The Meme: Day 01 – Introduction/1. Beliefs - Why Paganism?

[witchscauldron]

I purged my altar stuffs and did a huge clean this past week. Part of this is hoping to get myself motivated, and more active on a spiritual or magical front. I've been lying low for a fair while now, which has had its' own purpose, but I don't want to let that turn into genuine apathy.

So. For this month (and I will try to do these daily, when I can) I am doing not one, but two memes that have been going around.



Introduction

Like with most things, getting started is sometimes the hardest for me. I'm not huge on introductions, or talking about myself. But in the interests of the meme, here it is.

I'm 32, and I live in Ontario, Canada. I've always lived in Ontario, and I have a really deep and abiding connection to the land. I have a very hard time imagining living anywhere else. I spent my youth in Eastern Ontario, but after many years in Peterborough, I have come to reside closer to Georgian Bay. I live with my husband, barkman, and our two cats, Leanan and Zathras. barkman and I have been together since February 1998, and were handfast in 2006.

Basic vital statistics: I'm tall, fairly heavy, and have long hair with a shaved undercut. I wear glasses. I'm pretty pale, I have green eyes, and my hair is whatever shade of orange or red I've concocted in a bottle in the last while. I have a lot of white hairs now. (My father's family goes white, and goes white young - I'm actually looking forward to that, because I won't have to bleach for blues and greens.) I'm fairly easy to recognize once you've seen me. The hair tends to give it away, since I wear it up a lot. I hate it in my face.

I wear black, with the occasional shot of colour. You could say that my aesthetic in life is Gothic. I don't like socks. Bras can burn in hell. I genuinely love colour - all of life's crayons are fantastic - I just don't nescessarily want to wear them. My favorite colours are green and blue.

I have an obsession for shiny objects. One of my goals in life when I was a child was to own fabulous jewels and wear them everywhere. I've achieved that fairly well, I think.

Hmm. Let's see.

I used to write. I don't do that anymore, not since university. University snuffed out my desire to write very hard, and I've never gotten it back. I used to consider myself a decent artist. A bad teacher in high school pretty much ended that for many years. I still paint with watercolours and I like to craft in a hundred different ways...but I don't know that it's the same as "art". I sing. I've had classical training, and have (or had) a decent range as a soprano. I really wanted to study opera in university, but my parents thought that was stupid and a waste of time and money, so I didn't get to audition. So now I sing around the house, for the most part.

I took English Literature in university, with an angle to minor in Medieval History. I didn't finish, but by that time I'd a) gotten the hell out of my hometown, which was the best thing I could ever have done for myself, and b) I really didn't want to be a writer, or a teacher, which is all you can do with an English Lit. degree

I enjoy cooking - something I think I'm fairly decent at. Part of it is that I enjoy feeding people, and seeing them take pleasure in it. I'm a gift giver. I'd rather make someone else happy, than myself. I'm not good at letting myself be happy.

I like animals, more so than people. An animal will take you as you are, and doesn't take you for granted. I'm especially fond of corvids, big ol' hound dogs, horses that aren't high-strung morons bred for looks, cats, and ye olde wilde animal population, in its' natural environs.

And it's probably not escaped anyone here than I make jewelry for a living. It started out as a hobby, a way to make my own jewelry that I could afford...which quickly turned into having to sell off what I was making as I had more than I could ever wear, and then it became a self-supporting habit. As time's gone on I've built up a nice clientele of repeat customers, and enjoy meeting new ones all the time. I use mostly gemstone beads and silver or pewter, and am happiest working on mythological or spiritual themes.




Why Paganism?

This gets really long, and really rambling, so bear with me. My brain is sort of a tangled mess at the best of times.

First, some background material.

There wasn't religion in my life growing up. My father had been raised Anglican, and hated it, and became an Athiest. My mother's parents were Anglican, but I don't know that she was raised particularily religiously.

When I was a child, I was baptized into the United Church; this is something my mother says was done sheerly for the paperwork; a baptismal form is a form of legal ID for certain things in Ontario. My entire childhood I remember my mother as not being interested in religion, at all. She didn't oppose it, but we weren't brought up with anything. We didn't ever go to church. I didn't have a lot of friends growing up, since we moved frequently, so I didn't even ever go to church with friends. There was just no religious component in my life.

Some people would be aghast at this. I don't think it's a problem to leave a religious component out of child-rearing. I was taught to live my life with common sense, with a strong sense of right and wrong. I was raised with the importance of civic duty. I wasn't taught to hate anyone, or to think I was better or worse than anyone else, or to think that religious people were somehow stupid or wrong. I was raised to be a good PERSON - which I think is really what raising a child should be about, regardless of how you go about it.

While I wasn't raised in a religious way, I think I was raised in a spiritual way, at least on my mother's side of the family. I'm Metis, through my mothers' mothers', and we were always raised to know that we were Native, and to value that part of our heritage - it's always been a part of my cultural awareness, I guess. Don't know how else to put that. We were always taught to value the earth and the spirits that dwell on it, how to honour those things that give us life, and to try to live as part of Nature, not apart from it. So we weren't religious, but there was definetely an aspect of Native spirituality hanging around.

