As the end of 2010 fast approaches, I find myself thinking of the year about to pass with fondness at the same time as I eagerly await what 2011 will bring. 2010 was mostly kind to me, an almost soothing year in some ways after the few that preceded it. It was a year of strengthening, building and making forward progress, rather than one of cleansing, purging, and doing damage control. (We’ve all experienced the latter, and although they are of great value spiritually they aren’t at all fun to live through.) 2010 was a relatively stable year financially; it began and (I assume, anyway) will end with my having a steady job that I mostly enjoy and a home I love living in, in one of the most beautiful places on earth. It even witnessed a promotion that brought considerably better working conditions and slightly better pay. Things are still tight (we pay a LOT of rent due to our large animal household), but we’ve managed to stay on top of expenses with even a bit left over for wants rather than needs. It was a year that saw my existing relationships (both with the humans in my life and with my gods and spirits) strengthened and intensified, with friendships deepening and new understandings reached as a result of working through the handful of minor crises that occurred. My health has had a few new and troublesome downward developments, especially in terms of there being fewer and fewer foods I can tolerate most of the time, but overall it has mostly held steady too, and I found a wonderful doctor who has been willing to prescribe the medicine needed to keep my fibromyalgia, IBS, and other issues under control, as well as being a wonderful source of health advice and support.
In my artistic life, I worked hard at some things I had never tried before, or had only done on a limited basis until now, and increased my crafting skills exponentially. Around the middle of the year I began a small business (my Etsy store) and have had a few small successes. I have not yet hit my stride in a way that holds the promise of being able to quit working for others and become a self-employed artist/craftsperson, but I still hold out hope for that.
However, the most striking advances of 2010 were undoubtedly spiritual, with the service oath (to Odin, Asgard, and the Wild Hunt) I took in late September that has literally reshaped and realigned my life. Ever since initially oathing to Odin in 2002, my life has become a pattern of diminishing choices that have ironically meant ever-increasing freedom: freedom to be who and what I was always meant to be, freedom to give free reign to the power I have always had that had been restricted by other, prior choices, the limiting choices made both by myself and by others on my behalf throughout my life up until that point. This year’s oath was the final step in that process (well, probably not final—who am I kidding?—but a very dramatic and decisive one), and in swearing myself to service as I have, I have finally truly come into my own sovereignty. For this reason, more than any other, I ardently await what the new year will bring, what wonders it will inevitably show me, what opportunities to further perfect myself and my Work.
On the threshold of 2011, I am making a few steadfast plans for the year ahead–not oaths or resolutions, though, because I’ve already taken the most important of the former, and we all know what too often becomes of the latter. On January 1st, as soon as the taboo forbidding spinning during the 12 days of Yule has lifted, I will begin applying myself seriously towards learning to spin well on a hand-spindle, with a savings fund to go towards the eventual purchase of a spinning wheel. There will be more on this in the coming weeks, but for spiritual as well as aesthetic reasons, the fiber arts (especially spinning and knitting) will be occupying a huge chunk of my artistic life for the coming year, and perhaps for the foreseeable future as well. My other spiritual plans include continuing to uncover obscure but appropriate ancient English and Scandinavian pagan traditions and practices and adapting them to my modern path (we have some exciting festival ideas for the year ahead already!); deepening my oracular seidhr practice and my other forms of trance work (trance journeying, pathwalking, and uti seta.) by incorporating more of the afore-mentioned customs and my own spirit-led inspirations; continuing my study and practice of wort-cunning (herbal magic); and going back to basics with a renewed practical study of rune magic, galdr, and operational seidhr (the Big Three categories of Odin’s magical expertise). 2011 will also see the 9th anniversary of my sacred Marriage to Odin (nine being, of course, the number most sacred to Him), and will also see me broadening my practice a bit by working with a goddess I haven’t heretofore worked with in any depth: Frigga. (The latter is almost inevitable, considering my increasing involvements in the fiber arts, of which She is a patroness.) And at some point during the year (probably at Midsummer), I am hoping to get my big seidhrkona armband tattoo, for which the timing just didn’t work out this year.
Artistically, there will be the fiber arts emphasis I’ve already mentioned, along with a line of herbal witchcraft supplies for Lady Rosamonde’s Garden (which will be taking on a decidedly more herbal-hedgewitchy flavor, in keeping with its name), along with a few surprises I’m not ready to talk about yet. Also, a particular writing project I put on hold a year or two ago has been poking at me to take it up again, so there may be some news on that front at some point, although the project may also take more than a year to finish, since I have so many other things going on. I will also be looking to take further steps towards making my artistic work more sustainable and reducing my personal and artistic impact on the earth; I already make many of my creations from reused, recycled and upcycled materials, use earth-friendly toiletry and cleaning products in my home, and so forth, but as my relationship with the landwights deepens I constantly feel the need to do more.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, 2010 was the year I finally began to live the life I’ve been waiting and preparing to live for eight years: a life completely owned and directed by my gods and my spirits, living with Them and for Them fully and without reservation. There are still some practical tangles to be worked out in this (for example, I still work too many hours each day for other people, and am greedy for more time to do the things I really want to do both artistically and spiritually), but I am finally on the right path and headed in the right direction. It will be interesting (though hopefully not in the Chinese curse sense of that word) to see what the year ahead will look like, my first year lived fully and from beginning to end with my current sense of commitment, purpose and drive.
After today, I won’t be online again until Monday. Tomorrow I’ll be running a few errands (fun errands to some of my favorite places, including my local yarn store and the liquor store) and then we’ll settle down around our Twelfth Night fire to eat homemade stew and drink homemade mead, toasting in the new year in the old way. Whatever your plans, I wish you luck, joy and success (in whatever ways you define all of those things) in 2011. See you next year!