Birds

Hello there. This has been a long time coming, but I wanted to reintroduce myself on this blog.

This has essentially been my true blog since its inception in 2010, which is 15 years ago. I've been

looking over my posts, and I've been kind of editing things. I haven't been changing things; I've just

been editing for grammar and such so they're more readable. I want to get started with blog posts again

because I'm restarting the Dedicant Path. I've gone through and looked at my oath, and it doesn't look like

I've failed in the oath, per se. I am very grateful for my past self for consistently looking at what my words

mean and being really careful in my wording for things so that it wasn't easy for me to break my oath, but

it also wasn't easy for me not to break my oath. Mostly, what my original oath was about is me being

virtuous towards the nine virtues, and I have, for the most part, been fairly virtuous. There's been a couple

of times where I've struggled; we're all human, we're all going to, but I think I kept my oath thus far, and

I don't need to rededicate myself particularly.

This coming up of the New Year, I've been pretty consistent with my devotional path, which is on TikTok.

I can put a link to it if you'd like to see my devotional posts there, because that is part of mental discipline

during the DP, and that was the biggest stumbling block that I had during my original tenure as an ADF

Druid. Getting that focused on, that the mental discipline, the redefining it as the mental discipline is also

a thing that I really do approve of, as I've written about several times.

I'm getting things restarted. I'm on TikTok if you wanted to pop in and take a look at my devotional

readings for every day, because I've been consistently since the middle of this October. I've been

consistently putting TikTok posts and doing a devotional practice since a little bit before then, but I've

been recording it since the middle of October of this year. It's coming into the new year, and I wanted

to kind of reaffirm that this blog is active and I want to continue writing in it and kind of using it as a

DP journal, and kind of connecting to what was in the past that I've been doing and also what I'm

doing in the present and also what I will be doing in the future.

On my TikTok page, I've been describing what my dedicated path is going to be and how it's been going,

and also my definitions for the virtues that have been going on. I haven't really talked about the rituals

that I've been doing with my Grove or Protogrove, or just a group of people that do ADF-style ritual in

the Bay Area. I've been doing ritual with them fairly consistently. I need to look at my records to make

sure that I have all the records I need so that at the end of Samhain next year, I will have done a full year

consistently of honoring the deities and doing the work that needs to be done for me to complete that

portion of the Dedicant Path.

Because that has also been a really big stumbling block for me, because it is well, it is for most people,

because it is a large chunk of time they have to be doing something consistently. You have to be doing

something for eight of the high days every year, and it's hard to do. I think four of them have to be ADF

style, and I can definitely do that. You have to acknowledge the high days in some way every time for a

year. So four of them have to be ADF style, which I definitely got through, and then the other four just

have to be acknowledgment of the high days and maybe your personal practice or something like that.

So that is what I am working on at the moment. I'm doing the mental discipline and the high days in kind

of one chunk, because those are the biggest ones for me. They have to do with consistency and time and

keeping a schedule, which can be difficult for anyone with ADHD or Autism Spectrum tendencies, as I

do. Mental discipline was the most difficult, but the high days were the second most difficult, and I'm

getting that chunk done all at the same time.

Alongside that, what I'm also doing is I'm doing The Virtue essay, and I've started with fertility, which

is one I have given a lot of thought to. If you look at my TikTok videos, there is a TikTok video discussing

my definition of fertility. I need to do the word count and actually write it down, but it's there. I've done

the work; it's there if you want to see it. The next one I'm actually going to be working on, it's kind of a

tie between hospitality and what's the other one that I was working on? Hospitality, anyway, hospitality

is probably going to be next. If I find the other one, I'm going to do that one. So those are coming up

next for my videos on TikTok, where I'm going to be doing video mini-essays. These are like maybe 1

to 3-minute videos on TikTok, so they're going to be short, they're going to be sweet, just to get the

definitions down and the reasoning behind those definitions and how I came to those definitions. I

believe it's what is going to be in there.

