Sevenfold Silence

There's a guest post about personal experiences in pagan blogging over at the pagan blog The Wild Hunt that tweaked me. Paganism isn't otherkin, and otherkin isn't paganism, but the two are interwoven for a lot of people, so it caught my eye in the context of Sevenfold Silence.

The heart of the post is:

Don't give me your ideas on Pagan life, my sisters and brothers. I have ideas enough of my own. And don't give me answers, because ours is a religious movement with hundreds of answers, thousands of answers.

Give me your experience. Give me the marrow and the meat of your spiritual life. Because, unless you write it down, no one else ever will. Only from you can I receive this gift: your own lived Pagan journey.

And here, I'm thinking, is a key difference between the pagan community and the otherkin community (other than the obvious): where pagans talk about ideas and play their personal experiences close to the vest, otherkin talk about personal experiences and play their ideas close to the vest. There's much more chatter about the symptoms of being otherkin, the everyday reality of it, how different you feel, than there is about where we come from, what we're here for, how we can function.

Each of these has a place but I think, personally, that the personal side of otherkin is overplayed. Sharing personal experience is great! But drawing commonalities between experience, attempting to create (and break) generalizations--that's more fun, I think, and far more productive.

I think we're scared, as a subculture, to talk ideas and make the necessary generalizations to do that. We are all so rabidly individual, and potentially so very different from each other, that it gets hard to talk ideas. But I think that just chatting experience is part of why the otherkin community's gone so silent. There's only so much you can draw from "sometimes I feel like I have a tail and scales" (for instance), and only slightly more from "sometimes I feel this--does anybody else?"

But even something mild like "I think that sometimes I feel like I have a tail and scales, because of x y and z, and it usually happens to me during a b and c--can anyone relate?"--that has room for discussion. It puts the speaker in the crossfire, potentially, and it creates potential for controversy and disagreement. But without taking a stand you can't have a real conversation going.

I make a fair number of posts of a personal nature here on this blog. I try not to, generally, and I space 'em out when I make 'em, because there isn't much room for discussion with that, and honestly if I used this blog as a place to describe my own, very peculiar personal experience with otherkin I think that would border on the masturbatory.

I'm much, much more interested in stripping away the personal experience and, yes, sometimes the poetry from the otherkin experience, and getting to the heart of the matter--big ideas, theories, and experimentation.