Digital artist journal page by Connla Freyjason for Iaconagraphy, using our upcoming ArtLife set of digital assets, by Frances and Connla.
May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your spiritual life, filled with the life-giving energy of inspiration, will brim over with hope!
I began my arduous search for the God of green hope in February of 2016, following the realization that I had become hopeless. Clearly, Jesus wasn’t “that guy”, because He and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms by that point. Lleu Llaw Gyffes wasn’t “that guy”, either, even though I had considered myself a practicing Druid for a number of years previously. So I began my dive into the Norse Tradition, in hopes of finding “that guy” there.
I had been a “weekend Druid”, but I was anything but a “weekend Heathen”. From the very start, my journey down the Norse Path led me to daily prayer, weekly blots, and active participation in my newfound Faith. By June of 2016, I had finally begun to “feel better”, but I still hadn’t fully recovered my hope, nor had I met the God of Green Hope. A year on, in February of 2017, I still had not found Him/Her/It, and those feelings of quiet desperation began to slowly seep back in, this time compounded by my inability to figure out the “riddle” within that verse that I had been given.
The truth of it was this: I couldn’t find the God of Green Hope because I was looking in all the wrong places. I was looking outside, when I should have been looking within.
I am the God of Green Hope. You are the God of Green Hope. We are the God of Green Hope.
I automatically hold anyone suspect who says in a serious tone that they are the god of anything. Sure, people may jokingly say things like “I am the god of homemade tacos”, and I’m perfectly fine with that, because it’s a joke. But to claim godhood for oneself smacks of a brand of pretentiousness that I have a difficult time fathoming. It’s part of why I take issue with the writings of Aleister Crowley. Yet, hear me out.
For a full year, I prayed, participated in rituals, researched, and searched, trying to find that one, great, outside source that would fill me up with joy and fill me up with peace as that passage promised. A full year, and yet I still felt that I was hanging on the tree. I looked outside, and outside, and outside, but only on the rarest of occasions did I look within. And even when I did, my focus was on where I fit into our business, rather than on where I fit into the World.
In March of 2017, I finally looked inside. The business was tanking yet again, and as I sat in my office literally crying, it finally dawned on me that doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results is the very definition of insanity. So I decided to do something different: instead of shaking my fist at the heavens, I took a deep, long look within. And I discovered something I definitely didn’t want to discover: I was the problem. The good news was, if I was the problem, I could also be the solution.
Becoming the God of Green Hope:
Stop looking back; you aren’t going that way!
Mistakes and triumphs you’ve experienced in the past are precisely that: in the past. The longer you dwell on either, the more they are allowed to control your present, which in turn leads them to shape your future. Do you want a future shaped by your past mistakes and triumphs, or do you want a future shaped by you, yourself?
Stop mourning, and start celebrating!
Stop mourning all of the things you don’t have, haven’t accomplished, or didn’t do, and instead focus on celebrating what you do have, are accomplishing, and are doing via showing gratitude. You’re likely great at sitting down and making detailed inventories of things to mourn; take that skill, and instead turn it towards making a detailed inventory of all the things about your life that are actually good. These don’t have to be big things! Things for which to be grateful can be as seemingly insignificant as a shockingly blue sky outside your window, or as mindblowing as having your art published on the cover of a popular newsletter or magazine.
While you’re making lists, make one of everything that worries you right now. Read through it, and then discard it, and actually let go.
Worrying is basically looking towards the future with dread, instead of looking towards the future with eager expectancy. We all do it, and we all have done it, and even after you make this list, discard it, and make a conscious decision to let go of those specific worries, the chances are fantastic you will find a whole new list of things to worry about at some point in the future. When that happens, you should repeat this exercise. Worrying is a useless endeavor: all it does is leave you feeling defeated, and make you tired. It actually accomplishes nothing, so why keep doing it?
Rediscover joy.
The marrow of what we really want out of life is locked inside the bones of those things which bring us joy. Make a third list: a list of everything in your life, no matter how big or small, that actually sparks joy in you. In case it’s been so long that you’ve forgotten what joy even feels like, these would be things that create a sense of well-being for you; things that make you feel successful or fortunate; things that make you deeply happy or cause you to brim with delight. Your gratitude list might be a helpful jump-off point for creating this list. Once you have your list, take some time to actually spend time with these joy-sparkers.
Realize that you are enough.
Re-engage with yourself. The first question too many of us ask when attempting to “find ourselves” is “am I worthy?” That is an adversarial tone, and we all know what such a tone gets us when we’re talking about exterior human relationships, right? So why do we think it will go differently with interior ones? Think about it like this: let’s say you’ve just met a new person with whom you’re considering building a friendship. What would happen if, upon first meeting them, you introduced yourself by saying “I’m me, and I’m wondering if you’re worthy of being my friend”? That likely wouldn’t go over terribly well, now, would it? They would likely find you rude and pretentious, and they wouldn’t be wrong. So why do we approach our selves that way? The simple answer: we shouldn’t. Enough means “occurring in such a quantity, quality, or scope as to fully meet demands, needs, or expectations.” If you are enough, that means that you are capable of meeting whatever life throws at you halfway. Look around at your life: you’ve made it this far. You’re still breathing; you’re still sitting here reading this. If you’ve made it this far, that is empirical proof that you are enough, and enough is the first important step towards plenty: a large or sufficient amount or quality; more than enough.
Once you have found the God of Green Hope within you, you should start experiencing more joy and peace in your life. You may find that you need to do these exercises multiple times–I certainly did–and there’s no shame in that. Don’t worry if you don’t immediately feel as though you have been filled up with joy and peace; that will come with time. This is just the beginning, and we’ll discuss where to go from here in the next blog post in this series.
Connla Hundr Lung (formerly Freyjason) is the creator and founder of Heidhr Craft, a Vitki and Freyjasgodhi, and the author of Norse Witch: Reclaiming the Heidhrinn Heart and Blessings of Fire and Ice: A Norse Witch Devotional. Dead and Pagan for almost thirty years, he tends to view his status as a channeled spirit as “the elephant in the room that everyone actually wants to talk about”. However, he would much rather be regarded as a man with a valuable voice; a man who has something worthwhile to say, via both his art and his writing. He just happens to also be a man, like most men, who got where he is right now through considerable help from very dear friends and loved ones. Though raised Taoist with a strong Protestant backbeat, for the past two decades of his afterlife, Connla has explored various Pagan paths, including Wicca, Kemeticism, and Welsh Reconstructionist Druidry, before settling into Vendel (Scandinavian) Witchcraft. A General Member of the Temple of Witchcraft in Salem, New Hampshire, and a self-educated student of Archaeology, Connla currently resides in Massachusetts, along with his “hostess-with-the-mostest”, Michelle, and his Beloved, Suzanne. He is owned by two cats, Kili Freyjason and Lady Blueberry Cheesecake of the Twitchy Tail, and enjoys cooking, home-making, paper-crafting, crochet, serving his Gods and Goddesses, trying to make the world a more compassionate place, and learning as much as he possibly can about those things which spark his passions.
