Bewitched and Befuddled: A Spiritual Journey (Part One)

Friends and beloveds…the weather has turned fey and sweet. A rain so light and misty it’s practically a cliché has descended over the grass, and the needles scattered beneath the occasional pine tree are redolent with their aching, mossy, mysterious scent. It’s a liminal time – a time no longer summer, and not yet fall. The perfect time to invoke pasts and memories. A good place to begin a tale. In this case, a befuddled tale of spiritual seeking and finding…

Here’s the story. Well, the beginning of the story. Today’s version of the story…or at least the story as it stands right…now. Stories change with each telling…I’m sure you already know that. So to say this is THE story seems a little excessive. Can’t have that. So…here’s a story, anyhow. That might be more accurate. Yes. Glad we settled that.

Onward.

I grew up an unchurched atheist. My mom, the Atheist Matriarch, was herself raised on a regular diet of conservative Protestantism, and then one day she figured she’d had quite enough of all that hogwash, and became an atheist (naturally, that’s about the briefest account of one person’s spiritual journey ever…but it’s her story and not mine – I tell it only to illustrate my own spiritual ancestry). I think I was no bigger than a minute when all that happened, so when I was a wee lass, the only church experiences I had were when we went to the local UU church, and those visits were exceedingly…rare (I often say that we went to church about as often as the average family goes to the zoo). For the most part, my mom’s approach to religion went something like, “I think it’s all bullshit, but you’re allowed to believe whatever you like, and I’ll take you to your chosen house of worship should you want to go…you know…ever.” My dad? A kinda sorta deist with no inclination towards any kind of church-going (unless someone comes up with the Church of Old, Junky Cars…in which he may already be the unwitting Pope…or at least a cardinal of serious rank). Personally, I’ve always been both extremely happy and somewhat regretful with the way I was raised spiritually-speaking. Of course, I’m grateful for my parents’ liberal, hands-off approach to religion…certainly I know plenty of folks with quite the opposite experience who feel rather powerfully that they wish it had been otherwise. But a little part of me has always wished I’d had a childhood just a wee bit more rooted in a faith community. Still, fact remains, I didn’t, and that’s fine. Of course, it only naturally follows that when I came of age, thus armed with this totally irreligious approach, I promptly became hugely fascinated with mythology, magic, and religion, all to the general amusement of my parents.

Squirreled away there in the sanctuary of my little room, I read. And read. Fantasy novels, fairy tales, and mythology (Oh…D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths…), oh my. I wandered out into our Colorado backyard and looked avidly for faeries in and among the irises and the tall grass. I crept out of my house and night to look at the moon. I dreamed of dragons with quilts for wings and white-haired women made out of green rock crystal. I wrote poems. I wrote a lot of poems. I fell under the spell of a visiting storyteller. I watched movies like the The Neverending Story and Legend and near wrecked myself with wanting to live in those worlds. I not-so-secretly longed to see a unicorn. Yep. I was that girl – half Schmendrick, half Molly Grue, and all hopeless, hopeless romantic. All burning-heart, ineffable yearning for magic, all the time.

And it was for magic specifically that I ached. To some, this yearning may seem the antithesis of my views regarding the need for a religion of Right Here This Body This Planet Beautiful Beautiful Right Now, rooted in the Mama, the present, the Real, with a wicked aversion to technology and anything that escapes the senses or the body…and, hey, maybe it is. On one hand, my then (and oh, let’s admit it, still plenty extant) longing for magic, by which I mean Great Amazing Mysteries…things unseen suddenly seen…secrets…astonishing wonders…miracles…”supernatural” events/beings…tiny worlds within worlds that get bigger the further in you go…talking animals and prophecy and enchantments…things that defy science or explanation and baffle the senses…could be seen as a desire to escape this-world, to transcend or trick the mundane laws of real life…because real life isn’t beautiful or mysterious or good enough. That’s one way to look at it, and one way that many people who pooh-pooh fantasy novels and fantasy novel-readers sometimes look at it. But, and you can chalk it up to denial if you like, I just don’t see it that way. I long for those things, and I think a lot of us do, because there’s “real life,” and then there’s Real Life, and they’re really really really NOT the same thing. Believing in and longing for magic, (by which, yes, I *also*  mean Great Amazing Mysteries…the moment your heart turned to blackberry jam in your chest because you moved just in time to look some feral beastie straight in their wild and feathery eye…the rush of wheeling stars overhead…the music of poetry and story and the human voice…omens and signs…candlelight and dance…red rocks, bonfires, plum cordial and mountain springs…) is, to me, the same as the human hunger for god and the human delight in and search for true beauty…a longing for Real Life, not “real life.” Real Life exists in the family of fox kits that lives in the drainage pipe next to your apartment complex, and it exists in the tales that say that when the sun shines while it rains the foxes have their weddings, and it exists in the longing to hear a fox speak suddenly and miraculously in a human tongue and sing you a riddle and the holding of that possibility in your heart…whether the moment comes when it does just that, or not. Magic is Beauty is Mystery is Possibility is Imagination is Amazement is Storytelling is Poetry is Enchantment is Mama is God.

