I'm coming up on new year two out of three, that being January first. We've got a heck of a working planned to close out the old year, of course, and Amber and I are still finding areas we haven't explored before, undiscovered countries inside each other that we can wander together.
I've talked before about being mostly spirit-taught. More people are talking about that now than there were ten years ago, thank god, but the more "magical blogs" I read, the more aware I am that I missed a lot of the assumed steps along the way. I thought the solution to that was to join some group and "start from scratch". But that's just not ever going to happen. There is no "from scratch" for me at this point. Groups can be awesome and valuable but I can't just un-learn everything I know works.
I'm realizing that what I've really been looking for is structure. Most structure brings with it some kind of belief, though, and while both the ADF and UU Church allows for a wide variety of belief within the fold, there's never going to be a one hundred percent perfect fit.
Amber and I need to be working more with what we already know is important to us. Instead of trying to find another place to start at some imaginary beginning, I'm going to try looking at what we already have, what I know works and has worked since we were small, and use that, develop it into a full practice.
A lot of the last two years has been a process of excavation for me. I've posted about it here and there, talking about Narnia, hailing the creative ancestors, and posting about firebird stuff. I want to be doing more of it, though. Instead of it being stuff that comes up occasionally, stuff that fills in the gaps, I think it deserves a place of primacy in my practice. I've put aside the sidekick's role, I'm ready to be a protagonist, to assume that what's important to me is valuable for that reason alone.
What I'm sketching out, then, is a variation on the "30 days of X" meme, starting with prompts from 30 Days of Paganism and Allison Leigh Lilly's 30 Days of Druidry. I'm not good at daily, though, so I'm going to take a page from the Pagan Blog Project and plan for weekly posts. The result, ideally, should be 52 Weeks to a Religion, but I'm calling it Project Protagonist.