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I recently joined a discord and website called The Cloister, for pagan monasticism. One of the questions that came up on the discord was whether we had come up with a Rule of Life. At first I was confused by the question, but then I realized what they were talking about.

Back when I joined Metista (1999) and later the Toteg Tribe (2003), they had a list of tenets that members ascribed to. Because of my chronic pain and illness, I am a member of Chronic Pain Anonymous, so the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions are also a part of my life. A few years back I decided to figure out what my own code was, and both of these were highly influential. Here I'm going to break it down, and explain what I mean by each of them.

I should further preface all this by saying that I used to be known as Jaelle ShadowDancer, until some traumatic events in 2020 caused enough of a break that I took a new name. Nevertheless, I still consider my path to be my Shadow Dance, where I dance the borders between shadows and light.

And with that, here we go.

Shadowdancer Code

• I know that all things have a spiritual dimension to them and that we are all related, through Ask and Embla, and through our Ahma souls.
  As an animist, I believe that all things have Spirit to them in some form or another. In fact, I would go so far as to say that matter is crystallized consciousness. Whether it's self-aware or not is another issue entirely. Ask and Embla were the names of the first humans, each named for their starting material: logs of Ash (Ask, the male) and Elm (Embla, the female). The Ahma soul is a more complicated question. I follow a system in which we have nine souls, one of which is the Ahma. This soul is basically our connection to the ineffable as the mist of Ginnungagap (the void in which the world was made), undifferentiated consciousness. Thus, with this statement I am expressing a fundamental unity with all things. We are all related.
• I strive to pay attention when the gods, wights, ancestors, and nature speak, and live in accordance with what I learn.
  Paying attention is one of the hardest parts of spirituality. It's so easy for me to get lost in the clouds in my head, and lose touch with what's going on around me. This means I miss the subtle signs that should be guiding me in my life, especially when I am removed from nature to the point that I am rarely able to leave my room due to my disability. I must strive to pay attention to those strands of the Web that I can see, if I am to move in accordance with them.
• I aspire to walk in balance in Midgarð and live in harmony with the Holy Ones and all of their creations.
  Walking in balance and living in harmony sound so high-minded. It brings Disneyfied images of all the animals of a forest gathered together in a circle, gazing at the princess in the center. This is not what I am talking about. What I mean is to make choices responsibly. I don't give up meat, but I don't waste food either, and I try to give respect to sources of my food. I don't give up electricity (obviously), but I do seek to conserve. This will be addressed further below, but two of the principles that run through the code are personal responsibility, and to minimize harm. This statement unifies the two.
• I work to maintain my honor and integrity, and when I am wrong promptly admit it.
  Honor and integrity are the basis of social interactions. This includes family, pets, and simply the world around you. Without these, you can't be trusted fully, which means you can't really enter into a relationship in good faith with anyone or anything. This means accountability for your promises - you do what you say you are going to do, which means being aware of your limitations, and making provision for them beforehand, not after someone is already depending on you. The second half of this comes from the 12 steps: keeping my side of the street clean means being honest with myself and others when I mess up. It means making amends, not just giving an empty apology.
• I endeavor to be respectful with all things, for I know that all things have their challenges that I know nothing of. Kindness costs nothing, and is worth much. Being respectful extends past other human beings. It means respecting the strength of a storm, the power of a volcano, the lives of everything around me. It means treating my cats as I would want to be treated in their place. It means giving the benefit of the doubt, not taking things personally immediately, and understanding that just because somebody is snippy with me it's not necessarily about me or in response to what I have said. “Everyone you see is fighting a battle you know nothing about; be kind.”
• I honor and respect all of my ancestors: physical, cultural, and spiritual.
  A lot of people think ancestry ends with blood; it only begins there. I accept that even the worst of my relatives contributed to making me who I am today. They are all part of my ǫrlǫg, they all helped shape my destiny. And “relatives” includes everyone who has touched me in this sense. “Cultural and spiritual ancestors” includes everyone who has influenced who I am today, everyone who has shaped the particular subcultures I participate in, everyone who has touched me in a spiritual manner and helped to shape my view. This includes people with whom I had a contentious relationship; if you fight something, you can make it stronger by putting its focus on resisting you. This means my father who tried to force Catholicism down my throat helped strengthen my spiritual path away from his faith. And ultimately that helped me. It wasn't in a way that I appreciated at the time, but it is still worthy of my respect. And respect doesn't mean caving in; it means enforcing boundaries, and respecting the boundaries of other people.
• I listen with consideration to those who choose to share their wisdom with me, and respect their rights to do so in their own way, in their own time.
  My mentor had a big problem with people coming to him asking him to teach them and then not wanting to do the lessons that he gave them. They wanted him to teach them their way, not his way. That's not how it works. His wisdom was his to bestow or withhold as he chose. It belonged to him, not to me or the other students. Demanding someone teach you, demanding that they do it your way, is disrespectful of everything they went through to get to the point where they had something to teach. You can always request accommodations, but a person's wisdom is their own property; how and if they choose to share it is entirely up to them.
• I invoke the power of spirit for my own dreams and visions, and strive to live in accordance with their lessons.
  Here we start getting into my actual practice, rather than general behavior. Trance and meditation are a core part of my path, as is working with my spirit allies. Doing this is pointless if I don't pay attention to what my allies have to tell me. This goes back to respect for them as sapient beings with their own lives, who were kind enough to share their time and wisdom with me. There is a little point to engaging in these activities and taking these beings’ time if I don't pay attention to what is learned.
• I respect your right to follow your own vision.
  Just as I expect others to respect that I walk my own path, I too must respect that others walk theirs, and they may not be the same. One of my most exasperating recent experiences was with someone who kept trying to force me to research things that I had no interest in, that weren't mine to study. My path is my own; this means that your path is your own as well. I do not have the right to make another step off of their path. If I expect mine to be respected I must respect others’.
• I seek to give the benefit of the doubt, and try to learn the lessons offered from everything around me.
  This goes back to kindness. People don't act in a vacuum; they have circumstances that they are typically responding to. I have no way of knowing what those circumstances are. But I try to make a point of making sure that when somebody says something hurtful, that it's not because of something else going on. I was taught to monitor how people were responding to what I said, and I kept running into problems when I would assume if someone was snappy that it was because of me. So I've learned not to take things personally as much as I can, and to just be aware of the other circumstances somebody may be going through. For example, if somebody's having a really bad day, they are likely to be shorter tempered than another time. At the same time, I need to pay attention and learn from what happens. For example, my husband often looks angry as he goes down the hall, but usually he's just thinking about work, it has nothing to do with me, and I had to learn not to worry about it.
• I call out and resist evil in all its forms, wherever I see it.
  

