Pagan Coffee Talk
We will discuss topics related to the Pagan community. All views are from a traditionalist's point of view. The conversations are unscripted (no preparations have been made ahead of time). A special thanks to Darkest Era for the use of their songs: Intro- The Morrigan, Exit - Poem to the Gael. Check them out at http://darkestera.net/.
Pagan Coffee Talk
Rediscovering Life's Balance through Reconnection with Earth
Are you feeling overwhelmed in today's fast-paced world? Wondering how to find balance in your life and reconnect with nature? Join us in this enlightening conversation as we explore the power of homesteading and growing our own food to achieve a sense of equilibrium in our physical, mental, and spiritual health and how this can help us appreciate the interconnectedness of our world.
As we examine the role of technology in our modern lives, we discuss its impact on our sense of balance and our understanding of the world around us. Discover how our disconnection from nature may be at the root of the problem. Reflect on the negative effects of overcrowding and the importance of expanding our knowledge and experience to better manage our time and connections. You won't want to miss this inspiring episode, as we provide valuable insights that will leave you contemplating your own life balance.
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Welcome to Peg and Coffee Talk. Here are your hosts, azwan and Lord Knight. Today's topic Maintaining Balance.
Speaker 2:What do you think we're meaning when we talk about trying to maintain balance?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it could be any number of things. It could be balance in your daily life. It could be balancing your spiritual life with your mundane life. It could be balancing your emotions.
Speaker 2:Living in balance. I think we need to get more of a for us, more of the society where we are more connected with our food. Okay, we need that connection with nature. We need to interact with it. All right, again, it's been a running joke and gag going on, but it scares me too that some of these younger people you'll ask them well, where do you get this? where do you get eggs from The grocery store? All right, where do you get eggs from Chicken? Lord Azwan, chickens, eggs come from chickens, chickens, do you see what I'm saying? For us, that's the answer. Okay, where's beef come from Cows? Right, all right. Again, i think we need that connection to food. We need to understand how easily or how delicate this balance is between nature and man, and this alone is sort of the cause of problems in humanity. I don't think we're living in balance with nature. We've separated ourselves from the bad work.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Do you?
Speaker 1:think, while I was going to say, do you think that we need to get more into homesteading?
Speaker 2:Homesteading. I mean, don't get me wrong, i understand some people can't do it, but there's nothing wrong with growing a few tomato plants or something in your backyard, you know, on a balcony, where you can.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I have a problem with cities. Okay, because, again, my concept here on living with balance is, when we look at nature, beehives and other insects like ants and stuff like that, when they get so big they hive Yes, a new queen is made. That queen flies off and takes some of them with them Because, again, at a certain point, having too many of something in one place becomes toxic, right. Hence the problems, i think, is, with these big cities like New York and Chicago and, you know, la and all these, there's too many people We need to spread out.
Speaker 2:We need to work more with nature. We're not meant to live that closely confined with one another, and I think it's really causing not only spiritual and emotional problems Like what.
Speaker 1:Seriously, Really, i'm just asking the questions.
Speaker 2:I know, but come on look around. You know, first time in my life I'm ashamed to be in a gay man. True.
Speaker 1:Very true. So how it's even living in cities and stuff like that, how can we? I mean, it's easier if you're living out in the country.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But what are some ways that we can do that, what are some ways we can get back into balance?
Speaker 2:Well, like I said, start small, figure out what you can do in the city. There's other ways to do this Because, like the whole entire, growing your own food and stuff like that no, you might not be able to do it 100% Some people might but the idea there is it's something you need, It's something you should have access to.
Speaker 1:Okay, and it really should.
Speaker 2:For all of humanity. food was technically free if you could just get it to grow or if you could just gather it. Right, that was. the price we paid Was either we grew it or we gathered it.
Speaker 1:Are we hunted it down?
Speaker 2:Are we hunted it down?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So again, it's something to me. I think we should have more of a connection to realizing how, how long it takes. There's a page of the guy that went out and he showed how hard or how much work it took just to make a BLT.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, where he raised the grain to make the bread Right. He did it all that way, then grew the lettuce and showed how long it took just to put that together and how in the world, in our world, you can literally run into a restaurant and ask for one and have one in five minutes. Right Or less?
Speaker 1:Yes, You know. Otherwise you got to grow everything. You have to slaughter the pig, make the bacon Sure, the bacon, right, then it's got to be cured.
