Hi Patheos! How’s life?

How’s your week coming?

I want to get in the habit of writing a bit more about my personal life. I think we have a tendency to look at writers, artists, online personalities, and Pagans on the Internet and forget that they’re people. With work, and bills, and pets, and problems, and hangovers, and favorite TV shows, on top of all the secret occult affiliations and private witchcraft practices.

The last two posts I made got more attention than usual. Let me be clear: I’m grateful that anyone reads my blog. The response that I’ve gotten on Oathbound has been amazing, and surprising, and sometimes overwhelming. It’s done a lot for my writing, and also for my practice of witchcraft. Thank you for that, whether or not you like what I have to say each time. I try to always be open to discussion and debate, and I strive to create a space for views that differ from my own. One of the reasons I don’t post more is because I try to take a lot of care with everything that I write. Writing has never come easily to me, and I’ve seen the damage that a poor choice of words can do (I also hope that you guys appreciate the irony of a Gardnerian blog called Oathbound—sometimes I simply can’t say things the way I might want to).

But back to those last two blogs.

I’m moved to write more about myself because of some comments that I’ve gotten in the last couple of weeks. Namely, that I do a lot of line-drawing and a lot of criticizing. That I exclude people, and don’t do enough to be encouraging to beginners.

That’s fair sometimes. Oathbound represents the work of one Gardnerian priestess, running a coven in the American South. Further, I’m an academic in the field of religious studies, a public school teacher, and an angsty Millennial with a penchant for dry wines and projectile weapons. My boundaries, my preferences, and my convictions are all naturally going to be reflective of this. Everything I write here can only ever represent my experience and my perspective. One of the reasons I love blogging—and the only real reason I read other blogs—is because I enjoy that window into day-to-day life that it can create.

I don’t particularly care about anyone’s interpretation of history or theology. It’s interesting in passing from time to time, but mostly what I care about is that person’s actual practice. Their life.   I think the best blogs are the blogs that you can follow over time, getting to know the writer and watching them develop personally. That’s what I’d like Oathbound to be.

So if you only saw my two most recent posts (because they were more heavily circulated), I could see where you’d think I was negative and out to make people feel excluded. So, to those of you in that category, I’m inviting you to take a peek through previous posts, or maybe check out my YouTube channel (which I started five years ago, and represents all kinds of changes in my life and practice). There’s gentler stuff there, and plenty of material for beginners. One post angrily circulating on Facebook isn’t the entirety of who I am or what I’m about, and I think that’s true of all of the other bloggers here, too.

So hi! Oathbound isn’t just me giving advice and posing arguments and drawing lines and making lists. I’m not an authority outside of my own coven or my own classroom (and even that feels tenuous, pretty much constantly). I’m just one person writing about one perspective. I’m going to make more of an effort to include the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into a parable.

And on that note, I’m climbing into a bath tub with a bottle of wine (I like Cabernets lately, so there’s your personal detail for the week).

Edit: Look! There are more words about this on YouTube! In fact, you can skip all those other words and just watch the video. Actually, the video came first, but I had some uploading problems.