Long week.

 Dear Reader

It's been a long week. If you happen to see my sanity, put it into a nice little box with some fluff to keep it cozy. I have been working on this transcription/revision/synthesis project and I'm at about the final third of it. I keep having to fix grammar and language to make things flow smoothly. I thought editing my own work was an ordeal. Taking three separate versions of one text and mashing them together into one version with a few minor tweaks is proving harder than I expected.

I think, however, when I get this thing finished it will do a lot of good. I'm taking a religious text that has been heavily femme and moving it to gender neutral. I occasionally have spasms of anxiety that I am doing something WRONG!!elventy1! but then they pass as I realize that my efforts are actually making the text easier to read. Correlating the points that align across all three existent versions of this book is proving surprisingly easy. I truly believe that once I get this to the finish line, it will make the holy texts of Filianism and Déanism (one of the religions I practice, my spiritual life it weird.) more accessible and easier to understand. I am also going to have the audacity to put a section with commentary on changes made and why. Because there are some changes that I know the orthodox practitioners are going to disagree with because they want the texts to remain the same. My goal here is clarity of text, ease of readability, and opening the text to a wider audience (which from what my research has shown me was one of the things the founders of the religion wanted to do before their group fell apart due to politics).

Now, if I had the spoons for it, I would sit down and do the same thing for other religious texts that are much meatier (i.e. the Christian bible). Because I think that holy books shouldn't alienate readers and that they should be open to all believers, regardless of gender, which should be reflected in gender representation in the text itself. I try to do a decent job of equal gender representation in my writing. I feel it's important. That's part of why I took up this project to begin with. I want, in the end, a book that if my boys felt like reading and learning from didn't leave them feeling like they were less because they weren't female. I know the founders of the faith were working to uplift women during an era that female figures in religion were uncommon in England and most of "the west". (I have thoughts upon that expression, but I'll save them for another day.) The founding of this religion shows up during the civil rights era and attempts to address the inequality women faced in that era in England.

The original texts and the excellently researched published texts from Rev. Sarah Morrigan and from the Eastminster society for Filianic Studies (publishers of the New Celestial Union Version and the Eastminster Critical Edition of the Clear Recital, respectively) show that the founders were deeply thoughtful in their theology and philosophy. There is a branch of Filianism and Déanism that swings really hard into femme dominant territory, which I think is an aberration and deliberate misinterpretation of what the founders had in mind that arose during the 1980s, not long after the original cultus of worship had fractured and fallen apart due to political issues within their organization. At the same time, without that more extreme branch, Filianism and Déanism would quite possibly have become lost to the sands of time. It's all convoluted in places and yet very sensible in others. But, that's what you get with any religion.

But, this is what I have been working on this week while I try to pick up the threads of where I left off with everything else. My life's beginning to get a bit more organized with the school routine settled. I'm even beginning to get back into my journal writing. It is my hope that next week, I will be blogging on here daily. Even if it is minor ranting about writer's block or my frustrations with this big project that I'm working on right now.