Looking to the New Year

Legend's Yule feast has come and gone, and my ego has been stroked. Those people that I celebrated Yule with always makes me feel like a rockstar. Even though there are people that aren't the most positive of people, there is so much love there with that group that I feel refreshed walking away every time. 

I'm still afflicted by the coughing plague so that it's hard to clean and do what I want to do to prepare for the new year. However, despite this I am still working hard to get things under control. I finished allmost all of my Chrismas presents. I'm hoping tomorrow I will have all but the last bit mastered. 

I've been mostly cleaning too. Mostly it's unnoticable stuff, but I am deturmined to have the house cleaned to better standards by the 21st (Thats when my folks come to visit to pick me up for Christmas) 

I finished going through a box of other people's stuff and got all the items ready for shipping. I finished wrapping gifts. It wasn't much, but I've been in a bad health day today.

Because of this, Tomorrow will be me in my wheelchair heading down to Ace Hardware and CVS and picking up some odds and ends to help me clean. On top of that it will be nice exercise. I plan on mastering the dishes, the cat boxes, haging some curtains in the bedroom, and fixing the cat tower I made. I also intend to straighten the living room, and my christmas present frenzy has made a mess in there. 

So I've been conflicted. I am no longer Christian. My parents are. I want to differentiate my beliefs on the turn of the seasons and reconcile them with my parents. And although I'm not going to tell them I am Heathen, I want to share my holiday with them. Since one of the most important parts of Yuletide is family, I don't think that it will be too hard. Family has always taken centerstage during my family's holidays. However, I'm going to be going to Mass. I'm going to eat Jesus' birthday cake...I figure that if I'm going to do all that, I'll share some of my holiday.

So Heathenry of the Slavic flavor believes something about the the sun god dieing on the night of winter soltice and being reborn. It's a common story among most pagan belief systems. And although I don't believe that the sun literally dies and then is reborn. I do recognize that the turn of the season is an important event in the agrarian calander. Fire and stories (particularly ghost stories) play an important role in this. So I have challanged my father to a story telling contest around a fire on Christmas Eve. We are going to sit around a fire in my grandmother's back yard, drink cocoa, and dad and I will have a bardic compition.

Now, one of the things I love about my father is that he is such a wonderful storyteller. It seems so odd to me that despite being in a profession, and of a disposition, that doesn't lend itself to many flights of fancy, my dad can make up one hell of a story. When we were camping in Nevada he made up a story of a warewolf that could only be slain by sandstone stakes. A story compition is too perfect.

I'm looking to the new year as a year of focus. I need to focus on getting control of my life slowly, instead of all at once. I can influence the world around me and doing that without reaching too far is my goal. I'm going to start by keeping the floor I live on clean. Yes, I'd like to write, volenteer, work, and a lot of other things, but my first job is to take care of my health, and the health of the area around me. 

Although My goals for this coming year include 

1) Volunteer 

2) Start working

3) Publish a book (not just write, but publish)

4) Continue to explore my new spiritual identity