Ebony's Pearls

Rune Rock
Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/02/AR2009060200770.html?hpid%3Dsmartliving&sub=AR

“Food can be a beautifully communal experience, whether you're cooking for friend, relative, spouse or lover. But it also can (and should) be gloriously self-sustaining, and to treat the topic of solo cooking as a mere practical dilemma can mean missing out on the freedom and satisfaction it can bring.”

He’s talking about food, but this could as easily be translated to Numenism and our long-standing dilemma of single people wanting to become Numenist Celebrants. We’ve been treating it as a practical problem when we should instead have held true to our nature and looked at it as a celebratory one.

Doh!

We were (are, can’t say we’ve changed yet when we’ve actually done nothing) locked into the model and concept of Numenism as a community activity.

Yes, it is best done communally, in groups between 2 and 50 (any larger and someone gets lost). But maybe celebrating solo isn’t such a bad thing? In our society, we move a lot. I read an article yesterday or the day before about how we are so mobile that even those who live in the same place all their lives will still end up having lost half their friends and gained a new set of friends about every 7 years or so. It’s rare to hold on to friendships and relationships with people outside your immediate household (not House) because of this fluidity in our society. I suppose it seems a bit unreasonable to assume we Numenists can buck that trend.

"All the rules get broken. It doesn't matter how much we know about food, how to cook, what's good for us, healthy eating, all that kind of stuff we hear about all the time so endlessly. People go into the kitchen and they cook something that doesn't have anything to do with that, mostly. It might have to do with a kind of sentiment or with pure ease.” – Deborah Madison, one of the authors of “What We Eat When We Eat Alone” and founding chef of Greens restaurant.

Yanno, we could apply this to Numenism with superlative ease. Numenism is an open source religion that has few “rules”, and there’s no reason for some of them other than that’s the way it’s always been, that’s what the founders envisioned, and it was developed to be a group religion, not a solo one. Why are we clinging to these things? The important things about Numenism don’t have to revolve around family and community – and even at that, single people can still have family and community within the Numenist context without the other people also needing to be Numenist or to participate in Numenist Celebrations.

In fact, many Numenist Celebrations can proceed in layers – the Numenist spiritual layer that supports all Numenist Celebrations, the deeper pattern layer that underlies the supports, the pretty eye-candy layer that partakes of both secular and spiritual symbology, and the festive party layer that includes all in range. Not everyone has to participate in or even know about the other layers in a Numenist Celebration which is why a First ‘Mater Day Celebration can include the whole neighborhood when only our home is Numenist. We’ve never seen this as a problem except when we tried to address the single Numenist.

Why?

Because we’re too caught in the models and patterns of the past to see the individual threads?

As Suzanne Pirret, author of “The Pleasure’s All Mine: Selfish Food for a Modern Life”, says: “Cooking for yourself doesn't need to be about self-deprivation or about you're-not-worth-anything-better recipes.” And so it is with Numenism – Celebrating alone doesn’t have to be a state of deprivation. It can be as fulfilling, spiritual and beautiful (or simple) as you desire.

It’s not the trappings. Numenism isn’t and shouldn’t be about the visible layer. Sixty plus years, and we haven’t learned that. Boy are our Christian and Wiccan roots showing!

I’ll repeat because it’s so important – Numenism is not about the trappings, not the ritual formats, the traditions, or anything that catches and locks us into “because it’s so”. And yet, we fell into that trap anyway.

We Elders are all in an uproar over this because we’ve been so careful to nurture and safeguard the foundations of Numenism that we’ve blindly walked into a trap that limits Numenism in ways it was never meant to be limited. Sure, there are limits. There have to be simply because our corporeal forms hold us to those limits. But – as we’ve seen with athletes and heroes, those limits can be superseded and eventually, what was once incredible to us is now only a rung towards our fuller potentials. Limits, yes, but limits whose boundaries can expand at need and as we grow and gain more skills and knowledge.

So, if you don’t have family, friends, or community local to you where you can Celebrate, don’t sweat it. You can Celebrate solo. You really can. Just because we Elders didn’t advocate it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. We’re Elders in a comparatively new religion. I guess screw-ups are inevitable. Shame on us if we don’t learn from them and incorporate that learning.

How many people have we dismissed from Numenism over the years because we were stupid and blind and caught in one pattern? Far too many.

So, ignore all our previous rhetoric over how Numenism is a religion of groups, and we’ll sit over here in this corner and discuss beautiful and fulfilling ways to Celebrate Numenism as a solo person until we've learned thoroughly and completely not to get stuck in one image of Numenism ever again.

If you’d like to share your experiences as a solo Numenist, please do – we need all the input we can get so we can make sure this mistake, at least, never happens again.