The Goddess and God in England

I haven't updated since May, and that's no way for a blog to start.  I spent the last four months sleepwalking, slowly collecting and gathering the necessary articles to move to England - books, visas, graduate schools, my boyfriend's support, my family's support...even my own faith.

As much as I'm shocked to admit that I adhere to any one religion, I do.  I'm Wiccan.  After arriving in England I've come back to the faith I started with, the faith I served even as I practiced Catholicism.  As a kid of 13, I felt more at ease going outside and talking to the moon and the stars, felt more at peace at the Virgin Mary's bosom (a Catholic image for the Great Goddess) than at Yahweh's feet.  Is it any surprise that I have joined a community where the Moon I prayed to every night is revered as a powerful, beautiful mother goddess?

I feel a kind of power here that I felt was absent or barely palpable in America.  Okay, yes, I did feel there were sacred spaces, especially in Juneau, Alaska and Manteo, North Carolina.  Juneau is so wild, so rugged, so awesome in its natural beauty that it's hard not to notice the fertile energy coursing all around you.  From the 90 mph Taku Winds to the whales breaching in the Gastineau Channel, Alaska is as much alive as its inhabitants.  As for Manteo...I spent two summers there.  My first summer, I went outside every night and stood in the Roanoke Sound.  I listened to the murmur of the surf, I gazed in awe at the stars, I learned all their names (scientific and mythic!), I delighted in dancing in the sand and making the phosphorescence ignite beneath my feet, and, above all, I sang to the moon.  It was how I found peace.  But despite all that, I still strayed back and forth from Wicca.

Here in England...something so small as breathing becomes a devotional to the Goddess and the God.  The sunlight kissing my skin, the breeze ruffling my hair, the moonlight cascading through my bedroom window - all are evidence of Their presence.  But how?!  What changed?

When I arrived in England, I felt my bones and my joints loosen in the bright English sun.  Even London has a sense of order and peace to it, as if it's mellowed with an age New York or DC could never possess.  England is so...old.  Gravestones line the walls and floors of all the major cathedrals. Some of those stones are older than the US when it was founded by English colonists.  Of course age does not always beget sacrality.  Yet there is something sacred about the silence of the cathedral halls, so that when you walk in you whisper for fear of disturbing the atmosphere.
So maybe age begets respect.  British history reaches back to a time when people relied nature's bounty.  I wonder if memories of this time have quietly survived in the British collective memory, and because of that, the people have a little more respect for the land in which they live.  In England Gaia and Cerridwen and Artemis have been give space to breathe, space to sing.  In America their voices are swallowed by cities and chatter.  Americans have such little respect for the land - a grove of trees is a Walmart in three years.  Why?  Because they can!  What if a nymph lived in the heart of that grove?  It doesn't matter, it's prime real estate.  Crush it, raze it, clear it, build it and do it all NOW.
So is that it?  The feeling that I can actually hear and feel the gods in the silence and openness of England?  Is my devotion really based on something as tenuous as my surroundings?

And how does my life up until this point fit in with my revitalized faith?  Can you be Wiccan and still not believe whatever creation story it adheres to?  Can a Wicca be scientific and entertain the idea that maybe the Goddess and the God weren't around for the Big Bang, maybe they just appeared with the first Druid?  Can a Wicca believe that the Goddess and the God evolve, as humans have?

I know the Goddess and the God contain dark and light aspects, just as any human does.  Wicca isn't afraid of the dark side of itself.  It's not like Catholicism with an omniscient, benevolent GOD and an malicious, hateful, just as powerful SATAN.  In Diana's full moon, Hecate's face shines in the dark moon.  Everything, good and bad, comes from the gods.  Who are we humans, who only see so little of the picture, to judge what they do?
Right, so what about if a man is stabbed in the street?  Surely the man doing the stabbing is an evil, evil bastard.  I don't know if I can say for sure.  What if the stabber was desperate for money for food and felt as if it was the only way he could cope?  What if he was born a sociopath?  How could his parents have known what they were giving birth to?  Is it his fault if he was dealt a crappy hand in life?  Furthermore, is it his fault if he was dealt a crappy hand in life and wasn't given the tools to properly cope?
I told someone recently, that such a thing is not good or bad, it just is.  At the most, it's tragic.  And I'm honestly not trying to be morally lackadaisical, I'm trying to sort this out.  Darkness and light, life and death, feast and famine...they all come from the Goddess and the God.  They comes in cycles - they always do and always will.
So maybe that's another thing that draws me to Wicca: it embraces those cycles.  In the winter the Goddess dies.  In the spring she comes back again.  Wicca's cyclical sense of time allows its followers to fall into sync with those cycles, so that when dark times fall they can roll with them, rather than railing against them.  Catholicism's God is the All-Loving Father, All Good and All Perfect.  Yet when a good Catholic hits rock-bottom, reading Job doesn't always help.  In fact, reading a story about how your personal fortune is only fodder in a bet between your "all loving" God and the Devil probably will only make you feel worse.  People say it's His way of testing your faith. If someone's human father said he needed to destroy his child's life in order to test his child's love, wouldn't the neighbors think he was kind of psychotic?  Wouldn't they whisk the child away to child services?
All I'm saying is at least the Wiccan gods are honest.

