This post is subtitled “When you screw up in public, you have to make it right in public, too.”
First of all, I shouldn’t have used wording implying that I’m a priestess of Aphrodite. I’m not, and I doubt I ever will be. It just ain’t in me. After 10+ years as a Pagan, I still have some old ways thinking to fix, and one of them is forgetting that there are other ways of interacting with deity than as devotee. When I was shiny and new and learning about patron deities, I had a hard time understanding that a) you didn’t have to have a patron, b) not every deity you work with is your patron, and c) some deity relationships are targeted and specific; they don’t encompass your whole life or your whole person. I’m still learning that last one.
Second, I need to get laid more, because while you can make some equivalencies between food and sex, there are differences of degree that I was overlooking. You may see some triple chocolate brownies and go ohh, I need some of that, but they’re still brownies. You’re not going to take risks or do stupid things or endanger yourself or your existing relationships to get brownies. Eating the brownies is not really a transcendent experience. So on that point, I will say that if I’m sitting here wondering why I seem to be the only person trying to work in non-sexual qualities of Aphrodite and skimming the Theoi page about Her and not finding much, that may be because it doesn’t work. Watering it down like that leaves no space for someone who really does understand the power of sex and lust, someone who can wield that power and is fulfilled and energized by it.
I do have some more genuine experience of Aphrodite than the feel of different fabrics on my skin, and I might post about that if I’m comfortable with the detail (there’s that prude thing again). I just wanted to get this out right away because a friend gently pointed out how I’d written a few things that I’d have ripped on someone else for writing, and once I realized that, I didn’t want to let my last post stand.
So the line that kicked me into gear here was from Deborah Lipp’s most recent blog post about her cats and the strong relationship she has with them; she said that one “gave love like a Priestess of Ishtar.”
(I am sure I heard that line in a different way than she meant it, and I’m taking my thoughts off in another direction, but I did want to acknowledge the source.)
The first piece of background is that I am coming to claim the label of “prude” as an accurate one for me. I haven’t had many sexual partners, I’m long married, I generally don’t want to see or hear about sex except from my husband, and not any time is the right time. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture. Like I said earlier, not the kind of person you’d think of when you hear Aphrodite, right? But Ishtar falls along those lines. That’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about Deborah Lipp saying that her cat gave love like a Priestess of Ishtar — she can’t have been talking about anything sexual.
So for the rest of the day, and the day after that, I thought about connections with Aphrodite that weren’t sexual. Some of it was the “You like roses? I like roses! You like doves? I like doves!” kind of thing, true. But it was other things, like the sensual pleasure I take in feeling fabrics against my skin: soft flannel pajama bottoms, silky tops, scratchy wool, smooth cotton. The cooking I’ve been doing, concentrating on flavors and textures and combinations, experimenting, taking risks as well as connecting to comforts, experiencing the taste and sensation of the food. A reference to Her as the mother of all living things, in the beginning of my own mothering; the power of returning to sex to bring me back to myself, reminding me that I am more than a mother. The work that I did a couple years ago on dance and movement and embodiment, moving my body and being in it and reinforcing the mind/body connection, after a childhood and young adulthood of being discouraged from thinking very much at all about my body.
So what might a priestess of Aphrodite do that isn’t sexual? I talk about my cooking and what those flavors taste like, how the food feels in my hands and my mouth, inspiring other people to try this or that (or just that spark of desire, that ohh, I gotta have some of that). I talked about that process of embodiment as I went through it, and I try to stay conscious of my posture and my walk and move confidently — a daring thing for a fat person like me to do. At home, Hubs and I have a high-touch relationship, meaning that we check in with each other through a lot of touching shoulders, hands, feet, lips, whatever’s closest. We hug and snuggle a lot. And we practice attachment parenting with our daughter, in part because I grew up in a family that was very low-touch and I much prefer to create a family environment where casual touch is okay, and in part because I think it’s best for her to be held and snuggled a lot and picked up and soothed when something is wrong, not left to cry. We’re a bunch of breastfeeding, co-sleeping, babywearing hippies like that.
A complicating factor is that I also think of myself as selfish, not particularly giving, and not particularly observant of other people’s needs. (This is changing a little with my experience of motherhood and with just being in the world, thinking back on situations and going “Oh, this person said/did X because they needed Z, they were in this situation, and X is a logical reaction to that,” then looking for those signs next time.) I don’t have a lot of influence beyond my own wee family and my close friends. And I admit that I haven’t studied up on Aphrodite so I’m sure I’m missing big whacks of information about the way She was historically worshiped and thought of, and someone will likely be along shortly to tell me how wrong I am about something.
[ETA: See the results in Part 2.]
This isn’t the end of the story, though. This is another area where I have puzzle pieces and no box lid, bits of beginning but no end point in sight. In a future post I want to describe one more puzzle piece: how the statue currently in my kitchen came to be in my keeping.
So now that I’ve broken the ice, I’ll noodle a bit about the series I’d like to post. (I am likely to be very vague about any kind of posting schedule because I haven’t had a regular block of time in which I can expect to write posts. My daughter is, thankfully, sleeping in her crib for the moment and I’m taking the opportunity while I have it.)
Loath as I sometimes am to admit it, I have A Call. I’ve carved out this time because it’s irritated me so much to be away, as I felt, from the Craft. During most of my pregnancy and in the first months after my daughter was born, I skimmed or didn’t read or unsubscribed from a lot of the Pagan communities and blogs I had been reading. It just wasn’t as important to me as reading, say, a post from a mama dealing with a nursing strike and comments suggesting ways she and her baby could get through it with their breastfeeding relationship intact. I also didn’t have the time to spend reading Pagan books and blog posts and conversations that required me to think deeply. (Thinking deeply about things is one of my favorite hobbies, and my frustration at being unable to devote time to that is surely at play here.) Much less did I have the time to start the study group I was hoping for. In the past month or two, though, I’ve confident enough to put some of the parenting reads on the back burner and pull some of the Pagan stuff forward again.
