This post originally started as a reply to someone else on another forum earlier this week, before I realized it wasn’t *really* what the original poster was asking for. However, because it’s rare enough that I manage to be even this coherent about how I conceptualize faith, I didn’t want to just delete it. I originally posted it in a more protected space, but decided to clean it up (and expand on it in places) because I think part of what the person to whom I was originally replying is interested in involves the idea that people who think about what they believe (or don’t believe) tend to be private or introspective and therefore silent about it so we have a hard time finding each other. The ability to respect someone else’s belief (or non-belief) and engage in honest curiosity about our world, and about how we all navigate it, is, I hope, not as rare as all that so much as it’s something we’ve been taught by the various dominant organized religions is unacceptable. I don’t believe it is unacceptable, so decided to do my part to contribute to some real or imagined larger conversation.

This got pretty long, so to spare the feed readers of those of you not interested, more after the jump.I’ll preface this with some additional background about me, which some of you will already know. I was raised nominally Roman Catholic in the sense that my paternal grandmother was devout and raised her children within the traditions of the church. My mom is probably best described as agnostic, though I think she was raised Methodist. Neither of my parents were actively practicing in any faith for most of my upbringing, though both my sister and I were baptized, had first communion, and were confirmed. I remember attending church as a family on Easter and when we stayed with grandma. My sister did (and still does) attend services regularly, usually with a family from our neighborhood (now with her own family).

During junior high and high school, I was active in the youth group of the church to which we belonged, largely because the youth minister was an amazingly accepting and loving man. Brother M navigated some intently questioning conversations with me that ultimately led to my decision that I did not believe in God as personified in the Roman Catholic church; he never once expressed even the slightest disappointment in me or my decision, and his constant love and support for all of the youth who participated in the group, of many different beliefs, have been something of a guidepost for how I enter conversations of faith. His unabiding respect for us all as people, regardless (or perhaps because) of our myriad perspectives and backgrounds, remains a fundamental tenet of how I try to see and interact with the world.

Presently, I don’t ascribe to any organized religion and tend to eschew even putting a label on what I do believe, in large part because I’m sufficiently out of sync with the tenets of most commonly accepted religions for it not to make sense, but also out of unwillingness to let someone else make *political* statements or arguments on my behalf based on an assumed commonality about how we approach the world. Belief is personal and, for me, independent of my political views. My faith (or lack thereof) influences my personal political views, but not always in the way that a large organized religion says it should. I’m rather opposed to the politicization of religion as I feel it’s too easily turned into manipulation and spiritual blackmail – the idea that you’re not a “true” believer unless you stand with “us” on XYZ sociopolitical issue is antithetical to my conceptualization of faith and belief.

Belief evolves and I’m not always very good at keeping track of when and where mine has, so in a partial effort to document what I believe now I’ll try to do a concise little brain dump on where I’ve settled for the nonce when it comes to faith. I’ll try to keep things more or less linear, but I can almost guarantee there will be some skipping about. As stated at the beginning of this post, curiosity and respectful conversation about belief, asking for clarification or additional explanation, and respectful discussion about the differences in how we all approach matters of faith are welcome here; if I’ve said something you want to know more about, feel free to ask.

I identify atheist when I find the need to identify as something specific at all, even though those who feel it’s their right to do so have challenged whether I’m a “real” atheist. (My response to such comments – about me or anyone else – is that my faith or lack thereof doesn’t need to align with anyone else’s to be valid or “real”; see above about the politicization of religion. This is a belief that has become more pronounced in my attitudes towards faith in recent years in general, but I think it’s a more or less natural development for me.) I don’t believe there’s a conscious – benevolent or otherwise – higher power at play in our world or universe, nor do I believe in any kind of afterlife, spiritual or otherwise. My consciousness is more than I can explain, so for lack of a better word I claim it as a “soul”, but it’s no more eternal than my body is; when I die, for all intents and purposes the thing that is/was me ceases to exist in everything but a cellular/conservation of mass sense.

I believe there are more powerful forces that act in our world/universe in ways we don’t fully understand and the best name for those that I have is “nature”, but it’s really somewhat bigger than what that typically implies. I believe that those forces are de facto inclined toward balance and that we – meaning humans – can push the balance one way or another, but that the larger/other forces around us will work to rebalance; the system is dynamic, but ultimately closed. It’s a bit like the internet, in some ways: if one means to an end is closed, the system will reroute to accomplish the task. I believe these other powers are ultimately stronger  than us, in that they work on a time frame we simply lack the patience and/or longevity to fully appreciate, and that they’ll work toward homeostasis even as the system shifts. How that all settles out may or may not include the continuation of our species. There’s no malice or intention in that outcome, it just *is*.