  “...wherever you perceive evil, declare it as evil,
  And don't give your enemies peace.”
  -Havamal 127 (Pettit 2023, 109)

  Evil exists in many forms. We usually think of it in terms of the grand evils of the world, like Hitler, but I have found that most evil is more petty and subtle. I try to call it out when I see it, but I don't always do a good job. This is in balance with giving the benefit of the doubt; I don't want to assume someone is evil when they're just having a bad day. At the same time, someone who can perform casual evil because they're in a bad mood is a problem. So it's a spectrum... like just about everything else.
• I recognize that darkness and light are equally important, and dance the line between them.
  I remember starting this path when I was young, and thinking in terms of shadow work when I was thinking of darkness, or that death is a necessary part of life, because life feeds on life. Now I'm moving into my decline, and the shadows creep in. Darkness is not the same thing as evil, and that is nowhere more obvious than in my own body, as arthritis sets in and organs wear out. But decay is also the process of making new soil, so the flowers can grow.
• I strive to do the least damage possible, whether with people or with the land and all its wights.
  This goes back to one of my rants from a long time ago about the Wiccan Rede: “An it harm none, do what thou wilt.” It's a very Humanocentric view. I'm going to have a whole post on this topic, so I'm not going to go into it, but basically, every time you eat, you consume the remains of another living being. Harming none is impossible from an animistic standpoint. So my goal is to minimize harm, across as many frameworks as possible.
• I practice personal responsibility in my daily life.
  I end with this one because it's pretty much what all of it comes down to. I take responsibility for everything I do. There's an emphasis on intent in our culture, as long as you didn't intend harm, you shouldn't be held to blame for things. But the thing is, the harm was done, and somebody has to be responsible for dealing with it. Therefore, if my actions cause harm, it is my responsibility to deal with it. That doesn't mean I intended to cause harm, and it doesn't mean I get out of responsibility because I didn't. Responsibility and intention are two separate things that our culture seems to have conflated lately. This is what wergild is for.

Kethesa (KEep The HEart SAcred),
Asra Lokakona