Well, its the end of another calendar year. 2018 was not the greatest year I have ever had. In early October, I spent eight days in the hospital with pneumonia. After that, I spent the rest of the month and a good chunk of November at home trying to recover. The meds that were prescribed to me put my body into kidney failure, which I am still trying to recover from. In the Summer, I lost both Gizmo and Kaylee to cancers that spread through their bodies like wildfire. Gizmo was difficult because cancer had gotten into her throat, and she had begun to have trouble breathing, as well as eating. Kaylee, on the other hand, had cancer throughout the rest of her body. Even with pain meds, it was obvious that her quality of life was plummeting very quickly. All of that contributed to this being a very low year for me. But I still wrote, and continue to write. I grieve for my two furry children. And I miss the more healthy me from earlier this year. But everything continues forward. Over the past month, Gabby and Raven have been added to the home. Neither of them is Gizmo or Kaylee nor should they be. Nor are they replacements. They are part of my family, and I enjoy having these two kittens in my life. They make life interesting and fun.

Earlier this year, I also brought my podcasting “career” to a close. I was a podcaster for two podcast shows, which ran twelve years total between the two of them. Towards the end of the second podcast – Upon a Pagan Path – I started to realize that many of the folks that were doing shows out there were covering much the same territory I was, and doing it far better than myself. Plus, in my own personal life, I just could not fit enough time into making sure that things were managed in a timely fashion for doing such an endeavor. So, I made the semi-difficult choice to step aside. Do I miss it? Sometimes. I enjoyed the rapport I had with my audience. I definitely miss all of that. But like I said, others do a far better job than I had ever hoped of doing. 

Over the course of this year, not including this post, I wrote sixty-nine times here in the blog. The most popular post for the year wound up being The Morrigan is Not a Valkyrie. A lot of folks have interpreted this in one of two ways – both having a measure of correctness. (1) I do not wish to work with The Morrigan. (2) I had difficulty seeing the difference between The Morrigan and the Valkyrie, where it should have been easy for me to tell the difference. Both are true. The Morrigan scares the shit out of me. I know the commitment it takes to work directly with Her. I have seen it from some of the people I know that do work with Her, even on a casual basis. I prefer the more casual approach I get from Crow and Coyote – though They can be just as intense. As for not being able to tell the difference. Well, in my defense – I don’t work with Celtic or Norse Gods…being able to immediately tell the difference just wouldn’t be in the cards for me.

I did quite a bit of traveling through the year – at least all the way through September. I made it to my third Pantheacon in a row. Now, Pantheacon trips are expensive for me. San Jose, California is not a short trip. And while I do enjoy Pantheacon very much, it is also a scene of chaos, tumultuous energies, and a lot of what I deem as “unnecessary conflict”. For four days, I have to keep my shields up, as it were, as well as find grounding space where I could when I could. Thus, I will be skipping Pantheacon 2019 in the coming year…not just because of the energies, but because of a whole myriad of things that have converged together to make attendance there especially difficult. My trip to Iceland utilized nearly all of my vacation time and my pneumonia recovery time has eaten away a lot of other off-time margins that I had been holding in reserve. I will be making the ADF Imbolc Retreat in Mountain Home (I will be purchasing my attendance package shortly after I post this), as well as the OBOD Gulf Coast Gathering which has become my Spiritual Home. Aside from some possible one-day trips within the region, that will likely be the totality of my travel for the coming year. It is definitely time to bring things to a slower moving pace…and reintegrate with my roots here.

But sixty-nine posts…this works out to 18.90% of the year. Ok. Not that bad for someone who claims that he’s not very good at this. The reality is that I am probably a little better than I really admit. And I could do a far better job of posting as it stands. So, as the new calendar year seems to be a good marker for new goals, I will work towards eighty article posts for the coming year, and twenty poetry type posts as well, and another synopsis for the year post at the end. A total of one-hundred and one posts for the calendar year. I will likely be re-visiting some of the older posts, to come back and flesh out topics a bit more. I will have some newer topics as new off-shoots happen. And all of it will be my perspective.

Remember folks, the point of this blog is to share my perspective, in the hopes that it will let you come to your own conclusions on various topics. Not one single person needs to agree with me on what I write. All I ask is that we respect each other when discussing those differences.

Have a good new year…and remember…be yourself not a projection of what you think others want you to be. You’ll be far happier with who you are…