They call You savage, these scholars who study Your past, Your culture, Your people. They consider ancient writings, ancient fictions, consider enscriptions, old offerings. Cities toppled, earthquakes that shatter lives, curses and plagues with Your name on them, at some offense seen. Earth-shaker, in hopes that You would still Your wrath. Steadfast, in hopes to placate you.

They call You petulant, these men and women who live in a time when most dismiss You as a construct humankind created to help order our world. Long has it been since You were seen as a living thing, a being worth knowing, worth believing in. They look no further than Homer, some of them, and see You only as some ill-mannered child, creating chaos to soothe Your ego, Your pride.

You are named cold, uncaring, unconcerned with this most important of species. You are of wilder places, wilder times, ancient, too uncivilized for man.

Second to Zeus, they name You, and with it the air of a slighted brother, always in the shadow, always second fiddle, never first, never in the spot-light. The jealous would-be-king. The one passed over, over-looked, undervalued and feeling it.

You are great. Life-changer. Life-giver. You are demanding, shoving me to strive for more, to dig deeper, to look harder, to expand my awareness, to count the ripples, to follow the ripples, to see how they touch everything, and keep on expanding, keep on touching, movement unending.

You are gentle, in Your way, to Your own. The stillness You inspire, the stillness You carry, is a deep, dark, cool stillness, a calm that no hurricane can touch. Your generosity awes me. Your tenderness overwhelms me.

You are my first, and my last, and my all. They do not know You. They do not see You. They cannot dare to hope to touch upon what You offer. This world is better for Your presence. My life is better, for Your presence.

Hail Poseidon, my beloved savage god.

One of the first things people associate Poseidon with is with the sea. These days, it could be any sea — we’re past specifically referring to the Mediterranean Sea. My first encounter with the god occurred off the northern coast of Massachusetts, and the northern Atlantic speaks of His moods fairly well. When I venture to the Pacific coast, now my local ocean, I still experience Him there. When I tell people that I’m a devotee of the god, the first thing they say is, ‘Oh, the sea god?’ (You see that? THE sea god. That’s right. Muwhah. ;o) )

But, that’s not all He is, and arguably, it’s not even the first thing He was. It’s simply the most popular one that’s come down to us. His name, for example, seems to break down into ‘lord or consort’ from potei (the spelling we use comes to us from Attica; elsewhere the spelling varied and Poteidan was used) and ‘earth’ from ‘da’. Naturally, this isn’t completely accepted (what in academia is?) but either way, there is no definitive water or sea tie in in the name that comes down to us, and that can be telling all on its own.

When I left New England behind, He stressed to me the importance of coming to see and experience His presence away from that water-infused place. Even with all the water around me, I still associated Him first and foremost with the sea, and time spent further inland helped with that. In northeastern PA there was little approachable water; our cities river was down a gorge and impossible to get to easily. In Philadelphia there was the Delaware, and that was pretty amazing, especially on the days when it smelled like seawater. There was also other little waterways, but in a city that size and that filthy, touchable water was still pretty much out. I sought Him in other places, in other things, and my worship of Him has, because of that, take on an earthy component. Which, given my introduction to Him shouldn’t be all that surprising, really.

So, what does that mean it terms of worship and holy days? One of the frustrating and yet ultimately freeing and rewarding facts about Poseidon’s history is that, He’s never been as widely popular as some of the Others. You take a peek at the festivals that come down to us from Athens, and you can hardly see past Apollo and Dionysos and Demeter. This isn’t a bad thing, but it is frustrating when you are both called to delve into established festivals and to make Poseidon the center of your worship. There are pockets, of course, where He was The Local God, where He was hailed as savior, as father, as leader, pockets where He was truly an important god. In a lot of cases — in most cases — if we know about a festival of His, we simply know that it existed and not what was done.

The solution, then, is to create festivals to honor Him throughout the year. And so, during this spring I’ll honor Poseidon Phytalmios — Poseidon of the Growing things, an apt reminder that the gods can take away as surely as They can give, and Their gifts should be cherished. (I haven’t set a date for this yet, as my head is still in New England as far as climate goes, and spring isn’t until March at the earliest, whereas here, winter is about three weeks long and things are already growing, two weeks into January. This may become a January festival). February marks my anniversary with Him, so that’s a special time, too.

I honor Poseidon Hippios later in the spring, to synch that up with local foaling seasons and the mating season (the gestation period is 11 months). It could go earlier or later, depending on which energies you want to focus on. I tend to try to go for a happy medium, and really having it close to May Day is sort of fitting. This year, though, I’m setting it on the 8th of April.

In July I honor Poseion Taureos.

In August, during one of our drier months, I venture to an area of ponds, with the water growing low, to honor Poseidon of the Ponds, to focus on the importance of fresh water and the interconnectedness of all life.

