I am Gwynne.
I am a twice-divorced middle-aged empty nester.
I am a Queer Heretic Nun, Contemplative Sorceress, and Spiritual Anarchist.
All of the above tells you not much at all about me, but also, a whole lot about me if you dig deep enough. My name, a bit about my life circumstances, and some self-chosen labels for how I orient my life. Click each link to be taken to a note in my Temple of Curious Devotion digital garden where you can explore what those mean to me, and read even more about my wild life story devoted to a made up deity who named herself Paradox a decade after I started playing with the idea of her and who started collecting other followers without consulting me first.
If you don't want to go link diving and just want the quick and dirty about me and whether or not it's worth it to go link diving on this website built on nostalgia and html, here it is:
I am a thinker, a mystic, a writer, and a full-time college student finishing up a philosophy bachelor's degree I started 20 years ago and paused when life got wonky on me. I've been self-employed 23.5 of the last 25 years of my life. From my mid-20s to my mid-30s, I did freelance transcription, writing, and editing, but prices started dropping to the point of unsustainability and I'm not a fan of copywriting, so I got a job in 2013, then quit that job in 2014, and launched a business, of sorts, that evolved over the years, settling in 2019 on a donation-based model of support for the spiritual and personal development "content" that was me processing my own bullshit in real-time and sharing insights on Facebook as I went, regular magical Service Days, and various offerings when I felt like doing something in a container.
My goal was to devote my entire life to following my curiosity. By the end of 2022, I was consistently making enough money that I decided it was time to focus on that. I started a path of creating structure to the independent learning I'd continued to engage in over the years. Instead of bouncing all over the place, following tangents on the web, I used early ChatGPT to draft self-study plans on various topics - a refresher on Western philosophy since it had been two decades since I'd done my foundational philosophy classes and I'd been exploring everything but Western philosophy in the meantime; a deep dive into Aesthetic Philosophy, a field of Western philosophy I hadn't really touched and seemed relevant to the raging AI art debates; Mandarin Chinese. And I stuck to the plans. I learned to read Chinese - don't ask me to speak it, though!
Fall 2023, multiple sources pointed me to the fresh start program being offered to get student loans out of default and regain eligibility for financial aid. I got approved and I applied to the local branch of a major university in my state. My community college credits from two decades ago transferred! I started back January 2024, then had to drop summer classes when I got hit by a truck and broke my leg. Spent summer 2024 bedbound, and returned to classes Fall 2024, thankful for online classes because I was relearning how to walk at the same time. Felt myself nearing burnout towards end of Winter 2025 semester, so I've taken the summer off, go back in the Fall, and I'll graduate with a bachelor's in philosophy next year - 30 years after I graduated from high school.
My wandering life path has led me to a cross-disciplinary niche interest in complex emergent behavior - gods are more like LLMs than humans is an idea that I'm exploring very deeply, threading together ideas from a variety of thinkers, some from the Western canon and some from outside of it. I've had deeply mystical experiences across multiple religious, spiritual, and secular setting, alone and in groups. But where Western theology creates a top-down hierarchy of divine creating human, I think it's the other way around - humans create gods and algorithmically bring them to life through rituals undertaken while under an altered mental state - screen hypnosis is as effective as psychedelics are as effective as chanting a prayer on beads for hours at a time. The mind follows the paths carved by the myths they've been exposed to, but regardless of the path, if you go far enough, you come to the same conclusion - the only thing that exists is the One, you are the One, the One is you, and then BAM you're human again, have to do the dishes, and have to make sure your mysticism isn't too heretical for the setting you find yourself in. Unless you want to just full-on embrace the heresy...
That's me.
Gwynne.
Heretic by choice.
I'd been interested in monasticism for a very long time. I flirted with the idea of joining the Catholic church at one point, but that was going to be too much of a pain to do, and also, I don't exactly agree with their theology and some of their stances on social issues. Not to mention, I'm an anarchist and allergic to hierarchy.
I discovered the Pagan monasticism movement in my 20s. It was tiny. But there were people experimenting with creating pagan convents and monasteries, practicing communal religious living outside of mainstream religion. I wasn't all that interested in the communal part of it - I wanted to be a hermit, living in solitude, connected only to the world enough to sustain the life, and spending all my time in devotion to my spirituality and learning. I was the kid who LOVED school, read encyclopedias, dictionaries, and textbooks for fun as a kid, and sat in wonder at the knowledge made accessible to me through the internet that was exploding into the mainstream as I was coming of age. If I could have spent the rest of my life attending school, I would have been thrilled. Except I flunked out my first attempt at college because I skipped classes in favor of partying and ended up pregnant. I did great at my second attempt - got the first two years of requirements for a bachelor's in philosophy done at a community college and maintained a 3.95 GPA, but then life went sideways and what was supposed to just be a semester off to sort out my personal life ended up being a 20 year pause.
