not ready for prime time?
Posted in Uncategorized on 03/03/2010 08:57 pm by MaewynI 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.
03/04/2010 at 8:31 pm
If it helps any, my basic theory has been to write about stuff that people mostly aren’t talking about much (but that *could* be talked about), or stuff that keeps coming up.
In the first case, it helps me think through it, and in the second, it gives me a handy reference the next times it comes up. Readers are excellent in either part of the process, but I’m writing for myself as well, and that made it easier to get over my “Does anyone else care?” feelings.
05/11/2010 at 10:51 am
Sorry to come to this so late. But let me say, not writing because you can’t yet find words is fine–there is so MUCH I want to say, but haven’t yet found words for! And likewise, not sharing all that you have to say with the Whole Wide World (WWW, aka teh Interwebs *smile*) is also dandy!
But don’t think that you need to wait until you’ve been Pagan for a long, long time to have much to say. One thing that is very clear to me, as I read Pagan blogs, is how much of the best, most important writing going on in the Pagan blogosphere is being done by men and women who are coming into their spiritual maturity.
Keep effing the ineffable! No one else has your specific voice, and as long as you are true to what you experience, what you write will have value. (I’ll want to read it, anyway.)
Blessings!
05/15/2010 at 2:22 am
Cat, thank you so much!
The writing’s coming a little easier now that I’ve moved. I can be done saying “when I get there”, because I’m here, and now there are some things I can do! Digging in, mostly. Consciously treading the same patch of earth that was so influential in my becoming Pagan in the first place. Kind of a head trip.