Recently I joined an online social group for discussion on raising morally upright children in a neo-pagan home. Parents were asked what they thought was most important, the primary value or bit of ethical know-how that served as a lynchpin for their way of relating to the world. I expected to see a number of answers about nature, the organic way of things being proper, the need to respect the forces of life, or, well, anything earth-centric at all. I know that not all paganism is about nature worship (even though that phrase is part of the dictionary definition in at least two major publishers' tomes) but, in my experience, it's safe to expect a good half of the usual grabbag to be bowing to Mother Earth.
No one brought Her up.
It reminded me, unpleasantly, of a rude awakening I had when I moved from one city to another. I naturally began hunting around my new region for a pagan group to go do holidays and such with, maybe a place where I could find some friends, maybe even other neo-pagan kids for mine to get to know. A meeting at a local park was advertised. Even though it was not a park that was possible to get to on a bus line, I swallowed my environmentally-informed distaste for group events one can only get to by burning fossil fuels, and went.
My first impression was that everyone there was fat. Now, I've heard before that all neo-pagans are fat, and I've just rolled my eyes and said that most Americans are fat so whatever. I think of myself as pretty fat-positive. I teeter between a size 12 and a size 14, which is always XL, so I think I can safely say I am fat. So are some of the most beautiful people I have ever known. I am comfortable in this form, both socially -- I feel like I can present as good-looking and can access clothes that make me look nice -- and physically -- I have enough energy to do what I want to do, don't have any cholesterol or blood pressure or joint issues. All this is to say that I don't generally go around judging people by their weight, so when the size of everyone in the park jumped out at me first as a thing to notice, I had to sit with that for a while and figure out what was going on in my heart.
The day I walked in on this picnic looking for a pagan social circle, I'd been accustomed to spending all my social time roaming in middle-class liberal circles, amongst college-educated environmentalists. Most of the locavores, vegans, and organic-food coop members I knew were actually not fat. Had I really come to believe skinny = environmentalist and fat = eats foods and uses transportation that are bad for life, the universe and everyone? Was I deciding that right then? I decided not to decide that, set the idea aside, and went on in to the picnic of pagans.
But again I felt that sinking in my belly as I helped them unload Walmart bags of "food", produced by the biggest sinners against the Earth the planet has ever seen, from their SUVs.
And again, I scolded myself for being a judgmental jerk. Better to shop at Walmart than to judge people by it! I aggressively gave them the benefit of every doubt. I wondered if they just didn't know what kind of environmental damage Walmart and Kraft and Nestle and Dole do. I wanted to tell them that the people destroying the Earth have names and addresses. I wondered if they were very poor and couldn't put on a picnic at all unless they shopped for it at Walmart's very significant 25% discount. I wanted to invite them to garden with me. I wondered if those SUVs were company cars and they had no say in them. I wondered if they avoided buses because they'd been traumatized on them by bullies as schoolchildren. Maybe they had five kids; I know I don't like taking all five of our kids on the bus anywhere.
I wondered too, and let myself believe, that they wouldn't mention nature spirits or Mother Earth in the ritual that was to occur during the picnic. Maybe these were not the earth worshipping type. They were into ceremonial magic or gothic urban stuff or I don't know what but was about to find out.
But then the whole ritual was centered around Mother Earth and nature spirits. And I ended up leaving immediately after, because I had too much on the tip of my tongue about all the hypocritical worship I just saw. How can you magick for environmental healing and then drive a gas guzzler to Walmart and give money to ConAgra? No, I understand how -- if you are poor, if you have to, if you are desperately surviving and trying to undo your damage. I've been there. I have done that. I know. But publicly, loudly, showing not a sign of understanding what your daily choices mean?
I left griping to my ride that my current friends were better pagans than those pagans. Getting together to share local, organic food from a coop I can bike to that comes in packaging I can compost is ultimately a better ritual, a more pagan act, than standing in woods I had to pollute to get to, shouting in each of the four directions that I love the ground, the sea, the air and Mother Earth, and making a toast to the spirits of nature with food I bought from the biggest destroyer of ecosystems the planet has ever seen.
There's been a conversation in the pagan blogosphere lately about whether environmentalism is over. I think it is not over; it is completed. We have seen what changes everyday non-powerful people can make, as those who are willing have made them. Now we see that those corporations have enough power, without us small beans, to destroy the Earth, and they will take our governments over and do it. I can understand a sense that it doesn't matter on an actual political-power or save-the-earth level whether we buy ConAgra or not. But on a spiritual level, in terms of what kind of soul-energy we put in the world and compose ourselves of, whether our words are going in the same direction as our feet, of course it matters tremendously.
