A handful of years ago, when Ning was a fairly new thing and people were just getting their hands on easy ways to create social networks, I found myself involved in a site on the network helping as an admin. Unfortunately I found that I had some really big problems with the founder of the site with regards to his ethics and his intentions behind creating the site, so I decided to start my own site. The Pagan Teahouse was born, and it thrived for some time! Then, through a series of personal events and then the fact that everyone under the sun started a Ning site, activity died off. Then PaganSpace.net was born and most of the smaller sites on the network starting to die off.
I was never really worried about that stuff. I wasn’t trying to compete with anyone else’s site but I was personally finding it hard to run a site like that on my own. So I enlisted the help of a few people, then moved the site off of Ning and hosted it on a message board type site for a while. Most people didn’t like the switch and felt a lot of bits and pieces that made them enjoy the site before were like big gaping holes (things like profiles, messaging, MP3 sharing, blogs, etc). At the time before the move I had been paying for the premium services and spending around $40 a month to maintain those things with the site, but with the lack of participation it didn’t seem worth it anymore. So the Teahouse went back to Ning just so it wouldn’t completely die and instead it just sort of floundered for a while.
Well, here we are, spring again. A time for renewal and revitalization. I have been dealing with some personal struggles lately about where I need to be focusing my time and energy. Anyone that knows me knows two very big things about me; I am a knowledge junkie who is always taking classes and studying something and that free time to me is like kryptonite to Superman. It’s certainly not that I don’t have free time, but I like to know that the time I am working on something it’s a project or endeavor that I really want to be doing. So I popped over the the very inactive and unkempt Teahouse on Monday morning and decided it was time to bring this energy of spring to the Teahouse and breath some life into it once again.
If you haven’t visited us before, please come by! We’re a free site (and always will be) and have a number of great community features. I’m going to be creating some new groups and clubs in the Teahouse over the next few weeks, along with getting the forums back in order and changing around the look of things just to make things easy to find and use. We have a chat area where we’re also be holding some live events in the future and I’m going to bring back The School of Shadows and Light, a magickal “school”, so to speak, that we had several years ago. The School area was not aimed at teaching any specific traditions of Wicca, Paganism or magick, but instead was a place where we had weekly lessons in magickal practice for those that were either new or looking for a little brush up on the basics. It was my plan then, and will be my plan this time, that once we go through the initial material for the class we’ll go deeper into the aspects of magickal practice, all the while making each member of the group part of the process of where it will go next. When we did this before there was a constant “what do you want to learn next” area and I was always looking for feedback and suggestions from those that were participating in the lessons.
So stop by, create an account, and join us! 🙂