In December there is both Poseidon Nikólaos Day (see previous post) and Poseidea. Originally, because they happen so close together, I was going to merge the two, but in the end, I decided I wouldn’t. We have a few bits of information about Poseidea as it was celebrated in some of the places it was celebrated — like so many, we have festival names from other places, so we know they did something, but we don’t know the what. The what that we do know involves chariot races and horse sacrifices. In other words, details I’m not likely to recreate. We also don’t know the when, as the when can change, although arguably, if they have a month named for the festival (as with Poseideon) then the festival should fall within said month. So, I mark Poseidea on the 8th of Poseideon. Poseidon Nikólaos falls on the 6th of December.

It’s evolving. It will likely always be evolving. But, that’s what living, breathing traditions do. It’s important to live and breathe and evolve with them.

or, Poseidon Nikólaos?

A brief note to explain why I haven’t updated in a while: the Yule season (for our household this runs from Samhain through Yuletide) is my time to focus on my work with Odin. He’s in my life throughout the year, honestly, but that I’m Poseidon’s is pretty much the lens through which I see the world. For the Yule season, I consciously shift that. This is the second year since I realized this was how I needed to approach things, that I realized that the whole balance everything idea didn’t mean equal time so much as appropriate placement of mindfulness and attention.

(Of course, with my uncle’s passing in October [and how those words still seem so alien and foreign and incomprehensible to me] my Work this season has all been intensely personal and private)

Before I was mindful of this, Yuletide was still very much all about Odin in our household, even though we did incorporate Poseidon into the festivities. Poseidea doesn’t have an exact date, and places that celebrated it or something like it, celebrated it on different times. I have, for convenience sake, always placed it on the 8th day of the month Poseidon, which made it fall in the general Yule season.

This year, Dver was inspired to mark the passing of Saint Nicholas’s feast day (who, while having ties to Odin, for sure, also shares some things with Poseidon) with a trip to the coast and hey, did a certain person of Poseidon’s want to come along?

She sure as hell did!

For those who aren’t familiar with the history of Saint Nicholas (who is just one of many, many figures who’ve given us our modern Santa Claus), Saint Nicholas has many, many, many nautical themed elements to his story. A common one is that, coming home from a pilgrimmage, the ship he was travelling on was caught in a storm, and he prayed, and the storm calmed. This, the story goes, is how he became the patron saint of sailors, and why they spread word of him in their travels.

Over the course of history, many temples belonging to Poseidon were converted to churches dedicated to Saint Nicholas. In the Quarterly Review Vol 163, we’re told, “have St Nicholas as the representative of Poseidon This fact especially noticeable in Tenos where once stood the temple to the sea god here not only is the chief church to St Nicholas but the town itself is called by the name of saint Everything nautical has to do with St Nicholas Mykonos a little church built on a rock in the middle of harbour is dedicated to him . . .”

Typically, I hold my Poseidea ritual on the 8th day of month Poseidon. In fact, the only reason I follow the Athenian calender month, as opposed to others that are available, is because they’re the ones with a month (sometimes two!) named for my god. It was a small thing, however, to decide to wait until I was at the seacoast to honor him, instead.

We decided to bring some traditional Saint Nicholas feast day foods for offerings, although in the end this entailed only my moon cookies which turned out to be more like a cakey type thing. (In my working with Poseidon, there’s a moon connection, which should probably be obvious, and hence, appropriating the moon cookies). We also picked our locale pretty easily: there is a Neptune State Park, where one of the many creeks around the coast let out into the sea. It was pretty much perfect, and could have only been made better if I had actually brought my sandals with me instead of deciding I could walk barefoot. Yes, the smooth rocks are smooth, but they are still many and painful.

This wasn’t an insanely organized, everyone in ritual together sort of thing, and for me at least, what it was was exactly what was needed for me. I do want, at some point, to have a Poseidon festival and ritual that is big and planned out and with multiple stages and parts — but knowing me, this is likely never going to happen for me at the coast. My mind shuts off and all I want is to be in the water nownownow. I’m transported to a place that is intimate and immediate and has no place for words or talking or bothering with other people at all.

I brought along a number of sacred items to bathe in the sea water. I brought a change of clothes, because the water is always washing over me and I planned this time to go in. Yes, in December. What?

I selected an area, where the creek came into the ocean, to go and kneel and sing to Poseidon. By then I was already drenched from the knees down and happy for my change of clothes (and towel and blanket and toe-warmers) that we thought ahead to bring along. I danced, unmindful of my numb feet and the river rocks. I laughed and flirted with the waves and wanted desperately to be out in the breakers. At last, I knelt while the tide rushed up around me, and then back out and out and out, dragging the sand beneath me with it, freeing the rocks under the sand, to send them tumbling against me. I sang my Poseidon song, and water came up to my shoulders as I knelt, and the rocks fell away. I remained in the water as long as I could (surprisingly, it wasn’t as cold as I expected it to be, and I wonder if I’m just used to a greater water/air temperature difference in the winter, because generally the water up here is colder, stays colder, than the Atlantic off Mass.) and then a tad bit longer, and then made my way to my dry clothes and towel and blankets. Stripped and sat wrapped up for a bit before I could be bothered to put on dry clothes. The hardest part was walking back across to where everyone else was, across treacherous stones on numb legs without dropping and breaking any of my stuff — like my sacred items or, you know, my toes. Graceful I was not.

