Well, I’m here. It’s been a little more than two weeks and I’m still figuring out what my new life is like.
We didn’t get the house we’d made an offer on. That went to a bank auction, wires got crossed, communication ended, and I don’t know if anyone ever bought the house. We drove by it once, and the auction signs were still there. Never heard anything more about it.
Instead we’re staying with a friend who has dreams of creating an artists’ retreat, where people can come and play music or dance or whatever they most love to do. His house is beautiful and open, with two sets of sliding doors that lead onto a nice wide deck, maybe 20 feet from the river. (With all the rain in the past week, it’s more like 18 feet now.) We’re here until we get on our feet, or we find our own house, or we decide to move on. I’m savoring it: Sunsets through tree branches. Mist off the river after it rains. Bonfires. Well water. Watching mallard ducks and Canada geese and blue jays and robins and crows and mourning doves and a half-dozen other birds I haven’t learned to identify. And the trees! Oaks and beeches and maples and pines and birches, still sending out their first yellow-green leaves. It’ll go from beautiful to gorgeous when summer comes, and from there to breathtaking in the fall.
My next steps in learning to priestess involve curling my toes into the dirt of this place, waiting, and listening. I checked Witchvox for local groups, noticed a lack of listings for Trad covens, and started asking why that might be. I’m slowly getting answers. Some of it is politics among the existing groups in the southeast, a solid Christian presence on the west side of the state (where I am) that’s not very tolerant of difference, and not enough people in the north to sustain large groups.
I left here in 2006 convinced that I had to, because I’d been seeking for a couple of years and concluded there wasn’t any Trad Wicca to be had in Michigan. In 2009, when I’d been in Blue Star for two years, I discovered I was wrong and there is (and had been) Craft in Michigan. I figured that once I got back, I’d send out a couple of emails, and I’d get connected to the community here. Now that I’m back and looking more closely, I understand why I didn’t see anything in 2006 — and that it’s not as simple as folks not listing themselves on Witchvox.
This is where The Hubs grew up, and he’s told me stories of how he was treated as a non-Christian kid. How people look at you when you say you don’t go to church. In fact, he and I met because one of his classmates publicly ragged on him for not being a Christian! I guess it was easy to consider that an isolated incident because we were in a college town, where people are a little more liberal and accepting, and then we moved away and became bona fide East Coast liberals. It was easy to surround ourselves with like-minded friends.
If I’m really going to priestess here, I need to do more than that, and I really underestimated the work in front of me. It’s going to take some time to figure out where I fit in the community and establish myself, both mundanely and ritually, before I can hang out my shingle.
