The beautiful: Watching the trees burst into leaf during a particularly wet week in early May. Watching the river rise with the rain and fall with the heat (it’s been in the upper 80s this week). Standing in the river’s current, feeling the water flow past, and watching the tiny brook trout come up to see what’s going on. Hearing, smelling, feeling, seeing the winds that blow here. Watching the moon rise every night and grow to fullness; watching the sun rise and set across the sky. Learning exactly how little light I need to see through the dark. Identifying the local birds: we have at least one heron, Canada geese (who brought their wee fuzzy goslings across the yard and into the river yesterday), a couple of mallard ducks, some red-tailed hawks (who I’m told also have babies now), barn owls, mourning doves, blue jays, robins, red-winged blackbirds, and a few other songbirds I don’t know. There’s a doe who comes by, too, and she usually has twin fawns this time of year. Night noises are full of crickets and frogs.

The not-so-beautiful: The bat(s), who come hunting in our living room and flap around the cathedral ceilings, making us worry for the cats (who are not up on their rabies shots). The mosquitoes, who provide food for the bats, and moths and spiders and assorted other creepy-crawlies who don’t see any reason to stay outside our four walls. The mice, who see the house as a nice place to burrow, and at least one of whom met its demise in the jaws of a housecat. The raccoons, who see our food garbage and the outdoor cats’ kibble as equally tasty eating, and think they might stroll around the house looking for more.

All of them are doing what they do naturally. Mostly, it’s finding food and shelter where they can. Not the cats’ fault that we had to clean up the crusted, decaying, gnawed-on half of a mouse under the bed. Not the bat’s fault that I screamed and hit the dirt when it flew toward the shelter of the highest point of the ceiling, directly over where I was standing. Not the mosquitoes’ fault that my skin is delicious, or the moths’ and other bugs’ fault that we’re the brightest light for 100 yards in any direction. Not the raccoon’s fault that we more or less set out lunch on a silver platter.

This, too, is part of the cycles of Nature, only I’ve got far more connection to the emergence of Japanese lady beetles in the spring than to lambing season. Seeing this — seeing it and doing our best to work with it, not trying to fight it — is a whole different experience of Nature and of Paganism. (I will totally admit to telling myself “Come on, Pagan, fur and feather and blood and bone” when I gagged on the stench of that mouse and wiped its blood off my floor, even though The Hubs took care of body disposal.)

I must say that it is a dramatically different side of my religion than the one I experienced living in an apartment or a Baltimore rowhouse. Not that you don’t get any piece of Nature there; you do see the sun and moon, changing seasons, bugs and birds and critters. But living in a city, you’ve got the expectation that this is your turf and the critters had best not come in. Here, I’m on the critters’ turf, and I had best learn to live lightly, because there’s no exterminator in the world who could keep the critters away.

I still don’t feel like I’m adequately describing what’s changed. My memory is bringing up my horse show days and how you could tell a lot about a person by what they did if a bug fell into their drink: Shriek and dump the drink? Calmly pick the bug out? Or not worry too much and keep drinking around the bug? In other words, how in tune was this person with the reality of having horses around?

I don’t know that I’m attuning with the cycles of Nature so much as I’m learning some of Nature’s realities.

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.

The adjective “self-proclaimed” has featured pretty regularly in news articles about Pagans, usually implying to a mainstream readership “can you believe this person thinks she’s a real witch/Druid/etc.?!” and thus a cause for some grinding of teeth about not being taken seriously. In these recent cases, though, that hedge-word has allowed local Pagan communities to confirm that the person in question was not known to them and that no Pagan groups advocate the activities that person claimed to be practicing (such as murder and sexual abuse of a child) when arrested. (In one case, an abuser held clergy status with the Correllians. His clergy status has been suspended pending the outcome of the trial, and if he is found guilty, the Correllians say, it will be revoked outright.)

I can believe that many people could feel the need for such a statement of ethics; given the situations under discussion, I absolutely support the local Pagan communities’ ability to emphasize that they neither practice or condone such things. And I think that the people who create a joint ethical statement might end up with a halfway decent document at best. At worst, however, a finished document would be a replay of the Council of American Witches’ “13 Principles of Wiccan Belief.” (Recap: Published in 1974, and as I understand it, American witches ever since have had to explain that these beliefs are not universally accepted and that neither the Council nor the list of principles has any kind of authority among witches. Some of them aren’t even beliefs.) But an ethical statement that would be accepted by many practitioners across many Pagan religions — which we can’t even define without controversy — and would somehow also include solitaries?

To paraphrase Anne Hill on the topic, I wish them well.

These situations are happening because the only gatekeeper on Pagan religion is your willingness to look it up on the internet and then claim that you’re a Pagan. If you’re really dedicated, you might buy some books on the subject. You don’t have to join a single group or show up at any community festival. You can even decide to leave any group you’ve ever joined. You can go and collect tools and other shinies, you can participate on lists and forums and blogs, you can buy lots of books or borrow them from the library — you can get all kinds of information on Paganism and practice as a solitary, doing whatever makes your heart sing, and hardly anyone will say you nay. This is normally something that Pagans like about their religion. Where it’s mostly harmless for your average treehugging soft-polytheist who works with dragons and unicorns and Sephiroth from FF7, however, it doesn’t get more harmful than [trigger warning for descriptions of abuse at this link] sexually abusing a child for years and telling her it’s part of your religion.

Anne Hill advises keeping “ethics and standards on the front burner in our various subcultures.” To which I add: If we do that in all the various websites and YouTube channels and forums and books that any solitary (or group member) may pick up, it will reach the widest possible group of Pagans. We don’t necessarily have to agree at this stage (which I think is far more likely than the creation of one statement of ethics), we just have to keep talking about it, in places we can point to when cases like this come up. It would also be good to call people out on their ethical breaches — which we do, in these cases as well as loose campaigns like “Traditional Wicca Does Not Cost Money” — in ways that also keep the discussion going. Not all Pagans share exactly the same ethics, and where a single document may not be widely accepted for one reason or another, broad consensus may be more effective.

Or so I think. I doubt how effective a group Statement of Pagan Ethics might be; I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t think a definitive set of answers is even possible. But I’m certainly in favor of keeping the discussion going.

Recently I read a couple of books on (specifically) Wiccan ethics: When, Why … If and Before You Cast a Spell. I’m working on essays on both of them, plus looking for other books on ethics and witchcraft, which will eventually end up at my own ethics project as a contribution to the discussion.

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.

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.)

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.

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]

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!

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.)

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.