Branruadh?

For those of you who have no background in the Irish language or even its Scottish cousin, Gaelic, branruadh translates out to "red raven." I selected that name for this blog after I found out that somewhere along the way, I or someone else had already created an account named Lysana (my usual online handle) on Blogger, and either it wasn't me or I no longer have access to the email address that the account is associated with. I came up with it while contemplating what sort of sentiment I was going to bring to this project. It has echoes of the Morrigan, which suits a project that may wind up leading me into confrontational scenarios.

And the flower is a red raven lily. I was poking around Google's image search feature when I found out such a thing exists. I also found two superheroes and a lot of bars. Go figure.

Faith, paganism, and blogging

Chasing the Dragon's Tale's Paul Chenoweth noted in his short summation of the faith-based blogger panel at BlogNashville that such work is in its infancy. La Shawn Barber, a fundamentalist Christian blogger, noted the presence of "non-evangelicals, a Jew, and someone who may be a theist" at the gathering. From her loose sketch of the participants, I would've been the lone polytheist had I shown up. This got me thinking about this blog's purpose and direction and how it might cause some people a little bit of confusion.

I have faith in several gods. I plan to write this blog from that perspective. Thus, I am a faith-based blogger by simple deduction. I know full well that a fair number of others who claim that title would find me doing so to be a bit strange. But I can't really suffer myself to worry about it. To use one of their pet phrases, all I can do is walk my talk to the best of my ability and go from there.

So, who and what am I, as I promised in my last post? I'm the president of Imbas, a Celtic pagan (subset reconstructionist/restorationist), and I've been wanting a space where I can discuss both Celtic paganism and my perspectives on the world in a slightly different fashion than I've been doing on my LiveJournal. I admit I'd thought about keeping my identity hidden here, but I would feel too restricted at times. I may wind up restricted by being up-front about who I am at others, but that's a different issue altogether.

I'll also touch more on some of the rough-draft thoughts later on. Today, your humble blogger is running a bit too tired to wax grandiloquent.

Getting this baby into better shape

While my odds of posting to this blog very often aren't too high, I do want to get it into better shape in case I decide to rev it up more. The Mudville Gazette was kind enough to put together a how-to on getting one's blog going, and I've been following some of his steps.

His "find your tribe" suggestion has me contemplating what my intention is going to be with this. I've set the subtitle to "Paganism and other maunderings" due to a suspicion I'd like a forum to do explorations of some of the aspects of my beliefs that I'm not sure I want to put elsewhere. But I have so many interests, I feel like I'm at risk of pigeonholing myself with that description. And are there enough pagan bloggers out there to make it worth my focus? Or maybe that's the point. There need to be more pagan bloggers. Especially ones who aren't ultra left-wing radicals. Someone has to speak for the vague center. And represent some of the non-Wiccans.

On that note, I'll do a "what the heck am I" post later.

Breaking the blog in

I have nothing erudite to post at the moment (and usually won't anyway); this is just a means of getting the dang blog christened.