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silveradeptPrompt 5 is a god of wild places, nature, and taking time away from all the thoughts in your head to enjoy what's around you: Pan
The accompanying image for this post makes Pan look a bit like the late Bob Ross in hair and beard design, along with the color choices for the painting chosen as the image. It seems well-suited to him, given what Bob Ross was painting most of the time while on television.
The Other Wiki suggests that descriptions of Pan may have provided the template for the visual look of Satan, the specific Christian Devil (not to be confused with satan, a job description for an entity who usually functions as an advocate (an adversary in the legal sense) against the claims that the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton makes about his creations). It also suggests Pan as one of the gods that the template of the Horned God archetype (in certain strains of the neopaganism that earlier me was reading about) is based on.
As a deity, the associations that Pan has (nature, music, wild places), in my experience, tends to also make Pan a god associated with hedonistic pleasure, along with Dionysus. While the satyrs that Pan closely resembles are associated with Dionysus, in these times, depictions of Pan usually have him pulling his own weight about being horny on main. (Even if, as you read the stories, Zeus seems to be chasing tail pretty regularly and in ways that eventually get him in trouble or require him to intervene when another god or goddess is going to take their feelings regarding Zeus out on a mortal.) That may be a result of beliefs of this era about a dichotomy between "civilization", which usually demands self-negation and subjugation along the lines of Puritan (and other Christian) beliefs, with the acceptable ways of having fun and expressing oneself tightly controlled by the interests and marketing plans of capitalism, and "the wild," which is supposed to be more in tune with human nature, where the oppression of civilization is overthrown and banished, but which also carries the pejorative of being primitive, the sneaky stab in the back where civilization is assumed to be superior, even if there is admiration from others about people who refuse to confirm to societal expectation. (And note well how those admired people have wealth and privilege that allows them to break the social contract without the consequences that would be enforced on others.) If your cultural context, like mine, treats music, dancing, rhythm, and nature as things to be studied, analyzed, appropriated, and exploited for profits, or, alternately, something to be suppressed because it inspires passions and behaviors contrary to the dictates of the representatives of God on Earth, then the possibility of having a healthier relationship between body and mind is at best, suspicious, and at worst, temptation from infernal powers.
Even beyond the transformative works part, fandom itself offers an alternative where it's okay to be passionate and to be invested, possibly even over-invested, in things that don't have to have a productive return or to advance a career or become a side hustle. And, for the most part, there's no required monetary investment in a lot of Fandom, if you have friends who want to share, or your fandom is ad-supported, or you've got a library nearby that carries what you're looking for. Not every story has to tell a lesson nor impart a moral. Some of them don't even need a plot and are all about the possibilities of attractive entities having fun times together. Or are works that come into being because there's an idea that just won't let go. Fandom is one of those places where fen operate by different social rules and expectations, even as they have a relationship with the capitalist society around them, whose rules will often dictate the length and popularity of any given property or work.
At its best, fandom is a welcoming, accepting, and encouraging place for people to explore and indulge the heart and the feelings. And conveniently,rmc28 pointed out Gail Simone's call for people to use the hashtag #MyBrag to brag about themselves, without qualification, without apology, and without including faults, which, as Gail notes, is supremely easy for some and intensely difficult for others. Don't be surprised if the people who have the hardest time bragging about themselves are the people who have been told the most that bragging about themselves, or being themselves, is Wrong and Bad and contrary to the societal order. And, just reading through some of those tweets, you see that some people have done extraordinary things in their lives, and how many of those tweets are of the nature "I survived and thrived through situations nobody should have had to go through." And you can see how many of those situations are brought on by the contract that "civilization" offers.
The hardest part of the brag, for me, is not equivocating. It's a much safer position to take to not fully say "this is good," because when you have a definite opinion like that, other people are going to have definite opinions that it's not good, and the society around me has little tolerance or patience for nuance or for the ability of opposed opinions to coexist. And a nasty tendency to escalate things that are harmless into shibboleths of identity and to create conflict and pain over those same things. (At its worst, fandom engages in gatekeeping and exclusion and making passion and feelings into faults of character and self that a person should be ashamed of.) Beyond that, since I grew up as a "gifted" child (which, these days, seems to be more and more a marker of neurodiversity that makes someone do well in school than a question of intelligence), I had a skewed idea of what is difficult and what is valuable that takes time to unlearn. So does learning that success does not mean perfection. (And learning and trusting that mistakes are normal and will not result in immediate disaster, because many adults have figured out how not to be the poorly socialized children the school system tried to make them.)