My belief in the balancing aspect of nature, as stated above, strikes harmony with various Druidic or Pagan practices, though again, I’ve found I’m not sufficiently in sync with any of those religions, even loosely defined, to feel comfortable with claiming them. However, the various Celtic and Norse pantheons, and their concomitant associations with natural forces, are appealing to me as stories and myth – which for me is the nearest I come to a liturgy, I think – largely because their deities were human in a way that I think many modern (western) religions find incompatible with divinity. In the end, divinity isn’t something I, personally, seek; I haven’t felt the need for an external, or superhuman example of something I should try to emulate (which is a really awkward way of putting it, but I’m trying to make it clear that this is my personal decision and that there’s no judgment implied for or against anyone else’s decision with respect to divinity). I don’t believe in the physical existence of those figures of myth, even in a historical sense as they are represented in the myths – there may have been at some point living people who inspired the creation of those myths, but the stories have made them larger than life. In the end, though, they are just stories for me, ones I like and which tend to involve themes I enjoy and in which I find something meaningful. In some ways, they are the stories I might wish to believe were truth.. but not really, if that makes sense. This tends to come out when I find myself using a variation on the verbal memes the reference “god” – I’ll pluralize it or substitute goddess more as a subtle statement that I’m not monotheist, if theist at all (I don’t claim to be, but the verbal memes are so ingrained they’re hard to avoid altogether).

Additionally, the moon always has been and continues to be a force which fascinates me, and it’s increasingly one I personify when I find the need (which isn’t often). If I push myself to describe why the moon, in particular, it comes down to being a natural, nonhuman force that we now commonly understand influences our lives (e.g., the tides). It’s an accessible representation of that larger idea for me. It also helps that my physical body cycles in near lock-step with the lunar cycle, and the synchronicity is comforting even though it’s (fairly certainly) coincident (the parenthetical is because who’s to say whether the gravitational forces exerted by the moon aren’t partially related to the average length of a woman’s menstrual cycle *shrug*). I don’t ascribe any supernatural power or influence to the moon, though when I do personify it, it’s most often feminine which is likely due to the influence of the Greek and Roman affiliations of the moon with goddesses (Selene and Diana).

The combination of those last two paragraphs fairly succinctly summarizes why the six tattoos on my back are what they are, for what it might be worth. *shrug*

Recently, I’ve also listened to The Sunless Countries, the fourth book in Karl Schroeder’s Virga series. It was, again, not the direction I expected him to take, but still very, very good. I like that he seems to be doing character-based sequels, where a character from a previous book becomes either the main or a connecting character to a new cast. It’s been a rather believable way of doing the world exploration without stretching credibility *too* much that a single core group of characters is directly and integrally involved in everything fantastical that happens throughout the series. He also does a remarkable job of keeping his characters human without over-accentuating either their virtues or their flaws.

Prior to that.. hrm.. oh, yes, The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande on a recommendation from a work colleague. Very engaging (and reasonably short), but I’m not entirely sure there’s anything particularly groundbreaking about anything in it, except perhaps the author’s attempts to introduce the concept to the healthcare industry and his subsequent results.

Anyway, I’m not sure what will be up next as I usually decide what I’m in the mood for when I get to that point, but I have waiting in my library How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom, The Sacrifice by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (which you can get, too, and for free, even: “Limited Time #FreeBook ANYONE can get the First Book of Fey, The Sacrifice by Kristine Kathryn Rusch http://ht.ly/248Jd” (via @audible_com on Twitter)), A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende, and Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.

This post is pretty picture heavy, because I wanted to do some before/after comparisons, so I’ll throw in a cut here for those who may not want to deal with the pictures on a feed reader.

If I could figure out how to do the mouseover thing with the pictures, I would, but at the moment I don’t want to bother with it. Not terribly surprisingly, I don’t have as many pictures of the before and what I do have is from when I bought the house 5 years ago so I tend to see the *other* changes (like all the damn bushes) first. *smile* All the same, here are a couple from the side of the house, before, though you can just barely actually see the house:

From the front and..

..from the garage. (All clickable thumbnails; click to load a larger version)

What you can see in these, though, is the difference between the addition and the rest of the house. I think Brian did a fantastic job matching the new siding to the existing siding on the addition, as you can sort of see here:

There are also a couple of “in progress” shots with all the scaffolding here and here, in case you’re interested to see what was involved in getting this all done.

