First of all, I shouldn’t have used wording implying that I’m a priestess of Aphrodite. I’m not, and I doubt I ever will be. It just ain’t in me. After 10+ years as a Pagan, I still have some old ways thinking to fix, and one of them is forgetting that there are other ways of interacting with deity than as devotee. When I was shiny and new and learning about patron deities, I had a hard time understanding that a) you didn’t have to have a patron, b) not every deity you work with is your patron, and c) some deity relationships are targeted and specific; they don’t encompass your whole life or your whole person. I’m still learning that last one.

Second, I need to get laid more, because while you can make some equivalencies between food and sex, there are differences of degree that I was overlooking. You may see some triple chocolate brownies and go ohh, I need some of that, but they’re still brownies. You’re not going to take risks or do stupid things or endanger yourself or your existing relationships to get brownies. Eating the brownies is not really a transcendent experience. So on that point, I will say that if I’m sitting here wondering why I seem to be the only person trying to work in non-sexual qualities of Aphrodite and skimming the Theoi page about Her and not finding much, that may be because it doesn’t work. Watering it down like that leaves no space for someone who really does understand the power of sex and lust, someone who can wield that power and is fulfilled and energized by it.

I do have some more genuine experience of Aphrodite than the feel of different fabrics on my skin, and I might post about that if I’m comfortable with the detail (there’s that prude thing again). I just wanted to get this out right away because a friend gently pointed out how I’d written a few things that I’d have ripped on someone else for writing, and once I realized that, I didn’t want to let my last post stand.

(I am sure I heard that line in a different way than she meant it, and I’m taking my thoughts off in another direction, but I did want to acknowledge the source.)

The first piece of background is that I am coming to claim the label of “prude” as an accurate one for me. I haven’t had many sexual partners, I’m long married, I generally don’t want to see or hear about sex except from my husband, and not any time is the right time. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture. Like I said earlier, not the kind of person you’d think of when you hear Aphrodite, right? But Ishtar falls along those lines. That’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about Deborah Lipp saying that her cat gave love like a Priestess of Ishtar — she can’t have been talking about anything sexual.

So for the rest of the day, and the day after that, I thought about connections with Aphrodite that weren’t sexual. Some of it was the “You like roses? I like roses! You like doves? I like doves!” kind of thing, true. But it was other things, like the sensual pleasure I take in feeling fabrics against my skin: soft flannel pajama bottoms, silky tops, scratchy wool, smooth cotton. The cooking I’ve been doing, concentrating on flavors and textures and combinations, experimenting, taking risks as well as connecting to comforts, experiencing the taste and sensation of the food. A reference to Her as the mother of all living things, in the beginning of my own mothering; the power of returning to sex to bring me back to myself, reminding me that I am more than a mother. The work that I did a couple years ago on dance and movement and embodiment, moving my body and being in it and reinforcing the mind/body connection, after a childhood and young adulthood of being discouraged from thinking very much at all about my body.

So what might a priestess of Aphrodite do that isn’t sexual? I talk about my cooking and what those flavors taste like, how the food feels in my hands and my mouth, inspiring other people to try this or that (or just that spark of desire, that ohh, I gotta have some of that). I talked about that process of embodiment as I went through it, and I try to stay conscious of my posture and my walk and move confidently — a daring thing for a fat person like me to do. At home, Hubs and I have a high-touch relationship, meaning that we check in with each other through a lot of touching shoulders, hands, feet, lips, whatever’s closest. We hug and snuggle a lot. And we practice attachment parenting with our daughter, in part because I grew up in a family that was very low-touch and I much prefer to create a family environment where casual touch is okay, and in part because I think it’s best for her to be held and snuggled a lot and picked up and soothed when something is wrong, not left to cry. We’re a bunch of breastfeeding, co-sleeping, babywearing hippies like that.

A complicating factor is that I also think of myself as selfish, not particularly giving, and not particularly observant of other people’s needs. (This is changing a little with my experience of motherhood and with just being in the world, thinking back on situations and going “Oh, this person said/did X because they needed Z, they were in this situation, and X is a logical reaction to that,” then looking for those signs next time.) I don’t have a lot of influence beyond my own wee family and my close friends. And I admit that I haven’t studied up on Aphrodite so I’m sure I’m missing big whacks of information about the way She was historically worshiped and thought of, and someone will likely be along shortly to tell me how wrong I am about something.

[ETA: See the results in Part 2.]

This isn’t the end of the story, though. This is another area where I have puzzle pieces and no box lid, bits of beginning but no end point in sight. In a future post I want to describe one more puzzle piece: how the statue currently in my kitchen came to be in my keeping.