There was more huddling, wrapped in blankets, snuggled up next to Beth (who had also waded in but then made a beeline for warm and dry) and experienced that fun defrosting pain.

Once mobile again, I wandered around a bit to take pictures and videos, to leave out an offering of the moon “cookie” (which was then filched by a raven, which I caught with my camera. Tricksey Odin, that was for Poseidon!) and attempt to collect some sea water to bring home. By that time I was still far to cold and the idea of getting wet at all again was horrible, and so, I passed on the water.

After lunch, we stopped at two other parks, one being Heceta Head which is the one I’ve been to the most. Happy sand at the water’s edge, so I was able to get the water I wanted. Didn’t mind getting wet — I was warm and fed — and I wasn’t worried about bashing the jar against rock. Almost immediately after Dver commented that she never found whole sand dollars I found one for her, and then there was a sea lion. Happy happy. Sunning himself and seeming very unconcerned at our curious approach. More surf-flirting and dancing and happy, and another sand dollar, and then utter exhaustion and homeward bound.

This was a greatly needed trip for me. I know that my companions all had their own very personal, important, touching, not-Poseidon reasons for going to the coast — it’s simply one of those liminal spaces and not the province of the sea spirits alone — but I’m glad that everyone nodded to Poseidon, said hello. He does not get nearly enough attention. Also, I’m beyond grateful that we were able to tag along. This was pretty much a perfect trip.

Hail Poseidon.

or How Poseidon Uses Death to Encourage Reiki

In my first installment of this article series I mention both yoga and Reiki as things Poseidon encouraged me to explore. I’ve already spoken a bit of the yoga. I’ve since spoken to many others who use yoga as the wonderful tool it is for fostering awareness and I know this is something that spans cultures and pantheons and religions. It’s simply that good. Reiki, I fear, still falls a bit under the “New Age” stigma, what with people attending weekend intensive workshops that don’t necessarily offer quality, people charging an arm and a leg for sessions, never mind attunements, and the whole “it can cause no harm/can only heal” tagline people use when speaking of it in glowing terms.

For those unfamiliar with Reiki, the soundbite answer most common tends to be, Reiki is spiritual life-force energy. The word is Japanese, as it’s Japanese based tradition (with differences between what stayed in Japan and what migrated to the Western world via Hawayo Takata, and boy do I want to at least get my hands on this book. I’m of the “lineage is important” camp. Not all energy work is Reiki, you can’t call just anything Reiki (well, you can, and people do, and that sucks) and lineage actually means something.

I’ll admit: both my Reiki teacher and our good friend who is also a Reiki teacher cite the “can do no harm/can only heal” line. Having studied the system and having worked with it a bit, I lean toward believing that myself, with some caveats. One: I think people often mistakenly use “harm” and “hurt” interchangeably, and with something like healing (be it on any of the possible levels of healing) anyone who has gone through any type of healing at all should know that sometimes pain, sometimes hurt is not only necessary but good. Two: I think it’s very possible that people can access energy that isn’t Reiki, can call it Reiki, and can do harm with it. Three: I think it’s possible that ones’ spirits/gods/guides/whatever they happen to have can and do make various spiritual modifications that can and do render various energy systems and/or levels/wavelengths ineffective/useless/unwanted to a person.

I think it’s important, too, that when you explore something that obviously comes from a specific culture, you need to understand a bit about where and when its coming from, what its history is, and how it fits into your life, how it can be adapted and tweaked and still retain what works about it. I think that’s true for anything. For me, learning a wee bit about the various stages of ki, the seven basic stages, helped me to put Reiki into context. And I do mean a wee bit.

But, so, Reiki. Two very good friends not only learning the method but becoming Reiki Master Teachers and encouraging me to explore the system a bit. Naturally, I balked. I read about other people doing other things, other types of energy work, other types of healing work, and I felt stirring within me, a reaching, a questing, but I squished it down. And, one day while a sat on my mother’s front porch, I saw a pigeon come flying out of nowhere, as pigeons are wont to do, and flew into the side of the house. It brained itself pretty soundly, but it didn’t die right away, and me being me, I gathered it up, made a little nest for it in a shoebox with a towel and leaves, and sat with it until it died, less than an hour later. And, me being me, I cried as I walked off with it to a nearby wooded area and left its body exposed to the elements. I felt glad that it didn’t die alone and cold, as I felt (and still feel) that death should be watched, should be a part of life, that it’s an important passage that should be witnessed.