So I have this Call. I don’t just mean the irritation at having to give up some things as a new mother; I mean I had an auditory experience of deity at a young age and I have this drive and desire that will not quit, no matter what else is going on in my life. Witchcraft suffuses my being. I am called to be a witch, as hard as I can. So that’s awesome, right? Well, to paraphrase Granny Weatherwax, what good is being a witch if nobody knows about it?
I don’t have a clear picture of what I need to be doing. I have a whole bunch of puzzle pieces — experiences, *ping!* moments, feelings of gaps like a lost tooth — but I’m missing the picture on the box lid to help me. Yesterday, I got a couple of *ping!* moments in a row and I couldn’t figure out what to do with them. So in this series, I’m going to pull out and look closely at each of those puzzle pieces and see where they might fit together.
I’m hoping to write about me and Aphrodite, and how I am probably the last person on the planet you would pick as an Aphrodisian but here She is nonetheless. I’m hoping to write about my experience of pregnancy, birth, and the Wheel of the Year, because there has GOT to be something in there worthwhile for others to hear — that’s not the kind of thing you experience and then say “well, that was fun” and just move on. I’m hoping to write something about my career and how I needed to discover humility (though the career thing is still in process at the moment and I might not be right about some of my preliminary conclusions here). I’m hoping to write about being geographically distant from my Blue Star tradmates and how a whole bunch of Not Right Now signs have come up, and how rough to handle those signs have been. I’m hoping to write about my Saturn Return, especially in relation to a comment I read once (from a 3* whose name and trad I have forgotten) about waiting for initiation until after one’s Saturn Return. I’m hoping to write about what qualities I think a priestess might have and, thus, where I think I’m going.
Above all, I’m hoping to reach back to what I started before my daughter was born, grab that thread, and pull it into the present moment. I know that I am continuing to do witchcraft, that I am also doing the important work of raising my child and tending to my family first, and that the Craft will always be here. I suspect that I can bide my time until my daughter is in school (and her sibling/s, of which she will hopefully have at least one), that I will have more time as they get older, and that I’m underestimating how very wee my baby bird still is. However, I’m not happy with everything packed away and my tools getting dusty, so I’ll do what I can while I wait.
Living out here is an amazing opportunity to dance in the cycles of Nature — with all that represents.
The beautiful: Watching the trees burst into leaf during a particularly wet week in early May. Watching the river rise with the rain and fall with the heat (it’s been in the upper 80s this week). Standing in the river’s current, feeling the water flow past, and watching the tiny brook trout come up to see what’s going on. Hearing, smelling, feeling, seeing the winds that blow here. Watching the moon rise every night and grow to fullness; watching the sun rise and set across the sky. Learning exactly how little light I need to see through the dark. Identifying the local birds: we have at least one heron, Canada geese (who brought their wee fuzzy goslings across the yard and into the river yesterday), a couple of mallard ducks, some red-tailed hawks (who I’m told also have babies now), barn owls, mourning doves, blue jays, robins, red-winged blackbirds, and a few other songbirds I don’t know. There’s a doe who comes by, too, and she usually has twin fawns this time of year. Night noises are full of crickets and frogs.
The not-so-beautiful: The bat(s), who come hunting in our living room and flap around the cathedral ceilings, making us worry for the cats (who are not up on their rabies shots). The mosquitoes, who provide food for the bats, and moths and spiders and assorted other creepy-crawlies who don’t see any reason to stay outside our four walls. The mice, who see the house as a nice place to burrow, and at least one of whom met its demise in the jaws of a housecat. The raccoons, who see our food garbage and the outdoor cats’ kibble as equally tasty eating, and think they might stroll around the house looking for more.
All of them are doing what they do naturally. Mostly, it’s finding food and shelter where they can. Not the cats’ fault that we had to clean up the crusted, decaying, gnawed-on half of a mouse under the bed. Not the bat’s fault that I screamed and hit the dirt when it flew toward the shelter of the highest point of the ceiling, directly over where I was standing. Not the mosquitoes’ fault that my skin is delicious, or the moths’ and other bugs’ fault that we’re the brightest light for 100 yards in any direction. Not the raccoon’s fault that we more or less set out lunch on a silver platter.
This, too, is part of the cycles of Nature, only I’ve got far more connection to the emergence of Japanese lady beetles in the spring than to lambing season. Seeing this — seeing it and doing our best to work with it, not trying to fight it — is a whole different experience of Nature and of Paganism. (I will totally admit to telling myself “Come on, Pagan, fur and feather and blood and bone” when I gagged on the stench of that mouse and wiped its blood off my floor, even though The Hubs took care of body disposal.)
I must say that it is a dramatically different side of my religion than the one I experienced living in an apartment or a Baltimore rowhouse. Not that you don’t get any piece of Nature there; you do see the sun and moon, changing seasons, bugs and birds and critters. But living in a city, you’ve got the expectation that this is your turf and the critters had best not come in. Here, I’m on the critters’ turf, and I had best learn to live lightly, because there’s no exterminator in the world who could keep the critters away.
I still don’t feel like I’m adequately describing what’s changed. My memory is bringing up my horse show days and how you could tell a lot about a person by what they did if a bug fell into their drink: Shriek and dump the drink? Calmly pick the bug out? Or not worry too much and keep drinking around the bug? In other words, how in tune was this person with the reality of having horses around?
I don’t know that I’m attuning with the cycles of Nature so much as I’m learning some of Nature’s realities.
