Wyrd-Worker's Monthly: June 2022 Newsletter
Another month has come and gone and it’s time to send out another update of what’s been going on. This newsletter is probably going to be more personal than the previous ones because June was quite a month for me. Let’s get into it.
My Mother’s Health
I was distracted for most of the first half of the month by my mother going through a health crisis. I won’t go into much detail out of respect for her privacy, but let’s just say she spent about twelve days in the hospital. No, not for COVID. For something equally serious, though.
The good news is that she’s now out of the hospital and is currently at home with my father. Also, my sister came up to spend some time with her and help take care of her. The hope now is that my mother’s health will continue to improve through occupational and physical therapy over the next several weeks to few months. So with this distraction over, I hope to get more active again.
I’m Forty-Eight Years Old
This month also saw my forty-eighth birthday. I tend not to make a huge deal about my birthday, but the fact that I’m not getting any younger does seem to occur to me more often when my birthday rolls around. In two more years, I’ll be half a century old and that just boggles my mind. As I said on Twitter at one point, when did I become an adult? It seems like such a raw deal.
Pride Month
June is Pride Month, which is semi-important to LGBTQIA+ people like me. I didn’t do a lot for it, as my local Pride isn’t actually into mid-to-late July. This does not mean that pride is not an important aspect of my life and identity. I’d say it’s even an important part of my religious and magical practice. After all, to me at least, central to Freyja’s nature is the call to be true to oneself and unapologetically so. As I wrote in my invocation to her:
Oh queen who gained the powerful Brisingamen through your own sexual power and means, teach us to be unapologetically ourselves, true to our own ideals above all else.
And who knows, maybe someday I’ll actually go ahead and establish the Bifrost Brigade. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve joked about doing so.
Another Podcast Interview
James Prescott over at the Poema podcast released my interview with him on the 20th. This was actually the second interview I’ve given. James interviewed me before Meghan Crozier and Cortland Coffey interviewed me for the Thereafter podcast, but they had a shorter backlog of episodes and got that interview out before James. Either way it was an enjoyable experience.
As an aside, for those curious, the first interview I ever gave was with Wormhole Matt on the Wormhole Manifest podcast. I don’t know if there will be any more after this. I guess it depends on whether other podcast hosts hear about me and think I’d bring something to their show.
YouTube Videos
On June 1, I released a video where I discussed exploring the thinking behind “bad” or “silly” questions and how there’s often a legitimate need hiding behind them. Or maybe it’s just an assumption that’s worth exploring. At any rate, I shared how I used to be much more dismissive of certain questions in the past, but would rather explore them and the reason they’re being asked (assuming they’re not just plain being asked in bad faith) these days.
I partly did that video to encourage people to ask questions they worried wouldn’t be “good enough” for my first ever live “Ask the Wyrd-Worker” event on June 8. Despite the technical difficulties (like the fact that I was “on air” for twelve minutes before I found out my sound wasn't working), I felt it went pretty well. All the questions actually came from my husband Joe, so I hope the next such event will be more widely attended and include questions from other people. I haven’t decided whether the next one will bein July or August though. Provided I can come up with a different idea for a live event in July, I’m thinking I’ll wait until August.
The edited version of the event can be found here, by the way.
Tweets and Threads of Note
Because it’s pride month, a lot of Southern Baptists felt it necessary to comment on the “morality” of same sex relationships and LGBTQIA+ people. I occasionally reminded them that, given recent revelations about their denomination, they really should shut up about other people’s alleged “sexual immorality.” I mean, I also had strong feelings about the SBC leader that complained all the talk about the abuse in the denomination was “interfering with its mission.” And these are the people who think they have any business criticizing queer people’s ethics?
I also expressed some complicated feelings about affirming churches using Pride month as a recruitment opportunity. And I had commentary about Owen Strachan’s weird use of the term “neo-paganism.” Good old Owen: redefining words like he’s Humpty Dumpty.
That’s All for June
It’s been a hectic month. Here’s hoping for a more regular July. See you on or around the 31st! Or feel free to find me on YouTube, TikTok, or Twitter before then!