There's an energy alive in England that seems to be suffocated in America.  That much I know.
Listen to this -
My boyfriend, his mother, and I are out shopping in the local mall, when a man in a scooter approaches my boyfriend.  The man's leg had fallen off the scooter and was dragging on the ground, so he asks my boyfriend to help him.  Of course he obliges.  My boyfriend fixes him up and the old man goes about his day.
This probably isn't shocking, even my boyfriend wouldn't think of it much.  I've seen him just randomly help a man get his car out of the snow, unasked, and there's a newspaper article about how he saved a man's life.  Honestly?  He's extraordinary.  The old man could have asked anyone in that mall at that minute, there were three of us standing directly in front of him and it's not like his mom or I were entirely incapable of helping him.  But he zeroed in on my boyfriend!  He actually came into the shop we were in to approach my boyfriend.  Why?  The best answer I can come up with is that he just has that kind of energy around him that's easy for people to sense, even on a subconscious level.
Can logic and science provide a better answer?  I'm guessing most people would brush it off as luck, if anything.  Maybe it was, but I have to disagree.  Something small but strong was at work, helping the old man by leading him to the person that would have the most compassion and would be the most ready to help him.  As much as I try, I can't see it any other way.

So I believe in Wicca.  I believe in the Goddess and the God, I believe in the powers that bind us to each other, bind us to the earth and the sea and the sky.  I'm still not entirely sure exactly how I got here, what changed in me that made me a better receptor to the Old Ways.  But there you have it.

The Independent Woman

An article I read today about What a woman's last name means.  Yes, it is from offbeatbride.com and, as a woman who spend her entire childhood dreaming of Prince Charming, I love the illusion of the happily-ever-after that weddings seem to generate.  What has been dubbed today as "bridal porn" has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years.  I love... love!  I love watching my friends fall in love and watching them get married because they're so happy, at least for the moment.  It infuriates me that there is an entire industry that exploits this amazing celebration and now we have shows on TLC where it's more about the dress than the ceremony, much less the poor groom who has been shoved aside and turned into a prop in the bride's fantasy of HER perfect day.  But I'm getting off topic.  That's a post for another time.

For the last four years, since Randolph-Macon became simply Randolph College, I have struggled with my identity as a woman.  I want to be strong, independent, and fierce.  I don't want to be branded as a raging, angry feminazi lesbian who doesn't shave her armpits.  I want to embrace the joys and comforts of being in a loving relationship.  I don't want to be perceived as weak and needy.  I've already been accused of needing a man to feel complete, I would like to avoid that in the future.  Attempting to strike this balance at all has been tough.  I will admit, I've been alone with a guy before and have gone beyond my sexual comfort zone (my brain screaming, "GET OUT, GO HOME NOW!") because I did not want to be perceived as a tease.  As one ex once told me, "You have to finish what you started."