Reiki, I was reminded, could have offered help. Not necessarily to live, but just help. But, no, I said.

That year, it very nearly rained birds on me. Somehow, somewhere along the line it got out that I was the girl to go to to die. I sat and help broken bodies as their lives passed through them. Once, only once did I get to get a bird out of harm’s way before the situation turned lethal. I certainly don’t begrudge any of the time I spent simply sitting with those dying creatures, but you would think that at some point, while I was hand-wringing and feeling horribly useless and unused and horrible, that I’d've stopped being a dope. But, no.

It actually wasn’t until after the terrorist attack on New York and DC that I decided enough was enough and okay already, let me explore this whole Reiki thing. This was a learning experience not only for me but for my Reiki teacher as well, and I have to admit that while what I went through was nothing compared to what people directly involved went through, it was also incredible trying.

Even now, as I’m writing this, I want to toss in qualifiers. I have a tendency in my mind to still, still, make divisions between “real and physical” and “nonphysical and thus not real”. Not so much where the Gods are concerned, but in things like healing and energy work. I default, still, to being hesitant about speaking about this — about learning a brand new, tangible, *real* energy working system that touches upon the spiritual realms during a massively scary, depression, emotionally charged time that touched thousands of people being a very scary, very difficult process. I feel like I should apologize, that I shouldn’t be sounding like I had a hard time during a time when so many had it so much worse . . . except, no, I *did* have a hard time. And, yes, it was something I wanted to be doing, and yes, it was new and ultimately good, but it was still difficult. That the country was experiencing a national crisis at the time doesn’t make it any less true for me. Doing any sort of energy work — chakra work, yoga, working with the runes, shadow work, anything — it says, “I’m dealing with stuff, let’s all purge now” and the stuff you need to be dealing with comes to the foreground. The same detoxing period happens with Reiki. So, even if all is good and happy and calm and serene, it has the potential to Stir Shit Up.

(I also, still, want to digress into a spiel about how energy work is real and blah blah blah, except I’m pretty sure most people reading this blog already take that as a given, so I’ll suppress that urge.)

It was hard. The good: I learned through trial and error why it’s important to keep an emotional distance when sending a healing, why intent is important to keep in your mind, why cleansing on a spiritual level is important, why spiritual hygiene is important. Was I harmed? No, but dear gods, it fucking hurt at times.

As things calmed down I retained for some time my “sending Reiki to the dead” practice, as I sensed that this was a valuable offering. This cracked open a door that I wouldn’t even noticed for months.

But, learning Reiki wasn’t just about being able to offer this service to people/birds/the masses. With the second level of Reiki a trio of symbols are introduced. Now, I’m not a visual person, so learning these symbols and using them was difficult. It took me some time, actually, to delve into the feel of the symbols and equate them with their shapes, but doing so prepared me for my future work with the runes — just one more example of how Poseidon really did lay the foundation for everything that would follow. I became much more comfortable with visualization concepts after my work with the runes, though I am still primarily an intuitive/impressions/feeling/sensing person.

Because of Reiki, I became more acquainted with compassion as a discipline, as a practice, which is good for me, because Poseidon’s mantra with me is Awareness and Compassion. Because of Reiki, I gained confidence in the value of energy work, the value of tradition, of validity of symbols. I was introduced to a system that worked well for me when most of them seemed unapproachable or foreign or out of my reach. I also discovered that I was still willing to test my limits, still willing to let myself be made uncomfortable for the sake of growth.

(writing these, I’m realizing all over again how much Poseidon was a gateway for me as much as I am for Him, how reciprocal that function is in our relationship. Because of Him, I learned to be open, learned to test my comfort zones, learned so much about many things. So now I have this, “Poseidon: The Gateway Drug” thing in my head, and it’s cracking me up. Just for random)

Now and again I realize that I pretty much keep my head in the sand and remember to take it out to look around. I then remember why I keep my head in the sand in the first place, and end up sticking it back in even when I don’t necessarily mean to. There’s a lot going on in the world, a lot of it hard and horrible, and most of it are things I can’t even begin to do anything at all about.

Except, being aware of it does something, too.

Looking beyond the sand this morning I see that some major quakes have devastated Sumatra; that mudslides in Italy are claiming lives; that the Pacific has been ravaged by quakes and tsunamis.

One of the epithets that come to us regarding Poseidon is Ennosigaios, Earthshaker. He has at times also been called Asphaleious, called upon during earthquakes to hold the earth steadfast after quakes have hit.

He is, at times, a somber god. We’ve come a long way, I think, from thinking that these things are human-centered, that we anger the gods and They get revenge or retribution by large-scale environmental disasters. I won’t go into my ideas about tension, about balance, about the need for such massive tension relieving occurances in this post. This post is just to foster awareness, for me to gather things in one place, to look out of my hole in the sand, and to speak of His greatness, and to say, I see the severity of this, and I’ll witness it with Him.

