The Big Picture

We live in a very big world.  I am only one of seven billion human beings currently living on this planet.  And humans are only one species among many.   Our lives are very short, even in relation to other biological species.  Trees for example can live for hundreds of years.  Even over many lifetimes my impact is limited.

The world in which we live is incredibly complicated.  There are many problems that are too big for me to comprehend and sometimes it can be overwhelming to think of even one of them and I cannot count how many there are. I had thought about listing even just some of them but, I think every human being can list more than they would wish to.  

I cannot identify every problem nor define its causes or its myriad affects.  Nor can I identify the solutions to each problem and even if I could, I am but one small human with a very small impact, I cannot effect change on a scale large enough to fix even one problem among all that we face.  It is easy to become overwhelmed with the immensity of it all and with the smallness of our lives in comparison.  It is easy to despair of ever effecting positive change in our world.

But despair is not a valid answer.  Worry is also not a productive use of energy.  These are things that prevent us from having even a limited impact.  If each of us wastes our lives in despair and worry then we may as well all just give up and let the universe cease to exist.

I for one am not willing to concede defeat.  Being aware of the big picture is important but, it is helpful only if it informs my own purpose.   I can only do that which is before me today.  I can only focus on what impact I can have, not on the immensity of what I cannot accomplish.  

I must take responsibility for my footprints, for the work of my hands and my words and my magick.  I must make my impact a positive one, no matter how small it might be.  At every opportunity I have to positively change the culture, the environment, the future.  I am responsible for doing what I can.

My daily life is my responsibility.  And that is really all that I have.  To serve my Gods, to honor my Ancestors and my Allies, to care for others, to respect the Earth and all of those beings with whom I share it.  This is my responsibility.  To live a life that evolves my spirit so that each incarnation brings a better chance to improve the situation. 

In this life I have come to understand that my purpose is directly related to loving others.  There are many ways in which I can be loving.  All of them are important.  I can encourage, I can nurture, I can comfort and heal, I can listen and keep silence, I can respect another’s work and autonomy, I can show someone where to find the candles and I can stand up and say NO if I see something that is damaging.  I can learn when I am in error and be “teachable” and flexible enough to change my point of view. I can gently and compassionately guide and teach when it is within my authority to do so. Worry and despair, pride and stubbornness, complacency and carelessness, and adding to the damage are not a part of the equation. 

 I care about the big picture, and I want my world and all those I share it with to be healthy and strong.  I will do all that I can.  And I will have faith that it will be enough someday.  Blessed Be.

My Goddesses

painting by Susan Seddon Boulet

I had a conversation last week with a friend and Tradition-mate.  She is a lovely woman whom I enjoy and she is working on a project, a book about the Goddess.  The conversation was about my Patroness, Arianrhod.  She asked me some truly thought provoking questions about the impact of the Goddess on my life and my work. 

The conversation has had the Goddesses foremost in my thoughts this week.  And since my last post was about my love for the God, and since today is the one year anniversary of this blog, and because yesterday I was a part of the First Degree Initiation of a woman and coven-mate whom I love and who teaches me always about what it means to be a woman and to walk this path, I feel the desire to write about the many amazing Goddesses that I know and love.

The women in my life are goddesses, priestesses, mothers, sisters, daughters and friends.   The member of my family who I most wish to emulate is my Nana, my great-grandmother who never owned her own home, taught piano and was disowned by her own mother for marrying a musician.  She married for love; she loved us all with a generous heart and a warm and gentle spirit.  She was creative and beautiful and though she passed when I was only eight years old, I can remember her like she was with me only yesterday.  She is not the one I most take after but she is the one I want to be when I grow up, and I have since I was small.

My daughter and my nieces are beautiful, intelligent and talented young women.  They are passionate and curious and powerful.  They inspire me.  Nurturing them, guiding them and loving them is part of my purpose in this life. But, I also learn from them.   Living as an example for them has kept me on my path when it would have been easier to give up, to give in and settle for some half-life without power or joy.  I will not do that, for they might someday follow my example.

