those one day:

And seriously, I cannot stress enough that Wales is the most beautiful:

Also, there was slate everywhere. Here is a picket fence made out of slate:

And here is a tree eating a piece of slate:

We also spent a day going around the Isle of Anglesey, which was nearby seeing Neolithic Druid monuments. In one of them, Bryn Celli Ddu, a henge-turned burial mound, there was evidence of druid prayer. I found myself wondering whether these offerings were left by locals or visiting pagans.

A candle, a flower, and a heart-shaped stone:

A dried bouquet of flowers:

Some coins left in between the stones on the walls

Some runes scratched into a stone near the ceiling:

I prayed outside the entrance. It was nice. :

We went to Barclodiad y Gawres, which is another monument right on the Irish Sea. The name translates to “The Giantess’ Apronful.” They have the only example of painted standing stones in a monument in Wales, except for a single stone at Bryn Celli Ddu, which you can see in the previous picture. Unfortunately, we didn’t really get to see them because the mound is only open on weekends. But we did get to walk around.

It’s so windy there. The tree in this picture is not actually blowing in the wind. It grew that way.

And we went to Llanfairpwllgyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which is a town with an absurd name. Silly Welshmen. According to a book at our cabin, a Welshman named the town that to make fun of the English and their difficulty pronouncing Welsh words.

According to this book about Wales that was at our cabin, the ancient Celts used to throw hazlenuts at the bride and groom while they were in the middle of getting married. We thought that was an interesting bit of information, considering the nut pelted at us during our marriage ceremony. The “maybe we’re both Druids now” part of the title of this post comes from the Welsh part of our trip. Wales was just so beautiful everywhere you went.  Even the path to town was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Welsh is a beautiful language, and it was so wonderful to be in a place with such history. Davin and I got a book on Welsh and tried to pick up as much as we could while we were there. So far I can pretty much say “Y cacen yn y caban.” Which means “The cake is in the cabin.” I told my husband what I know about druidry, and he liked it. He said that he could almost see himself exploring druidry. So we came home and kept talking about it, and then at Yule we went to the celebration of our local Druid grove. It was wonderful! My husband was happy because we showed up in the middle of a ritual that was pretty much sumbel–everyone was passing a mug of spiked hot chocolate and making toasts. Pretty much as soon as we got there, one of the grove members said that she’s just as happy in the church as she is in the grove, and that she likes the grove because noone there makes her feel weird about it, whereas when she’s at Church as says she feels comfortable in a Druid grove, people are always demanding explanations. That put my husband’s fears away that he would be rejected for his Christian faith quite quickly. We spent the weekend having an overnight vigil for the sun, and a joyous sunrise singing and toast. I loved that the ceremonies were so simple and moving. There was ritual to it, but nothing so complicated as to leave anyone confused or lost. I really liked it. There were a few people there for sure we are looking forward to seeing again this weekend at the Imbolc celebration.

So, yeah. My honeymoon might have turned us into druids. And that makes me happy!

On my wedding

I promised my readers a few months ago that I would post more thoroughly about my wedding and honeymoon eventually, and now here it is!

But, before I start going into everything, I have to tell you the most amazing thing that happened! During our marriage ceremony, right in the middle of my vows, a black walnut fell out of the sky, shattered the piece of slate our marriage license was sitting on, and left a stamp mark right on the witness line! My husband’s grandfather used to show him how to break open the black walnuts and make foods out of them, so we took that as a blessing from him, and from the forest. See, look:

All photos were taken by Meghan Hayes.

Husband and I had a first look, so we saw each other before the ceremony. I’m so glad we did–it made me so much less nervous just beforehand, and gave me the chance to get to see his reaction to what I looked like as his bride, and gave me a chance to sink in how good he looked as a groom before we got into the nitty gritty of it. There were tears all over the place.

Then I did the same thing with my dad:

My sister and I acted like twins:

And then the ceremony, which was the so emotionally intense:

My nephew was the “ringing bearer.” He started everything by running around the circle where everyone was sitting ringing a bell. Everyone else had a tiny pair of bells in their seats they were welcome to ring.

During the procession, everyone in attendance sang “Down in the River to Pray.”

And then a friend of mine played Native American flute for my entrance:

And then things proceeded to be very emotional:

And then, the most amazing thing happened! A black walnut fell out of the sky, shattered the piece of slate our marriage license was sitting on, and left a stamp mark right on the witness line! My husband’s grandfather used to show him how to break open the black walnuts and make foods out of them, so we took that as a blessing from him, and from the forest.

