My spiritual beliefs summarized

I recently learned about "ietsism" and it fits me nicely. It's described on Wikipedia as "an unspecified belief in an undetermined transcendent reality... a range of beliefs held by people who, on the one hand, inwardly suspect – or indeed believe – that "there must be something undefined beyond the mundane and that which can be known or can be proven", but on the other hand do not necessarily accept or subscribe to the established belief system, dogma or view of the nature of a deity offered by any particular religion."

This describes me perfectly; I don't believe the universe is exactly what it seems, but I don't believe any religion or common spirituality has gotten it right so far. My current stance is that if the multiverse is infinite, we don't truly understand what goes on on a quantum level or how time functions as a facet of space, and there are higher and lower dimensions we cannot see or comprehend, it's not out of the realm of possibility that things might exist or happen that we consider to be impossible. (Yikes, what a run-on. My high school English teachers would be disappointed.) I don't know what those things are, no one does, and no one ever will. Maybe not necessarily souls or reincarnation as we would think of them, but perhaps something akin to them that defies understanding and definition. Something that causes a therianthrope to feel the way they do, probably without being Reincarnation™ as we think of the concept — that would imply the existence of souls, which I don't really believe in — but potentially being some form of "passing on" of life or maybe just energy.

So I guess you could say I'm an ietsist, as well as a Jewish atheist in that I subscribe to Jewish cultural practices and the interpretations I've cherry-picked from Talmudic ethical ideology, but not Jewish theological beliefs.

Whew, what a pretentious, illegible word trash heap. That's my spiritual beliefs summarized. You don't want to see the novel it would be if I described them in detail.

Raven awakening

Starting a four-part “series” of entries on how I discovered each theriotype. I need something to fill out the blog a bit more and an excuse to use the cool icons I made.

I have always loved birds. Well… that’s not really a great way to put it. I have always longed to be a bird. Ever since I was a kid I craved the feeling of wind beneath wings I didn’t have. Always had frequent dreams about flying, and apparently most people don't dream of flying the way I do -- I told someone once that I flew in my dreams by flapping my arms like a bird, that it was so vivid I could feel it like I knew what it felt like, and they told me that was weird.

Of course when I learned it was possible to have more than one theriotype, I knew immediately I was a bird. At first I thought I was a red-tailed hawk, after shifts that led me to believe I was a bird of prey plus a very cool close-up encounter with a red-tail. Turns out I was partly right, and I am in fact an osprey, but that came later.

I have m-shifts very rarely, but I do occasionally have raven m-shifts, and when I realized this, I quickly realized this kintype was not a predator. (Osprey m-shifts are rarer.) Based on the mindset I took on, I was a social species that loved to have fun but was still wary of predators. That led me to corvid, although admittedly it wasn’t the only thing that did so.

Back when I was in middle school, before I discovered therianthropy, my family took a trip to Alaska. The place is teeming with ravens. I quickly developed a fascination with them; something drew me to them. So I was beyond captivated when I had a face-to-face encounter with one. It landed about nine feet in front of me, with something in its mouth, and we both froze and stared at each other. My family kept walking and I probably stood there for a solid minute before my mom realized I was behind and yelled at me to catch up. You read on Wikipedia or wherever that these birds are intelligent, but you don’t really grasp it until you see them up close. It was like it was studying me the same way I was studying it; I was curious about what its life was like, and I don’t find it hard to believe that it was wondering the same thing about me. I doubt it knew something about myself that I didn’t at the time, they’re not that intuitive, but the purposefulness in its demeanor was fascinating.

So later on down the line, when I was trying to work out my avian theriotype, I felt pulled toward raven. I always see therians, mostly wolves, say that they always felt a connection toward their theriotype even before they knew they were a therian. I don’t really have that for any of my theriotypes except raven. I really felt that connection that all those wolf therians talk about.

It was the fact that it explained a lot of other stuff, not just the connection, that made me settle on it. Phantom shifts of thick chest and hackle feathers; the way I felt like I should be able to fly, frequent flapping but much more gliding and soaring than a crow is capable of; my urge to collect shiny objects. (Despite claims that this is a myth, ravens are actually typically attracted by bright objects, particularly round objects. Trust that I’ve done my research.)

But at the end of the day, raven was always the most obvious answer to, “what is my theriotype?”

Osprey awakening

Osprey and badger are the two theriotypes that proved to be the most troublesome to understand and figure out. Osprey especially, because I already had a bird kintype; it’s hard to distinguish phantom shifts when both species have wings, grasping feet, short tails that help with flight, feathers, and beaks. You can probably see why it took me a while; it was hard to separate the shifts from my raven shifts. But they are different. It just takes a good understanding of bird morphology and behavior, which I have after being obsessed with birds my whole life.