My daughter has another mother, the one who raised her, and to me she is the goddess as well.  She is nurturing and loving, she is accepting and forgiving, and she is generous in her willingness to share our daughter freely with me.  We are equally anticipating the birth of our daughter’s first child with great joy.  We are expecting the child to be a girl yet we will both welcome and cherish a grandson with equal love and happiness.  I have often said that if I were to have chosen a mother for my child, I would have chosen her.  It would have been a tragedy if she had not been a mother.  And I give thanks that I was granted the gift of knowing my daughter as an adult, and that I was granted a wonderful sister in the bargain.

My own mother is a good woman.  She loves her family and they love her. She is not without her shadows and being her only daughter, I am probably more conscious of them than others are but, what I know is that she wants the best for those she loves and we will all behave in ways that will make her happy simply because we desire her happiness.  She strives to love the way her God would want her to and she is genuine in her desire to do right.   I remember once as a child, we were home alone and young woman was walking past the house obviously distraught.  My mother went to speak with her in the street and brought her inside and made tea and let the girl cry at our kitchen table until she was ready to go home.  She never knew the woman and I cannot remember anything more about the incident but, I remember my mother’s hospitality.  My mother’s rule is an open door and food (or a bed if that is needed) for anyone who might need it.  Not for recognition or reciprocation, but just because it is right.

The women in my coven are beloved to me.  They are daughters and sisters and they show me always the amazing beauty and variety of Her many faces.  My High Priestess is my friend, my sister and my mentor.  I trust her more than any other human being I know.  The priestesses and witches of my tradition and those others that I count among my beloveds are each my daughters and sisters and teachers, and some are even my mothers.  I give thanks for each of them.  Without them I am less and my world is less colorful, less bright, less beautiful.

I have loved the Goddess since I was a small child, the Goddesses I read about in the stories of Ruth and Ester from the Old Testament, the story of Demeter and Persephone from my storybooks, the stories of queens and princesses and faeries.  I still have the baby-doll I was given before I was two years old; I have always been a mother.  I remember meeting Grandmother Spider when I was nine or ten on an overnight trip with the Girl-Scouts.  I remember meeting Artemis-Diana when I was about fifteen and writing poems to her to express my love for her.  And twenty years ago I met the Goddess who would become my Patroness, Arianrhod, my Goddess of the Moon and the Stars, my Queen and the Weaver of my Fate and Destiny, my Goddess of Sovereignty.

I have read the stories of many Goddesses since then and met and worked with some of them.  Bloudwydd the Flower-Bride and Owl-Goddess, Rhiannon, the Faerie-Bride, Horse-Goddess, Great Queen and Mother, Cerridwen the Initiator, Shape-Shifter and Mother, Gwynwfar and Morganna, Brighid, Goddess of poets, healers and smiths and the Patroness of my beloved Moonfire, and Kali-Ma, the Dark Mother and destroyer who will cull from my life that which is unhealthy for me so that new life may take hold and I may grow strong and new.

All of these Goddesses teach me and they are each welcome in my life at anytime they choose. 

I Give thanks for each one of these, my Goddesses, the Human ones and the Non-Human.  May I serve them with love, honor and grace and may they bless me with their wisdom, guidance and council.  Blessed Be.

For Love of the God

painting by Susan Seddon Boulet

I am a witch. That is to say, I am wiccan.  I worship and love the Goddess in all her forms.  The Light, the Dark, the Young, the Old, the Mother, the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Rivers and Lakes and Oceans, the Indefinable, all forms of the Goddess are holy and sacred to me.  I am grateful that I have found her in this lifetime, in this incarnation.  She is embraced fully and fiercely by my Community.  And that is as it should be.  But what of the God? 

I was raised in a liberal Christian church, where I was taught that God was Love.  I have never stopped believing that.  Even when I was sent to an extremist, militant, fundamentalist college in my early twenties, it was the God of my childhood faith that sat beside me, walked beside me, stood beside me.  It was He that helped me to survive that place.  I bare no ill will towards Him. 

