Blood, Whiskey, & History

A year ago I decided to start practicing paganism. I began with researching Lughnasadh, and designed a simple ritual that I felt combined some aspects of traditional practice with my own invention in a way I was comfortable with. It was not my first time I acted on the desire to acknowledge an earth-centered holiday; a year or two back I had burned a small fire and sung a song on Winter solstice. But this was my first time coming to a ritual with the intent to craft a kind of practice for myself, and to do so consciously embracing some sort of paganism. Lughnasadh, 2020. So much researching, experimentation and exploration has happened in this past year. I’ve learned a massive amount about Norse and Germanic paganism, and began reading some of the best primary sources we have for this history. I began a book series — which for me, is notable because I rarely read fiction — to spend even more imaginative time there. I’ve learned to mark memories based on the full moon, and I’ve spent ho...

Blood, whiskey, and history. So why blood? It is important to emphasize at the outset that it is not because of any fascistic notion of racial inheritance or purity, as in the Nazi chant, “blood and soil.” As I’ve discussed, insofar as any of us inherit anything “from the blood,” it is a heritage belonging to every single human on the planet. To me blood means something very different. It represents some of the most delicious aspects of existence – whatever might be described as a passion. My experience of passion has been both one of the most difficult things for me to regulate in my life, and without question the side of myself that has come under the greatest scrutiny by the society I live in. I’ve conducted myself, I guess you might say, in a very unregulated way on many an occasion. This has not of course always been a good thing. The worst times were when I had anger I could not contain, and so said or did things that hurt other people. There were also times...

I've been regularly running for about three years. I always enjoyed it -- enjoyed the challenge more than anything -- but was frustrated with how little I managed to improve. When I was young I was a great runner, almost always the fastest girl; my 6th grade phys ed coach once told me I was a "running machine." So while I didn't expect to be very fast at once after a decade plus of neglect, I was surprised I couldn't get my mile time below 9:30.  Then about a year and a half ago I found out I had anemia. I had been running on low blood cells for at least two years. I started taking prescription iron, and within two weeks, my mile time had dropped by 30 seconds, and by a month, a minute.  More importantly, being able to go faster enhanced everything I already liked about running; the feeling of flight and fight, the rhythm of your body moving, seemingly by default, unless you make it stop: that rush of blood when you finally do, and ...