A lot of folks who are working from home during the present pandemic have been complaining on social media about the increased amount of time they’re being forced to spend with loved ones and family.
Personally, I’ve enjoyed it.
Yesterday, for instance, our household spent the morning doing light ecstatic work while listening to songs about the Wild Hunt and Crossroads Spirits and intermittently having conversations on the Odinic traits of Harlequin, the various forms of Loki, Northern European and Asiatic Bear-cults, Mumming and how we want to do more of it, the overlap and differences between Fairies and the Dead, how Orphism has a World-Tree though conventional Greco-Roman religion does not, the important role that ‘zines played in the development of contemporary Heathenry and Hellenismos back in the early ’80s and ’90s and how this history is in danger of being lost, as well as our plans for the next couple festivals on our respective calendars.
The key is finding the right sort of people to socially isolate with.
The House of Vines 
lol i’m reading all these memes and such about people going stir crazy stuck inside with their spouses. um…A) read a book, get a hobby – it’s called having emotional coping skills and inner resources; B) i didn’t marry someone I hated. LOL. I actually LIKE spending time with you.
yesterday was fun.
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Why would anyone marry someone whose company they don’t enjoy? Even if the sex is great there’s a lot of hours to fill in a day.
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That sounds wonderful!
I’m not enjoying it very much for several reasons. First, it highlights to me how vulnerable I am with my multiple underlying conditions, so that I have to think about wearing gloves and such to go out and check my mail seventy feet away because if I get the virus, both hospital and death are three times more likely. Second, I wish I had the time to read and such, but given where we are in the quarter right now (final grading), I’ve got tons to do with all of that; plus, in the two weeks we were supposed to have off after grading is done, they’ve piled on a whole bunch of garbage that we now have to do for next quarter that none of us were expecting. So, every minute I’m awake when I’m not doing those things feels like it isn’t mine to do with what I wish since “work” has now non-consensually invaded my time and space at home. While I am glad to have work that allows this to be possible with no loss of money/etc., it comes at the loss of peace of mind. I could ignore online work with my classes before the plague when I was at home in favor of when I was actually in my office at college; now, I can’t escape it.
There are so many books around here that I could be reading, and in fact would love to read, but they lay in place on their respective shelves because there just isn’t time at the moment. I hope by the end of this month I’ll be in a better place of balance with all of it, but I still resent it right now. I’m not usually this contrarian, but with my loss of control on several fronts being what it is, I suspect it is only natural that this is how I would feel about a lot of this…
Nonetheless, I am carving out spaces for devotional time and spiritual work pretty much whenever I decide I want to do that rather than other things.
I do miss hanging out with other humans, though. I didn’t have many opportunities to talk shop with folks in my local area before this, though, so I guess–in a way–I can be happy for you without envying you (even though I would love to do the same as you have!) because I haven’t lost what you have, if that makes any sense…I can go “Oh, that sounds nice!” rather than “Dammit, I used to have that and I want it back so YOU SUCK, SANNION! Don’t you know it’s rude to drink the waters of Mnemosyne so openly when there’s a lot of us who can’t even get any Sterculinian parchment [toilet paper]? Stop throwing your Orphic Privilege in all of our faces!!!”
You see? Subtle difference. ;)
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Privilege, eh? Is that what we’re calling making difficult choices and navigating their consequences these days?
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Well, in fairness, “we’re” not calling it that…the imaginary troll in my head who gets mad at anyone in polytheism doing anything that they didn’t think of themselves first is the one using that language.
I hate how easily such voices appear these days.
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Ohhh, shit. I completely misread that and thought you were making fun of the Tumblristas.
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That works, too! ;)
(Don’t you love multivalent sarcastic humor that is in poor taste at a time like this?)
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Hi! Do you have any sources that talk about Orphism and the world tree? Sounds fascinating.
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I should probably put together an article on that. In the meantime I’d recommend starting with Hermann S. Schibli’s Pherekydes of Syros and M. L. West’s The Orphic Poems though there’s material they don’t include in their respective discussions – for instance that Greece gains a World Tree after conversion to Christianity:
https://greekerthanthegreeks.com/2014/12/greek-christmas-customs-traditions-2.html
Which I think has less to do with Christianity than it does Slavification.
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Interesting! That time period also has crossovers to the info we have on Old Thiess, the Livonian werewolf, and the ways in which he and his lycanthropic colleagues were responsible for the well-being of the community during that time. This would fit in with that sort of generalized theme as well (i.e. the goblins cutting down the world tree)…!
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