Hello, dear friends. It’s been about five years since my last update. I started this blog in 2010, the same year I picked the nickname Sage to identify myself in Pagan and polytheist spaces. I don’t think of it as my “spiritual name” so much as yet another name to call myself in a different online space. Sage has stuck (as has the dad joke levels of my introduction: “I’m Sage, like the plant, not the smart person!”) and Brighid has stuck and my call to priesthood has stuck, when so much else has changed in my life.

Instead of a recap, I want to focus on the year ahead. I am going to journal, either here or in an actual physical diary, as often as I can this year. My impulse is to promise every day, but I am trying to let my impulses guide me rather than take control. More broadly I am dedicating myself to myself this year. I’ve had so many signals from the universe that It Is Time – time to get my house in order, time to take responsibility for my place in the web of life, time to seriously ask the questions Who are you? And what are you going to do about it? (Shout-out to Ariana Serpentine, author of Sacred Gender and dear friend of mine, for these two questions linked together which started a small revolution in my heart.

I’ve been asking myself for years what it means to be called to priesthood. I have a few scattered, often contradictory answers that I’ve gleamed from divination, talking with beloved and trusted friends, dreams, an intuition. Every answer leads to more questions until I’ve been overwhelmed and unable to see a path forward or back. So I’d let it sit and go back to whatever else I was doing. (Surviving. I’ve been surviving. And that, too, is part of the questions and the Work.) But I am trying out patience and compassion and comfort with being uncomfortable this go around. Instead of berating myself for not making ‘progress’ – what even is that, anyway? – I am trying to come back to my breath, where everything is centered and in which everything is contained. Can I sit with failure, doubt, criticism, fear, trauma, despair? Can I hold these things in my hands and say no, things are not okay, but that doesn’t mean I have to deny myself this moment?

To do this, I need to reallocate resources. Badly.

At the height of my depression and anxiety this year, the average time spent on my phone was 6.5 hours a day. Added to this the time I spent doomscrolling on social media on my laptop, before and after work, stuck in the cycle of doing things without actually getting anything done. My job is emotionally and physically taxing. I have not been taking care of myself the way I need to be. I’ve been smothering a constant unease by chasing hits of dopamine. I’m not talking about genuinely enjoying time off doing things that make me happy – video games, for example, bring me such joy – but getting lost in the algorithm and letting myself be a passenger in my own head. Whenever there’s a break or change in routine, I found myself reverting to habits that have always brought me peace: writing, drawing, reading, cooking, keeping an altar, sitting with my thoughts. Every time I promise myself I would try to bring that peace with me back to “the real world” and every time I feel like I’ve failed.

Only, what if the failure has been the point all along?

What if the rightful answer to a question is another question?

What can I learn from the environment that sustains me and how can I use that to understand my vocational call, here and now?

There’s a lot to do this year and I’m excited to get started. To kick it off, I’ve finally bought a domain for this blog. We are now a dot com, and we’re going to be shaking things up here over the next few weeks.

Thank you, everyone who’s ever read this blog, who’s ever known me, who is with me still. 2024 is going to be our year.

Sage