Long Nights Moon: Decidedly Unceremonious

Because I keep a record of these things, ceremonious or not. For the files.

Long Nights Moon, 2012.

Exhausted from excessive cookie & Bûche de Noël production, we did not bake this Esbat.

Stollen from a local bakery & Spiced Vanilla Mead from the Pagan Brewer's Guild for La Luna. Alone, I placed Her gifts outside that night. I offered a few words, blew a kiss & shuffled back out of the cold/into the light so unlike Hers. 

Elk Bolognese -- so right for the depth of Winter -- for those of us in attendance. The Little Lad, a vegetarian, was absent & this was fine because the High Priest's generous gift of the Horned Ones' meat would have left him unappreciative & underfed.

My plan had been to continue work on a hanging driftwood Moon "shrine" that evening. Instead, the project was sidelined by Moonrise Kingdom. (Thank you Bryan. Thank you.) Being parents of small children (& also not owning a television) we watch about 1-2 movies a year, so I suppose I could justify it was a special event. Or, I could say that watching the film had nothing to do with anything. But more accurately, I will say that it had everything to do with everything.

Sometimes I am just a human doing human things, human things that don't seem very relevant or austere or even reverent. Working hard to be deep & complex all the time easily becomes play-acting. People lose sight of relationships & begin to build a cult of personality. They weave tales of shady Woo -- questionably sexy & otherworldly. The more allure they develop, the more I feel they are marketing themselves. (To what end?) Acts of "spirituality" become about self-image & no longer about Them. The other-than-human world does not care about how our relationships with them look to other humans. Attempts to make our spiritual relationships appear more sophisticated than they are is akin to dating someone good-looking with the primary purpose of looking good oneself. It becomes the practice of vanity. 

I also feel that pushing thru & just doing "it" (whatever your flavour of ceremonial "it" is) despite not "feeling it" can also lead to play acting. I don't do it if I don't feel it. I call this my principle of rote-avoidance. Just as we work to avoid a routine & mechanical love-life, I believe in upholding a similar goal in our Love-lives. 

Honesty. Sometimes our relationships are just a bit lackluster, or even very lackluster. All relationships get that way from time to time. 

My relationships with my primaries in the other-than-human world are firmly slumped over in the doldrums at present. I credit this to the fact that I have spent virtually zero time out of doors since the day I found Love again... That amounts to nearly two months. I had better go outside. Soon. This is easier said than done. I look outside & I see Alaska. It requires a feat of strength & will -- acting on a spiritual & intellectual knowledge that my comfort-loving body refuses to embrace. 

With that, I excuse myself for the general lack of pomp & circumstance that evening which is generally (but not always) reserved for Full Moon communing. I can be nothing but human (sigh), so I might as well be so in the most authentic & honest way possible. I suspect She doesn't mind all that much. Real rockstars don't.