Speaker 2:You know, So, this doesn't happen overnight, right, all that just for a BLT. All that for a BLT. You know there was like another guy. Another guy sounds stupid, but again showed how expensive and how much trouble it was just to make a toaster.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Same problems he ran into, you know making the plastic, getting it foam, doing it just for once and once only. It just became this outrageous process.
Speaker 1:Well, i hate to be this way. If you got a grill, you can make toast, just saying, all you need is a little bit of fire.
Speaker 2:But again the point there was look, let me show you how hard it is just to do something as simple as make an actual toaster from scratch. Right, you know it, the stuff takes more skills and stuff than we think it does.
Speaker 1:No sure it does. Yeah, like there was a guy at work and yesterday was his last day. He set it off to Alaska and he's a homestutter.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:He brought in homemade peanut butter. Yeah, i don't know. I mean, i don't know what his process was, i don't know what all he put into it, but yeah, he made homemade peanut butter for everybody and he brought in like apples to dip into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's kind of me, Did he grow the peanuts Yeah?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Well see, I think a lot of people, when we sit here and we talk about homesteading and stuff like that, they, I think they think we were talking about getting away from technology and everything altogether Right, Doing the whole entire wilderness family.
Speaker 1:Like little else on the prairie.
Speaker 2:Something that you just going to get. That ain't what we're talking about. All right, we're not talking about not having power at your house or stuff like that. We're talking about can you, if the world fell apart tomorrow, maintain yourself and your family anyway? Right, you know food prices go through the freaking roof. You can still somewhat feed your family. You know they might not be the most nutritious, but you can still at least feed them.
Speaker 1:Right, you might have to go to a vegetarian diet, but you know, hey, hey At least you got food.
Speaker 2:You know the squirrel population might take a hit Just maybe Don't have a problem with that Because you got to do what you got to do Squirrel, snakes, rabbits But again, i think, i think we're creating problems by separating ourselves from this. We're creating a problem of when a disaster actually happens. Right Again, we live through it. Remember what happened down in New Orleans?
Speaker 1:Mm, hmm.
Speaker 2:You know this to me shouldn't have had these. A lot of these people should have been able to stand up on their own for those days without as much. You see what I'm saying. I'm not putting all the blame on them. I'm putting the blame on us losing that knowledge.
Speaker 1:You know there's, there's a guy and I'll have to look it up. But there's a guy. I saw him on YouTube And that's exactly what he's done. He's he's put together. He spent years learning how to do the old ways of doing stuff Right. He's actually got a book out. I'll have to look him up, see if I can find him and put that in like or something. But yeah, he's, he's got a book out and it's like instructions on how to, how to, how to.
Speaker 2:How to. I mean, you know, like, how to make a water purifier, right, you know how to. How do you actually do? this is stuff you know people should know.
Speaker 2:When we're talking about living in balance, we're talking about not forgetting what we need Easy access, stuff like this We're talking about because, again, if you have perfect I might be going off on a tangent here If you live in a world of perfect balance, nothing happens. Perfect balance is considered stagnant, right? So nothing's ever going to be 100% perfect, or you wouldn't learn. It would just be the same thing day in, day out. So you have to go out, you have to experience, and the problem is I keep on seeing us in the cities and all these other places. More and more of our day is spent inside. I'm just as bad as the next person. Right, it's easy to sit here and watch movies and stuff on TV with streaming services and blah, blah, blah. Well, yeah, go out and do. But the point of the stuff was, hey, if I can watch it whenever, that means I can go out when it's fun.
Speaker 1:Right, but we don't. Oh look, the weather's good, let's go outside.
Speaker 2:Oh, no, no, no, no, let's binge the next episode.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, you know I hate to be this way when we were kids That's the way it was We didn't have all the streaming services. We had three channels, Yeah, You know. So we spent a lot of time outside, especially if the weather was good.
Speaker 2:And God forbid if you were grounded and you could watch Saturday morning cartoons Right.
Speaker 1:Hell, if you were grounded, you couldn't even go outside, so Oh, no, no, no, no, You go outside.
Speaker 2:You couldn't watch cartoons Oh.
Speaker 1:I couldn't. No, if I got grounded. I got grounded from everything My friends going outside having fun. If it was fun, i couldn't do it.
Speaker 2:No, my mom was like no, no, no no, no.
Speaker 1:I'm not having you in this house.
Speaker 2:I'm not having you in this house all day on a Saturday. They will find your little body Again. It's like. It's like we talked about, like, with the difference, with the way boys and girls learn.
