#Ár nDaíocht Féin

[themodernsouthernpolytheist]

I've made contact with one of 2 local CUUPs chapters...

They're about 35 minutes from me. I tried to contact the chapter that's closer to me, but the email listed on the CUUPs website is an old aol account that returned the email. The further chapter is gonna be at Pagan Pride, so I'll ask them about it next week, too. Does anyone have a lot of experience with their local CUUPs? I know @bogganbeliefs does. Anyone else?

I'm also seriously considering lookin into ADF. Anyone have experience there? From what I'm gathering, the only local grove is Pan-Indo-European and has some issues, but I've also caught wind of possibly a new grove that's more recon-focused forming sometime soon. I know @bywandandsword has some experience there (how have you liked it?!), but any other thoughts?

[themodernsouthernpolytheist]

I went to Atlanta Pagan Pride today.

It was really interesting! I was super uncomfortable at first, not knowin anyone and some type of anxiety that flared up as I got there. Speakin of which, the parking for the event was in a Missionary Baptist church and the event itself was in a Quaker Friends Meeting House! I thought that was really cool and it made me smile. 

So, I wandered around the booths for a while. Most of them were stuff for sale, which I didn’t have the money and/or the need for, so I lighted in the meeting room and listened to some poetry and retellings of Greek myths from Alena Sullivan that I super enjoyed. She’s an MFA student, though I didn’t catch where, and y’all should definitely take a gander if you’re into that. 

After that, I went to the Grove of the Red Earth ADF ritual. I’ll start with the positives here. As a Grove, they honored Demeter, Sif, and Tailtiu, so it was an interesting way to celebrate this time of year. It was also nice to see Tailtiu honored because I feel like she gets left out a lot, often cause people’ve never even heard of her. I also loved that they provided offering materials for everyone present (bread, water, and herbed olive oil) and had three methods of offerings (water, burial, and fire - though the final acts would have to be done later because of the rules of the Meeting House). They also gave an invitation and time for everyone to come up and make their offerings, then handed out blessed water for a group libation, which was cool. 

But the ritual was also a little too freeform for me. The folks leadin were readin from paper and it didn’t seem well-rehearsed and that kills a lot of the vibe for me. The people randomly chattering didn’t help, but I understood given the amount of time it took for everyone to go through the ritual offerings. But, because of all that time take, the ritual itself was like...maybe 15 minutes? I’d like to see another of their rituals and my understanding is they have public ones every so often, so I may try again. 

After the ritual, there was a class on diversity and inclusion in Pagan spaces. This is RIGHT up my alley. One of the facilitators was a prof at UGA and the other her student in the Feri Tradition. It was a cool intro into why Pagan spaces are so white based on history and that took a whole hour, lol. I’m sure we could’ve taken the day and still had more to discuss. But we exchanged emails and I really hope we can get somethin off the ground. 

I also got to talk a bit more to someone from the local CUUPs group and get a little more info. They’re havin a dinner thing in a couple weeks that I think I’m gonna go to and that should be fun. I’m really wantin to take advantage of the size and population of Atlanta while I’m here and I really hope this pans out.