Hail Poseidon

Or, How Poseidon Saved My Life by Changing It.

I’ve mentioned previously that, when I first encountered Poseidon, I was quite negative. I had no tolerance for other people, no patience for what I perceived as weaknesses. I had some friends at this point in my life by they either only saw the surface me with glimpses of the deeper parts of me, or they were a special few who actually knew the darker, colder parts of who I was and accepted me anyway. The latter few had their own darker, colder places that they hid from the rest of the world.

My first step toward awareness was getting used to Him in my life. After the initial meeting, it took some time for me to get my head to a place where the experience could be useful to me. It took time to process, and then, I also had stuff going on — finishing high school, working close to full time, graduating, dealing with my father’s death, dealing with some rocky times with my relationship with my then-boyfriend. Then there was wrapping my head around polytheism, trying to figure out where I stood on the issue of the nature of the gods (I decided only polytheism-in-practice because it made my head hurt less, and I continue to do so because we will never be in a place to completely understand the nature of the gods and because they come to me as individuals, and I can only honor that) and sorting through some of His myths. The biggest, hardest ones to contend with, at that time, were his rape myths. It was a long time before I would even touch them, and it was difficult to deal with. The subject hits way too close to home for me to be comfortable with. Learning the history of the word helps, when factoring less-than-wonderful translations and then just sloppy translations; you take words out of their native use and connotations get lost. Learning about the mindset and worldviews of translators help. Coming to understand that not all myths should be taken literally helps. Finally, approaching Him without the baggage of the stories about Him, taking Him at face value, understanding what it was that, on that one night, He did for me, helps. He completely turned my life around. That was were I would start our relationship from.

Four years passed before I was at a place to devote to exploring this relationship more deeply. On the one hand that seems like such a long time. On the other hand, considering my age, considering everything that was going on in my life, it doesn’t seem so long after all.

Shortly after our initial meeting, I got internet access and started poking around pagan forums. My original home on the web was a now-defunct message board attached to a shop. Friends I met there are still counted among my spiritual siblings, and one in particular was a great, great support in my budding relationship with Poseidon. I was blessed to find a place where, for the most part, until it really started to go south, many of the people encouraged thought and research and had the ability to debate civilly — often heatedly — and still remember that the debate was about an idea, not about one another’s intelligence or worth. My initial meeting of other pagans, especially wiccanesque or Wiccan pagans, was positive, and, over a decade later, I appreciate how rare that is.

One of these friends, about four years after my initial meeting with Poseidon, was talking one day about her relationship with the spirits in her life, walking matter-of-factly about daily interactions with a few of them. I said to her, “I wish I had that.” That night, Poseidon moved in.

The sensation is hard to explain, hard to express. Early on, my most natural way of getting into that receptive headspace was through writing. It was the way I meditated, before I learned other ways, and it remains the easiest, most affective way for me to get to that in-between place, in my head, the easiest way for me to slip between the worlds and be in both. So, when, as I settled in for sleep that night, I was Told to get up and pick up a pen . . . well, you know I didn’t. It’s not my way And the pressure built until I had to relent, so the next day (though not as soon as I got up) I did.

For three months, I thought I was going insane. I can recognize now that it was likely a three-month-long anxiety attack triggered by this new awareness. My skin felt tight, my head felt blown open, I felt pressed in on all sides by people only “people” here means Poseidon, I felt like I was never alone — and as a person who needs solitary time, this was very difficult — I felt like I never had any silence around me. It sounds easy, now, talking about it, sounds like no time at all, but this was the first time I experienced anything like that, and it was a long, loooong three months.

Once that settled down, things began to change in my life. I wrote, dialogue between us, almost every night (and I wish I still had them, I can’t believe I lost them in the shuffle from MA to PA) which was my way of interacting with Him. A friend of mine talked about yoga, and at His prodding, I looked into it. The two closest spiritual sisters I had at the time both taught Reiki, and this would start over a years worth of His encouraging me to pick that up. Yoga taught me how to meditate without writing, taught me about moving into stillness, brought me to that delicious, open place where awareness hums throughout ones various bodies. Yoga was my first devotional act for Him and really underscored the whole “awareness” theme that He seemed to have for me.

Being aware, though, often means pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, and it wasn’t long before He was asking that of me. It was fine to do yoga in the privacy of my own home. A friend was, at the time, spending time at a Buddist temple in NY. She was attending a “walking meditation” workshop, and invited me along. I opened my mouth to say no (people! Omg, people!!) and yes came out instead. Apparently, I wanted to go.

It was a daylong event, though I worked out with Poseidon that I’d go and participate in the morning stuff, and see about the afternoon stuff. I was terrified. Ridiculously so, but these sorts of anxieties — new things, where other people can see omg! — aren’t really rational. I was able to seek out a corner (and there was a giant bell to half-hide behind, too) and that was good. There was some interaction with the monk who was leading the workshop, but it wasn’t terrible. In truth, the mindful-walking, calling attention to the present part of the workshop has stayed with me and it’s something I use a lot to calm myself, or to try to, when I’m in a crowd and it becomes too much.

