after enlightenment, the dishes

So I have this goal. It flows from an earlier goal, which was to find training in traditional Wicca. I didn’t know what I’d do with that training once I got to it, but the drive to find it was so strong, I skipped over any kind of purpose until I’d found a tradition and a teacher and had been formally studying for more than a year.

But the question of purpose did need asking, if I were to progress, because attaining that purpose is, well, the purpose of progressing. If I just wanted to be part of trad Wicca, ta-da! I got that already. Why continue? Why work toward initiation?

My purpose has to do with my roots. I grew up in Michigan; I spent 18 years on the eastern side of the state and 8 years on the western side. When Hubs and I left, we were all about getting the hell out of the state and moving to someplace more exciting — someplace with jobs and, for me, a trad Wicca presence. There wasn’t anyone in our corner of the state, I was just sure, and I knew I’d have to move somewhere to find it. We landed in Baltimore, where I connected with Blue Star. My local grove is here and my teacher’s grove and coven is in southeastern Virginia. And around the time I started thinking about what my purpose might be, Hubs was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and discovered that his intolerance of heat and humidity had a medical reason. He wanted to be back home, where it got plenty cold in the winter and not that hot in the summer, and mostly, where his family is.

Which led me to my purpose. If there really wasn’t a trad Wicca presence where I came from … perhaps I should get myself trained up and take it back home, so that others wouldn’t have to leave the state to find it.

I thought this was a bit presumptuous of me until recently. Last weekend Hubs and I drove back home to attend the Wheatland Music Festival, and one of the audiobooks I borrowed for the drive was A Hat Full of Sky, one of the Tiffany Aching books by Terry Pratchett. Tiffany is such a product of her chalk hills, and such a good (but young) witch, that the story is about her going off to get trained in witchcraft and coming home to be the witch of the hills. It’s who she is and what she does. And I see a little of myself in that story. I don’t have a well-known local family, and there’s no larger drama hanging on my going out to be trained as a witch — but the parts about needing to go away so you can come home again and see the place with new eyes, and about coming back better than you were when you left, ring true.

So I have a fairly grand goal, and right now I’m just a wee young thing. Never run a coven before, not very far into my training, still learning names and histories and what people are like. I don’t plan to reach my goal for another ten years yet. What I didn’t realize was that, with a ten-year plan, you don’t feel like you’re making a whole lot of progress right in the beginning.

Today’s primary lesson has been about the need to put my nose to the grindstone, and how not all of the work is sparkly and mystical (even the mystical bits involve a bit of staging and unglamorous heavy lifting). Today’s secondary lesson is that sometimes I need to talk about it, however vaguely, because bottling it up isn’t working so well for me. I hope to write more posts about the process of learning to be a decent priestess and witch, but we’ll see. (My various blogs are littered with promises to post more about something or other, so I leave this one as a hope, not a promise.)