after enlightenment, the dishes

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.

Ode to Spring
- Sonya Florentino

It snowed today
Again
Like yesterday
And once more
Snow tomorrow

A harsh winter
That’s what they say
Colder than it’s ever been
Snow like we’ve never seen
Spring… it will be late

But I will wait, for like fate
Spring always follows
Spring always comes
Spring has never failed me

Even under 6 feet of sorrow
No matter how long I burrow
Spring somehow always finds me

[participant in the 5th Annual Cyberspace Poetry Slam for Brigid]

This New Year’s, I’m not in the mood for retrospectives, for listing best or worst, for naming the things that I did or that happened to me in 2009. Not keen on taking the time to send off the old year.

Neither am I in the mood for resolutions, for naming things to do or goals to reach in 2010, for shaping the new year while it’s yet raw and unformed.

The more I protest, the more I start thinking, maybe these lists of old and new serve a purpose. Maybe they structure our memories and our hopes; maybe they structure the very turning of the year.

So, despite not being in the mood, I’ll give it a shot.

In 2009, I:

- Acquired a dining-room table and set it up (with chairs!) in the dining room. This meant that not only does each room of the apartment have actual, functional furniture in it, but also I could conceivably have long chats with someone over coffee, or host dinners. (That part didn’t happen, unfortunately. We ate our small family Thanksgiving dinner, Yule dinner, and maybe one other dinner there, and the rest of the year it held clutter.) Whether it was well-used or not, it was important to me to create a space for Craft conversations and feasting, and I did that.

- Angsted rather a lot over my professional blog and ended up all but abandoning it, spreading myself over LJ, Dreamwidth (brand new in 2009!), there, here, and Facebook. Overall posting went down, too.

- Survived a third round of layoffs at my place of employment. I’ve worked at the same place for more than three years now, and (mostly) expect to continue there through 2010.

- Attended my second-ever Pagan festival and danced at a drum circle for the first time. (I was so worried about this that I researched it before I went.) Though it was profoundly transformative for me, I never did write about the experience. In a similar vein, over the course of the year I participated in several rituals that grew my practice by leaps and bounds. Reading is really not the same as doing.

- Shifted into a caretaker role for The Hubs during a particularly bad MS exacerbation, which culminated in a neurologist appointment and a five-day hospital stay for him. I was Superwoman for a couple of months, and it forced me to shed a lot of the fear and trepidation I’d had about things like grocery shopping by myself, being home alone at night, and speaking up for what I need (or what The Hubs needed). At the end of the year The Hubs was awarded disability income and shifted into writing full-time.

- Formally left one of the two Blue Star groups I belonged to. Leaving this group was a graduation of sorts for me. It’s where I first encountered Blue Star and first met an awful lot of people (both in Baltimore and in the tradition). My departure meant that not only had I forged enough relationships on my own to sustain me away from the group (especially since my other group, and my teacher, are long-distance), it also meant I could see when a situation was not useful to me and leave it gracefully.

In 2010, I will:

- Move, somewhere. We now live on the third floor and The Hubs needs a place without stairs. We’re looking at a place in the suburbs; we may not get this particular house, but I’m sure we’ll be living somewhere other than this apartment at the close of 2010.

- Find a dentist and get my teeth regularly cleaned/looked at. (They’re hurting me now, probably because I haven’t seen a dentist in a couple of years.)

- Learn to handle scary and stressful situations gracefully. As my stressors mounted this fall, I panicked more. I spent so much time grumping around, hiding in my favorite escapes, and gritting my teeth that I was scared to exhale, lest some other boulder drop. It’s no way to live, hunkering down like that. I’m sure 2010 won’t be all sunshine and roses, so I’ll spend the year practicing better coping mechanisms, breathing out as deeply as I breathe in, and not staying quite so tightly coiled up.

- Become a Blue Star Neophyte. I spent a lot of 2009 scared of this Rite of Passage and its subsequent life changes, but I came through so much that year, I’m now confident I can make it through whatever Neophyte has in store for me. (This isn’t necessarily a practical goal to list, because my teacher and others are planning the ritual and its timing, but I’m also confident that a suitable time will present itself in the next year. For my part, I will take the first available opportunity.)

- Keep track of the books I finish for the 50-Book Challenge. Reviews are optional; the list itself isn’t.

To borrow a toast from Thorn Coyle: here’s hoping that 2010 is a year of love, joy, prosperity, knowledge, and great sex!

When life gets a little rough, I daydream about going back to West Michigan and starting a coven there (which is, in fact, one of the things I plan on doing when I am All Trained Up). There’s probably no call to be joining regional Yahoo lists quite yet, though. *ahem*

I am nevertheless surprised at the number of groups that exist. When I lived there, I felt like there was nothing! I moved away because I was so sure there were no Pagans near me! Some of these groups have been around for 8-10 years, too, so they must have been there when I was. Were the existing groups not good enough for me? Did they meet further away than I was comfortable driving? Did Yahoo’s search feature suck so much that I never found them?

I suspect the answer to all three questions is “yes”. I know I was picky about what groups I joined (and I rarely met physically with any of them), and I whined about driving an hour — though, to be fair, I now drive four hours for an all-Craft-all-the-time weekend with close kin, not coffee and more-fluff-than-not “discussion” with virtual strangers. And Yahoo’s group search has been widely known to suck.