It was hard, though, and by lunch time I was worn out, so I bowed out of the afternoon stuff and passed the time walking around the beautiful grounds. I spent some time at their Kuan Yin statue, wandered around the flowers and pond area. Out of nowhere a downpour came and drenched me, and I laughed and danced and was soaked in cool springtime rain. It lasted a good fifteen minutes, until I was happily soaked. That did a lot to soothe my anxiety, and I was dry by the time it was time to leave.

more to come . . .

(Bear with me with this post.  I have a gazillion things I want to talk about, and they keep getting jumbled in my head, in regards to this.)

A quirky fact about my history with my gods: Poseidon showed up first and took up a prominent place in my religious life years before any of the others did, but I was calling Thor Uncle before I deigned to have anything at all to do with Poseidon’s family.

Partially this was because I was not going to be dual-faith (and that is a rant for another day, and possibly another place entirely) but largely this was due to my private nature.

I come from something of a small family.  My maternal grandparents both had a large number of siblings and so my mother grew up with oodles of first cousins.  My paternal grandparents I’m actually unsure about; I knew them, briefly, but I have no idea what their families were like.  My parents both had two siblings each, and we weren’t all that involved with my father’s family.  My aunt and uncle on my mother’s side are childless.   Our family functions often never included more than 14 or so people, unless we were getting together with my grandmother’s people.  People I hardly knew and had little in common with.

Perhaps because of this, and perhaps because of my early childhood, I don’t and never have felt the need to be close to, to care about people simply because of genetics.  It’s fine as a starting point, but it can’t be the sum of the reasons why.  Some of my family is made up of people I’m related to by blood, but that’s really a small part of my family.

So, when Poseidon initially started making noise about me getting to know some of His Family members, I balked.  Why would I? Just because They’re His Family? That wasn’t enough of a reason for me.  He persisted, because apparently, it was enough of a reason fo Him.  These days, there are a number of gods and spirits I count as family, and a large number of Them are included because of Their relationship to Poseidon.

Who, then, do I count as part of my Family, because of Poseidon’s influence? Zeus and Hades, because there is something to the three of Them that I can’t even hope to get into words.  Hera. Aphrodite, Savior of Marriages, who helped me to start healing pieces of myself I never would have approached otherwise. Dionysos. Apollo.  Hekate.

I’m finding, over time, that it’s a lot like any other sort of family.  There are family members I have and love dearly, who I talk to every few months, and others I hear from weekly.  There are furry members of my immediately family I spend exchanging attention, and others I exchange pleasantries with and little else, during the course of most days.  It’s not a jump for me to consider spirits family, and while this may smack of disrespect for some, I truly can’t think of any other way to be.  There is love and respect and warmth, and really, that is what should make family, isn’t it?

As I sit down to write this, my household is still feeling the effects of an emergency cross-country trip I paid for months ago.  We’re catching up and while we’re not yet at the point to being able to save money, we’re also not stretched as thin as we had been.  For a while, the food quality for everyone was forcibly downgraded more than I would care for.

The situation has led me to reconsider our living choices.

In October of last year, we sold our house, packed up our household, shipped it cross country, and put down roots in Eugene, Oregon.  This was done for a number of reasons, but the biggest reason for me was simply that my spirits and gods supported the idea, even before we came to check the place out.   It’s not a perfect place, by any means, but it’s a heck of a lot better than where we had been living.  People — and not everyone, no, but many — are aware, here in the northwest, about the impact we have on the environment.  This is a city that prides itself on being creative, proactive, involved.  If there’s a cause going on anywhere hoping to better the world, someone in Eugene knows about it.   Its a town were people are encouraged to recycle and reuse and reduce waste.  We’re all about canvas shopping bags and local, organically grown produce, about humanely raised and slaughtered meats.  It’s a town that wants to support its local artists and craftspeople, wants to foster substantial living, wants to provide food for the hungry, wants to reduce its carbon footprint.   Public transportation and carpooling is encouraged.  Many companies here are “green”.  More often than not, corner stores are stocked with bulk sections filled with organic foods, vegetarian options – some are exclusively vegetarian, in fact – and local products.  We have extensive bike paths connecting the city, a huge assortment of public parks ranging from woodsy areas to meadows to picnic areas.  Enviromentalism is a big, big deal here, as is humanitarian efforts.

Ideals are hard to live up to.  As a teenager, I didn’t even have ideals, exactly.  I knew what we were doing was wrong, that the way we approached the world was unhealthy and unrealistic – a disposable thing to be used  at our discretion – but I wasn’t bothered with wanting to change how we approached things.  Simple solutions seemed best: we were like so many fleas upon the back of Mama Earth.  Like fleas, we ought to be shaken off.

