This was a fun experiment, but I think I'm done with it now. My "spirituality" has shifted so many times with everything I've learned, that I don't even know where I am now. I see the giantesses as spiritual/energetic forces in the land; "giantess-oriented practitioner in an animistic Norse Pagan context" doesn't exactly trip off the tongue.
I'm shedding. I've deleted more social media accounts, and I have to look at what I'm leaving online in terms of what it costs me. Every site or account I leave online, every account I walk away from and leave neglected, poses a security risk. I'm not even entirely aware of where I exist online: I was deleting a dummy Gmail account and realized it was attached to Pinterest. Forgot all about that. I'm angry with myself for being so careless and unaware.
And the effort I put into posting these things online and making them look nice, that's entirely for me. No one else sees these things, they'll never accidentally find them in a web search, no one has them bookmarked and returns to my sites or accounts to find any updates. It's just me babbling into the darkness, not a 20-something with a three-year marketing plan for online engagement and scaling, tracking trends, optimizing thumbnails, other stuff I can't even comprehend. It's just one old guy with wrong ideas muttering in a small, empty room. Why do I need to perform that online when I could be living it?
Why, anything. Everything I'm involved with is up for scrutiny. Why am I studying Old Norse language? Why do I straddle with one foot in runic history and another in runic magic? WHy do I persistently bang my head against the wall of social media, expecting it to change before I do damage to myself? Because I'm dumb. Because the flame of stupid hope burns ever-brightly within my breast, despite precedent, education, and experience. I should know better, and I choose not to.
So, Gýgratrú. The worship of giant women, who were the anthropomorphization of animist concepts. Made sexy for men in the Icelandic sagas, named and vilified by men in the myths. Giantess-worship cults were isolated from each other, nonstandardized, and entirely an oral tradition. We will never really know what they looked like or how they operated, except in the vaguest terms: place-names for giantesses, literary and archaeological records of fertility and agriculture jurisdiction. My spirituality is entirely made up by me, inspired by what I've studied. Why does this need to be online at all? Shouldn't I go meditate by a creek, hug a tree, lie down on the ice? And if I do, why do I need to photograph that and post it online? What am I expecting to come out of that? What will a hundred Likes get me? What will I do with a thousand followers?
There is no reason for me to continually post my changing, bad ideas online. It doesn't benefit me in any way, it doesn't improve my condition. Even if I were successful in social media terms, that's not my measure of success. So I'll shut this place down and continue to take down other accounts. I'll never be completely offline, but I'll come close.
Update: My wife has asked me not to shut this website down, so I guess it'll linger a while. I don't know why, since she doesn't look at it either, but she insisted.