Reincarnation is one of those topics that bumps into me every once in a while.

When folks know that I don't come with the "standard religion," the question I usually get is "Hey, you believe in reincarnation, right?"

Maybe.

Logically, I have to say whatever I was or was not in a previous life doesn't really make any difference in this one.

I could have been the King of France, but that is not going to put me on the throne now.

I do think I have memories of a previous life. Rather strong ones in fact. But I can't prove it's anything more than a hallucination. I can't prove that the man existed. I can't point to a corner of my soul and say "That's from him." For all I know, I could be just plugged into a small piece of the collective human consciousness.

I do think that there is a world on the Other Side. Not exactly a Heaven, not exactly the Summerlands, and not exactly the afterlife. Just a place that is different from This Side. I believe we choose some of the gifts, some of the strengths, and some of the weaknesses we manifest here. And, just like tempering metal or carving wood, our life experience is what we take back.

We don't necessarily carry it with us into the next life (if we return), we just take it back to the Other Side, that place that is ultimately unknowable to a mortal.

Our challenge is to manifest what we brought into life This Side.

Maybe that is why I have been talking so much about "updating" godmasks for a modern context. Manifesting means more than just importing something across a border. It means drawing it through yourself as if you were a screen, mixing it with a part of yourself, and fitting it into the world around you.

Hestia isn't one of my gods, but I feel like I know her well. I grew up with her priestesses, although they "knew it not." Not every woman in the American South is a Southern Lady, but you soon learn to know what a real Southern Lady is. They're the ones who can't have company without feeding it. Their tables groan under the weight and variety of food. They govern their homes from the kitchen or close to it. The menfolk may say one thing outside, but they don't cross the Lady Priestess inside her place.

Hospitality shapes their actions, but their real gifts are the ties of family and community. You can't just come in, they have to share their world with you. By the time you leave, you know what the neighbor's grandson's fiancee's little sister's friend did last Tuesday. And you've been invited back.

There you go, manifestation of hearth and home in a modern setting. And you thought the old gods didn't come around any more.

I don't think our worship belongs enshrined in some fantasy setting.

I do believe that the old gods sometimes walk among us. And I believe that some of the gods yet-to-be are with us now, they just don't know what they are.

I've said that because I seek the Divine in human, nature, and machine, I'm a technopagan. But it goes farther than that. The magick I have manifests through me in each of those. It doesn't matter if it's my computers humming quietly as they do their tasks, or my vegetables basking in the spring sunlight, or the lives I touch around me.

I can't just hoard the magick. It doesn't work like that. I give some of mine, I take some of theirs. I manifest what I can. I dream the bear song that kept me This Side.

If magick remains a part of my life, I can't put it somewhere safe in a cabinet or carefully sealed in a jar. It has to flow.

Then it comes back. Changed. That's when I have to take it through me and manifest again.

It never stops.

I bring it home. I give it away.

There you go, have some.