Dilemma

Next weekend, Pagan pride descends on North-Western NY in the form of the Central NY Pagan Pride Festival in Liverpool, NY (near Syracuse).  I'm really excited about the keynote speaker, Patti Lafayllve.  She's a practicing heathen devoted to Freyja and seidh work.  Even though I follow an Irish-inspired path, I do have Norse blood in me and know that the Celtic nations often interacted with them (hence my mixed ancestry!).  I feel that I could learn a lot from seidh.  Really, I think any trance-related workshops would be greatly beneficial to my spiritual growth*.

I was delighted to hear that Lafayllve is performing a rite using oracular seidh.  Unfortunately it's the night before Pagan Pride Day...  And I live an hour and a half away.  Now it wouldn't have been an issue if things had gone according to plan.  My husband now has to go into work Saturday morning for a meeting that he cannot get out of.  We didn't anticipate this and had been talking about going to Syracuse Friday for the rite, getting a hotel, and staying for Pagan Pride.   Bugger!  A part of me really wants to go to the rite anyway.  It's something I've never seen before and I want to learn more about it!  Yet the driving...  An hour and a half down, an hour and a half back.  Then the next day we would do the same thing!

"But Grey," you chime in, "don't you deserve to go?  Don't you have every right to further your knowledge?  It's not that bad of a drive."

Yes, I know...  But there's a part of me that would feel like a huge hypocrite.  Druidism, to me, is very Earth-centric.  I work so hard to make sustainable choices.  If I do so much driving for selfish reasons, it seems spiritually counter-productive.  It practically negates everything else I do...  We recently figured out how many miles my husband drives to work every week and it's depressing.  We really need to move between our two places of employment.

It's not that bad if I miss the rite...  I'm hopeful that I'll get the opportunity to see something like it in the future and learn more then.  And as long as Weretoad's meeting gets done in time, I should be able to make the two workshops Lafayllve is giving then - one on Ásatrú and the other on deepening relationships with Goddesses - in her case, Freyja.  It just stinks.  I'm so often faced with these transportation dilemmas.  I'm hoping to get a second car soon so that I have more freedom - freedom to pursue grad school and other areas of interest.  Even so...  it's so much pollution and so much driving...

I'm so ready for mass public transportation in the US now.



*Well...almost any...


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