At the moment I am somewhere in the middle of the question of my identity.  I value my freedom and independence but every day I struggle with the notion that I am NOT an island, that I need the support and love the people in my life provide.  I hate opening up to my friends because I don't want to be an emotional burden, and besides, that's not what Independent Women do.  Independent Women don't rely on their friends or significant others for affirmation and emotional support, don't rely on them for financial support, and have outgrown their need to rely on their family for any support whatsoever.  Yet I  do - I enjoy the affirmation and emotional support my significant other provides and am still dependent on my parents to provide everything for me - food, transportation, clothing, all of it!  I feel guilty that I am not the Independent Woman Randolph-Macon groomed me to be and I can't stand myself for it.
On the other hand, I don't want to be the island that is typical to my idea of an Independent Woman.  By opening up and venting my emotions, I know I create a healthier atmosphere for necessary relationships to grow.  When I try to be an Independent Woman, I feel distant, cold, and cynical.  When I try to be someone who is nurturing, kind, and giving I feel like I wind up getting trampled on.
Examples: My last year in college I began dating an old friend that I cared about very much, but I was very driven to succeed in my career.  For that, I pushed him away but doing so left me feeling like a cold, Amazonian.  Later I moved to DC to pursue my career.  While I was there, I was bombarded by homeless men and women asking me for money, food, even a place to spend the night.  One man I gave forty dollars to get back to his family stranded on the highway.  He left telling me I was an angel, but in the end I felt like I had been used and duped.
So where, exactly is the happy medium?  How do I embrace my femininity and the fact that I know I need the affirmation I get when my significant other tells me I'm drop-dead gorgeous while still retaining my independence?  How do I balance these two facets of my identity?

This brings me back to the article I mentioned earlier.  According to the study, women in the EU who take their husband's last name are perceived as less independent, intelligent, and ambitious but more emotional and caring.  Meanwhile, women who keep their last name are perceived as the exact opposite: independent, intelligent, and ambitious, but distant and cold.  The study goes so far as to say that women who take their husband's last name earn less than women who don't.  It frustrates me.
At the moment, I'm in a place where I'm deeply in love with a man that I would be proud to marry.  I'd even be happy to take his last name, because his simple English last name is far harder to mess up than my North German last name with all the weird vowel pronunciations.  Do I plan on playing perfect housewife if/when we get married?  No - he knows I can't cook to save my life (that's his job) and how highly I value my education and my career.  But I don't plan on wearing the pants in the relationship, either.  I love and respect him too much to turn him into one of those little mousey men who spend their married lives getting trampled by their wives.

I suppose in the end I'm raising a cry for balance.  I know men and women are different, we have different strengths and weaknesses, but respect among the sexes shouldn't vary.  What does a person's last name matter?  It only tells you where a person's coming from, not where they're going.

The Good Men Project Magazine

A little bit of background.

I attended undergrad at Randolph College, founded as Randolph-Macon Women's College, from 2005 to 2009.  My first year, the college was a women's college that strove to mold young girls into brave, mature, intelligent women who could go toe-to-toe with their male counterparts in every field, from music to political science to biology.  By my sophomore year, the Board of Trustee's decided to transform the women's college to a co-ed school, a decision that the students fought as much as possible with class strikes and coalitions, but lost in the end.  The first co-ed class came to Randolph in the fall of 2007.

I will admit now, since this will come up later, Randolph(-Macon) had a large impact on how I identify myself as a woman, and that identity sometimes seems nebulous.  I want to be an empowered woman - I don't want to be branded as a raging lesbian feminazi (and it's sad how often women's college graduates have to disabuse people of that very notion).  But that's a different post all together.  For now, I just wanted to link up to The Good Men Project Magazine.  A friend of mine posted a link to this article on her facebook and it sparked my interest.  Hugo Schwyzer, a professor and an activist, writes about SlutWalk, a campaign started in Canada in response to a police officer's remark that if women didn't want to be raped, they shouldn't dress like sluts.  Schwyzer's comment that "[he has] come to believe that there’s one lie that’s bigger than any other we tell about men: we cannot reconcile our arousal and our compassion. In other words, the lie says we can’t truly respect what we also desire." struck a chord with me.  It's refreshing to see a man, any man, stand up for women's basic rights to be respected as a human being, rather than an object or an archetype that must be revered or feared.  
Further information on SlutWalk can be found here.  Take a look and read the stories.  Satellite walks have been going on for weeks since the original SlutWalk in Toronto.  If there's one near you, I urge you to join in.  


I ventured to read another article entitled "What Women Don't Tell You".  It sounded like yet another vapid Cosmo/Glamor/Marie Claire article on How to Have Better Sex NOW, but I was honestly surprised by how well thought-out the content was.  Writer Amanda Marcotte starts the article by stating that women are taught from birth to coddle the male ego, especially in bed, and because of this they often don't speak up if their sexual needs aren't being met.  To put it bluntly - I am that girl.  Outspoken in public, but I have a unfortunate tendency to get lock jaw when it comes to having a relationship with the opposite sex.  Working on it.  


In short, The Good Men Project is definitely worth adding it to your bookmarks.  


Plenty more to come in the next few weeks.  More on gender and feminism, much more on identity, and far more on religion.