Despite the pain and oppression that some people with power in that culture exercise over their followers, the people themselves are human, like I am, with hearts like mine and like me, they desire to live in communion with deity.  That they live in such fear is incredibly sad but that does not make them worthy of my hatred.  Nor does it make the God they follow complicit for the sins committed in His name, anymore than the Goddess is complicit for the hateful pain inflicted upon others in Her name.

I say that so that there will be no question that what I am about to say about the God includes Him as well as the Gods I now worship, serve and love.

The men in my life are the god to me.  They wear his face and each one gives me a glimpse of his beauty and a chance to interact with him in a physical and real way in this world.  My Grandfathers, now  crossed over, were beautiful men.  My paternal grandfather taught me how to tie my shoes when I was five years old.  My maternal grandmother’s husband was grandfather to all fourteen of her grandchildren and always smelled of beer and pipe-smoke and to this day those smells invoke in me the warm feeling of being loved that is beyond words.

My father and my uncles are each wonderful and loving men.  My brothers are equally irreplaceable to me as are my sons (my nephew is the son of my heart and I could no more part with him than I could the son of my womb).

My coven brothers are as beloved to me as are my coven sisters, and while my High-Priestess  lacks in nothing in leading and caring for our beloved Coven, the Priests and Elders of my Tradition are men of warmth, strength, honor, and grace. 

All of these men are human and as such they are not transcended beings without shadow or weakness but, they are beautiful and their ethics, honor and service are beyond reproach.  They serve out of love and while they may sometimes be wrong, it is never for lack of striving to live lives of service to their community or their families.

As it may be clear to you by now, I have been blessed with the privilege of knowing many beautiful men and so, while I am aware that men can commit dreadful acts of violence, I believe that is the result of their human failings and not their maleness (women too are capable of horrific violence) . The entire gender may not be painted with the same brush.  Men are individual beings and as such deserve to be honored and loved and appreciated and even hated for “the content of their character”  to paraphrase Dr. King, and not for their anatomy.

I have been happily and blissfully isolated in most of my time on this path.  I have only recently truly become aware of the controversies that plague our greater community.  I am a simple witch who practices quietly and until recently I have not made myself aware of much of the larger pagan discourse.  So take what I have to say and ignore it or discount it as you please but, I feel the need to say it.

I want the men in my life to know that they are valued, trusted and loved.  I want the men in my community to know that they are welcomed, embraced and equally beautiful and needed.  Gay, straight, bi-sexual, asexual, androgynous, transgendered, transvestite or nudist, I don’t care what labels someone else puts on you, or if you choose to identify yourself by any label at all.  You are irreplaceable in my world.  I need all of my gods. 

The God, the Gods who are not of this world, are necessary to me as well.   They are a part of me and they teach me and guide me and they help me to understand myself as a woman, as much as the Goddess does.  Not one of the Gods has ever harmed me.  Not even the God of those poor frightened souls in Indiana.  What some human does in the name of God is not His responsibility.  Many people over the history of our human race have committed great evil in the name of religion, and many still do.  But I would not turn my back on that which to me is my most human need.  Religion is a human expression of a human need to unite with deity and the diversity of that expression is a testament to the beauty of the diversity of our humanity.

I want to say to my sisters who have had to fight and struggle in order to claim their womanhood, you are Priestess and Sister.  You are beautiful and needed and valued and embraced.   You are Goddess and I need you too.

I want to share a blog that I have only discovered the past few days.  It is written by a man who works with the Goddess and it is inspiring to me.  I spent every free moment reading every post since I found it and he is part of the inspiration for these thoughts.

Thank you Erick Dupree  You are beautiful!

http://www.aloneinherpresence.com/

Freedom

Life has been good this past week, settling into a happy balance and plans for new adventures.  The transformation I have felt has had the surprising affects of new perceptions as well as changes in my internal structures and the way in which I function.  There has been a real change not only in my perspective of who I am but, a freedom that I have never experienced before.  Most notably, I have experienced an inspiration that is far greater in scope than I have ever had. 

