Pagan Values Blogging Month: Know Your Place.
To "know my place". To be truly familiar with where I live. To indwell.
Chas Clifton addresses a lot of this in his 1998 essay "Nature Religion for Real". For this entry, I want to add a couple of reasons why I consider the study of and grounding in place central to my Pagan practice.
1) Reverence. If I am going to claim (and I do) that I practice an Earth-based religion, that I revere Nature, then by gum I ought to know Nature. I should be able to name at least a few plants that grow natively in my area (buffalo grass, Joe Pye weed), say what my watershed is called (the Twin Cities watershed), estimate when the irises in my front yard will bloom (Memorial Day weekend, near what Leora the Sane and I cleverly call the Iris Moon).
In the Judeo-Christian traditions of my youth, God was the ultimate unknowable. In my Pagan practice, my divinity, this glorious Earth around us, is the ultimate knowable - or at least experienceable. The more I learn about this place I call home, the more amazing it seems to me, the more I understand my place in it and my relationship to the others who live in it, the more I fill with a sense of awe and reverence.
2) Magic. Keep in mind, as always, that, as a naturalistic Pagan, my definition and understanding of magic is a bit off from the norm. Nevertheless, here is my thinking: every definition of magic I know of centers on the concept of change, whether to personal consciousness and perception or the world around us. I believe that, before I can effect change, I must understand the base conditions that I'm changing. Without knowledge of current circumstances, how will I know what to change, or how to change it? How will I know whether or how my attempts have worked? Without the baseline, the alterations are meaningless - if they're perceptible at all.
So, to engage and participate as a true resident, reverent, and change-maker in my world, I must know it as best possible. How do I do that? Well, that's a post for another day.