The most dramatic, though, is definitely the porch; here’s the before shot:

And a couple now, after:

Porch and north side siding.

From the street

The front yard (though it needs to be tended some at the moment) was done I think the second summer so it’s been done for awhile. I love that there aren’t solid walls around the porch anymore – I think it makes the house look a lot friendlier.

The back is where the difference between the addition and the rest of the house is most obvious; here’s the before:

And the after, though from outside the fence:

All in all, I’m very happy with it. I need to spend some time getting the gardens in this year – the raised beds got neglected while the contractors were working because they used them to put the gutters on to keep them out of the way, so I spent a chunk of this morning weeding out the big stuff and will till them all up this afternoon with the new little Black & Decker Garden Cultivator I picked up yesterday (does it count as a power tool if it’s for the garden?). I also picked up some Preen in hopes that it will help keep the weeds and grass subdued long enough for the garden to get established. But that’s all for another post. *smile*

I’m reading more or less regularly again. By which I mean I’m actually reading printed-on-paper books as well as listening to audiobooks in the car (which I’ve been in a lot lately between the commute and a more-than-usual amount of weekend travel). Like many things in my life, reading sometimes ebbs and flows, and lately I’ve not had the calmness of mind to slip into a story and just let it take me away. It’s a sign of some peace and predictability returning, as I settle into the new job a bit more as well as make some decisions that, while not exactly weighing on my mind have been bouncing around the back burner for quite awhile. All things considered, this is a Good Thing(tm) and somewhat of a relief – for some reason it always makes me worry when I lose the desire to read.

I plowed through Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey‘s newest non-Kushiel novel, in a couple days last week. It lacks a lot of the depth of the Kushiel series, but was still a well crafted story with enough counterculture to satisfy. Feeding off that momentum, I started Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson and though it started a little more slowly than I’d have preferred, it’s progressed into the combination of well-researched history and plausible near-future that I love about his work. About the same time, I downloaded Bright of the Sky by new-to-me author Kay Kenyon and have been thoroughly sucked into it to the point where I actually finding myself wanted a commute longer than the 50 minutes it already is!

I’m also beginning to plot for the garden this year.. so far all I know for sure is cukes and tomatoes and pr’bly onions and peppers again. I’d do herbs (oh, right, I’ll do dill again) but that always seems like a grand idea until I realize that I have no real idea how to cook with them. *shrug* I’ll pr’bly do peas and beans again, though in the back yard this time instead of one of the boxes so they’ll get more shade and possibly vine up over the pergola. Lettuce would be good, if I actually manage to tend the garden well enough to stagger the planting (and therefore the harvesting) well enough. Pr’bly no squash this year as I don’t seem to go through as much of it, but I might give in and do a summer squash anyway. I’m learning that I’m a sort of haphazard gardener, which I’m honestly okay with, but sometimes means my follow through suffers. *smile*

More new music tonight – prepping for a long drive, which seems to be the way of things lately:

• Johnny Cash – The Man Comes Around
• Dropkick Murphys – The Warrior’s Code
• Tally Hall – Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum
• Dave Potts – One Night in the South

Also picked up Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong by the Spin Doctors because a good friend quoted it at me a few weeks ago and I can’t get it out of my head. Same good friend forwarded me news about a set of God Street Wine reunion shows in New York in.. June, I think; I’ll be looking for plane tickets soon, since I already have tickets to the shows. *grin*

Next weekend I’m going to see Gaelic Storm, along with I think nearly a dozen friends. I’m pretty stoked to be seeing them again, even if I am a little disappointed that we’re in a real theatre with seats which might mean dancing will be a little annoying. Not that I’ll let it stop me, but it might piss off anyone behind me. Oh well. *shrug*

Yup, this is my life lately. No real fiber artistry to speak of, and even though it’s finally spring I haven’t done any serious planning for the gardens yet. I switched jobs in there somewhere and have a longer commute, but also more stuff rattling in my skull so I haven’t even been listening to many books – it’s all about music these days. So it goes.

It’s always sort of surprised me how many of my friends from growing up fell in love with and married their high school sweethearts. Not in a bad way, really.. more in .. well, it’s sort of a little awe-inspiring. To know so young, and to love so strong. To openly embrace the growth and change in each other, and encourage it, even as it changes the material foundations of your world. That level of certainty.. of commitment to another soul.. there is magic in our midst.

