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.