The brag of my undergraduate collegiate years would be "Played a John Williams arrangement, conducted by John Williams, broadcast live for for a national audience." I think the brag for my graduate school years would be "hired in my current job, full-time, to a professional position, less than a year after graduating, in a profession that is notorious for putting over-qualificated people in positions that don't use those qualifications and primarily offering part-time, not benefited positions that do and expecting someone to suffer in those until someone dies or retires and everyone fights for that single position." I could brag about having landed a position that allowed me to pay off my student loans on time, but student loans are a racket, and that debt should be canceled anyway.
This year, I completed a six year project of chapter-a-week close reading of a book series I read when I was younger. That's a brag, right? And so far, I've completed all the fic exchange assignments this year. And I've done a lot of delicious baking on camera. (That's been a lot of learning that success does not mean perfection.) And this year is a year where I'm both getting published in a journal and presenting at a conference.
And, because this is supposed to be a brag, I'm going to shove all the other stuff that I want to say about these things off the stage and let them be exactly what they are. One of the advertised things about spending time in nature, or listening to (or creating) music, or possibly even doing worship of a god who has few temples and more sacred places is that these experiences are meant to prevent someone from reaching into the past or the future and requiring them to stay in the moment they are in. I know this atemporality is, at best, temporary for those who do not deliberately arrange their lives so there are no concerns of past or future, but it's definitely a thing worth cultivating, and being in the presence of fandom and fans is sometimes really helpful for achieving such a state.
Part man and part goat, Pan is a nature god well known in many mythologies. Born in Arcadia to Hermes and a dryad, Pan was a precocious child whose goat’s feet and horned head delighted the gods, but startled the mortals he lived nearer to; Pan did not live on Mount Olympus, but rather in the forests and wilds of Arcadia. Pan famously invented a musical instrument: the syrinx, or pan pipes as they are more commonly known. He is known for his haunting melodies, and music was often a central part to his worship.
The accompanying image for this post makes Pan look a bit like the late Bob Ross in hair and beard design, along with the color choices for the painting chosen as the image. It seems well-suited to him, given what Bob Ross was painting most of the time while on television.
The Other Wiki suggests that descriptions of Pan may have provided the template for the visual look of Satan, the specific Christian Devil (not to be confused with satan, a job description for an entity who usually functions as an advocate (an adversary in the legal sense) against the claims that the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton makes about his creations). It also suggests Pan as one of the gods that the template of the Horned God archetype (in certain strains of the neopaganism that earlier me was reading about) is based on.
As a deity, the associations that Pan has (nature, music, wild places), in my experience, tends to also make Pan a god associated with hedonistic pleasure, along with Dionysus. While the satyrs that Pan closely resembles are associated with Dionysus, in these times, depictions of Pan usually have him pulling his own weight about being horny on main. (Even if, as you read the stories, Zeus seems to be chasing tail pretty regularly and in ways that eventually get him in trouble or require him to intervene when another god or goddess is going to take their feelings regarding Zeus out on a mortal.) That may be a result of beliefs of this era about a dichotomy between "civilization", which usually demands self-negation and subjugation along the lines of Puritan (and other Christian) beliefs, with the acceptable ways of having fun and expressing oneself tightly controlled by the interests and marketing plans of capitalism, and "the wild," which is supposed to be more in tune with human nature, where the oppression of civilization is overthrown and banished, but which also carries the pejorative of being primitive, the sneaky stab in the back where civilization is assumed to be superior, even if there is admiration from others about people who refuse to confirm to societal expectation. (And note well how those admired people have wealth and privilege that allows them to break the social contract without the consequences that would be enforced on others.) If your cultural context, like mine, treats music, dancing, rhythm, and nature as things to be studied, analyzed, appropriated, and exploited for profits, or, alternately, something to be suppressed because it inspires passions and behaviors contrary to the dictates of the representatives of God on Earth, then the possibility of having a healthier relationship between body and mind is at best, suspicious, and at worst, temptation from infernal powers.
