Okay… This is less about paganism itself and more about me, but I think you reach a point where everything is interconnected to some point. Your religion and your lifestyle, perhaps even your perspective on life, feed into one-another until they are parts of the whole.
This is a post about the people around me; it’s about the family I was given and the one I choose, if you want some slightly-saccharine poetic version…
On the whole, I’d say that I’m not that close to my family. It’s not antipathy, nor even really apathy – I’d still be sad to hear that anyone was unhappy or hurt – but I think we drifted apart in many ways. My dad (@RobinHJ) appears to be the same sometimes, a little distant, though he does seem more affected by the comparative lack of kinship.
I could look at reasons, but I am not sure there are any obvious ‘major’ reasons for it or even any strong contenders which are relevant to this blog. It’s just a thing. Bound by blood, we’re still not close. I doubt I’ll ever stop being slightly protective of my little sister or subconsciously competing with my brother, but I will have been with my wife eleven years some time in the next fortnight. I have not lived with my parents or siblings for more than ten-and-a-half years, I’ve been living in another part of the country† for five-and-a-half, I’ve been a father for over five…
Okay, maybe there are some good reasons in there somewhere.
The point is that my family, my birth-family, are not people I feel amazingly close to. I wish I could, it feels disloyal and unfilial to say it, but I can’t. Separated by a decade and a hundred miles, we’ve drifted apart.
I suppose there is a similar issue with my fellow druids. I attend gatherings with an OBOD grove about an hour or so away (we sometimes meet closer, but the furthest we meet is an hour’s drive) and I have to say that I don’t always feel the connection I expected to. We share a religion, but I’m not sure that’s always enough. We are united by some traits, but we differ on other points.
Sharing blood is not enough, nor is sharing faith; both are traits I can’t help but share. That leaves only my friends, the people I chose to include in my ‘family’ and they are an odd bunch.
My wife is the most notable one. When you talk about ‘family you choose’, a partner or spouse is the most notable example. I chose her (actually, I think she chose me) to spend the rest of our lives together, to raise a family of my own with. I think my daughter is not so much of a ‘choice’, but is certainly the result of the choices I made; between choosing my wife as her mother, the decisions we made on how to raise her and the way we treated her, our daughter is the family we created. More than that, the family we chose to create.
When I think of our other friends, the ones we have made a more definite part of our life, they do share some odd traits. If I chose to define them by their faith, not one (except my wife) is a druid; a Hindu, an Anglican vicar and her husband, an atheist, a maybe-Satanist (LaVeyan, though we’ve drifted apart a little) and even a medicine-woman. What they have in common is that they are thinkers, open-minded without being credulous, accepting of others because they know they don’t have all of the answers and they know what they believe rather than believing what they’re told.
I suppose that’s what I value in a friend. Even though there are others (some of them in my family) with the same traits, these few people stand out as my true friends. I can’t say why, but they are the ones I choose.
The Grumpy Druid 
I wonder sometimes if we are a little higher up the autistic spectrum than average. I feel very little connection with my sisters other than some friendly girls I vaguely remember from my childhood and that I sometimes see at Christmas. I do feel intellectually guilty that I didn’t miss my mother or grieve much when she died, despite us being quite close. Though my father is alone and missing his wife I have to make an effort to call him at least once a month (And frequently fail). At least with him I can come up with some common topics of conversation. He keeps telling me it’s important to stay close to sisters and call them for a chat regularly but I have only ever called them when I needed to discuss something because I would not know what to talk about if I rang for an idle chat.
Sometimes I assuage my guilt by saying ‘If They are so sociable and I am the unsociable one then why do my father or sisters never phone me for a chat?’ Perhaps my Dad is worried about seeming pushy or needy but my sisters don’t have that excuse. Maybe the whole ‘close family’ thing is rarer than people make out, at least our family does not have the schisms that so many families seem to have where people refuse to talk to each other for decades. That’s not to say it could not happen in the future 🙂
The one thing wrong about the autism theory is that I am actually a fairly emotional person who cries at sad books and films and other peoples tragedies; I just don’t find ancestry guarantees closeness. On the other hand, if my wife or any of my children were taken from me I think I would go to pieces.
It does say a lot that, rather than being offended by this post, you actually agree and have insight into it. On the other hand, I am not sure that we were in any way the best example of a well-adjusted family growing up. Maybe there’s a hint of autism in there (four of us have degrees in computing, a common discipline for those on that spectrum) or maybe our priorities are different from normal due to the things we experienced. Maybe we just live in the moment more than most, engaging more with what is right before us than the people and situations from our pasts.
For my part, I have always blamed it on my habit of walking away. Whether it is a symptom or a cause, I do have a history of making clean breaks; I’ve reinvented myself so often, going from a plan to read chemistry at Oxford to acting, then on to directing, game-development, lecturing, novel-writing and even writing training manuals. Each time, it feels like I just walked out of my old life and abandoned everything that tied me to that persona specifically.
I think autism, or Asperger’s or some other ASD, is not as unlikely as you might think though. I’ve met highly-autistic people, both ‘high-functioning’ autism and those who have carers to help them cope with daily life; they have feelings, attachments to people, the ability to cry at a sad film or book… It varies from person to person and I think the spectrum has more than one dimension, being more than a straight line, but maybe that’s just me….