When Poseidon first initiated contact, a lot of time was spent dealing with that.  I won’t make it sound as though from day one there was constant contact.  The night I met him was the night a lot of foundation was laid, but at the time I had a lot going on in my life and there wasn’t time or desire for any sort of constant contact with a god.  Hell, at the time, I wasn’t yet even polytheistic and was still influenced a lot by the God-and-Goddess duality paradigm of Wicca.  But the conversation we had that night was life-changing, and it centered around humanity, our place on the planet, and the ideas I had about our species I needed to step back from and consider more objectively.

What did Poseidon help me to see anew?  First, I had to set down the inherently-evil conviction I had regarding our species.  This was hard for me.  From a personal standpoint, I had been hurt, a lot, by people who should have protected me.  I’d felt more honesty and stability from non-human beings – animals and spirits – and so I was more inclined to see thing from what I thought of as their point of view.  And from their point of view, humans take and don’t give, destroy and don’t build, lord power over and do not take up the responsibility that comes with that power.

Second, I had to set down my anger.  I had to give up the feeling of helplessness, had to give up the feeling of hopelessness.  I had to dare to allow myself to be open to possibility, to change.  You have to understand, up to this point in my life I relied on masks, on inner fortresses, on keeping people at bay.  They weren’t trustworthy, even when they meant well, and while I did let some people in, at least part-way, most people couldn’t touch me beyond where my anger and distrust started.

The conversation that Poseidon and I had the night I met Him focused on some simple things.  I was convinced that we were destroying the earth.  He insisted that while we could very well render the planet uninhabitable to life as it is now, we couldn’t actually destroy the planet itself, and that, with time, the planet could be purged of our touch, our damage.  He took some of the awesome power I was giving our species, and made me see that that power actually belonged to the earth itself.

I was convinced that we were utterly evil, inherently evil, cruel.  He pointed out the good that we do, and while it never negates the bad, he also pointed out that evolutionarily speaking, we weren’t that different from other species.  Creatures adapt their environment is ways when they live there, and they aren’t removed from it.  And therein, I think, lies the root of our problems with the earth, with how we treat it – we think we are not part of it, rather that we are separate. That we’ve tamed nature.  Poseidon helped me to understand that, at a basic level, we’re not really all that different than others – we use what we have to our advantage, and that in and of itself is not evil.  We are not inherently evil. These were the first steps I took, baby steps, that started me down my path toward compassion.

But I’m digressing, because this isn’t to be the article on Poseidon and Compassion. This is about coming full circle.

For a long time now, Poseidon has encouraged me to eat better, not simply in terms of real food over junk food, but also in terms of higher quality real food.  I’m not ashamed to admit, I love junk food. And I don’t just mean snacks and cookies. I mean, I prefer fast food over real food.  Fast food is some of my favorite comfort food.  I love McDonalds and Wendy’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken.  I know all the horror stories, and these days I stay away from these places as much as I can, as I don’t want to support them with my money even if I buy non-meat options there.  I strive to eat real food, even when it’s junky real food like organic, humanly raised (pricey!!) hotdogs with no additives.  These days my biggest failing continues to be diet cola and candy bars. Cheap candy bars. Snickers and M&M’s and Nestle Crisp bars.

A little over a year ago, I stumbled upon http://plasticfree.blogspot.com and was inspired.  Then, I came across http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2.php and became overwhelmed.  The feelings of hopelessness came back. I’ve learned that I often don’t try to do things, because I know I can’t start out doing them perfectly.  But, that’s not the point. The point is to make a difference, as you can.  Not playing lip service to the ideals, but to actually make the effort.  Even if you fail to reach your goals, to at least try, to really try, to push past the comfort zone, to challenge the assumptions, to strive to make things better.

I’m not perfect. Living plastic-free has not become a goal of mine, because I don’t do well with “do this or else” goals.  I’ve made gradual goals.  I shop with reusable bags, either the “plastic or paper? Neither!” bags which are actually a type of plastic but are cheap and at the time, I was poor, or canvas bags.  My produce either goes directly into the bag, or into paper bags that the stores provide.  I’ve drastically reduced the amount of plastic that comes into the house, and I wish more of it was easily recyclable.

It’s difficult to navigate these waters.  Take the plastic bags issue.  Paper bags aren’t a perfect solution, not when you’re looking beyond the direct impact the plastic has on the environment.  Where does the paper come from?  What trees were cut to make the bags? Was it a sustainable tree farm? What about the damage that sustainable tree farms do to the local ecology?  In nature, forests are diverse, teaming with life, and the balance is delicate.  Planned, planted regrowth forests are the same type of tree.  There is no balance.  Yes, it’s better than cutting down old growth forests just to make paper, but, at some point, that tract of land was an old growth forest, and a whole ecological system was destroyed.