Family, both biological and chosen, and the connectedness of people, the importance of those ties, even when we don’t renew them.. maybe especially when we don’t.. there’s something.. *there* that I’m not able to articulate. Nostalgia and remembrance.. *shrug*

I was reminded, in my mind’s meanderings as I wended my way south on Highway 52 this afternoon, of Ambrosia. The .. urgency of my quest for freedom, and for identity, has waxed and waned in the 10 or so years since I wrote it. Despite the apparent prophecy in the line “I want to form my life again and again from the raw clay of my soul”, I’ve lost and found myself – not the same myself, to be sure, but still, at the essence, me – more times in the last decade than I expected. More deeply, or completely.

And yet, the weaving continues, telling stories – my stories, our stories – in myriad colors and textures, flowing like water – sometimes placid and smooth and sometimes churned to a great tumult. Like fine silk, the threads of connection seem so terribly fragile, so easily snapped and severed. And yet, in truth, they are so very resilient. Our humanity, the simple coincidence of having known each other once, then, is enough, sometimes, to bring the color and vibrancy of a faded strand to light. I’ve let too much of the tapestry of my life fade, neglected and untended, and while doing so is alternatively so simple as breathing and so terrifying as leaping from a great height, it’s past time to begin the mending.

It is, however, a line from something else I wrote – or rather, something I spat at a friend (then and again) in (admittedly somewhat eloquent) anger and frustration – that still haunts me. I’ve turned it into a challenge of sorts, a hurdle over the black abyss of a moat surrounding my deepest self, a moat that despite my best attempts to bridge seems some days unfathomable. It’s a test, administered in jest, or at least seeming so. I don’t know what will happen when someone answers it in truth. I don’t really even know what that answer is, or will be, or whether there is one. It’s somewhat of a romantic, fairy tale notion, but one rooted in an all too real need. I know it should be unnecessary, that I should be more trusting, more self-reliant; that it’s a shield behind which I hide, a crutch upon which I lean instead of learning to strengthen myself to stand without it. But I also know that, as the soul of my soul once said, healing is a spiral and sometimes we have to move a little backwards before we’re able to move forward again.

That said, likely because I do, I think, spend a fair amount of time (or have in the last year or so) in self-reflection, it nonetheless surprises me when other people .. don’t. I’m willing to believe that I live within the confines of my head more than I should – it’s comfortable and warm and there’s no one there to ridicule or judge or misunderstand – but it still baffles me to some extent to realize just how many people simply go through their days, their lives without ever turning the focus of their curiosity inward. The unexamined life and all that.. which leads further into the knowledge that the freedom to examine my own life, to wander the halls of my mind more or less at will, is a privilege afforded me by virtue of the fact that I’m fairly secure, socially and financially. The ennui born of living a comfortable, safe life.

None of which was what I thought I would end up writing about when I opened this post this morning. I expected instead to prattle on about recent acquisitions to my music collection (this morning’s being Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet and Prince’s The Hits/The B-sides 3.. *shrug*) or fretting about the tomato plant that overbalanced its cage and my neglect in righting it sooner or about the old school sci fi kick I seem to have been on lately (Orson Scott Card and Heinlein have been living in my head – and on my iPod – a lot this month*). Ah well. C’est la vie.

* Because that actually may be of some interest, I listened to Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow in rapid succession, and am currently listening to The Speaker for the Dead. I’ve never read anything by Orson Scott Card before and have enjoyed both his writing style and the worlds he creates, though they are very definitely of a style I tend to identify as “classic sci fi” as opposed to some of the newer sci fi I’ve read (or more accurately, listened to). It’s a style I like – a reasonable balance of grit and social commentary that is both easy to relate to and at the same time removed enough not to be in your face should you choose not to give it attention. I queued up Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (which I apparently originally purchased some three years ago.. fortunately, Audible remembered that so I just had to download it to my current computer instead of purchasing it again) and Starship Troopers after a conversation I had earlier this week brought them up. I’ve read both of them before, but not for some time. Moon is, as should be no real surprise, one of my favorites of his, though in general Heinlein’s endings tend to annoy me – not because they’re necessarily bad stylistically, but because I tend to feel they’re less true endings than they are simply points at which he decided to stop writing. I’m also increasingly thinking I need to re-read or at least purchase and listen to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy again as it’s come up in conversations with friends at least three times in recent weeks. Not sure I’d want to listen to those, though, and it seems that I’ve had little patience for actually reading lately, which is odd and somewhat troublesome, but not enough for me to angst about overmuch.

