Who’da thunk that having a cuppa joe would have emotional impact, huh?

In the last six months or so, people from the northeast Ohio area who met on Pagan Nation have been getting together once a month for “coffee.” Last night, there were a half dozen or so of us sitting around, and I thought to myself… we need this more, and our young people need this more.

We… the pagan community at large… has become even more isolated than ever before, regardless of how many advances in communication technology we’ve had in the last fifteen to twenty years. Yes, more information is available on line… as are internet communities such as PN or TPC. However, as much as many of us have claimed they do in the past, these internet communities do not replace face to face interaction and fellowship. The keep us removed from it! We are all so eclectic now that we convince ourselves that no one will ever think the way we do, so we should all be solitary to preserve our own uniqueness, and in the mean time, we are forgetting (if we ever knew) how much face to face human interaction can teach and give us.

Our young people are growing up in this insular world, thinking that this is the norm for pagan fellowship. What ends up happening is that, in their drive to fill an empty void, they get sucked in to groups or pseudocovens based on fantasy characters out of fiction novels, with no real sense or idea of this world, this plane of existence, this life.

All this from a cuppa joe last night, with some amazing humans that think vastly differently than I, at least spiritually, but with whom I find much common ground and mutual affection.