Monday, November 24, 2008

I'm Not Dead Yet!

No, really. 

I've been busy with a lot of different things, from a trip to Arizona to teach a couple of brief classes at the Irish Cultural Center in Phoenix to working with the CR group that we started here in Seattle back in January. Political and other concerns had a lot of my focus this year as well, though I'm a little calmer now the elections are over. 

That said, my work has been moving on apace toward my writing on filidecht and geilt, with my writing plans being slightly revised to work on the geilta book first in accordance with a suggestion from Phil. Given that a lot of my focus in filidecht is about the material surrounding the geilta, this made sense for me on a lot of levels. To get the materials on madness and trauma and how poetry works as a healing methodology in that context frees me to write more clearly about the rest of the traditions surrounding filidecht in books and articles after that.

Writing for anthologies has also taken a lot of my time and energy this year. I've got two essays coming out in an anthology due in December about cultural appropriation and Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism. After that there's another essay in an anthology on animist practice, taking a CR perspective. I have yet another essay in progress for an anthology on sacrifice in Neopaganism that's based on a lengthy email on Nemeton back in the day. All three of these will be from my publisher, Megalithica. A non-Celtic short story will be coming out next year sometime in an anthology dedicated to Thoth from Neos Alexandria.

The incubation chamber is finally ready for dedication. I had planned to do it around Samhain, but events caught up with me and I've been too overwhelmed, though I hope to do the dedication in early December after several other obligations have been dealt with. This week I'm reading a manuscript by Alf Siewers that my roommate is doing editing for, on landscape and the Otherworld in Insular Celtic imagination. It's a fascinating read and has been very useful in some regards, though I'm having to wade through a great deal of postmodernist jargon. It is, however, saying a lot about the kinds of things I believe about deity and immanence, about how the Otherworlds and the landscape interpenetrate in my spiritual consciousness, and giving me places to look as I ponder what may have been the practices of the early filidh.

In keeping up my LiveJournal, I've rather neglected this blog. This has partly been due to a lack of emotional energy on my part, though not from any lack of interest. I will admit that there have been many days when I've been driving from Seattle back to Everett thinking about something and telling myself I was going to write about it here, but my energy fled me when I got into the house and I've collapsed on the couch and grabbed a book instead. This fall has been both difficult and rewarding, given how successfully the local CR group has been going while I've been facing some of my own personal demons on a deeper level.

I do have a post in progress about deity that was sparked by a friend on LJ which I'll likely post in both places, as I think the content warrants posting here as well. I only hope I'll do the question justice in my answering.

Thanks for your patience.