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| Photo: Samuel Dickey, 2017 |
Living with spirit(s) in a late capitalist, materialist, and rationally minded can be a challenging endeavor. So much of neopagan discourse ignores or is irrelevant to the urban experience of the post-industrial experience. We tend romanticize past cultures and traditions without fully understanding them or their contexts, and ignore the realities of the currents which we are presently part of. In my own journey with spirit, I have observed that not only does decontextualizing ourselves from our place in time and culture do us a disservice to the spirits that are very much contemporary, it also detaches us from work with eternal spirits that are continuous and present parts of existence.
To do effective work as spirit engaged humans, we must foster awareness, respect, and stewardship for the world as it is now. In my mind, this includes being involved at a community level, being aware of political and economic movement and its repercussions, and actively building bridges between ancestral and historical traditions and wisdom, and contemporary understandings of science, sociology, culture, and innovation. Spirits don't disappear because we have smart phones.
Contemporary spirit work doesn't have to be about eschewing technology, modernism, or the necessities of our daily lives. It does, however, require a reframing. One must learn how to observe, how to hear, how to see, how to listen, and how to interact - both with the spirit world, with the earth, and with the human world we are ultimately bound to whether we enjoy it or not.
This is the long way of declaring the soul of this blog - to unite the mundane world with spirit in a practical, relevant way that everyone can engage with, and hopefully enrich their lives, their connection with spirit, and with themselves as a result.
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