A roundup of inspiring posts.

Living in a sacred world

Mark Green at the AtheoPaganism blog on the wonders of the beautiful world we live in. I’m not an atheistic Pagan but I very much appreciate the focus of AtheoPaganism on what we can sense and experience directly.

Experientially, we have mountaintops and forest walks. We have riversong. We have ocean waves and orgasms and the soft, warm glow of a hallucinogen coming on. We have the sweat of exertion and the exultation of dance, the thrill of skin on skin.

We have seasonal rituals and rich, alive moments of intimacy.

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Hormones, feelings, and identity

A very helpful post from Nimue Brown about changes in hormones and how this affects one’s sense of self and gender identity:

I know my cycle well and I know who I am within it, and I identify with those emotions. Who and how I am shifts during the month and I experience all of it as being intrinsically me.

Now, peri-menopausal, or as I prefer to call it, living with the menoporpoise, everything has changed. Hormones turn up as late night tsunamis that I can drown in, that sweep all before them, and wash away my brain and sense of self.

I can definitely relate to this, and wrote a post about creating an inclusive space to talk about this stuff about a year ago.