Blog Post Title Two
The Importance of Community
(Quick side note....there is only one private room left for our event. All others are the smaller shared bedrooms. If you feel strongly about having a private room, please snatch it up before it's gone, or if it's gone when you read this, please contact us.)
Hi everyone! Welcome to our first “newsletter.” We thought we would let you know about the Spirit of Hearthstone and ourselves a little bit, and let everyone know what our intentions are for this community. Then it was pointed out to me that not all of you are involved in the Shamanic community, and discussions of Spirits or Guides might not be as clear to some of you, so a quick introduction on that is in order.
Animism is a pretty clear, and roughly well-known thing if you’re even the slightest bit Witchy or Otherworldly. People have different mindsets around it, like say “all natural things, things created without human intervention, have a spirit attached to them of some kind,” while others say, “No, some human-made creations also have a spirit attached to them,” and still others say, “It’s not that the spirit is ‘attached,’ any more than your spirit is ‘attached’ to your body. It’s more like the spirit IS the thing.”
We’re not here to tell you what you should think. That’s part of your own journey down this lovely and beautiful rabbit-hole of a path. We’re here to let you know what WE think, and we hope that you are interested in that, or want to learn more about that. In this moment I am speaking for all three founders of Hearthstone Community, Marcela, Jessica, and myself. (More on us on the “about the founders” page if you care to look, but it’s really not required.) All three of us believe that many things have spirits, plants, stones, people, animals. I’m not sure where all three of us fall on the human-made scale (I mean, I name my vehicles…I don’t always feel they have a spirit though. Some do more than others.) I know that some things do not have spirits in them, and we can ask spirits to inhabit them for specific jobs, but we don’t hold them there, and it’s voluntary. Spirits are family to us, and we treat them with respect and kindness, just like our teachers taught us to do.
Spirits do not exist in a vacuum, there is an entire ecosystem in the Otherworlds (which is the word we use to refer to the non-material worlds) and there are predators and prey in that world just as there are in ours. When a cat eats a mouse, we don’t consider the cat to be evil…we consider the cat to be hungry, and it is the natural order of things. There is nothing in these worlds that are unnatural to us…except maybe us, as visitors. (That’s a personal thought of mine, Mowgli. I haven’t talked to the others about it, so I don’t want to give you the opinion that that they feel that way as well. They may, but I don’t know for certain, and honestly, that thought just occurred to me as I was typing, so I may not feel that way by the time you read this, lol.)
Anyway, the point is that the job of a Shaman is to help their community, and the tools of the Shaman include Spirits….although a better word than “tools” would be “co-workers.” We work together to do healing work for our community, and we do this through our training with our teachers and our guides and our ancestors.
We do not consider this to be magical work (personally I have stopped using the “k” in magic for reasons you can ask me about in person or via email if you care to know. It’s not really germane to this topic) and instead look at it as Otherworld work or Spirit work. Magical work involves ritual, spellcasting, energy raising/throwing, etc., and although we know how to do some or all of those things (I’m speaking for three people, so the answers are varied) it is not where we are at this point in our journey.
So an Animist is aware of the various Spirits that inhabit various things, and a Shaman actually WORKS with those Spirits to accomplish goals to help their community. Not everyone is called to do Shamanic work. Not all of our work is Shamanic. Some of us have our roots in Wicca, and have a deep love and respect for it, and others have come to the Shamanic path through other means. Some of us aren’t even sure what this all means to us in the future. (Does this mean I have to live in a hut in the woods and live off the land or something? No. No, it does not. But I am amazed by how long I ran from this thinking that it would.)
Part of Shamanic training is learning to listen to Spirit, to learn how to discern between what is an actual message from a Spirit, and what is us telling ourselves what we want to hear. Part of that is learning how to find a spirit and forge a relationship. Part of that is determining who is trustworthy and who is not. (Surprise! It’s just like people, because we are spirits in human bodies.) Not all people are trustworthy, neither are all spirits. Shadow work and boundaries are super important. Etc., etc.
When we formed the idea of Hearthstone, we didn’t know we were going to get a Spirit to come along with it. She just kind of happened because the thing we are trying to create is what her purpose is. She encourages this and wants us to succeed. Spirits like our Ancestors used to be human, they know what it’s like to be sick, or have to pay rent, or to worry about your family. Not all spirits know those things, because not all of them have had bodies…so sometimes the messages they give come across as harsh, or demanding. They are understanding, though. You can tell them things like, “I can’t do that. Is there something else I can do instead?” and that usually works.
Side Note: One of the rules we learn when working with Spirit is, if your guides tell you something three times, you have to deliver the message. Sometimes we get a message for a person and we’re like, “hell no. I am not telling them that,” and we change the subject. If the message comes again, we can try to avoid it a second time, but if it comes a third time, it’s important, and we have to deliver the message, so we do. I tell you this because…well….I’ll tell you at the end of this article. Promise. End Side Note.
The Hearthstone Spirit has told us that she has been around since two people gathered to tell stories over a fire…and in my imagination that sounds pretty prehistoric. As you may know yourself (or not) from your workings with Spirit, as students of the world we tend to feel we know things, or we tend to make assumptions, and I am no exception to that. So I said, “Oh yeah, People gathered together in community to share their stuff! That’s awesome!”
“Not at first,” she said. “At first it was for protection. The fire offered protection and light and they gathered together because of Fear. But that is not Community.”
Hearthstone told me, “Community is created by the sharing of stories. It is created by the sharing of work. Without the sharing of stories it is only people gathered together in a crowd. Community can only be created by community. You cannot be a part of community and stand outside of it. You have to partake of it, to expose or risk yourself in some way so that your energies blend together. Without that, you are just people in the same place.”