It’s only a kiss. Don’t make drama over it; he’s not hurting you. Besides, you like kissing, right? And it’s not like you’ve got a boyfriend, so you can kiss whomever you want. What’s the big deal? “See? Good kisses.” He says it as if he’s showed me something. As if telling me to like it will make it so. I don’t remember his name. We only met that night. I extracted myself from his presence as quickly as was polite and never spoke to him again.

From LiveJournal, cereta posts “On rape and men (Oh yes, I’m going there)” (via) (emphasis in original):

Because men raping women is systemic, and cultural, and yes it is the patriarchy and it is misogyny and it is men thinking they are entitled to women’s bodies. “Well, what did she expect, getting drunk like that?” isn’t salt in the wound, it is the foundation of the problem. The idea that if a woman is not actively preventing a man from sticking his penis into her (and even then, if she’s an enemy), he is doing nothing wrong, and hey, who can blame him, IS THE PROBLEM.

From Sociological Images, “Do You Love Animals? Do You Have Lady Bits? Take Off Your Clothes!“

I know, PETA is low hanging fruit, but the pictures so nicely illustrate the difference between the roles that men and women are supposed to play and what about a woman is supposedly important.

From the Rochester Post-Bulletin, “Man given jail, probation for sexual assault“.

A Rochester man has been ordered to serve 90 days in jail and be on probation for 30 years for sexually assaulting a teenage girl

Edited to add one more.. from the Houston County News, “Hokah man charged in sexual assault” (emphasis mine):

A 21-year-old Hokah man is accused of sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman while she slept.

[The accused] entered the woman’s Onalaska, Wis., bedroom early June 30 after a stream of harassing telephone calls, according to the complaint filed July 15 in La Crosse County Circuit Court.

…

[The accused] was charged with second-degree sexual assault and returns to court July 29 for a preliminary hearing.

He is free on a $5,000 signature bond.

“The lesson here isn’t about global warming. It’s that you shouldn’t take data lightly. When you’re dealing with data, you have to look past the numbers.”

I feel like this has been my mantra since I started my current job (November 2004), which it seems surprises more people than it should. From my blog, written in September 2005 (emphasis added):

“As I sit and ponder this confluence of things fibery, specifically knitting, though I imagine the same would hold for weaving as well, and number crunching, there’s a certain .. something that connects the two. I’ll try to explain, at least how it works in my head, but it might get tangled. Essentially, when I look at data, I’m trying to draw out the pattern, or the story, the data tells. Another way of thinking of this is trying to create the picture of what’s happening by finding the strands and threads that weave the whole together. A single data item, like a single strand of fiber, may be beautiful, but is rarely complex. Only by combining it with others and teasing out the patterns does the larger picture, in all its glory, become clear. Sometimes, like when working a delicate lace motif in a fuzzy mohair, the pattern stays diffuse and difficult to perceive until you set it off against some contrasting background. Sometimes, like when working cables in 100% cotton, you have to exert a fair amount of effort and a not-insignificant amount of force to bring the pattern out, but once it’s there, you can’t miss it. And sometimes, like when working with hand-dyed variegated yarn, you start out expecting a certain pattern only to find a completely different one emerging as you go. Of course, there are also the times, like when working with a luscious and soft wool in stockinette, when the pattern comes out exactly as you expected without an undue amount of effort. So, when I think about it that way, it makes a certain sense that data geeks are also commonly fiber geeks. It is, after all, sometimes easier to just follow the pattern than it is to find it.”

It’s nice to have some external validation of this approach, especially lately. My life has been consumed by work this summer.. sorry for the radio silence, but sometimes that’s just how things go. Major data systems conversions will do that to you (but I can now add the development and delivery of a two day training workshop on PeopleSoft Query to my resume). *shrug*

My garden is growing; I ate my first peas yesterday (yes, they’re very late) and have several squash and cukes and tomatoes and even a  pepper, and more onions than I’ll know what to do with (not really) happily ripening. I think the watermelon vine has bit the proverbial dust, however, and the birds are eating all the strawberries and not leaving any for me, but for now I can deal with that.

I’m also knitting some, but you’ll have to wait until I replace my camera to get updated pictures, which will have to wait until someone more knowledgeable about cameras can accompany me to a store to check some out. I finished the back of Celtic Icon, though, and the right front. So that just means the right front, the two sides, the two sleeves, and the hood and seaming.. *sigh* Baby steps for now. (Though I’d love to have this one done by fall.)

I’ve also been reading and listening to books (always am really). I’m about an hour and a half from finishing listening to the third book in Karl Schroeder‘s Virga series, which has been amazing, though I have to admit I’d expected him to follow different characters for the second and third books than he did.