Speaker 2:And that we think classes should be more, that certain classes should be tailored to the behavior of boys versus girls Right, you know. Again, it's understanding those differences and using them to our advantage. While a wild animal, a mongoose or something like that, they're going to eat all the eggs from a chicken, us, on the other hand, we're going to leave a few behind because we need more chickens. Right, you know, we want more chickens. So again, it's this thinking into the future. Right, this is part of that balance. What about tomorrow? We can't take everything now, or we won't have nothing tomorrow, but we've become a society of now. Oh, definitely. And again, this is causing a big to me, it's causing a bigger problem. It's not in balance And again, i still think it's our separation from nature that is doing this.
Speaker 1:So the more we can do to get back in touch with nature, the better off we are. That's what you're saying, we can.
Speaker 2:the more we can work with nature, the more we can do things in nature like throw our own foods, take care and actually have the abilities to take care of ourselves. There are people in this world and if they're still in late, they're going to panic because they don't know what to do. Right, i've seen it before. Where is the most simplest thing that older generations would have been like, you know, okay, whatever, you know, the silence like a pot underneath there. There's nothing you can do. right in the second Right. But you know, you look at the younger kids and they're like, oh my God, oh my God, what do we do? What do we get? And I think that is a lack of knowledge being able to actually take care of ourselves. You know what was that? Remember the running joke about millennials and changing tires?
Speaker 1:Hmm, yeah.
Speaker 2:But to us I mean I want you to think about this The idea of gay men know how to change tire just seems completely weird in the air we grew up in. But everybody did. You know, it was kind of more like this seems like a trope. Yeah, we did know, everybody did know how to do this stuff. The only ones that didn't were those. Those did see, we grew up with. You know the ones I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2:You know, i like ice cream. I like ice cream, i'm pretty.
Speaker 1:Oh God, you're going to hell.
Speaker 2:Yes, i am, i am driving that bus.
Speaker 1:And we're going off the road, yeah, right into the ditch.
Speaker 2:This is the kind of balance. We're talking about Living and being a part of nature. We're not talking about giving up technology and stuff like this. And I realized we still have to have cities and stuff like this, where we got manufacturing and stuff like that, but we need to try our best to get back to single family homes. I think cities need to spread instead of going up. We need more elbow room. I think it's causing more problems than good. Yeah, but I think that's going to be so hard to do.
Speaker 1:It is, but I really wish this is what we would go to and we would literally just spread out.
Speaker 2:I think it would be better for the environment and for all of us Just to get some room.
Speaker 1:You know this idea of living on top of each other and cookie board cutter houses, one right after another.
Speaker 2:It just baffles me. Yeah, it's a little cringe.
Speaker 1:As far as you and I go.
Speaker 2:I always felt so confined in one of them places, Yeah, even in a housing development, I mean it just seemed like your neighbors were too close.
Speaker 1:There wasn't enough space in between all of you. So, again, this is what I'm looking at when I'm talking about this.
Speaker 2:So, again, this is what I'm looking at when I'm talking about the balance stuff that we have to try to do this. No, it's never going to be perfect, but we want it that way. We want it non perfect. We want to be able to learn, grow and bend.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to say that that does allow for room to expand if you will expand your knowledge, expand your experience, your skills, your experience, Yes, You know, there's a lot of things I know how to do, but I've never done them.
Speaker 2:And right, there's a learning curve.
Speaker 3:Reality is a whole lot different.
Speaker 2:That should be the beginning of every school year. Reality is different. This is not reality, right, you know? I think this brings us back into like what we were talking about in that whole entire album, in the pagan family value video Uh-huh, about us living a more tribal life, a family life, and having families surround you. And do this. If you're living in this kind of world, this is your ideal place. You know that you're going to be the grandparent with three or four kids living on the land, still raising food and taking care of the rest of the family, and you sit there teaching the grandkids.
Speaker 1:So you're looking at more of a family commune.
Speaker 2:You see, but again you're going to have that problem where the word commune I'm not talking about some isolationist freaks of nature, i mean you with me, i'm talking just about a family that's on some land and they're not arming up for the apocalypse.
Speaker 3:All right.
Speaker 2:You know some people live on the land and stay there, but you know they're running the farm to feed the whole entire family.
Speaker 1:You know it's back to more of the farm days where you did have a large family living on the land? who was taken care of it?