At work this past Friday, in a moment of quiet, I wrote on a blank piece of paper the name of my Coven.

The Weavers of the Moonfire

I looked at it and saw the faces of my coven-mates.  As I continued to look at the words and admire how beautiful they are, I saw the title of a novel.  Not only that but, I saw the world in which it takes place, the characters, the plot and the vision that I want to share.

In the past I have written poetry, character sketches and short stories.  Some of which I am quite proud of.  I have tried to write longer pieces of fiction as well but, the stories have always died within the first few pages. The larger work of imagination has always eluded me, until now.

 I think that stories have to tell themselves and the writer is a conduit first, then a craftsman.  I have always been so focused on the responsibility of crafting something of value, and crafting it well, that I have not been able to let the process, the story itself, take on a life first. 

In the past, I have felt the need to constrain, analyze and construct.  In the past few days I have been able to let the secrets of the story remain hidden until they present themselves to me through the act of writing.  I can see glimpses of them in my peripheral thoughts but, I do not feel compelled to catch them and examine them in bright light under a glass in detail.  I can allow them to remain hidden until they are ready to become seen.  And I am enjoying the adventure and the discovery immensely.

It is the difference between wandering in the woods or sitting alone in the windowless silent room in the second grade doing multiplication, because my teacher felt that I was distracted,   (she didn’t understand that I could daydream anywhere and that quiet, gray prison created a stronger need to do so than the classroom…she meant well but, an abacus would have been more helpful).

I am enjoying the feeling of living without chains, or cages, or locked doors.  I am enjoying the freedom of life without constrains.

New Perspectives

The past ten days have been very positive for me.  The healing and learning that I was able to experience have allowed me to feel rejuvenated and re-energized in every aspect of my life.  I have returned to work, but in a positive and healthy situation, and I am enjoying being productive and useful again.  I have been able to re-establish a healthy balance of work and life and my physical health has returned as well.  I am sleeping well and eating well and I go to work and return home feeling happy and alive.

This has resulted in a renewed ability to engage with my loved ones, my purpose and artistic expression, all of which are necessary for me to be happy.  I have been able to spend time in the natural world, reconnecting with the magick around me.  I have been able to spend time with my Beloveds and time playing with my Pwca.  I have been able to dream and to imagine and to engage more fully in my daily practice.  All of which has been about regaining that which I had lost during the time that I was struggling but, there have also been new perspectives, new ideas and new plans. 

I have committed to joining a local women’s business forum.  I will be participating in a local writers group to gain feedback and motivation to finish my book projects that have lost momentum.  I will be actively practicing massage again and riding horses at a local barn.  And I will be seeking out opportunities to experiment with other forms of expression, pottery, painting, stained glass and dance.  I will be engaging more with all of those things that inspire my passions and engage my mind, heart, soul, body and spirit, and in ways that I never have before.

One of the most significant changes has been my perspective on who I am, of how I see my own identity, both magickally and in my mundane existence.  I am a strong person.  I am intelligent, opinionated, knowledgeable and curious.  I have valuable gifts, talents and skills.  I have a wealth of light and shadows and compassion and the capacity to recognize and appreciate those in others. 

I am beginning to see myself more accurately, more clearly.  I am beginning to recognize that I have much of value to offer.  I can learn and improve upon those skills that I have not yet mastered.  I can ask those who know more than I to teach me. I am a deserving student, worthy of a teacher’s time and effort.  This is a very new realization for me and it is a necessary one if I am to serve my Beloveds, my Gods, my Ancestors, my Allies, my Community and my World.

I look forward with anticipation and enthusiasm to the renewed journey and to the many new lessons and opportunities to be discovered.  

Side Trips and the Things We Learn from Them...

