So, some of you may have noted that I don't contribute as much OC as I used to. The reason for this is that much of my time is wrapped up in a great new project... Building a new tribe.

I'm the eternal optimist, and in that vein I came to a conclusion about heathenry. We always talk about different types of heathenry... Icelandic Asatru, Swedish Forn Sed, Anglo Saxon... But all of these have a common theme to them as it relates to me. I don't live in Iceland. I don't live in Sweden or England. Those regional sets of customs and practices arose because of a lot of reasons, but much of it was the tribe and the land. So, as a heathen living in Cascadia... Shouldn't I be practicing Cascadian Heathenry?

But there's no such thing! You say. Heathenry isn't native to this area. Of course it's not. It wasn't native to England, either. But it's people brought it there from other lands, and over time it became a distinct cultural variant.

I believe modern heathenry has grown enough that it's time this started happening. We need to begin moving beyond the customs of tribes seperated from us by oceans and thousands of miles and begin growing into our own local tribal groups, with our own local tribal customs and ways. We need to stop aping the customs of others and start taking and making our own. I’m far from the first to do this (I’d say I’ve seen quite a bit of it in the ASH community), but it’s not nearly as common as it should be.

But it’s difficult. It’s time consuming. It’s not as simple as picking things you like out of a grab bag of heathen ideas. Things have to make sense in a cultural way. They have to make sense in relation to our ancestors and our gods. This isn’t the heathen version of eclectic paganism… It’s the taking of everything I have ever learned, and everything those close to me have learned, and trying to make those parts into a new and functioning whole. This isn’t creation of the new, but synthesis of the old, of the learning and wisdom that I and those others involved have gained over many combined decades of study and worship. I don’t know if it will work, or if it will survive, but I do know it needs to be attempted. So, myself and a couple of other users from this sub who live nearby are doing it.

We will fail in some respects. We will get things wrong. But we will also strive to see those things, and to change them, to adapt our tribal structure and customs both to the ways of our ancestors and to the needs of our land. The creation of a tribe is, after all, not a simple affair. But failure of a part is not failure of the whole, and as things go on and we see our successes and failures, we can cut away that which does not work for the good of the whole.

Don’t expect a lot of OC from me for the foreseeable future, except where it relates to this new endeavor. I’m not going to be spamming the events of my tribe, but rather trying to chronicle the creation of it. Succeed or fail, it should be something we can all learn from. And if my tribe, Stone Shore, out lives me, then I’ll know we did something right.