nicnevyn

So tomorrow I shall be rising early and with a short stop enroute to help a friend out transporting stock for their stall I shall be pootling off to PaganCon in Preston.

It’s not a big convention and in truth, I had last year decided that I would not be going again as they have stopped weekend camping and I nearly always end up being the designated driver, which in and of itself is fine until you have to try and load enebriated passengers into the car when your tired, knackered and hoping that there is half a chance you will get home before the offie shuts so you can buy a nice bottle of wine.

The biggest reason for going is twofold,  several friends this year are either doing talks or running workshops and I figure you should support your friends in their endeavours and also because Maxine Sanders is speaking.

Now I am not a Wiccan, nor ever likely to be, but I do think it is important to go and listen to somebody who is effectively first generation of the modern witchcraft movement. It was the same reason I spent a weekend doing a Marian Green course. These guys are our elders and for most of us, there doing it with the coffee mug and the t-shirt whilst we were still charging around in the playground at school.

I shall report back after the event I am sure.

I actually didn’t know what to call this post, I am not 100% sure that the title I have given is right even now, but it is the closest I could get. This post is not a finished peice of work my any stretch of the imagination, it is the start of something, but I am not sure what. But I imagine I will be re-examining it again a number of times over the next few months as my observations grow.

So where to start, hmm well I am a person with a lot of moles, many of these are not a result of sun damage but have been with me all my life, yesterday I started the process of having the larger, more troublesome ones removed. The one that was taken away yesterday I have had since I was only a toddler, my earliest memory of it is over 30 years old, when I caught it on clothing for the first time, I was about 3 and I can still clearly recall the pain and discomfort of catching it.

Anyway it’s gone now, although I haven’t seen the results it’s still under a dressing, I know it’s gone, a little part of me has changed. I know that it is going to take a while for me not to be freaked out when I look down at my side and it is no longer there. The realisation of it’s abscence really got me thinking about how I view myself and how that perception of myself may affect me. I realised that when I visualise myself whilst working it really does include all my spots, marks and blemishes. Even if the visualisation includes clothing I can mentally strip away that clothing and what is underneath is a pretty accurate representation of me!

So there I was this morning trying to make my “other” me and failing miserably to create a “me” without said mole, when a conversation I had with a friend sprang to mind. They are a very talented tattoo artist, who has a large following of practitioners from a number of paths who utilise their exceptional skills in the persuit of spiritual and magickal tattoo’s.

Apparently it isn’t uncommon for people to have minor personality changes after they have their tattoo, and after some discussion it was agreed that the reason for this was that the act of tattooing physically and mentally changed your wiring on the subtle. Initially I had a bit of issue with this, the tattoo I underwent as a form of personal initiation seemed to do nothing of the sort, it was easy for me to include it in my other “me” almost as if it had always been there. And then I realised that was the point, it was something I had worked towards, I was meant to have it, not a flight of fancy, but the cilmination of a hard worked for magickal operation.

But it really got me thinking, if having something “added” can tweak you subtly then surely it goes without saying that having something removed must also have a similar effect? This is not something I had considered before, all the rumination I have done over the years regarding the removal of these little parts of me have been done on the mundane, the purely down to earth here and now practical. I have no idea what the subtle implications of losing it will be, but I am pretty sure even so early on that there are going to be some. Which leads me to think that I may have to work on my personal perception of my magickal self before I make the appointment to have the next one taken away.

A few weeks ago one of my elders took me to one side for a “talk”. Apparently they were concerned that I was isolating myself too much, becoming to much of a hermit. Apparently they felt that this wasn’t in my best interests and asked that I consider perhaps interacting on the scene just a little bit more.

Now there was a caveat to this, interacting didn’t mean that I had to socialise with any old nut case out there, the idea being was that I find sane, sensible like minded folks with which to interact. So a chance invitation came my way via a good aquaintance (who actually does fall into the sane and sensible category) to accompany them to a pub moot in the next town tonight.

Now normally I would have shied away in horror, but there is actually no reason to make an excuse not to go, I have more than enough money in my pocket, I’ve not been out in over a month, the significant other is willing to babysit, and public transport runs almost door to door right into the night. So I figured what the heck, even if the folks there are completely barking, and it wouldn’t surprise me, pagan moots can be very colorful places, I will have spent time with my sane and sensible good aquaintance.

And you never know I might meet some really nice people too!