Tag: event report

I’m slowly recovering from an absolutely magical Northeast Thing (NET) 2023. If last year was about rekindling the fires of faith and cracking open the seed of change, this year saw that seed burst the rest of the way into the light and blossom.

I describe NET as “the center of my religious calendar,” but it’s not just about the devotional aspects of religion. NET is a powerful space for me, where our gods feel more present, easier to reach. It offers the opportunity for intensive spiritual and magical work, and a wider array of people to do that work with than I tend to have the rest of the year. It gives me the opportunity to ‘check my answers’ against a community of like-minded people. And while I am not (and may never be) ready to go into a lot of detail about that work on a public website, it has fueled a foundational change in my understanding of myself.

I almost didn’t attend the Northeast Thing¹ this year. The 2019 version of the event was catalyzing and meaningful to me, but it also surfaced some issues that eventually led me to, for lack of a better turn of phrase, a crisis of faith. Not faith in the gods (that’s pretty unshakeable) nor even faith in the community (no community is perfect, but this one is certainly doing better than most) but faith in myself; in my ability to embody the values and beliefs that I actually hold sacred. And so this blog fell by the wayside, I mostly stopped holding blóts for my family, and I fell into a rather long and severe depressive episode.

So between all of that, the fact that the rest of my family declined to attend, and worries about COVID, I was going to let the event pass by. But a couple of friends were attending, they required proof of vaccination, it was largely outdoors… and perhaps most importantly, after 2019 I had intended to return with a very specific offering to Sigyn. So, I went.