And then we were married! And the first thing I did was turn around and run to my sister, who was crying her eyes out.

During the receiving line, a hawk flew right overhead. That was amazing blessing/omen number two, courtesy of Lady Freyja, who often appears to me in the form of birds of prey.

And then, everything else happens just like it does at weddings. And it was amazing.

My family:

My sister made me this amazing shawl as a wedding gift. I am definitely going to keep it as an heirloom.:

Our wedding cake was toadstools:

There was a lot of cowboy hats and hat hair:

And we danced the night away:

Next time: The Honeymoon; Or Maybe We’re Both Druids Now?

On Death and the Clarification of Ancestors

My grandmother died last week. January 3, 2013.

She was born in 1919. She made it from the teens all the way back around to the teens, saw 11 decades, had 9 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren. She was a child during the roaring twenties, a teenager during the Great Depression, married a WWII solder letter carrier and had her first two children in the 1940s, gave birth to my father during the fifties, saw her first grandchildren in the seventies, and had great-grandchildren beginning in the nineties. Her youngest great-grandchild is six. She was mobile and healthy (relatively speaking, for a 93-year-old.) She was still walking on her own, only used a walker for long distances, and still had her mental capabilities until her last few days.

She called us on Christmas Eve to tell us she was going soon. It’s amazing that she knew. She asked to speak to my husband. She was so impressed with what he had written in his wedding thank-you note to her. He told her that she is the strong religious backbone in the family, and the matriarch, and that he sees her strength in me. She told him that she appreciated it, then told me that I’m a good wife, and that she’s ready to go.

I got a phone call on the morning of the January 2nd from my father, telling me that the doctors thought she had three to eight hours left to live. My sister and I booked a flight as soon as we could, and arrived in the city where she lived later that afternoon. She was sleeping in her hospital bed. I spent time with my cousins (who are fifteen to twenty-five years older than me–their parents are 10 and 12 years older than my dad, and they both had kids young) and my aunt and uncle, and we watched her sleep. 

She was still breathing by that night, and everyone went home besides my parents, my sister, and I. We told her that it was alright for her to go, that we hoped she saw her husband in heaven. We sang to her.

My mother asked me if this made me believe in God. I told her I didn’t want to talk about it right then.

I didn’t want to talk about it over the dying body of my grandmother, who prayed the Rosary every day. 

But the experience has deepened my faith. I saw how right it is to honor the ancestors. Not some vapor ancestors as a group of people who donated their DNA to us, but as our true and honest ancestors who lived long and short lives leading to us. My grandmother lived twice as long as my grandfather, all that time leading a family alone. It is right to remember them and their journeys.It is right that they should be with their departed family in death. It is right to tell them to go be with their parents and grandparents and sibling and spouses who have gone before them. And it is right for us to tell their stories, so that we may remember.

I learned a lot about my ancestors this past weekend from my grandmother’s photo albums, and from asking my family about the people pictured in them.

I came into possession of two photos from 1916–one of which features my great-grandfather and my great-great grandfather. I learned that my great-great grandfather was a plumber who did work on the St. Louis Fountain in Forest Park. The other photo shows two of my grandmother’s sisters, their mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Which means the photo shows my great-grandmother, great-great grandmother, and great-great-great grandmother. It tells their names on the back. And this is what I learned about them:

My great-great-great grandmother was called “Big Grandmother” by the children. She liked to snack on rye bread and beer.

My great-great grandmother was called “Little Grandmother.” She raised my grandmother and her five siblings during the Great Depression after their parents died. She was born in Dublin, Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day and died in America on the Fourth of July. 

My great grandmother was the mother of five girls and then, finally, one little boy who died young from a stroke. Her husband worked in manual labor across state lines, and died in an accident on the job. She died just a couple of years later.

My grandmother, who just passed away, did not know what to expect on her wedding night. She believed that if two people loved each other, sex was unnecessary. She wore a gold cross around her neck from when her husband gave it to her in the 1940s until she died in 2013. She never went on a date again after my grandfather passed away, but some years later told a widowed friend of hers that dating again is the better way to go. She loved yellow roses-my grandfather used to give them to her when they were dating. She was an extremely faithful Catholic, and kept things that were sentimental to her. I have inherited her rosary. While we were cleaning out her apartment in the retirement home, I found the tiny bells from my wedding and the jars from my favors, and she wasn’t even able to come to the wedding. We found all of the cards we had ever sent her. And she loved us–she had a whole photo album dedicated to our portion of the family. 

