Deepening Resilience is off to a strong start. If you're looking for a place to think about these kinds of feelings in a practical, pagan-flavored context, Syren is putting together a very necessary community.
Linked there, Sage and Starshine posted: How Not To Explode With Anxiety in a Time of Ecological Disaster
If nature should be so important to my faiths, then I feel that the logical conclusion is to wind up in a state of constant panic. We’ve been on the brink of ecological collapse as long as I can remember. There’s a reason Millennial and younger generations’ nihilistic senses of humor joke about not needing to pay off student loans because of rising sea levels and dead bees.
Maybe I'm showing my Gen X side here but I just figured the difference between now and the Captain Planet era is that at that point we could have fixed it, But Capitalism Happened. Or kept happening. Is still happening.
I love my child but sometimes thinking about the world she's growing up in makes me question if it wasn't just selfishness to have a kid in this time. In my rational moments I know it's more complicated than that, but even though I'm better at punching my inner Tyler Durden in the face the thoughts are still there.
I'm writing this at 6 in the morning because I woke up from a... not a nightmare exactly, somehow, but an anxiety-producing dream where I was part of a high school quiz bowl team that was invited on a cruise but the cruise ship was a portal to Faerie and once you got past the row of cabins everything got all complicated and there were kids from all different time periods. I kept getting lost, and there was a vague sense that there were rules I didn't understand, but I also had a sense that it... liked me? I'm not quite sure how to put it, but a sense that while it was dangerous for other people, I would be okay. So it was a kind of secondhand anxiety, a combination of being lost and feeling responsible for the other people on the ship.
I can't not be anxious, but every time I make progress in deconstructing my anxiety I feel like that's almost as good. It's a kind of unmaking of that false self, I think. I can take all the bits of me apart and then reassemble the jewelry into something that fits me, chaining the good things together.
When I was in my early twenties, I made a thing I called a "keychain" which consists of a chain with clips on both ends, from which I hung a bunch of personally and magically relevant little objects and charms. Several of them were keys, which is where the name came from. It seemed like the sort of thing people must have done before me, but I somehow I never ran into one until today, when I read this blog post where Howie talked (amongst other things) about completing their charivari.
If you're like me and hadn't heard the term before today, charivari are chains with hunting and other charms traditionally worn on leiderhosen or a dirndl. I'm mostly amazed this was never a thing when I was into steampunk costuming because holy heckballs do they look like the sort of thing that steampunk costumers would be all over. Howie's is gorgeous, with handmade everything, I totally recommend checking it out.
Sometimes I think 3/4 of my magical practice is unvention - a word I learned from P that in the fiber community means when you independently discover a technique or skill that is already known. Part of the problem is there's just so much to know, and so much that you have to know you don't know it to find it, that all I can do is feel along in the dark and see what I find.
But that's okay too. Maybe instead of unmaking, we're unventing ourselves, discovering what was already there and our connections to other traditions and the past. The answers to how we should walk forward are somewhere behind us, and whether we stumble on creating what fits around us or seek to recreate the past, it doesn't matter. We're shaping ourselves, and the world around us either way.