Loath as I sometimes am to admit it, I have A Call. I’ve carved out this time because it’s irritated me so much to be away, as I felt, from the Craft. During most of my pregnancy and in the first months after my daughter was born, I skimmed or didn’t read or unsubscribed from a lot of the Pagan communities and blogs I had been reading. It just wasn’t as important to me as reading, say, a post from a mama dealing with a nursing strike and comments suggesting ways she and her baby could get through it with their breastfeeding relationship intact. I also didn’t have the time to spend reading Pagan books and blog posts and conversations that required me to think deeply. (Thinking deeply about things is one of my favorite hobbies, and my frustration at being unable to devote time to that is surely at play here.) Much less did I have the time to start the study group I was hoping for. In the past month or two, though, I’ve confident enough to put some of the parenting reads on the back burner and pull some of the Pagan stuff forward again.

So I have this Call. I don’t just mean the irritation at having to give up some things as a new mother; I mean I had an auditory experience of deity at a young age and I have this drive and desire that will not quit, no matter what else is going on in my life. Witchcraft suffuses my being. I am called to be a witch, as hard as I can. So that’s awesome, right? Well, to paraphrase Granny Weatherwax, what good is being a witch if nobody knows about it?

I don’t have a clear picture of what I need to be doing. I have a whole bunch of puzzle pieces — experiences, *ping!* moments, feelings of gaps like a lost tooth — but I’m missing the picture on the box lid to help me. Yesterday, I got a couple of *ping!* moments in a row and I couldn’t figure out what to do with them. So in this series, I’m going to pull out and look closely at each of those puzzle pieces and see where they might fit together.

I’m hoping to write about me and Aphrodite, and how I am probably the last person on the planet you would pick as an Aphrodisian but here She is nonetheless. I’m hoping to write about my experience of pregnancy, birth, and the Wheel of the Year, because there has GOT to be something in there worthwhile for others to hear — that’s not the kind of thing you experience and then say “well, that was fun” and just move on. I’m hoping to write something about my career and how I needed to discover humility (though the career thing is still in process at the moment and I might not be right about some of my preliminary conclusions here). I’m hoping to write about being geographically distant from my Blue Star tradmates and how a whole bunch of Not Right Now signs have come up, and how rough to handle those signs have been. I’m hoping to write about my Saturn Return, especially in relation to a comment I read once (from a 3* whose name and trad I have forgotten) about waiting for initiation until after one’s Saturn Return. I’m hoping to write about what qualities I think a priestess might have and, thus, where I think I’m going.

Above all, I’m hoping to reach back to what I started before my daughter was born, grab that thread, and pull it into the present moment. I know that I am continuing to do witchcraft, that I am also doing the important work of raising my child and tending to my family first, and that the Craft will always be here. I suspect that I can bide my time until my daughter is in school (and her sibling/s, of which she will hopefully have at least one), that I will have more time as they get older, and that I’m underestimating how very wee my baby bird still is. However, I’m not happy with everything packed away and my tools getting dusty, so I’ll do what I can while I wait.

First, I went and had a baby! I found out I was pregnant in June 2010, when I was about 9 weeks along. That’s largely responsible for the absence of posts here, as I focused my energies on learning about pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood. It was like dropping into a whole new subculture. There was a LOT to learn: gestational stages, infant and fetal developmental stages, health risks for mother and baby, social norms and expectations (among both pregnant women and new moms as well as parents in general). My daughter was born in February 2011 and she’s almost 8 months old now. I don’t expect to post my birth story here, but I did receive the extraordinary gift of birthing at Imbolc and thus participating bodily in the Wheel of the Year. I do hope to be able to write about that and about my journey into motherhood. If I can’t describe those things, I’m willing to throw a lot of words on the page in the attempt.

Second, I got a day job in July 2010. I’m not sure how much I want to connect my career to an explicitly Pagan blog in a geographical area where that might be risky, so for now, all I’ll say about my day job is that I work second shift and for 40 hours a week, my time is not wholly my own.

Third, because I mentioned Cassiopeia here before, I must note that our not-poly family broke up in August 2010 over a financial imbalance, at least on the surface of things. I had hoped to retain a friendship (and break my usual pattern of completely cutting someone out of my life), but instead we went our separate ways. I know that she’s living in the same big city the Hubs and I now live in, that she’s working hard and saving money, and that her boyfriend recently flew in to spend a lot of time with her, which was something they’d both wanted for a long time. The other day I thought of contacting her again, but what I wanted was that old closeness. I doubted, first, that it’d be possible given the huge bust-up that happened, and second, that she’d want me in her life at all. And I didn’t know what I’d want our friendship to be like if we did reconnect. So that loss is a wound on my heart that’s healed over a little time, but it’s still tender enough to cause some sadness and pain every now and then, when something happens to poke it.

Fourth, the Hubs and I moved into our own tiny house in November 2010. Being heavily pregnant and then having a tiny baby at home, it’s taken us awhile to unpack and rediscover things and decorate and settle in. We’re still working on it and I’m enjoying little bits of the settling-in process. I have the dresser I had throughout my childhood, and I have such a big kitchen that there’s room for gadgets and stuff-accumulating projects (the latest is canning), and so on. I’m feathering my nest with old precious things that come back to me and new things that make a space just right. I may write some posts about how my space affects my Craft, because I have Some Opinions on that and I enjoy airing them.

In the next post, I’ll start sketching out what I’d like to be posting about next.

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.