My ancestors are real people. This is a truth that has eluded me up until this point. I had never known anything about my departed ancestors. My grandfathers all died before I was born, and my grandmothers have always lived as the family matriarchs. But now a 93-year-old Eleanora has made the transition from Family Matriarch to Beloved Dead, and in doing so, she told me my ancestors stories. I will put their pictures on my altar, and I will say the rosary in her name. I will give them offerings of rye bread and beer, and I will remember where I came from, and that their work built the world I am now living in. 

On Sif, Seasons, and Family

My alopecia is acting up again.

The day I returned from my honeymoon, and the day hurricane Sandy made landfall along the coast of the Northeast, I noticed quite a few of my newly four-inch hairs above my ears falling out in my fingers. I ran to the bathroom mirror, and, sure enough, it looks exactly like it did last December above my left ear–a small bald spot. And then I noticed another one, right on top where it’s always been the worst. Where I had only finally gotten rid of the bald spot three months earlier.

This time, however, I didn’t despair. My feelings were not even remotely as strong as they were a year ago when I was first experiencing alopecia, and there are good reasons for that. For one thing, I know what it is this time, so I’m not constantly thinking I’m disgusting for having some infection like I did last time when I was misdiagnosed with ringworm. For another thing, I have dealt emotionally with this loss. Last time, the concept of losing my hair was such an impossible concept that I had never even considered it might happen to me. But this time, I know that it’s something that happens to me, and so life goes on. But perhaps the biggest reason why I’m not as upset this time is that I no longer have to worry that I will be bald at my wedding. My baldness waned in time for me to have a full head of hair for my wedding and honeymoon, and now that it’s over, I have the comfort of that perfect memory, and life goes on.

It’s been two weeks since my baldness came back, and so far it’s not even really noticeable. A slight change in how I’ve been wearing my bangs, and even I can’t tell looking at myself in the mirror. Hopefully it stays like that. It won’t.

Last time, my hair fell out during Hurricane Irene’s Northeastern tour, and this time, it was just in the middle of Sandy. So I’m joking to everyone that hurricanes make my hair fall out.

But there’s something else to it, something that has me thinking a lot about Sif, wife of Thor, and that’s the seasonality of it. It is apparently not unheard of for those with alopecia to experience a worsening of their symptoms in the fall, with regrowth tending to appear in the spring. Of course, as with everything about alopecia, there’s very little research, so all of this is sort of speculative.

Many people liken Sif’s hair to the golden fields of wheat, and Loki cutting her hair off as a representation of the wheat harvest, which occurs in late summer. So at the end of each summer, Sif loses and then mourns her long hair, and is given a new head of golden hair by the dwarves.

This is the second autumn in a row that my hair has fallen. Which gives a whole new meaning to the season of “fall.” I feel like a tree, like my leaves fall out in the autumn and I am bare all winter, only for new growth to come once more in the summer. And today, while musing about Sif, I feel like my hairs are the golden fields of wheat that she grows until they are long and she is proud of them, then are torn away, leaving her bereft for the winter, only for new golden stalks to return with the strengthening sun.

There’s another aspect to my thinking about Sif and my hair loss today. With the gods, what thoughts aren’t multi-faceted? So for one, I am thinking of Sif and the seasons of loss and gain, but I am also thinking of how she is the wife of Thor, and how her name means familial or in-law relationships. How she turns the mind to love.* How she lost her hair, and in the process, Loki got her new gold hair from the dwarves, and the gods got the best of their treasures–Sif’s husband’s hammer, Odin’s spear and self-replicating ring, and Frey’s ship and golden boar. These allow the gods much more strength in their position among the worlds, particularly thanks to Thor’s hammer. I am struck that her loss leads to the gain of all in her family, not just herself.

It is so common in Norse mythology for a deity to be missing just the thing that gives them their power–Freyja is missing her husband, but has passionate love as her domain. Odin is missing an eye, and so gains vision. And so on. Sif loses her hair, and also her femininity, and so gives the gods those things that make them the most powerful. Her loss was powerful enough to transform the Aesir. And so I have have been thinking of her and my new marriage, and how we’re in it together now and that sacrifices I make and losses I sustain can have a positive effect on me and Gent and our whole family. And how, like Sif, I am an in-law, and how I am his wife, and he is now, for real, my family. How families are a whole web of connectedness, and how marriages tie a knot to combine two whole wyrd webs into one so that they always and forever affect each other.