But that's where I'm at with the DP, and I'm working on it. I'm still an ADF Druid. I've got some issues

that I'm working through with that from our last update, which was in 2014, I think. A lot of things have

gone down. I know that I never talked about my relationships, but I met Vernon, who was my fiancé up

until he passed away in 2020. At that juncture, when he passed away, I had to find a new living space

because he was paying for the apartment that we were living in, and there was also the pandemic that

happened, which caused a whole bunch of chaos just in general.

So for those three or four years during that time period from 2020 to about 2023, that was very chaotic.

Then I had a whole bunch of my grandmother passed away, my grandfather passed away, and my life

was pretty much in chaos at that point up until about maybe a year and a half, maybe 2 years ago. My

life was pretty much in chaos at that point. Then I was getting a bit of stability. I was with my current

partner and we were living together, and I'm now living in the same place, but they're living elsewhere.

We're still together, it's just logistics happened.

But my stepmother passed away late November of this year, and we had to deal with a lot of emotional

stuff around and surrounding that because it was my dad's second wife. My mother had passed away

way back in 2014, I believe. I have talked about this in the blog post. It was around when things

started to get a little bit chaotic. In 2014, when my mother passed away, and then a year later, my

grandmother passed away.

At that point, I was living with my sister, and then I started living with Vernon. Up until 2020 things

were pretty stable up until that point. Just to give you a fairly update on what was going on in my life

from the time we last talked.

--- All right, moving on to the more current era. I've mentioned this before. More currently, I've got my

TikTok videos with my devotionals that are happening, and I've got The Virtue videos that have come

out on TikTok as well. In the last year, I've been going through getting the high days done for the

Dedicant Path and the DP requirements and all that.

So I'm fairly stable at this point. There's still a lot of chaos going around me. I mean, last month my

stepmother passed away, so we're still going through that, and I'm helping my dad grieve through that.

I have to give him a call later. But anyway, so that's what I'm working on right now, and I wanted to

give everyone here a heads up and tell you what's going on.

What this blog is probably going to be turning into is a record of my DP work and those devotional

videos that I do every morning. I have a devotional to Bridget every morning, and I do a virtue poll,

which is basically I have a nine-sided die that a friend of mine made for me, and each side is associated

with one of the virtues in ADF. I do roll and see what virtue comes up, and I do, and I post the video.

So she's with that virtue. Fairly simple ritual. I've been doing it fairly consistently, and it's been really

helpful to keep those virtues in mind, especially when I'm struggling. It's been helping me be a little

bit more grounded in my spiritual path.

When I talk about being grounded in my spiritual path, what I mean is that most spiritualities separate

the mundane from the spiritual, and there is a separation there. But they also, if you're looking in the

Judeo-Christian tradition, mostly, they say the spiritual is more holy and is better than the mundane

physical world. In druidry, there's not as much of a disassociation from the material world because

they're all interconnected, and neither one is as good or better than the other. Both of them are as good

as one another is what I mean.

And grounding my spiritual tradition into my mundane life, having this tradition that I do is very simple.

It's very sustainable, and it also helps me throughout the day. Like if I have the hospitality virtue that

comes up in the morning, I'm like, this is a virtue that I need to be thinking about throughout the day,

and when I have a chance to practice the virtue of hospitality, it's on my mind, and it helps me to do that.

Particularly considering I'm living in the United States, hospitality is a virtue that I myself am not struggling

with, but I think that the USA is very much struggling with the virtue of hospitality. It's very much been on

my mind, which is probably why it's next on my list of videos to do, because I have a lot to think about.

I have a lot of research to do, and I have a lot of writing to do for that particular post, which is going to

be coming up.

But if you want to come here and see what I'm up to and talk and listen to me about the virtues of

druidry and how it can be grounded in your own real life, and me searching for a sustainable practice

that I can continue, and that is helpful to me as well. I think it is not just sustainable, not something that

you could just do it every time, but also something that helps you in your daily life, has always been a

kind of a marker for me for a daily devotion or practice of any sort.

So thank you, everyone, for listening to me ramble. This has got to be looking like a lot of block of

text. I will be going back and editing this a bit to make it less block-like. But thank you for listening,

thank you for reading, and I hope everyone is praying with a good fire.