I also have always believed in magic. I think my parents wished that I'd outgrow my 'wild imagination', but I don't think I ever have. Many of things I've experienced in life related to magic and witchcraft started happening at an early age. I recognized, at some point, I could just ignore it all and repress it and just let it go - but I am not the sort of person to do that. Curiosity often gets the better of me, and once I'm in for a penny I'm usually in for a pound.

So. That's the background info.

---

This is more just the personal history that feeds into it all.

I became very curious about religion around age 10, and stayed that way. I am naturally a curious person. I think my parents were a bit dismayed about it at first, but realized I was just exploring the world in a way they couldn't really help me with, and left me to it. I read everything I could get my hands on, about all faiths. I liked to visit churches, and just look around. (Still do.) I talked to clergy of all kinds.

It was still an exploration limited by what was on hand - small Canadian towns generally aren't brimming with non-Christian faiths. But books were still good.

My parents decided to split up when I was 12. My mother started attending the church she was married in, the United Church in Smiths Falls. We weren't regular attendees - she just wanted to have some community, rather than religion. I began singing in the choir, just to have somewhere to sing. As time went on I ended in taking the confirmation course there - I was looking for my own sense of community, and maybe something that could help me. Somewhere inside I felt a calling - some sort of tugging pull towards service, ministry, something. I spent an entire winter plugging away at these things, thinking that really could be.

As time went on, I desperately wanted someone or something to help me, to give me something stable to stand on. It didn't happen.

I didn't end up staying with the church, obviously. The confirmation class that year formed a clique super-fast - hurray for pre-teen girls - and I was clearly not part of it, as I was a) 'poor', b) 'a hick', c) 'a tomboy'. The same clique ended up in the choir. I was left alone most of the time, which rather defeated the purpose of using these activities to get out of the house in the middle of nowhere and be a little social. Things were also complicated by the small-town nature of life there, and the adults: most of them had known my family forever, and had varying opinions about you that were entirely based on who your parents were, and their parents. Ugh. Some were old family friends, and the rest wouldn't talk to you, or in some cases even look at you. Anything I said or did would just end up going back to my parents anyway, so I didn't trust anyone with my thoughts.

I was comfirmed in the United Church, if only because my parents expected me to finish the things I started, and I wouldn't be allowed to quit. I was still the only person I could count on or trust, so the whole exercise left me right back where I started.

Looking back on it, I never really -got- Christianity. Jesus to me was 'just this guy, you know'? The faith itself didn't provide me with anything useful...or even a sense of comfort on any level. The United Church isn't a particularily religious or spiritual organization ; it seems more to be about having a place to go Sunday morning for coffee or tea, and gossiping with the neighbours. Maybe if I'd been part of a different church it might have ended differently. But since my mother wasn't there for the faith, I'd never find out.

I still believed (or wanted to) there was something out there greater than us - but Jesus wasn't a part of that for me.

So. Christianity had nothing for me, in that the community I experienced disappointed me and left me in the cold, and that the religion itself wasn't the source of my calling. I was only 13 at that time.

I turned 14 in August that year, and I started high school a week later. The friends I had painstakingly scraped up over the course of a year and a half in our little country school, utterly vanished. I would spend nearly 2 years of my life almost entirely alone.

---

The start of this period is where "Why Paganism?" can be answered, really.

As I grew older my "awareness" for things on a spiritual/psychic/woo level started getting stronger. I had a good idea that the time when I had to decide what I was doing about that, one way or the other, was getting close. I've never been the type to just let things go. I have a strong sense of curiosity, and a need to learn things empirically.

I figured out that some of the Native stuff I knew made the "awareness" easier, and might help me to learn more. Having copious amounts of empty country space to do copious amounts of walking and thinking helped this a lot. I started actively looking at witchcraft, magic, energy work, and psychic practices as well. It gave me something to focus and work on, to give myself a space where I had some control over things, because I didn't in any other part of my life. I really began to explore. This was an entire other world, and one where I wasn't powerless or at the whim of others.

I used spend a lot of time staring out my window at night. I still miss those huge, farmhouse windows - mine faced the East. Sure, when the wind in the bottom of the Ottawa Valley made the temperatures drop to -40, they were cold as hell, and mornings were like fire in the head, but in the winter under a full moon the snow was truly awe-inspiring, and the thick hoarfrost curls glowed like stained glass in morning sun.

One very cold night, while I was enjoying my window and a brilliant winter moon, I remember thinking "Is there really anything out there?" I never felt a response in previous times, addressing God or Jesus or whatever...I really wasn't expecting anything. I remember thinking it likely that there wasn't any sort of God, and really we're going it alone down here all the time. But...something (-someone-) actually answered. There was a special something to that moon. And to my confusion, and then wonder, it wasn't male.

"Find me. Answer my call."

That experience flipped a switch in my head, and shortly thereafter I discovered that there was indeed still such a thing as Paganism, and Pagans.

I've never looked back.

Comments

[silere.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this... i appreciate the insight. Love for you. <3

[vicki-sine.livejournal.com]

I like this thing you are doing. I like the retrospective on one's life idea, and the focus on journal writing.
My LJ has kinda taken a back seat lately for several reasons, but I think maybe I will do something like this in January, since that is my birth month.