No pictures just yet.

But if you're interested, you can find more at my flickr page. For anyone interested it's:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiergrrrl/

Was reading through a friend's LJ and he talked a bit about spirituality. It's something that I think about a lot, and enjoy talking about. So, I made a comment, and this is what I said. I'm sure that I'll add to it as I think of it, but...

There are about sixteen reasons I left the whole neo-pagan game (aside from God hitting me upside the head with a clue by four), and you hit on a few of them.

I'll see if I can make this coherent, but I make no promises.

I grew up knowing there was a "God." He wasn't particulary present in my family, beyond going to church with my grandmother when I went to La. and being petted by all the older women. After that, church was where you went on Christmas Eve, and *maybe* Easter.

Since I started Faire when I was 15, I'd had some exposure to neo-pagans, including a *lot* of fluffy-bunny neo-Wiccans. Didn't run into too many lineaged folx, but I met a couple.

After getting into college, for some reason, I checked out Margot Addler's Drawing Down the Moon< and from there headed to Starhawk and Murray, and then...it was a slide into neo-Paganism. Meeting the ex didn't help the whole spiritual thang, since he was a mish-mash of Zen Bhuddism/Taoist and Europagan/Cetlic reconstructionism.

Part of it was that I really wanted to believe that I was somebody, in a past life was fine, since I wasn't anybody here. I wanted to feel strong and not ordinary, and paganism allowed me to do that, even while I maintained something of a "respectable" veneer. In other words, I didn't purposefully try and freak the mundanes. I wore normal clothes, a small silver pentacle, and wasn't freaky for freakishness' sake.

Whily the ex was stationed at DLI, we did run a teaching coven, and one of the classes I taught was..."Psychic Attack, or Just Low Blood-Sugar?" The subtitle was "Try eating more than Twinkies and Coke for breakfast." I had very little patience with the fluffy-bunny crap, and had since grown out of the need to "be someone."

So...I get divorced, and slowly drift away from paganism. I disliked the kneejerk reaction of "We can't write it down! It will become...DOGMA!" when discussing trying to actuallly get folx to agree on some things. The coven I circled with in Tenn. had left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, due to what I perceived as serious lapses in judgement, to include breaking the "no alcohol" rule at a state park, as well as allowing minors to get drunk at said park. I am a random person, but I really need boundaries. I need to know what the rules are, where the lines are, and where I am in context to those boundaries and rules.

I was content to drift for a while, just calling myself agnostic, but not really searching for answers, just kinda hoping I'd get hit with the spiritual equivalent of a Greyhound bus.

When we were told we were deploying, my lackadaisical searching days were over. I didn't have this whacky feeling I was going to die, but I did want to have it sorted out before I headed over to Iraq. I wanted to have some sort of answer. I'd thought about returning to church with my mom and dad, but they were still kind of random about attending and such, and so...it wasn't exactly a methodical way to figure it all out.

Then, I met John. I joke that he and God introduced me to each other. After our first date, I went to church with John, and from then on out, I've fallen more and more in love with the Orthodox Church. Hmmm. Perhaps I'll have to finish this my blog, since I'm sure I'm up against the comment limit, if not over it.

There's a whole lot more backstory, but I'll have to sit down and see if I can actually get it down in an organized fashion. I'm tired of not having things read well. I'm not writing for public consumption, but it's nice to be able to follow my own thoughts.

BTW, the smell of drying laundry is one of my all-time favorite smells. It's just comforting in a way that few things are. It smells like home and like all is right with the world.