So it follows of course then that in addition to my Enya-listening uber-geekdom and my fledgling identity as a poet, I also had a fascination with the natural world – it seemed like some great and gorgeous realm, full of that same magic, mystery and potential. Now, I wasn’t exactly a mountaineer, so don’t think I just thrust myself out into the great beyond on all occasions. I was a fat kid, and I wasn’t stereotypically sporty. But I did spend a lot of time in the tamed wilderness of our backyard whispering to the wind, talking with irises and peering at snowflakes, and I spent many a weekend in the Rocky Mountains with my mother and sister – hiking, driving to the top of Trail Ridge Road and spying on marmots, visiting mountain towns like Nederland, and exploring the front range. I also spent several summers attending camp in those same Rockies, where I participated in backpacking (hate), horseback riding (love), more hiking (depends), and vesper worship evenings around campfires on mountainsides at sunset (love). I spent many weeks of winter in Arizona, where the wind would shoot its arrows of astonishment straight through my heart, and the sound of mourning doves wedded me to the Southwest forever and ever. And of course…there was my young childhood spent in Texas out among the fire ants and the scorpions…and the cedar trees and the silence and the wind. So, combined, all these experiences had, at the very least, embedded in me the understanding that the mountains and the hill country and the desert were all heart-thumpingly gorgeous, stunning, shocking, amazing, capricious, dangerous, and vast. Not unlike all those Greek gods I’d read about as a kid…not unlike magic.

So it really made total sense that I would stumble into the world of Neopaganism one day in the bookstore. I mean, my god, it was practically inevitable. I had already encountered one book on spellcraft at an early age…memorable for the fact that it was the single only book my mom ever took away from me; my absorption of the book’s section on black magic (which wasn’t meant to be instructive, only informative, but still) resulted in me innocently ask her what LSD was one night as she tucked me into bed, and that was that (kudos to my mom for agreeing to buy me a book of spells in the first place). But it had been a few years since then, and I was stunned to discover that there were people, real people, living in the world, practicing magic and calling themselves witches, and carrying on as if both were as every day as rain and gravel. I had picked up the book thinking it was a fantasy novel (a frankly conceivable mistake). It was called True Magick by Amber K, and it rocked my 12 year old world. From there it wasn’t difficult to find material – my adolescence after all was spent in Boulder. That really should tell you all you need to know, but let’s just say that books on alternative religion weren’t exactly hard to find, and I set out with a passion and mission to find all of them I could. I became a regular ghostie at the library and at the local mall’s chain bookstore, haunting the “New Age” section and committing juvenile acts of civil disobedience by reshelving Buckland’s Big Blue Book in the “Religion” section where I felt it belonged. My first book with the word “Wicca” on the cover was dear Scott Cunningham’s well-known guide for the solitary, and I ate it up like butterscotch pudding (it was also the first and only time I felt weird buying a book and asked my mom if the clerk would think I was a crazyperson…to which my mother responded that a. if they did, who gives a crap, and b. it was highly unlikely that they were going to notice or give a crap themselves – both excellent and accurate bits of advice). And I will never, ever, forget the euphoria of reading my first copy of Circle Network News. I thought I would die of excitement, though I admit I did raise an eyebrow a bit over the obituary for a hamster named Lugh. I mean, I was 12. An obituary for a hamster named after a Celtic god seemed weird then. Funny how 20 someodd years of Neopaganism can make that seem totally and utterly normal.

From there it was a matter of practice. I wiled away more hours in my little sanctuary, burning buckets (and buckets) of sandalwood incense and learning about besoms and athames. My first altar was on top of a small footlocker/trunk my parents had bought for me a few years earlier when I went away to camp…I still have that trunk as a matter of fact - right now it’s serving as a coffee table. (It is rather old-fashioned and steampunky of me, but I rather suggest investing in a good trunk…they’re just incredibly useful.) My first ritual was in honor of Lammas and I performed it there at my trunk/altar. I had a kitchen knife, a loaf of bread I baked myself (possibly for the first time ever), and a glass of apple juice poured into the most goblet-y blue glass I could find in the kitchen. I burned more sandalwood incense, lit a tiny candle, and recited some stuff from a book. I don’t remember much else from that first ritual…except the light. Not from the candle, but from the day outside the window. It was late afternoon, and the light had a dusty, buttery quality, filtering in through the glass and settling over my makeshift Things of Power. I was home, and Home.

 

And that’s the way it went on through high school, though few really knew about it I guess. I was curiously reticent about that part of my life at the time – my friends probably knew (I honestly can’t recall if I ever said anything about it), and even if they didn’t, they would have been fine with it, we just shared different interests (mostly delightfully nerdy ones, like Star Trek and stand-up comedians). There was at least one other Wiccan in my class that I knew of, but I didn’t know her very well and never spoke to her about it. I’m sure there were plenty of reasons that I kept it more or less to myself. I was, after all, a nerdy, shy, fat girl…I’d made a conscious choice after the hell of 7th grade to be as invisible as possible with regard to the greater student body in order to survive adolescence with my center intact…and to expose myself to any potential ridicule, especially regarding something I felt to be so beautifully precious, seemed simply unwise. ‘Course…college pretty much took care of all that. But for now, we’ll leave the story where it is for the moment – solitary and sweet, awash in late summer sunlight and the smell of sandalwood.

 

That was the beginning. It’s an interesting exercise, this spirtual journey-telling. To remember that girl so bent on magic, and who in many ways is still here, typing these words. I do think it was that original pursuit…that fiery desire for magic, for the ineffable, for Real Life, that led me into the study of theology and now storytelling. But there’s at least a few stories inbetween then and now to get to, and they’ll have to be gotten to another time.

 

In the meantime of this time, beloveds…I wish for you that dusty, butterly light. The relishing of memory and the drift of thought – ravens both, and crafty.

 

Grok earth, friends. Pray without ceasing.

• September 8, 2011
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