She is a very wise spirit.
Most of us have some sort of job to provide for our own sustenance. Most of us are in “Mundania” for that job where we have to act “normally” and put our spirituality on the side for the time period that we are there. Many of us don’t have a spiritual community local to us, and because of that Mundania creeps in and takes its toll. We can forget the amazing things that happen to us because we don’t have anyone to speak it out loud to. We can write it down and re-read it ad nauseum, but without someone to share our wonder, it feels a little empty. And maybe it feels less real.
Part of the reason we need to share is that we need to see the wonder reflected in other people’s eyes to really feel seen. It’s a rule that crosses many emotional aspects of being human. For example, if we feel Shame, the best cure for it, and I mean the absolute best cure for it is to confess our shame to someone while we can see their face. To see them weep for us, or hurt for us, or forgive us, or to realize that they don’t understand why such a thing is shameful…to see those things on another human’s face is what takes the wind out of the sails of Shame. It takes bravery to expose our shame, but the rewards are great.
Community is also a repository of knowledge. It’s hard to come by good information borne from experience. Our Elders have that in droves (and most of them would LOVE to share that information so it isn’t lost) but it is hard for them to travel sometimes. Community gives them an opportunity to speak once to many people, and it gives us an opportunity to ask questions and be validated. Sometimes weird things happen in the Otherworlds and we don’t have an explanation. I told someone once I was driving down the highway and I saw a young dragon on the back of a flatbed. There was a bulldozer on the flatbed and the dragon, a slightly chubby red thing, was on its hind legs investigating and smelling the smells. Their response to me was, “Yeah…sometimes the adolescent ones get curious about machines.”
It’s one thing to not be told you’re crazy, and another thing completely to have your information taken as completely normal. Community brings you that. It’s becomes normalized as dinner table conversation….Pass the salt, please.
Community can be a comfort in your grief. If your grieving rituals are not the standard rituals of the “Big Three” faiths, having to go through them alone can be devastating. To have your community respond with, “Hail the Traveler!” cannot heal your pain, but it can let you know that you are not alone, and that they will be there for you when you are ready to speak. To know that they will be willing to all write letters to the departed and burn them with you without once saying, “this is weird.” It can offer a piece of closure you could not get otherwise. Community “gets it.”
The Hearthstone is the base of your fireplace. It offers protection by being a heat sink to help protect your home. Some people will cook on a Hearthstone, so it can offer nutrition. The warmth will spread to your home, so people would gather around it, tell stories or juicy gossip, or just draw comfort for old bones. Dogs and cats would curl in front of it. People would knit or read in front of it. It provides stability and is easily the center of a home.
Our hope for the Hearthstone Community is that it will provide all of those things. Our gatherings will focus on an exchange of knowledge that you would be hard pressed to get in other places. We will be reviewing healing work of many kinds, dealing with Spirit and Spirits and figuring out how to strengthen those relationships with our guides and work, venturing to and through the Otherworlds, and listening to and for guides and our higher selves. We will share magical knowledge with each other and learn new things. Spider reminds me (I work a lot with Spider) that we will be forging connections because we are all part of the web. Our connections to each other will make us all strong together.
The Hearthstone Spirit laughs and says we were all strong already…that the nature of following the path of Spirit requires strength to begin with because it defies the norm, but that together we are something larger, that joy is multiplied, and that together we are protected…which is why, she reminds me, people gathered to the fire in the first place.
I’m not sure I understand all of it yet. I know that I trust my guides and Spirits, and I trust the Hearthstone spirit, I trust Spider, and the Guides and Spirits of my co-founders, and they have led us to this place to be together at this time. They have led us to create a website and rent a house, (this house specifically) and make all of this happen. Every step along this way has been blessed in so many ways it’s an embarrassment of riches. We are grateful to our guides and spirits, and to you who have heeded the call.
Because Hearthstone told us she would find you, that she would speak to the guides of the people who were meant to be part of this to bring you here to be with us. We trust her. I find that, the more I am willing to go out on a limb for Spirit, the more Spirit is willing to catch me.
So that thing I said I would put at the end….about the messages three times. The Hearthstone Community Spirit literally told us she is sending messages to your guides and ancestors. Basically she’s lighting a beacon…I’ve made a joke several times about, “Gondor calls for aid! The Beacon is Lit!” because I’m a geek, but the imagery holds…She has lit the beacon, she put out the Bat Signal, she turned on the Lighthouse light, all so you could find safe harbor with us. She specifically showed me a wall of symbols that said, “These are the symbols of the guides of the people you haven’t met yet that are meant to be part of this community. I will tell them to come.”
If you get the message from your guides that you should be here...If you get that message three times…then you should come. Disregard any insecurities about your skill level or abilities. If you are meant to be here, you are meant to be here, and all that will get cleared up quickly. If you don’t get the message three times you’re still more than welcome to come, but if you DO…then you are meant to be here.
I don’t know who you are, but I’ll have a big ol’ hug waiting for you when you arrive.
Welcome to the Hearthstone Community. We hope it feels like Home in your heart the way it feels to us. We want to create something beautiful and educational and spiritual and evolving for all of us.
So mote it be!
Mowgli Recckia, for the Founders of Hearthstone Community.
(Our intention is to post an article every other week or so written by someone in our community. If you have a topic you would like us to write about, or if you yourself would like to write an article, send an email to Founders@Hearthstonecommunity.org and we’ll take a look. We can’t promise we’ll use it, but we can promise we will consider it.)