Three years since I stumbled upon all of this. So many hours dedicated to study in that first year. Gods, I was a sponge. I soaked it all up. Everything. I can say I wasn't fluffy - I've enough mind (and quite honestly, enough life experience at my age) to be spared the fluffy mentality. But I sure was not throwing anything out. Got to a point where I couldn't really tell where my feelings ended and something I'd read began. I bought a pentacle and the first ritual I ever attempted was...well, not even a dedication. You couldn't call it that. It was more a commitment to study and really, an introduction.
God and Goddess....meet Rachelle.
Rachelle....meet the God and Goddess.
I am VERY happy to meet you. Finally.
Year One.
OVERWHELMED. Got my pentacle, got some candles, tried to meditate, read some shit about backwards counting while thinking of colors in a specific order to get yourself into some state that you can make red lights turn green for you....realized I was hyper-focusing and pulled back. Saw that I was plainly trying to run with the Cliff's Notes version of Wicca. Acknowledged it. Moved forward. Bought a lot of books, read a lot of essays, got myself a Witchvox account, hung out at the local Pagan shop, read, read, read until I really couldn't stand to read anymore. Hit the mailing lists, message boards...had a new crisis - why can't I see aura-ghosts-spirit animals - the Goddess Herself descended from the moon. Ran into every sterotypical Pagan from the extreme fundie Lord Elder 47th Degree High Priest of The Oldest Gardnerian Direct Lineaged Super-Secret You Will Never Get In Coven Straight Outta Britain to the extreme love spell flinging, reading-is-hard, I just like the Stevie Nicks clothes, I'm-still-Wiccan-even-though-I-don't-know-anything-about-it, does-anyone-have-a-spell-to-make-my-parents-let-me-go-out-this-weekend fluffy bunny. I needed all of that overwhelming experience. I needed it because I needed to plainly see that Wicca had its share of assholes. Just like Christianity, The Republican Party, Freemasons, the cheerleading squad, your co-workers and the gang down at the bar. Like any cross-section of humanity, you've got assholes and close-minded elitist jackasses. You've got mindless followers. You've got sages and teachers. You've got friends.
At the end of year one, I realized some things.
1. I didn't know shit about being religious.
2. I dove into Wicca for all the right and wrong reasons. Which is confusing to say the least.
3. I spent money on shit I didn't need and discarded free things I should have taken.
4. Oh....this isn't a phase I'm going through.
Well, shit...Year TWO.
Okay, year two, I make this choice. I am not going to be idiotically obsessed with everything I can possibly learn about this. Why? I got it one night while journaling that I was trying to somehow be the best at being Wiccan. And you can clearly see the many, MANY problems with that mindset. Okay, my bad....move forward. How about I get my head out of the book, and begin being a PRACTICING Wiccan.
Year Two. Be Wiccan.
I wrote a truly lovely self-dedication ritual. It consisted of the barest ritual aspects - ritual bath, casting of a circle, invitation to the God and Goddess to attend. It required I light a single white candle to symbolize my personal awakening to Them followed by a short but truly personal commitment to be both reverent and joyful in Their presence and to accept and seek out that presence in my life every day.
I took my ritual bath...of a sort. Since I only have a stand-up shower, I took a shower. A long, long hot shower in a dimly-lit room imagining the water rinsing me clean of the gray, dishwater filth of stress and pettiness.
I lit an incense. My sense of smell is huge in pulling my mind to a certain place. It is now hard-wired...that particular incense to that particular feeling and that particular mindset.
I walked in a circle around the place I'd chosen to kneel, casting a circle, seeing it in my mind.
I knelt.
I froze.
I just knelt there, my mind fluttering bits of informtion like confetti and me unable to grab a single fucking one. North=Earth. Brigid and Imbolc. Cakes and ale. Divination. Deosil. Goddess on the left.
I felt myself start to panic. Actual, honest-to-goodness PANIC. My face heated up, my hands went ice cold, my heart thudded so hard in my chest that I nearly started to whimper. I couldn't think. I couldn't THINK. And I knelt frozen, panic-mode, heart-failure for a length of time I'll never know. Maybe 3 minutes....30 minutes. I don't know.
And when backed hard into a corner, my brain has a defense mechanism.
THIS IS BULLSHIT. You know it's bullshit. Get off your knees, this is silly, you look silly, hell, you look downright stupid, and your hands are cold and do you really want to commit yourself to something you can't easily categorize, label or find in a well-written, thoroughly researched and massively foot-noted book?
And I was going to stand up. And call it a day. Go back to my old attitude that I didn't need it.
And the moment my laid-back, fuck-it-all mind told my body to knock its fight or flight shit off, I felt something.
Like...a tingling. Post-adrenaline come-down. Perhaps my body was falling asleep having been in a kneeling position for too long. But still......
Like a child unsure if they've heard their mother's voice in the darkness (and that is PRECISELY how I felt in that moment...the absolute best decription of it I can think of) I thought....
::Goddess?::
I'd love to end this enchanting story with a solid "I AM HERE" straight from the Divine into my brain....but that's not what happened.
What happened was, I felt good. I mean, REALLY good. Just, happy. The things I'd been thinking....that it wasn't worth all the bullshit, that it was all bullshit, that it was silly, that I looked silly, that other people would judge me, that none of it could be true....just seemed, trivial. Sort of a weak, petty objection made by a fearful, ignorant person. I just felt good.
First I started to cry. Then, I realized I was crying. Then I got it that it was an amazingly deep sense of relief that had me in tears. So I laughed. And then I started to talk. First, really, to myself. But quickly that evolved into a conversation with Them. There was a casualness to it that may have offended other Wiccans but I (for once) wasn't considering what other people thought. I was just, talking. Connecting. Making commitments. Observations. Working things out aloud. Being reverent and joyful, feeling powerful and humble.
