Patterns, relationships, meaning – my professional life has moved from the world of teaching to one where I spend time trying to wrestle meaning from patterns and relationships from numeric values presented from various reporting methods and tools. As I dig through the material and try to be as neutral as I can with my meaning, other people that I present these findings to will make decisions based on that. Thus, I tread very carefully in the manner in which I try to represent my findings. After all, I want these folks to make up their own mind when deciding how to proceed with a choice.

Life, on the other hand is a little different. Every single day, I am presented with a choice of some sort.  Do I take a coat with me on my way out the door to work? Do I wear a tie to work today or just a polo shirt? What will I eat for lunch?  Dinner?  Which route do I drive to work?  Which route will get me to work on time? And there are a variety of choices for where I get the correlating data to make those choices. And through that data, I try to discern patterns for the rest of today, the rest of the week. Choices, choices, choices.

But one pattern I have noticed since I started working – is that I have found myself getting a little more distant from my own daily practices – and this was leaving me feeling off-balance. Over the last few weeks, I have started adjusting my sleep schedule – so I was up an hour earlier than normal – where I could put back into practice my morning grounding exercises, and find myself watching the morning sunrise again.  This has helped me tremendously, especially keeping me from feeling disconnected at my job.

I have a HUGE office. So large, my boss has started moving in filing cabinets that have been in storage into my office. I don’t really mind – it gets me into a place where I can start putting things into some kind of order – particularly material from the past. But I have no windows. In fact my office could be designated as a tornado shelter, since it is centrally located in the building, and concrete on all sides. Not a bad place to feel secure, but with no windows, I find myself continually yearning to see the outside at various times of the day. Luckily, when I get stuck on pieces of SQL code, I am free to wander the campus – and find myself spending time down around the gazebo that looks out over the campus duck pond (and we do have ducks).

Around this time last year, I was coming away from a highly energetic Pagan Pride Day. It was an amazing feeling to have spent time with so many other Pagans who were so happy. But eventually, I found myself in a position of doubting…who I was, what I was doing, and where I was going spiritually. Now, I find myself a bit cut-off from my practices because of the extreme altered aspect of my work schedule…and I found that all of this…this Paganism….this Druidry…is very much a part of me, more so than I ever thought before.

How does all of that speak to my choices?  My writing?  Yes, even my “professional” writing. Seeing patterns and relationships within data; digging deeper into the data to find the correlating story in the real world that helps explain one perspective or another; showing how one choice may affect another further down the line, or may influence the decision making process of the decision-maker(s). I have a vague understanding of how that takes place, and its an area of observation that I am more keenly aware of.

Perhaps I was a bit naive when I started down the road of Paganism – thinking that this Path was all the individual relationship one has with Nature. Way back when I was bright-eyed, novice Pagan…I saw the “Natural” world as that where the bushes, trees, and tall grasses started – not the area where concrete, asphalt and electrical wiring dotted the landscape in various sizes, shapes, and functions. Slowly, I have started to realize that there are so many more aspects – so many more relationships that I have yet to explore and determine.

As I wander through the patterns, relationships, and roads of what is the world around me – I find that my understand of my belief is so small now, and will be still quite small when I pass beyond the veil. But its about growing who I am – not gathering knowledge, or trying to understand all of it. I am only a single individual in this entire story…and as I raise my voice to tell my story – I join the chorus of the others around me. Just another thread in the pattern…related to all the threads around my in an intimate fashion that I could never begin to express in such a limited forum as this…

…and so I continue my walk, my discovery, my Path…