Another tumblr refugee

[lenyberry]

-Name you would like to go by: Kat or Leny is fine

-Present path or tradition: Self-constructed, spirit-initiated, fairly eclectic, animistic. I pay respects primarily to Athena and the gods of väenusko, but my magical path is overall more secular than not.

-Interests: music (I sing and play keyboards), calligraphy, poetry, mixology, gardening, handcrafts. Much of that overlaps with my magical practice. 

-Age (not mandatory): 30

-Brief Bio: I've been a witch and pagan for about 15 years now. It's been a long and interesting road, and I'm sure I've yet got a ways to go. There's always more to learn! I live in northern Utah with my boyfriend and two cats, and moderate the Energy Spiral discord group. I bartend in my day job and have a long-term project of writing a book about making magical cocktail potions. 

Comments

[varianbetweenstars]

Nice to see someone else on a self-constructed path, welcome!

[lenyberry]

Thanks! I didn't have much choice but to do it myself, really, unless I wanted to be just another Wicca 101 (nothing wrong with Wicca, it's just Not For Me). Growing up in a small and very conservative town with conservative parents in the days before internet communities were so widespread and easy to find (and while just barely out of the dialup era, I'm Internet Old lol)... well, the few Wicca 101-type books at the local library gave me a start, but then I had to do a lot of my own work from there.

[varianbetweenstars]

My Pantheon is unrecorded, so I have to do a *lot* of figuring stuff out myself.

[lenyberry]

My initiatory spirits are similar in that regard. They've been wonderful, and on the one hand I do think it's good to not just rely on books to learn... but at the same time it would be nice to be able to compare/contrast some of my impressions against other people's.

[hrafn]

Wow, I feel this so hard: "it would be nice to be able to compare/contrast some of my impressions against other people's" . . . so many of the spirits I encounter/have relationships with are land spirits/local Powers of various kinds, and now I have a pantheon in my life who are using names I only know from fiction and *throws hands up*

[lenyberry]

Yep, it's always fun to try to figure stuff out on the fly with local land spirits & co. Like is this new contact a fae, a genius loci, an elemental spirit... etc etc. And sure, spirit communication skills go a long way... but unless you've got a foolproof way of preventing a spirit from lying to you that won't hugely offend them (and I haven't yet found anything that hits BOTH points. A fluorite pendulum helps avoid being misled without offending anyone when it's just my standard spirit-communication pendulum in general so no one feels particularly mistrusted, but it's not foolproof, just helpful)... confirming what you're told can be a bit of a hassle.

[mdehners]

Welcomen! Know Utah well. My Mom's family were part of the Handcart Brigade that helped settle it. SLC was, back in the 80's surprisingly Progressive culturally(well, away from Temple Square;>). The oldest Gay bar west of the Mississippi was there!
Cheers,
Pat

[lenyberry]

Yeah, I hear a lot of Utah was surprisingly progressive and/or just generally fun, in the 70's/80's. Unfortunately I missed that and my family didn't move here til the early 90's when I was but a tiny sprog with neither the cultural awareness to know to object, nor the power in the family dynamics to have such an objection taken into account as more than the whinings of a near-infant.

Since my high school days the local subcultural diversity has grown. There's even a semi-active in-person group of varied pagans that meets up once in a while, I used to go to their rituals but it turns out, I'm so used to solo work by now that trying to group-ritual feels strange and uncomfortable.

[fayanora]

The term I use is neomythos, but that might be different from "self-constructed" in some way. Especially given the rest of the context.

Anyway, my path started out as a religion I invented for an alien culture in one of my stories. That was almost 20 years ago. (Gods, I feel old now. Time to go do something to make myself feel young again!)

[lenyberry]

Mine's a bit different from that, in that I don't feel like I "made it up". More that I cobbled it together out of existing bits and bobs rather than following a pre-constructed Tradition. For example, I'm not Wiccan, but there are Wiccan elements in my practice -- stuff I learned starting out that's just worked really well for me so I see no reason to try too hard to replace it. I'm not Asatru, but I've incorporated Asatru elements. I've incorporated Buddhist elements. I do try to be careful to avoid appropriation of course, and to take only what's open and freely available, or use less-open stuff I learn about as inspiration rather than copying it directly.

[fayanora]

Okay yeah that's something definitely different, that's called being eclectic.