For one, ospreys have differently structured wings than ravens, and they fly differently. The different types of wings feel slightly different during shifts, though you’d really have to be paying attention to notice; it mostly comes down to how the flight urge grabs me. Ravens have elliptical wings, like many other larger passerines. This lets them take off faster and perform maneuvers in the air like rolls, but requires more flapping. Ravens are surprisingly acrobatic in the sky. Ospreys on the other hand are accipitriformes and have passive soaring wings, which lets them catch columns of rising air to soar, but doesn’t let them go very fast unless they’re diving to catch a fish.

That’s the other big difference; behavior and diet. Ravens are omnivores and opportunists. They’ll eat anything they can fit in their beak, although mostly they eat carrion, bugs and small animals. They’re not ferocious hunters, though. They’re scavengers. They’re also highly socially developed. Ospreys are solitary except when they’re breeding, and they’re also predators who prey almost exclusively on fish. They hunt by diving into the water to grab their prey, which is what my hunting urges tell me to do when I’m in a shift.

There are other differences, like talon shape and strength, the osprey’s crest, vocalizations, and hard-to-notice differences in beak shape during a phantom shift, but those two are the main two.

When I figured out my osprey kintype it just made so much perfect sense. I’d always been disproportionately fascinated with ospreys; ever since first seeing a picture of one I was enthralled. I’d just never considered it for my kintype because I became convinced my bird-of-prey feelings were just wishful thinking after realizing my raven kintype, and because I thought it would have “made too much sense;” if I considered osprey for my kintype, I’d be too in love with the idea to think about it critically. I’ve now thought about it critically and realized that that’s incredibly stupid.

Opossum awakening

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with rats. Now, there may have been other things at play there than what I’m about to say, but nevertheless, it’s possible. I pretended to be a rat. Apparently I told people that I was one. What I loved most about them were all features that opossums share, morphologically speaking, but I didn’t know much about opossums when I was six. I believe I was subconsciously drawn toward animals that looked like that and had never seen an opossum, so I latched onto rats. From childhood to adulthood I’d always been a defender of the “ugly” animals that nobody else liked.

So, you could say I’ve had these shifts my whole life. When I first entered the therian community I briefly entertained the idea of being opossumkin but threw it out in favor of being a fox, which was obviously so much cooler. But I couldn’t shake the opossum feelings, the shifts, the strong sense of “me” that I felt, and still feel, when seeing an image or video of an opossum. That last part was what did it for me; that feeling of “hey, that’s what I look like — wait, no it’s not” upon seeing a picture of an opossum. Just like I had with ravens.

The opossum story’s not quite as long as the first two.

Badger awakening

I have gone through so many species before finally understanding this kintype.

When I first came into the community, I briefly thought I was a cat. Then I realized my shifts were of a longer muzzle and a bushier tail, so I thought red fox. (No indication, of course, that the tail was particularly long.) Then my family took a trip to Arizona (and every day I wish I could go back), and I realized I had to be some sort of desert animal, as being in the Sonoran desert brought the shifts on at full force and I felt right at home. I labeled myself a swift fox, because I’m bad at geography and thought swift foxes lived in the Sonoran desert. It wasn’t until three years later that I learned it’s kit foxes and not swift foxes that live in the Sonoran desert. Swift foxes live in the Great Plains region.

So I called myself a kit fox, and I slipped into it easily. I had no inkling, not a single hint, that it was wrong. I had been a fox for four years and it felt like the most natural thing. No way I could be something else. Hm… a nocturnal desert predator with a bushy tail and long snout. What other than a fox? Right?

Around the time that I learned the shocking truth about kit vs swift foxes, I started to think I had another, aquatic kintype; I took some of the traits I felt in shifts that did not yet have an explanation: long bear-like claws (badger), hunting urge towards fish (osprey), and calling toward the ocean (osprey). I decided on Yaguarasaurus, a type of semi-aquatic early mosasaur. That didn’t click. I learned about Kutchicetus, a type of terrestrial whale ancestor, and adopted it. That didn’t click either.

It took me longer than I care to admit to even consider the combination of badger and osprey. I had long described these claws I felt as “badger-like” and never even considered once that they might be exactly that. I'll admit right now I was too caught up in the joy of having “cool” kintypes. There is a different kind of joy in knowing what you really are, though.