Speaker 2:Right. And if you had a doctor or a vet or a nurse, they were your doctor, because you got the services for free, because you fed them.
Speaker 3:You gave them land.
Speaker 2:This. this, to me, is a more balanced life, because you're interacting with family, you have those bonds.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You. We need that close knit type family in our lives.
Speaker 2:You know you always need a place to where, if something goes wrong, you have somewhere to fall back to. Like I said, i'm not talking about you know. Hey, you know everybody needs to do this. We need to do what she thinks best, because I know we still need people living in the cities, running factories and stuff like this. I'm not an idiot, all right, but again, these are where these families that we used to hear growing up you know the banking families and the train families they live this type of life.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:That's how they gain their wealth. Now, once they gain their wealth, my belief is hey, if you can support your family on your little trust fund, then yeah, you should become a lawyer or a doctor or a police officer or something and do it for free and raise your family on your trust.
Speaker 3:fund All right.
Speaker 2:We gave you that money. It's chance. It's time for you to give it back. You know the whole family is not needed to run the whole entire business and y'all make billions plus your trust funds. Right Yeah, You with me.
Speaker 1:Mm, hmm.
Speaker 2:There's greedy, and then there's this That's not going to happen. But that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen unless society tries to push this idea. You know that we don't mind having rich families and stuff like this, and we understand what y'all are doing, the risks y'all are taking, but when y'all reach a certain level, can y'all start giving back. Can y'all be doctors for free, you know, can y'all be lawyers for free and just do pro bono work? I don't think that's asking a lot.
Speaker 1:Well, i don't think it is either, but it's in today's world. It's just not going to happen to many people, or?
Speaker 2:Well, I realize that's just like that. That's just like you know. I'd like to see the whole entire school systems go away and everybody just convert back to homeschooling And the worst thing you have to do is take a test to show you know this much, to graduate right, And that's it. And then you move on because that again. I don't think everybody learns at the same pace.
Speaker 2:Well, they don't, You know and I'm sorry if you're, if you're young and you've already done and made all the requirements to graduate, you should. If it takes you longer than, oh well, it takes you longer, Right? I'd rather you know the info And someone's saying oh yeah, yeah, they're good, Right, We've seen what happened with Oh yeah, they're good.
Speaker 1:No, they ain't No. No, when you got somebody who's in the seventh grade and 15, 16 years old, there's a problem.
Speaker 2:When you have someone with no problems whatsoever graduating that still can't read. I have a problem Right And my thought is the school systems.
Speaker 1:Well see, i think that stemmed from too many people being held back for whatever reason and being held back too much. And then you do have that, you know eighth grader, who's you know? again older than everybody else.
Speaker 2:And again, while homeschooling makes better sense, right? I mean, I went through special ed There was a lot of things that would have been better if I would have been homeschooled and being school year round.
Speaker 1:Hmm.
Speaker 2:You sort of saying for my needs, not anybody else's. It makes better sense As an adult looking back, yes, it would have made better sense to me for that to happen versus what I got. And again, you can't do that in the school system. No, you can't. And people are needing that. We are failing the next generation so bad.
Speaker 1:I think we are. I think there's so much more that we could be doing to make it a better place for the next generation of people.
Speaker 2:You know, here's the real balance, where we are balancing our old age with their youth, and we're hoping that we are guiding them to a better place than we were at.
Speaker 1:Hoping That's the key word. hoping.
Speaker 2:I'm not exactly sure where that destination is going to end. Woohoo.
Speaker 1:At least you know, at least we're trying.
Speaker 2:This is one of the reasons why, in the world, this question is so hard to answer, because it does mean so many things to so many people. Right, you know, these are just a few of the reasons we think about balance. You know, again, just like you started off, you know, between working and jobs, and families and responsibilities and doing things for yourself. You know there are a lot of times there doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day.
Speaker 1:That's the truth.
Speaker 2:Then, on the other hand, sometimes there seems to be too many hours, too many hours in the day. yes, I'm just letting you know the opposite is just The opposite is just as true. Oh, we can.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. Join us next week for another episode. Peg and Coffee Talk is brought to you by Lifetime and Seminary. Please visit us at lifetimepleseminaryorg for more information, as well as links to our social media Facebook, discord, twitter, youtube and Reddit.
Speaker 3:We travel down this trodden path, a maze of stone and mire. Just hold my hand as we pass by, see your blazing fires. And so it is the end of our day, so walk with me till morning breaks. And so it is the end of our day. So walk with me till morning.
