Blessings

Amazingly, with all the meetings, rituals, classes, work and everything else I managed to fill up my schedule with, we have now added moving to our schedule. Makes me wish I had not become such a packrat over the last few years. I've been slowly working on cleaning out stuff as time allowed but now it is just clean it out and make quick decisions and dump it.

This is one of those times when you sit back and look around and ask yourself what is the lesson here? What is the gift here? What is the blessing here? Sometimes they are hard to find. I love my house and am having to move. The place we found to move is really nice and cute but quite a bit smaller than our current home so I'm having to make some tough decisions on furniture and other belongings. My cats are not going to have the screened in porch they love so much and the yard won't have the nice large space for circle I have now. We will be driving at least 5 times further to work eating up more gas.

So, what is the blessing? The blessing is that the house we are in now has a mold issue. I have breathing issues so living with the mold is a problem. The blessing is that we are moving from a neighborhood where we don't know anyone to a neighborhood that has one of my best friends moving to it. The blessing is that we will be paying significantly less. I might even be able to work my way back to working from home again. In retrospect, we probably should have done this before now but I am a big believer in all things come in the time they are meant to. This is how we learn the lessons we need to learn. So here's to my new lessons and challenges.

Today I being making offerings of thanks for the blessings of finding this home we've found and thanks that it is located so close to people I care about so much. Thanks for letting me find a landlord that was so easy to work with about my cats. I could never have given up such important members of my family. Thanks for my husband that works so hard to not give me a hard time about all the stuff I have and actually manages to make it seem like he has sympathy over me having to get rid of some of it. :) Thanks to the wonderful friends that have jumped in to offer assistance and love. Life is really good. My reality is really good.

Atlanta Pagan Leadership Roundtable

One of the most promising things I've seen happening in the local Pagan community is the birth of the Atlanta Pagan Leadership Roundtable.  It apparently was started early this year with a few leaders in the community that thought it would be a good idea for the local leaders to start getting together and sharing news of upcoming community events and resources.  I heard about it for the first time at the Atlanta Pagan Marketplace of Ideas at Sweetwater Creek State Park.  Someone there had a sign-up sheet at their table.  I'm always looking for new ways to network within the community and meet more people.  I signed up and made sure that the person I was with signed up as well.  Frankly, with the crowd that was there and all the new people I met that day I promptly forgot about it.

I received an email a several weeks later advising that the most recent meeting was being rescheduled.  I started paying closer attention and made sure that I was signed up and my calendar was cleared for the next meeting.  The next meeting was going to be a good hour and 1/2 drive from my neck of the woods so I posted to see if anyone from our area was going that wanted to ride.  As much as I would like to drive a hybrid or something a little more "green", my current vehicle is a minivan with the perfect monthly payment of zero.  So that "green" vehicle will have to wait until I can afford to make that change.  The seats quickly filled up.

I was so pleased when we arrived to find that this idea was really taking off.  There must have been 40-50 people there and I recognized people from several different groups/covens/churches.  I'm sure there were groups represented there that I didn't recognize as well.  There was a really professional presentation put on by that month's host of the meeting, Lady Belladonna of Covenant of W.I.S.E. followed by food and entertainment put together by her church.   The one thing that struck me at the time was watching people that had had problems in the past come together for a common purpose and then socialize after in a respectful and friendly environment.  It was made clear by the attitude at this meeting that our community has the potential to come together and start building some major resources when we put our egos aside and can have fun doing so.

The Roundtable has met once since then.  This time it was all work.  We broke out into smaller groups with discussion topics and goals.  Once these groups had narrowed their discussion down we met back and brought our topics out to the group as a whole.  Everyone was pleased to hear that all four of the smaller groups ended up with very similar ideas, so a consensus on most items on the agenda was easily reached.  We had a potluck after the meeting and all went home hot and tired but feeling like we accomplished something.  We defined the purpose of the group, came up with some workable goals and discussed how the group is going to communicate.

I can't wait to see what we can accomplish together next year.