Yes, sometimes it’s a good idea just to take stock and re-assess you entire set of beliefs and opinions. You mentioned that you’ve been in communities in the past, what were they? Anything analogous to, say, the Pagan community?
I’ll describe the last moot I attended, but I think you’ll be disappointed, because I most certainly was! (See below, for other more interesting stuff, though.) It was in February last year, about a month before the lockdown, at a pub well-known among local Pagans. There were only four of us present, and since two of the others were smokers, we had to sit outside in the beer garden, and it was a bit chilly. It had been billed as a discussion about the Northern tradition, but pretty soon one of them lit up a spliff, right there in the middle of the beer garden. I didn’t want to get thrown out so I left, in disgust. And then a few weeks later the lockdown happened and the world changed. I imagine moots will be starting up again soon, though, and indeed, other events such as rituals, though I don’t have any specific details yet.
As for belief, this is not an important concept in Paganism. Practice is much more important, as with the form of ritual, for example. There are Pagans who believe in all sorts of different gods and goddesses, Pagans who don’t, and Pagans who don’t think it even matters.
Being blind has impacted my journey through Paganism in a number of ways. For example, a very common practice in Pagan ritual is visualisation, which is used, for example, to visualise the result you want to happen. This is no real problem to me as I just imagine the result without any visualisation. More difficult are colours, which are used in almost all Pagan rituals, with each colour having specific meanings, often connected to the planets and astrology. My workaround for this is the same technique I mentioned before about associating colours with their most familiar linguistc couplings (blue sky, green grass, red blood, white snow, black night, and so on).
I’ve never met any other blind people at any Pagan events that I’ve attended, but I know other blind Pagans online. As for the attitudes of other Pagans to my blindness, this runs the whole gamut that I get from people in general, Pagans or otherwise. Ranging from nervousness and being uncomfortable talking to me at one end of the spectrum, to a desire to befriend me and ask me things about being blind at the other. My reaction to people being nervous, as always, is to de-sensitise the issue by making jokes and talking about it as openly as possible.
Ok, here’s the more interesting description of a Pagan event that I promised earlier, hehe. A few years ago I attended a handfasting at Glastonbury. A handfasting is a Pagan marriage, and Glastonbury is a well-known centre of Pagan and New Age activities in south-west England. The handfasting took place on Glastonbury Tor, a large hill with a lot of legendary and mythical associations. At the top of the hill is a ruined church tower. We started at the bottom of the hill then walked up it, gradually spiralling round the hill till we reached the top. They had laid out a design in the tower with sticks, comprising three squares, one inside another. The bride and groom each had nine followers, called maidens and knights. I was one of the maidens, in other words, a bridesmaid. When we got to the tower we each took our places in the squares laid out on the floor, then moved around in a complicated pattern decided by the bride and groom (who stood outside), symbolising a battle, followed by reconciliation and union. This is the part that relates to your question about how conflict is resolved, and why I chose this particular example, because the answer among Pagans, at least in theory, is through use of stylised ritual (in practice, of course, Pagans are just as fractious as anyone else, perhaps more so). The bride and groom took their oaths, and after that we all went down to a nearby pub for a meal.
Maddy is indeed brilliant, and here’s another.
youtube.com/watch?v=sls3mig_58I
Sounds like a interesting novel, but I have to note that the author seems to believe the common fallacy that blind people see black, or darkness. It certainly shouldn’t affect the story though, as you describe it, which looks like an intriguing concept.