These issues are never black and white, never cut and dry, and it always comes down to choices.  To keep from being overwhelmed, we have to remember that one person truly cannot change everything all at once.  We can – and do – make a difference, however, and we need to keep that in mind.

So, right now, as my household is climbing back out of a down-graded cycle, as our food quality goes back to being the standard that we strive for, as the cats are taken off the cheap, drug-store cat food and put back on their highly screened, nutritiously rich, no-by-products-used, wholesome kibble, as the humans return to the local, organic produce and meats, I try not to feel too badly.  Living with high quality standards is costly – that, too, is another post – and for now, our toiletry items will continue to be products that don’t necessarily promise to be cruelty free – which was the first standard I incorporated into my life, before the organic, etc. – and don’t promise to be paraben free.  Right now, it’s what we can afford, and what we’re fueling our body with comes before what we’re putting on our body.  The balance is a delicate struggle, and we need to remember that it’s a process that is on-going.  We’re not set up as a society, as a culture, to support this kind of lifestyle, so it’s unreasonable to expect perfection.

Unlike the hopelessness and helplessness that I felt as a teenager, sixteen years later, I have the perspective that I need to face these choices, to make my decisions, and to be able to retain my compassion toward humanity.  This, I think, is very good.

The story of how I discovered modern paganism is not unlike that of many others.  Animism came naturally to me, owing to a large degree the attitudes of my maternal grandmother and grandfather.  I spent a lot of my younger years in their care, watching wildlife both on television and in their yards, and listening to their stories about family pets and farm experience.  It seems a natural step from believing all animals have feelings to seeing the world imbued with spirits.

Before I learned that modern paganism existed, before I learned about Wicca, about the Golden Dawn, about gods and goddesses from cultures that came before, I was having conversations with tree spirits and land wights and spirits of the water.

For a number of reasons that are only relevant in that they fostered my outlook on life, my teen years were difficult a bit beyond the stereotypical teen angst.  I grew, early on, to hate my species.  Many of the examples I encountered, of how people could be, left me jaded and cynical, and so, by my sixteenth year, I was cold toward humankind.  Between the hurt people caused me on a personal level and the harm we did in a larger scale to the natural world, I wanted more than nothing to do with my species.  I wanted us to be wiped off the face of the earth.

The summer of my sixteenth year I spent a week at the ocean with a friend and her family.  At the time, I had been pagan for around two years – that general paganism many of us start with: I’d read about Wicca and felt a connection to parts that connected with the elements, but felt nothing special when reading about the Goddess or the God.  I wanted to have a position on my beliefs of the nature of the divine but, I didn’t.  In hopes to understand more, I turned to the gods of my ancestors.  Of the Celts and the Scandinavians, at the time, the Celts won out.  I ventured to the ocean with a book on Celtic myths and history.

In the earlier parts of my childhood I’d been to the ocean.  We used to take day trips there, and one of my first memories is being stung by a jelly fish.  But, at this point it had been a decade since my last trip, and I very excited read up as much as I could on the various Celtic sea gods and goddesses.

The night I walked the beach alone, to watch the full moon rise over the waves changed my life. I’ve written about it before – my story Savior in Treasures from the Deep was inspired by that night – but every time I get to write about it again, it’s made fresh in my mind.  I wasn’t out seeking anything that night other than some quiet time with sand and sky and sea.

Instead, I found litter. Lots of litter.  Foam coolers, mere feet from the trash cans.  Bags and bottles and plastic rings.  I walked, picking up litter as I went, and I cried, and I broke.  I found myself sitting where the sea meets the land, sobbing in frustration, and then, sobbing every hurt and disappointment and bruise I’d ever experienced.  My wall of ice, of distance, of distain, cracked, and like water released from a dam, everything came rushing out of me.  My heart was exposed like it hadn’t been since the fortress was erected around it, years before, and in that moment, I reached out.

Poseidon reached back.

He held me to him, caught the pieces of myself as I shattered and broke, and held them until I could take them back.  He took every tear I had to offer, took my pain, witnessed it with me, and offered me something I’d never thought to offer myself or my fellow humans.  On the heels of my breakdown came shame – for myself, for my fellow humans – and his answer to that was simple.

Compassion.

I quickly grew to love this god, and my love for him, and his love for me, has carried my through my life since then.  It hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been pretty.  But on that night, he utterly changed my life and for that alone I’m indebted to him.

While I often pride myself on not jumping on bandwagons, this is one I’m going to hop on.  I can’t promise to post nearly as often as some people might, but I do hope to post interesting bits when I can.  I have often complained in private, to many, that I wish there was more “out there” with regards to Poseidon worship in a modern context, and more information on Poseidon in general.  I have wished it so for a number of years, and while there are people out there, doing things to honor Him, I haven’t yet come across anyplace that focuses primarily on Him and is actively posted to or talked about.  And so, here we are.

More forthcoming.