So it’s been a little bit since I have written here and I will tell you that this will be short. I have come to some realizations in my life recently that hopefully kick started something in me to pursue a dream I have long had.
1) The least important realization is I have to get off my butt and keep going with my dieting. I’ve gained 3 pounds back and I know this isn’t the “water weight” type deal. I have been monitoring it for a few days and I know it’s the real deal. I have also been …
Some of you may have heard the phrase sweet spot used to mean the spot on the jaw where hit would almost automatically knock out the person being hit. When I use the term sweet spot it has a similar context, but not specific to that area. When I state sweet spot it means any part of the body that is particularly vunerable to a quick and painful attack with minimal effort. While these points on the body can be utilized regardless of gender I specifically keep them in mind for females because they …
Ladies and Gentleman – this blog has moved to it’s permanent residence at mymommythepaganwarrior.blogspot.com.
Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you enjoy it!
So I have fallen off the wagon once more, but I’m sure it won’t be the last time. It’s a struggle to stay on my exercise schedule when lacking energy, but I’m working on it. I know that it isn’t in regards to my hypothyroid condition, but it is related to my lacking sleep. One week without a babysitter has turned into four months without one and so the nights I work I am lucky to get four hours before I have to be up with the little man then, of course, returning to my work shift that night. It’s …
I promise not to get too preachy on this blog, but I felt this fit perfectly here since I have not mentioned my faith very much. Enjoy! –
My words reflect who I am and what I believe. I’m a Warrior who lives the philosophy of the Fianna – “Truth in our hearts, Strength in our arms and Fulfillment in our tongues.” Truth is spirituality that is specific to the inidual as revealed by communing with deity and study. Strength is being physically capable of living your truth through keeping the body healthy and ready for whatever comes (specifically battle) and fulfillment means living a life as far from fallacies and deception as possible through not only actions, but through my words. Perhaps a more general look at it could be – Knowing Truth, Living Truth and Speaking Truth.
I pull no punches and I speak bluntly. I can do so without being insulting, but some consider my lack of beating around the bush as being tactless. It is far from it. What I recommend reflects me. If I knowingly recommend any group or website or book to study that I’m telling others they should read to learn from (in the manner that what they learn is “truth”) and I know it’s main component is fallacies that is a direct reflection on me.
Others choose to go about things other ways and that is their right. I prefer to be myself and speak my mind. If that gets me kicked so be it. We pagans are a vast and very different group of people with many different paths and many different opinions. I personally think that which should draw us together should be the reality of our deities in a world where they are compatible with that which is natural. Not a world where our faith is based on lies.
If we can’t take ourselves seriously how will outsiders?
You’ve all pictured it. One day you’re living your happy go lucky life then you end up in a car wreck, getting shot, or a plane crash. The next thing you know you wake up in a hospital gown, in a hospital bed, in a hospital room alone. You pull out the tubes from your arms (which apparently doesn’t even cause you to flinch despite ripping 1 inch long imbedded needles out from under your skin). You stumble around a deserted hallway continuing the stumble out into an empty parking lot filled with abandoned vehicles, some of which look pretty banged up. You think to yourself, what the hell did I miss?
You hear someone approaching you from behind so you whip around to find a mangled human whose jaw seems to be missing as is half their hair. They’re limping toward you reaching out for what you think is help. You move in closer to get a better look since you have some morbid fascination with this decomposing creature and you live to regret the slip in sense when the woman lunges at you. She spits blood and bile at you as she starts aiming her mouth for your neck. Then she starts aiming for your chest. Then your arm and you start thinking “This woman wants to eat me.” You’re able to toss her off of you and grab the nearest rock swinging at her head. You strike it once and it does nothing to dissuade her attempt at making you her breakfast. You hit her again and again and again until finally she stops moving, her head bashed in beyond recoginition and the foul stench of death strewn all over your hospital gown. In comes the melancholy music of doom as the camera pans out conveying the loneliness and confusion you feel. The realization hits you. It’s December 22nd, 2012 and the Mayans were right! It’s the Zombie Apocalypse.