And that's what I want my kids to know. The lynchpin in any ethical system is believing that each action choice must be in harmony with our intellectual ideas about what is great and what is lousy. Whether or not my children ever find anything worthy of worship -- and so far I have two atheists and an agnostic -- if they think in terms of every small choice mattering, they will be living with integrity.
No one brought Her up.
It reminded me, unpleasantly, of a rude awakening I had when I moved from one city to another. I naturally began hunting around my new region for a pagan group to go do holidays and such with, maybe a place where I could find some friends, maybe even other neo-pagan kids for mine to get to know. A meeting at a local park was advertised. Even though it was not a park that was possible to get to on a bus line, I swallowed my environmentally-informed distaste for group events one can only get to by burning fossil fuels, and went.
My first impression was that everyone there was fat. Now, I've heard before that all neo-pagans are fat, and I've just rolled my eyes and said that most Americans are fat so whatever. I think of myself as pretty fat-positive. I teeter between a size 12 and a size 14, which is always XL, so I think I can safely say I am fat. So are some of the most beautiful people I have ever known. I am comfortable in this form, both socially -- I feel like I can present as good-looking and can access clothes that make me look nice -- and physically -- I have enough energy to do what I want to do, don't have any cholesterol or blood pressure or joint issues. All this is to say that I don't generally go around judging people by their weight, so when the size of everyone in the park jumped out at me first as a thing to notice, I had to sit with that for a while and figure out what was going on in my heart.
The day I walked in on this picnic looking for a pagan social circle, I'd been accustomed to spending all my social time roaming in middle-class liberal circles, amongst college-educated environmentalists. Most of the locavores, vegans, and organic-food coop members I knew were actually not fat. Had I really come to believe skinny = environmentalist and fat = eats foods and uses transportation that are bad for life, the universe and everyone? Was I deciding that right then? I decided not to decide that, set the idea aside, and went on in to the picnic of pagans.
But again I felt that sinking in my belly as I helped them unload Walmart bags of "food", produced by the biggest sinners against the Earth the planet has ever seen, from their SUVs.
And again, I scolded myself for being a judgmental jerk. Better to shop at Walmart than to judge people by it! I aggressively gave them the benefit of every doubt. I wondered if they just didn't know what kind of environmental damage Walmart and Kraft and Nestle and Dole do. I wanted to tell them that the people destroying the Earth have names and addresses. I wondered if they were very poor and couldn't put on a picnic at all unless they shopped for it at Walmart's very significant 25% discount. I wanted to invite them to garden with me. I wondered if those SUVs were company cars and they had no say in them. I wondered if they avoided buses because they'd been traumatized on them by bullies as schoolchildren. Maybe they had five kids; I know I don't like taking all five of our kids on the bus anywhere.
I wondered too, and let myself believe, that they wouldn't mention nature spirits or Mother Earth in the ritual that was to occur during the picnic. Maybe these were not the earth worshipping type. They were into ceremonial magic or gothic urban stuff or I don't know what but was about to find out.
But then the whole ritual was centered around Mother Earth and nature spirits. And I ended up leaving immediately after, because I had too much on the tip of my tongue about all the hypocritical worship I just saw. How can you magick for environmental healing and then drive a gas guzzler to Walmart and give money to ConAgra? No, I understand how -- if you are poor, if you have to, if you are desperately surviving and trying to undo your damage. I've been there. I have done that. I know. But publicly, loudly, showing not a sign of understanding what your daily choices mean?
I left griping to my ride that my current friends were better pagans than those pagans. Getting together to share local, organic food from a coop I can bike to that comes in packaging I can compost is ultimately a better ritual, a more pagan act, than standing in woods I had to pollute to get to, shouting in each of the four directions that I love the ground, the sea, the air and Mother Earth, and making a toast to the spirits of nature with food I bought from the biggest destroyer of ecosystems the planet has ever seen.
There's been a conversation in the pagan blogosphere lately about whether environmentalism is over. I think it is not over; it is completed. We have seen what changes everyday non-powerful people can make, as those who are willing have made them. Now we see that those corporations have enough power, without us small beans, to destroy the Earth, and they will take our governments over and do it. I can understand a sense that it doesn't matter on an actual political-power or save-the-earth level whether we buy ConAgra or not. But on a spiritual level, in terms of what kind of soul-energy we put in the world and compose ourselves of, whether our words are going in the same direction as our feet, of course it matters tremendously.
And that's what I want my kids to know. The lynchpin in any ethical system is believing that each action choice must be in harmony with our intellectual ideas about what is great and what is lousy. Whether or not my children ever find anything worthy of worship -- and so far I have two atheists and an agnostic -- if they think in terms of every small choice mattering, they will be living with integrity.