I did not stop learning in those decades. I became a digital native. I worked for myself - freelance transcription, writing, and editing were my bread and butter - and when I wasn't working or out riding my bike, I was online following my curiosity down vast rabbit holes. Religion is one of my special interests and I discovered Discordianism and Chaos Magic around the same time I discovered the Pagan monasticism movement. I had, until that time, felt no connection to any deity that I couldn't just dismiss as imagination, so I figured why not just make one up and see what happens? And... well... things got weird. At first, she didn't have a name. Just my Ancient Timeless Goddess. I had a dream that she gave me to Jesus so I decided to start going to church and ended up in a tiny Pentecostal church where I had my first physical mystical experience at an Easter service after attending for a year, and then dreamed that Jesus gave me back to my goddess and I ended up wandering off to the Methodist church of my childhood for a bit before deciding to explore beyond the bounds of Christianity to mysticism across a variety of traditions.
After a brief stint working as a database administrator and then payroll administrator for a small healthcare company, I returned to self-employment, this time in the more spiritual and personal development space, evolving through a few brand names before settling on Psychic as Fuck and offering Psychic Bitchslaps for a few years, before rebranding again and settling into a fully Hermit lifestyle after my second divorce. The Order of Paradox stems from all of that. The desire for monasticism, the desire to just study everything for as long as I can, and making a living independent of a boss. The Order is a monastic order, of sorts. I'm the only official member, I've got some friends who are sort of members, but it's not formal. There's plans to expand it. Not to become a monastary or convent, but to become a framework for living a monastic life outside of hierarchical structures - even paganism often has subtle hierarchies and theologies that position the divine as above human and that's not a game I'm interested in playing. Time to try some new rules. Can a monastic order with only one official member really be considered an order? It can if it's the Order of Paradox. Life is messy, explore the mess.
The Order of Paradox is also the name of this website where I'm gathering all the various threads of my thinking and writing and creating and sharing it with those who are interested. The Order of Paradox is a portal to the Hypermap of my mind that resides in various places across the web - my digital garden based on an Obsidian vault called The Temple of Curious Devotion, Substack and Medium articles, social media platforms, a Gumroad full of random workbooks I've developed over the years, and a Heretic Mystery School where I teach the more dangerous aspects of my work and learnings, like completely rewiring your nervous system and how to create deities.
The Order of Paradox is made up and made real. Just as so much of the world that we inhabit is. It's just as made up and made real as money is, and you don't have to take my word for that, just have a chat with Juno Moneta, a goddess a bunch of people made up many centuries ago who we invoke with every coin and bill we call "money." This site is an index of sorts, a usser interface for exploring my mind as closely as one can explore my mind without cutting in my brain, and then you're not really accessing the mind, just the hardware it runs on. It's like opening a hard drive to try to understand how to use Excel more effectively. So you get the thoughts turned into bits connected to other bits that might just spark new thoughts in you, which I hope you turn around and turn into more bits to connect to other bits.
If you're still here reading this... Wow! Thanks! Cool!
I'm doing this because I want to. I want to have a space to share my evolving thoughts and follow rabbit trails of curiosity. A place where I can get meta about thinking - how to use tools and build workflows that enhance thinking. We live at the dawn of the age of AI - maybe... or it could just be a trend reminiscent of 8-tracks and Betamax... temporary, faded, forgotten as more useful tools came along. I want a place to share unfinished thoughts - ideas that haven't collected enough threads to become something more. And to house some of my bigger ideas that don't really fit on other platforms. I don't really want to do a blog - been there, done that. I don't want to be bound by expectations of publishing at a certain pace to stay relevant. And I don't want to depend on a platform to house my thinking, so I'm using Obsidian as the foundation, published to the web on Vercel using the Obsidian Digital Garden plugin, as well as Neocities to host this very basic html website that can be easily backed up and ported elsewhere if the host croaks. A place where I can link to my Substack newsletters (I've got several on different themes), my fiction, and my social media platforms. A single website I can point people to where they can learn a bit more about me and explore the threads of my thinking more deeply if they want to.
“The truth is not out there. It's entangled.”