after enlightenment, the dishes

Somehow it snuck up on me this year. I bought egg dye and a bag of pre-filled eggs earlier this week, then on Saturday realized we didn’t have any Ostara baskets or much candy or fun stuff like that. We went shopping and bought seed packets, felt baskets in bright colors, chocolate rabbits, and a box of festive spring cupcake mix and frosting with sprinkles. By the time we got home, it was late, so we filled the baskets and moved the celebration to Sunday.

However, I woke up grumpy Sunday morning, and in no mood for silliness or egg-dyeing. I made the cupcakes, but I handed the baskets around with no ceremony, and resisted anything to do with my actual life. I spent most of the day morosely watching HGTV and picking paint and appliances for the house we don’t own quite yet. (We made an offer on a bank-owned house, went back and forth with the bank once already, and are due to hear an acceptance tomorrow.)

I would say it’s not a big deal to have one down day, but it seems different when the day in question is a holiday. There will only be one Ostara 2010, and I stood a strong chance of missing it, candy and cupcakes notwithstanding. But, I reasoned to myself, I spent these last two days in an interminable limbo, worrying about the house, just waiting for the balance to tip one way or the other. Surely that’s one thing equinoxes are about.

Then the negative self-talk started up: On one hand, it seems like I could grow up to be a shitty priestess if I can’t get past this morass and do what’s gotta be done. I need to learn to put my personal crises aside, just long enough to get the ritual done the right way at the right time, if I can’t deal with my crises beforehand. (There are different schools of thought on ritual timing. I’m not taking a side in this post. I just know that if I chose to put this off another day, I’d continue putting it off until I felt like it was too late, and I’d wind up not doing the ritual at all.) On the other hand, I’m only a priestess for myself right now; no one else’s ritual experience is hanging on my ability to get through my brain muck. When my covenmates are actually present and waiting for me, it’s a no-brainer to say “This needs to wait until later,” center myself, and refocus on the ritual. When I’m talking about theoretical future covenmates or students, it’s harder to understand that tonight’s solitary ritual paves the way for solid, regular group ritual next year. I go back and forth between thinking “it’s OK if I can’t do it, if I softball this one and write a post about feeling the seasons change instead of holding ritual, since I’m just by myself” and “if I can’t do it by myself, how do I know I can do it for someone else?”

Tonight was hard. Some sabbats are super-fun, all-day group events, and it’s easy to get into the spirit of things and look forward to that night’s ritual. I tried, this time, but I couldn’t summon a whole group’s energy by myself. My family is supportive, but they’re not my coven, and the two structures don’t work in the same ways. And all day today I had been eaten up with worry about this house, even though we won’t hear until sometime tomorrow and nothing I could do today would make tomorrow come sooner.

Nothing, that is, except hold this ritual. It’s funny; with my solitary rituals, there’s a point at which I realize I’ll be holding this ritual, and I might as well get on with it. It’s like finding yourself awake earlier than you meant, and knowing that even if you lay there all morning, you won’t get back to sleep, so you might as well get up. So I got up, pulled out the altar box, and held ritual.

Turn the Wheel; feel the balance begin to shift; tip things so they fall the way I want. It helped. And the baskets and the cupcakes feel like they had a point, after all.

Wild Geese
- Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

[source]

We went home on an emergency visit this past weekend. The third member of our not-poly plural family, Cassiopeia, had news that her grandpa was ill. So we combined her visit to see him with The Hubs’ and my visit to see houses. (Her grandpa is not as ill as she first expected, but he’s not doing well, either. It’s good that we’re moving back to the state.)

Meanwhile the sun and the sharp scent of pine moved across the air.
Meanwhile the Canadian geese honked in their travels overhead.

It was really good to be back home. I am still sad about leaving Baltimore, but now I know, viscerally, why we’re moving back. And I have a story that fits. We are not like the kids from nowheresville who move to The City to make it big, and only come home after they’ve done it, which is the story I had in mind when we moved out here. Instead we are like the salmon, who spend their adult lives in the ocean and then, when the time is right, travel back to the small streams they’re from.

Being out here was good. The experience will always be a part of us. Now, however, it’s time to go back to our place in the family of things.

PS: Cassiopeia made pancakes she is so awesome. (I told her I was writing that in my post, so there it is.)

I started this blog with the idea that I’d talk about my journey toward becoming a priestess. And, I’ll admit, I read posts from famous-among-us priestesses like Anne Hill and Thorn Coyle and Deborah Lipp and Cat Chapin-Bishop, even my friends who actively talk about their priestess work (like Jenett and Beth), and I think I can totally write that too.

Thing is, I can’t. Not yet. All these women have been doing their Work for years (30+ years in some cases), and me, I’m just starting out. I’ve got a few months to go before I’ve even been alive for 30 years. Where they can talk about what happened in this coven or that collective, they have enough distance both to share the story and to see more clearly in retrospect. Where I’ve gone through some difficult time that’s helped me grow, it’s been far too close to home to post about it on the public internets. I’m still near the beginning of my training. They’ve had enough training and enough experience to speak with wisdom.

It’s not that I don’t feel my words have value, or that I feel like anyone’s discounting me because I’m so green yet. It’s that I hardly know what I’m saying, or how to say it. And it’s that I don’t want to get so wrapped up in writing the experience that I forget to live it.

Depending on the next few months, I may be starting a study group. I wrote last November that I daydreamed about moving back to West Michigan, and I wrote in my 2009 retrospective that I expected to move somewhere else in 2010. Well, those two things collided faster than I ever thought they would. I was laid off in January and The Hubs told me in February how much he wanted to move back home to Michigan, where his family is and where the weather’s cooler. (Baltimore summers play hell with his MS, and almost certainly contributed to last year’s attack.) So it looks like we’re on the move. If I can’t bring my coven with me, I’ll start one.

Maybe after that I’ll have something worth saying — what went well (or blew up in my face) at a coffee-shop meeting, what some kook wrote to me via Witchvox, how it feels when I find some good people and we start to coalesce as a group — or maybe not. It may not happen quite that way. Or I may still feel that the stories are too private to post.

Quiet contemplation doesn’t make for good blog posts. Either that or I don’t yet know how to express it so that anyone else could read it.