I know some of you are asking yourselves, what the hell does this have to do with anything? Well, stick with me. The first rule in Zombieland? Cardio. What’s the first rule in Warrior training? Cardio. If you get winded in a fight you are almost guaranteed to lose. While the average street fight lasts seven seconds there are fights that go on for minutes. Watch the energy expelled during a muay thai or boxing match. There are times when at the end of the first round both are breathing heavily. Then they’re taking hits to the face. How quickly can you think when you have just taken a beating and can’t catch your breath? On top of utilizing the energy to fight back imagine having to run from your attacker. So, yes, cardio is extremely important to the Warrior.
Second rule in Zombieland? Double tap. I’m sure those reading my blog are aware of what double tap means, but for those who don’t it is when you shoot your enemy and assume they’re dead. You place another shot in their head just to make sure they are actually dead because you never know when they will pop up and come grabbing for your ankles. While this isn’t necessarily a rule for Warrior training it does bring up two other subjects. Weapons and awareness.
We can learn a lot from Woody Harrelson’s character Tallahassee. The man made an art out of killing zombies with whatever was around. I bet you’ll never look at a banjo in the same way again! In Resident Evil: Afterlife Milla Jovovich’s character Alice uses stacks of quarters in lieu of shotgun shells. Warriors should be aware of everything of use around them. Look around you right now. If you were attacked what could you use as a weapon? A pencil? Scissors? A shovel? Now, where could you hide? Where are the exits? If someone you cared about was with you how would you defend them? Everything is a potential weapon and everything can aide you in an escape – just think outside the box.
In Dawn of the Dead, the survivors got supplies from and took up shelter in a mall. In Resident Evil: Afterlife they got what they need from a prison. Zombieland they took supplies from whereever they could find including what they thought were abandoned mnasions. On a Warrior’s mind should be some very simple questions – where would you go to get needed supplies like food, ammunition, and survival gear? What could you easily carry with you? Once those supplies run out can you survive on what the land has to offer? Do you know what plants are deadly and what could sustain you? DO you know how to hunt and prepare game meat? Do you know how to combat weather conditions and keep yourself warm or from becoming over heated?
In a Warrior’s world, these questions are common place. Looking to ancient Warriors and soldiers their survival relied upon what they could find in nature to eat and the skills they picked up to keep themselves from having the elements cause their deaths. The Warrior mentality doesn’t just include how well you can defend yourself, but how long you can survive with minimal supplies and your knowledge of the land. Wars don’t just las A war isn’t generally hours, it’s days, week and years or grueling conditions, supply conservation and planning. This common scenario ring a bell with every zombie movie you can recall?
So like the common trend goes I find myself utilizing the impending end of the world scenario to dictate some of my focus while training on my path. It’s partly as a joke, partly because my husband is obsessed with zombies, and partly because it is actually good sense. With all the questions posed above you realize that movies like Zombieland, Dawn of the Dead, and the Resident Evil series make you ask yourself one very important question – could you survive? Are you Warrior enough? ;)
Being a reconstructionist parent offers many challenges and one of the most complex may be celebrating Lughnasa.
Lughnasa is one of the four Irish fire festivals and is generally celebrated on August 1st. The word itself means the assembly of Lugh, and is often said to commemorate the funeral games of Lugh’s foster mother Tailtiu. Traditionally the holiday may have lasted for more than a single day, possibly even several weeks, and marked the beginning of the harvest season. Lughnasa was a time of celebration for the entire community when everyone would gather at local sacred sites to celebrate with story telling, music, athletic competitions which could include anything from games of skill or strength to races, decorating wells and standing stones, marriages, ination and feasting. Reaching the sacred site was intended to be a challenge, and might involve travelling to the seashore, a hilltop, mountaintop, or river. Particular emphasis was placed on the preparation of foods related to the new harvest, especially the first fruits of the season. In very modern times the potato is usually the main harvested item prepared, but older sources often refer to corn as and it’s preparation, although corn too is not a native crop; it’s likely the original featured food would have been an oat or wheat, or similar grain product, that could be used in the bread or porridge dishes that are ubiquitously talked about in reference to Lughnasa.