Even beyond the transformative works part, fandom itself offers an alternative where it's okay to be passionate and to be invested, possibly even over-invested, in things that don't have to have a productive return or to advance a career or become a side hustle. And, for the most part, there's no required monetary investment in a lot of Fandom, if you have friends who want to share, or your fandom is ad-supported, or you've got a library nearby that carries what you're looking for. Not every story has to tell a lesson nor impart a moral. Some of them don't even need a plot and are all about the possibilities of attractive entities having fun times together. Or are works that come into being because there's an idea that just won't let go. Fandom is one of those places where fen operate by different social rules and expectations, even as they have a relationship with the capitalist society around them, whose rules will often dictate the length and popularity of any given property or work.
At its best, fandom is a welcoming, accepting, and encouraging place for people to explore and indulge the heart and the feelings. And conveniently,
rmc28 pointed out Gail Simone's call for people to use the hashtag #MyBrag to brag about themselves, without qualification, without apology, and without including faults, which, as Gail notes, is supremely easy for some and intensely difficult for others. Don't be surprised if the people who have the hardest time bragging about themselves are the people who have been told the most that bragging about themselves, or being themselves, is Wrong and Bad and contrary to the societal order. And, just reading through some of those tweets, you see that some people have done extraordinary things in their lives, and how many of those tweets are of the nature "I survived and thrived through situations nobody should have had to go through." And you can see how many of those situations are brought on by the contract that "civilization" offers. The hardest part of the brag, for me, is not equivocating. It's a much safer position to take to not fully say "this is good," because when you have a definite opinion like that, other people are going to have definite opinions that it's not good, and the society around me has little tolerance or patience for nuance or for the ability of opposed opinions to coexist. And a nasty tendency to escalate things that are harmless into shibboleths of identity and to create conflict and pain over those same things. (At its worst, fandom engages in gatekeeping and exclusion and making passion and feelings into faults of character and self that a person should be ashamed of.) Beyond that, since I grew up as a "gifted" child (which, these days, seems to be more and more a marker of neurodiversity that makes someone do well in school than a question of intelligence), I had a skewed idea of what is difficult and what is valuable that takes time to unlearn. So does learning that success does not mean perfection. (And learning and trusting that mistakes are normal and will not result in immediate disaster, because many adults have figured out how not to be the poorly socialized children the school system tried to make them.)
The brag of my undergraduate collegiate years would be "Played a John Williams arrangement, conducted by John Williams, broadcast live for for a national audience." I think the brag for my graduate school years would be "hired in my current job, full-time, to a professional position, less than a year after graduating, in a profession that is notorious for putting over-qualificated people in positions that don't use those qualifications and primarily offering part-time, not benefited positions that do and expecting someone to suffer in those until someone dies or retires and everyone fights for that single position." I could brag about having landed a position that allowed me to pay off my student loans on time, but student loans are a racket, and that debt should be canceled anyway.
This year, I completed a six year project of chapter-a-week close reading of a book series I read when I was younger. That's a brag, right? And so far, I've completed all the fic exchange assignments this year. And I've done a lot of delicious baking on camera. (That's been a lot of learning that success does not mean perfection.) And this year is a year where I'm both getting published in a journal and presenting at a conference.
And, because this is supposed to be a brag, I'm going to shove all the other stuff that I want to say about these things off the stage and let them be exactly what they are. One of the advertised things about spending time in nature, or listening to (or creating) music, or possibly even doing worship of a god who has few temples and more sacred places is that these experiences are meant to prevent someone from reaching into the past or the future and requiring them to stay in the moment they are in. I know this atemporality is, at best, temporary for those who do not deliberately arrange their lives so there are no concerns of past or future, but it's definitely a thing worth cultivating, and being in the presence of fandom and fans is sometimes really helpful for achieving such a state.
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