I never did get to the little cords I'd cut to bind and symbolically free myself.
It was at the end of my conversation, when I'd talked myself out, and come to a comfortable quiet that I thought to light the candle. It seemed more appropriate to come at the end, as it turned out.
To date, it remains the single ritual during which I felt what all of these other people were talking about. I felt everything and nothing. I felt colder and warmer within that circle. I felt outside of myself and very deeply inside of myself. I felt Divinity and humanity.
And I wanted more. So I started a formal Book of Shadows and spent lots of time writing my own rituals for everything from Sabbats to tool consecration. I wrote prayers and poems, laws and beliefs and all manner of shit.
By then, the people closest to me knew I was Pagan. And there were questions. Lots of them. And I felt unprepared, like I didn't know enough facts. And I blackslid, read more. My rituals for Sabbats were uncomfortable, fumbling at times, and not even close to what I had experienced that first time. I doubted myself, I doubted my faith, I doubted Wicca, and I became this person hiding behind PAGAN hoping no one would notice I didn't know precisely what I was doing.
Things I learned Year Two
1. I felt the God and Goddess - my personal issues can't remove that. They can however block me up like the highway at 5 PM and make getting back there an exercise in futility.
2. Celebrating holy days you have not made a personal connection with is like cheering for a sport you have never seen and don't understand. You're clapping your hands, but you don't know why. And you desperately don't want everyone around you to figure that out.
3. Trying to live your life in THE ANSWER is easier than accepting your life exists in THE QUESTION. What I mean by that, kids, is you might not win Trivial Pursuit if you don't have ALL THE ANSWERS but it's really a trivial pursuit anyway. I choose to keep asking questions as opposed to deciding on answers and then living like I know my answers to be the ultimate truth. Matter of fact, you should be questioning everything I've just said because it sure sounds like I think THAT'S the answer, doesn't it? Hmmmmm.......
4. Looking bad or stupid is probably one of the strongest (and least known and/or acknowledged) factors in human decision-making. What will make me look least bad and/or stupid? Also, humans spend lots of time trying to convince other people that they don't care what other people think, effectively trying to control what other people think about them (that they don't care) which they could only possibly be doing at all in the first place because they desperately and deeply care what other people think to a point that they feel the need to go beyond detailing their behavior to what is acceptable to others, and go straight for mind-control. Everyone does this in some capacity. ::inhale:: Well, all that means for me personally is that I've come to a place where I can see myself doing that....accept that despite my distaste for it, people will think whatever the fuck they want to think no matter what I do, I have no control over it, so why not do what feels appropriate for me.
Like, say, kneel on the floor and cry as opposed to having anything remotely cohesive and akin to a Wiccan ritual...and then stop basing decisions about faith on the worry that people will think I'm stupid.
Year Three.
The Skeptic Year.
I suppose, since this is a journey of self-exploration and faith, there must be a Year Three. There must be a period of detatchement. You simply cannot fully appreciate the light without the dark. I simply could not go forward without going back.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't denounce the God and Goddess. I simply stopped trying so effing hard to be Wiccan long enough to see if I was Wiccan. Did Wicca fit? And by the way....what the hell WAS Wicca? And what wasn't it? Had I jumped the gun in my choice? Or just in my dedication? Was I just loosely Pagan? Let's find out.
So I did what called to me. I followed what interested me, what piqued my curiosity, what didn't feel like homework. It occured to me that other Wiccans (and Pagans) may view this as half-assed, lazy fluffery at its worst.
Acknowledged. Moved forward. My point was not to be Wiccan. My point was to be ME long enough to see if Wicca was where my heart dwelled. The year saw me vastly more in my life than I had been previously. It saw me make real-life connections and interpretations of the Sabbats - then celebrate them. I sifted through my knowledge base with a more critical eye. Ethics. Morality. Responsibility. Year Three, strangely enough, was the year I lived my faith. I walked out my door in the morning whispering a prayer I'd written during my zealous BoS-writing frenzy....one that stuck hard in my heart.
Goddess guide me
Let me see the world with Your eyes
Work with Your hands
Walk with Your feet
Love with Your heart
I understood that prayer. It wasn't elaborate. But it was elaborately thought out. It was not lovey-light, save me. It was meant to be balanced. And I could see the world as She sees it. Like a loving but stern parent. I saw the value of my work in my job, in my home, in my education. I moved through this world as the Goddess moves. With Her feet. I treaded lightly when I had to. I stomped when I had to. And I loved with Her heart. I loved completely and without reserve. And I did not confuse love with submission, with guilt, with obsession or with duty. And there was a balance to me that even Lexapro couldn't accomplish.
The sight of the moon at night when I let my dog out pulled at my heart. The sight of the sunrise every morning on my way to work pulled at my heart. I could not look anywhere, experience anything without seeing Them.
You couldn't have TOLD me during Year Three any of that. I wasn't being Wiccan, dammit.
Things I learned in Year Three:
1. I know who I'm not. Like trying on jeans, I know the ones I've already tried that don't fit. Maybe that doesn't seem like much, but knowing who you're not is pretty key to knowing who you are.
2. I don't know that Wicca (as a religion in general) knows who it is. Wicca knows who it's not, for sure. My opinion, of course. There will be plenty of angry people who will protest that Wicca knows PRECISELY who it is. But for the record, I think the "living in the question" advice works just as well for a religion.
3. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. While I wasn't away from the God and Goddess, I certainly was away from the community, the practices, the rituals, the conversations and the pentacles. And I yearned for the unique brand of flowing structure.
So, another year. And it is another step.