Speaking of food, that is one of the first and most basic ways to celebrate and to include the kids. One of the traditional foods, albeit from the Christian period, that was mentioned in several sources is the Barm Brac, a type of bread made with fruit; most recipes use non-native dried fruit but since gathering fresh berries is another Lughnasa tradition it would be better to use fresh berries. Porridge is another food that is mentioned as traditional. I tend to go with oat based bread or porridge since my youngest daughter cannot have any wheat products due to a gluten sensitivity, but someone seeking other traditional cereals could use wheat or barley flour. In any of these cases it would be perfect to take the children out to gather fresh berries if they grow locally, or if you can grow your own, and then have them help you cook the chosen food.
So, what makes this holy day so challenging to a parent? Partially it is the heavy emphasis on community in a time when most of us have little real world community beyond our families. Unlike Samhain, Imbolc, and Beltaine which are all easily celebrated within the family unit Lughnasa is meant to be celebrated on a much larger scale. This is an immediate conundrum for the recon pagan parent that is not easily solved. One possible solution is to expand a portion of the day’s festivities beyond your recon family and include others; perhaps non-recon pagans or possibly a non-religious picnic that include many of the elements of Lughnasa. The religious celebration could be done privately before or after, but gathering friends and family for a picnic with games would still preserve some aspects of the other Lughnasa traditions. Neither of these is ideal, but they do at least attempt to include the important social aspects of the holiday.
Another challenge for the recon parent – one that I am particularly struggling with this year – is how to include the children in athletic games in ways that they will find fun but that are age appropriate. The foot races and swimming races of Lughnasa tradition are meant for adults (and are often dangerous) and are hard to tailor to a wide age range of children, and horse racing would exclude the youngest children, at best. My own daughters are 3 and 7 so the difference between them is huge when it comes to physical ability. How do I find athletic games that are challenging but still fun for both of them? Moving away from the traditional practices but keeping the spirit of the holiday I have decided to include the entire family in relay races, so that the adults can balance out the children’s abilities while still letting the kids have fun. I also settled on a bean bag toss that could be modified for each age group, with different levels of difficulty, and – in honor of the old stories of Lugh outwitting his rival Crom Dubh – on a couple trivia games and a scavenger hunt.
This year’s Lughnasa will be something of an experiment, as we try to find new ways to celebrate that are more family friendly. We don’t live in a time or place where we could join our entire town in celebrating and enjoy watching the athletic games from the sidelines but we still want to celebrate in a genuine way. So on Lughnasa my family will hike to a local place that we feel is sacred, we will bring Barm Brac we have cooked with local berries we gathered, we will sing, make music, and tell stories with whomever of our friends decide to join us and we will have our own types of games. We will hold a ritual to honor the deities we choose, most likely including Lugh, and possibly Tailtui. The food will be passed out and then we will all walk sun-wise around a fire, or if we don’t have a fire we’ll substitute a candle, and a prayer will be said (this comes from McNeill’s Silver Bough, volume 2) and we will leave some of our food as an offering to the daoine sidhe and to the gods of our rite…and hopefully our children will have fun doing it all.
Bibliography:
Danaher, K. (1972). the Year in Ireland: Irish calendar customs. Minneapolis: Mercier Press.
Kondratiev, A. (1998). the Apple Branch: a path to Celtic ritual. New york: Citadel Press.
MacNeill, M. (1962). the Festival of Lughnasa. Dublin: Oxford University Press.
McNeill, F. M. (1959). the Silver Bough, Volume 2: a calendar of Scottish national festivals, Candlemas to Harvest Home. Glasgow: Maclellan.
Author: Morgan Daimler
Irish Reconstructionist Parent & Author
Morgan Daimler Amazon Page
Sidhemoonwitch@aol.com<>
I know what’s coming. 1) It’s July so why am I writing about St. Patrick’s Day? 2)…
As a Págánacht each holy day is a time to reflect on our ancestors and what their lives may have been like when they sat around their hearth or bonfire and celebrated their sacred times of the season. The Iron Age Irish (700 BCE – 400CE) didn’t have the luxuries of the modern kitchen with the ceramic top stove and built in microwaves. Much of their time was spent out amongst the rest of their tribes, partaking in a three day festival of celebration and preparation for the new season. In the time of Samhain preparation was particularly important because they were at the end of the harvest period and entering the winter where food needed to be stored and cattle slaughtered for meat that would be salted and kept to sustain them through the winter.