*This is something that is actually said of Sjofn, but I believe that Sif and Sjofn are the same goddess. Sjofn is solely attested to in Snorri’s list of goddesses, in which Sif is not listed. Sjofn’s name means “relation” and so does Sif’s. 

On marriage and families

I’m feeling pensive tonight. No particular reason, but I can’t sleep, so I’m going to subject you guys to my rambles.

I can’t sleep tonight because all I can think about is how wonderful my wedding was, and how long ago it already seems. That two week whirlwind trip to Europe just made it seem like October could have been a wonderful year. Now it’s far enough in the past in my brain’s clock that I’m starting to actually process what happened, how I went from being a fiancee to a wife, changed my name (well, I’m working on that one, really. It will probably be a while before that’s done), and gained some family members.

For the first time in my life, it actually occurred to me that any children I have will have family members that my twin sister’s children wouldn’t. Somehow I had always thought of our future children as interchangeable. That probably makes me sound like a freak, but I guess it’s a sign that my new family is a real family now, instead of the ghosty vague forms little girls have in place of their future husbands and wedding guests.

Husband and I are starting to combine our finances, and we bought a new bed, and we have a whole set of china, and all kinds of adult things. So in a way, things seem different. In a way, I’m having a bit of post-wedding cold feet. Beforehand, it was so exciting and I love him so much, that marrying him was just the obvious answer. Don’t get me wrong–I’m not saying I wish I didn’t marry him, just that now that it’s done, I’m able to deal with the enormity of it in a way I couldn’t before. We’re married and I’m his wife and he’s my husband and we’re responsible for each other.

And then there are all those cultural narratives about what being married means and how we should be a nuclear family unit and I should now all of a sudden start wanting a baby. Not that anybody has outright said this, except my mom, but it’s one of those things people say “get married and start a family.” As if it’s something that happens all at once.

But what’s with the nuclear family ideal? How on earth can my husband and I “start a family” when we’ve just invited each other into ours? Don’t we already have a family and not need to start one from scratch? Why is making a baby starting a family?

I’m not really into the nuclear family structure. That probably comes mostly from my twin sister, who I love so dearly, and who lives with me and my husband. She and I lived together far longer than he and I have, and she’s lived with us the whole time we’ve lived together. I don’t really ever intend to live apart from her if I can help it. People are always telling us that it’s a necessity that she and I will part ways someday, as if it’s a given because all kinds of children want to live with their siblings when they grow up, but then everyone grows up and realizes that’s silly. But why not? If I love her and she loves me and she loves my husband and he loves her and we all three love her boyfriend, why shouldn’t we live together? Why should I ever live apart from either of the two most important people to me? I lived apart from my husband for 5 years, and that was horrible.

I once told someone I was annoyed because my sister’s boss and everyone have been asking her when she’s moving out, and then they are confused when she says she isn’t going to. He said, “She shouldn’t have to, as long as you aren’t starting a family right away.” Which just confused me even more, because why would you ever want fewer adults around when there’s a baby to be taken care of?

But there’s another reason besides my sister that I don’t really believe in the nuclear family structure. I don’t think it’s the way the human brain is built. We’re social creatures, and we tend to lean on different people for different things. I can go to my sister for gossip, and my husband for architectural design kinds of conversations. He doesn’t want the gossip, so it gives him a chance to watch the sports he likes but I don’t while she and I chat.

I was raised in the suburbs, and I saw the nuclear family making everyone lonely and depressed. If you only have one person who is supposed to be your everything, what happens when you and that person are fighting? What if it’s the two of you and a really unhappy set of teenagers? There’s nowhere to diffuse the tension, so it just swirls around the nuclear family like a giant ball of too many electrons, making it have a negative charge. But link up with more people, and maybe you get a stable molecule, and the electrons can swap around between atoms so that some of the tension from one place can diffuse in another, and the people can be happier. I just don’t see how one person could ever be enough for anybody.

My parents lived in a nuclear family my whole childhood. They rarely went out with friends, and we saw their families only once or twice a year. They were miserable. After I moved out, my brother and his son and his father moved to live near them, then my aunt went as well. And then instead of an unhappy two, they were six. And my mom could talk to my aunt when she was really upset with my nephew, or my dad could talk to my brother’s dad or my aunt, and everyone had someone to talk to, and they were all much happier.

So I don’t think my husband and I have started a family at all, or that we will when/if we have babies. I don’t think it’s even possible. We already have families. And I intend to keep our non-nuclear family structure together, me and my sister and my husband.

And that’s enough late night ramblings for today.