I sat in an exit interview today and when I had finished saying what honor required, I was asked to rescind my resignation and remain with the bank in a position outside of the situation that I left.  I was told that I was needed.  It is nice to be valued and appreciated.  It also feels good to be going back to work next week.  I dislike being a “quitter” and I need to work.

So what was all of this for?  Was it all a waste of time if I am simply going back?  No.  It was not a waste.  It was one of the most important learning experiences I have ever had.  I learned things that I would never have learned unless I had experienced these past few weeks.

I learned to respect my own gifts and talents and to access my own strength and light.  I learned to listen to my inner voice, instincts and intuitions, and to act on them. I learned to trust in my own wisdom and hard work.  I learned to really look at the rules that I live my life by and recognize where they come from and let go of the ones that do not come from my own inner truth.  I learned to sit with the unknown, with no plan, and not panic.

Each step of the way I learned things that, if I had not taken each step, I could not have learned.  Some things have to be experienced.  Sometimes it is necessary to step off the path and take a side trip even if it seems to lead nowhere, to “a place that is not a place and a time that is not a time” even if you need to return to the path exactly where you left it.  It may seem that you have gained no ground and that you have only wasted time but that is not the case.  You return to the path with clearer sight, better understanding and sometimes even happier circumstances.  It has cost you time but, what you have gained is of greater value than what you have sacrificed.

I am amazed and grateful for the side trip and for the lessons.  I am also grateful for the opportunity to go forward and to get back to work. And for the freedom from fear that those lessons have provided to me. I Give Thanks.

Epiphany

Having left my job without another secured, I have been searching actively every day.  I spend a lot of time looking for jobs to apply to. I have also been fighting against the feeling that I should feel guilty and miserable and do nothing except job search until I secure the ONE position that will absolve me of my “sin”. 

A full-time, day-shift, office job that pays enough to meet my obligations.  Some of the parameters I have placed on it are mine.  No Sales, close to home.  But a lot of the “rules” do not come from me; they come from someone else who gave me the rules years ago.  I am still trying to comply with someone else’s idea of what my life needs to look like.   

Finally, yesterday after a very vivid dream that began the process, a conversation with my ex-husband (the source of some of the original “rules”), a conversation with my High Priestess’ youngest son (who is currently in college) and a few hours spent with a wolf-pup (all dogs are wolves), I had an epiphany. 

I live alone, with just my Pwca (and he cannot tell time).  I am not a morning person.  I like a lot of different things and can do a lot of different things.  I really miss actively practicing massage.  I don’t like being constrained, or having all of my “eggs in one basket”.  I like structure and I crave freedom.  I am capable of creating the structure I need.

It finally occurred to me that I can build the life I want to build.  It can look the way I want it to.  I do not have to please anyone but me and Pwca and all he cares about is that I am happy and healthy and home regularly.  He has finally begun to play again.  I had been very concerned for his welfare lately as he has been lethargic (reflecting my ill health).

So I have been daydreaming and imagining what I WANT my life to be.  I am continuing to search in the traditional way but I am considering part-time jobs, evening shifts, and doing many things at many places.  Meeting new people, becoming a part of my mundane community, and having fun.  A few shifts at one place doing one type of work, a shift here and a shift there doing different things in different places.  Having time to give a massage to someone once in a while, having time to write and of course having time to spend with my Moonfire, my community, my family and friends.

Having faith in myself, in my Gods, Ancestors and Guides.  Having faith in my abilities and my own hard work.  Living in faith and not in fear.  Living out loud, without the need for an escape route.   I have always wanted to be that person.  And yes, it helps immensely to know that my family and friends have my back, that failure will not be catastrophic.  That Pwca and I will never be homeless or starving (or separated). 

But I am not so focused on the possibility of failure; fear is not the overriding principle in my life.  I want to remain in my treehouse and if I can build my life the way I want, I will.  The future is as yet unknown and unwritten, but I am finally able to imagine it like I never have before.  I am not afraid.  I can create that which I dream.  I can build the life I truly want.