So far I haven’t found any regional Pagan groups worth delurking on. Which is just as well, as Baltimore is still home, and distances in Michigan probably seem shorter from here than they would if I lived there. (Either that or I’m lazy I’ve gotten used to the East Coast, where driving an hour gets you to another state.)

Where is the discussion happening nowadays? Sites like Ning? Blogs with lots more traffic than mine? Or, should I say, is there still discussion happening? Seems to me the signal-to-noise ratio has gone down, but it could also be that my definition of “signal” has narrowed over the years.

Off to wander; it may be a short trip. My need for community is already satisfied, and it also seems to me that “community” is the first and sometimes only purpose of most online Pagan groups. What I’m looking for is the realization of the daydream — and I don’t actually want that to happen yet. Too much to do here. (Which work I am tidily avoiding.)

I call out to the nameless plurality of the Divine and I say, “Who among you is calling me? Who is reaching outward? To whom do I open my hands?”

Silence answers me back, but it is not the silence of absence. It is the silence of presence. Someone is waiting for me to come to my senses.

I call out again and I say, “What am I working toward? What will be my great work, and how will I accomplish it? Who will I become when I have undertaken this work?”

Silence again. There is, perhaps, a smile.

I call out a third time, irritated, and I say, “Why is my work delayed? I am ready to begin it! Why am I waiting? For what purpose am I being held still?”

Silence, in which my plaintive questions echo deeper and deeper, until the questions fold over on themselves and become an answer:

To learn to listen, to wait, and to be still.

And now I feel foolish. Like I’d gone up to a Zen monk in meditation and demanded he tell me about the monastery. Or to a museum and loudly asked what all those paintings were for. Or to a library and said, “Damn, there’s a lot of books here!”

Stillness and patience have never been my strong suits. Apparently it’s time for me to learn them.

I am now a big proponent of the battery-powered tealight, such as appeared last holiday season and will probably start popping up in stores again soon.

Handy substitute for the real thing. I can let it “burn” all night with no worry of fire danger, I can take it to work in my purse without stopping the flame, and I can stash it somewhere unobtrusive to keep it “burning” all day. The kind I bought even flicker like candlelight!

I mentioned the idea to some of my tradmates, who have suggested battery-powered tealights as an option for mothers with curious toddlers, as an emergency candle when you’re at work and need to send healing energy to someone, in a travel altar for overnights in a hotel, and at college if your dorm doesn’t allow open flame.

Battery-powered candles also comes in pillars of varying heights and seasonal colors. Three cheers for 21st century candle technology!

I’ve been crazy busy at work. This is fairly regular for my job, so I’m getting pretty good at remembering to get enough sleep, take vitamins, drink water, eat breakfast (and lunch and a balanced dinner, for that matter), and build some downtime into my week.

Yet I’ve still been feeling stretched. Physically, I’m fine, not too tired or hungry or hurting. Emotionally, I’m all right; I feel loved and supported, and I don’t freak out too much. Some other system — spiritual? mental? — felt like it was running on fumes. I noticed I kept trying to escape, to get my head elsewhere, and couldn’t stay focused.

So last night I drew a hot bath with lavender-scented suds, and I spent some time grounding, centering, doing square breathing. I figured something needed restoring and that’d be good for what ailed me.

This morning, I felt dramatically better. Who’da thunk, right?

It’s a little embarrassing to admit that I’ve never been able to keep up a regular meditation practice, and I’ve had a lackadaisical approach to psychic hygiene. I’m a strongly visual person, and psychic hygiene is hard to see (unlike physical hygiene; I can see if my hair’s in bad shape, for starters). But a big chunk of the woo-woo that I do is not visible, and my sense of energy is tactile/kinetic, so how exactly is “I can’t see it” an excuse to discount it?

I think improving will be a matter of connecting that stretched feeling with a need to center, breathe deeply, and then making time to do that often so I don’t have to wait until I feel stretched. And, luckily, I’ve got plenty of opportunity to practice.

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.)

I’ve thought too long, and missed out on Pagan Values Month.

Ah well; I think it may be a yearly thing. Looks like it was well-participated-in.

Perhaps my voice isn’t tuned enough. I wrote two or three drafts — mostly about how writing is so vital to the Pagan community, from books to websites to forums and groups, especially to those of us who didn’t have a physically present community when starting out (or still don’t) — but they pretty much read, “Wow, man, writing is, like … super important.”

I would like to think that I have important things to say. Maybe I’m not, to borrow a phrase, done cooking yet.

Summer rain showers that scent the air first, then drench everything, sending us running to close the windows — but only after we’re sure that it’s raining in. When they let up soon afterward, the temperature has gone down ten degrees, and everything smells wet and green and soft.

Macaroni shells cooked a little past al dente, onion and garlic red sauce, homemade garlic bread, with the last of a glass of lemonade to drink.

For dessert, homemade iced mocha and a little schadenfreude via Chopped. (First course: beef shoulder, fish sauce, and canned pumpkin! Yeah, that sounds like my cupboards.) And the windows are open again.

I love iced coffee, and there’s going to be a lot of it at my place this summer … especially because I’m not using anything special, or large quantities of anything expensive, to make it. Simple, easy, cool, delicious, comforting.

That’s the theme of tonight.