Coming up with our own version of the Divine

I sometimes wonder if, left to our own devices, each of us wouldn’t come up with our own version of The Divine. I’m pretty sure that’s what primitive humans did and I know that it’s what I did when I was, by most peoples standards, quite young. It only took me one dive into the earth at about age five to come into contact with an aspect of life that the grown-ups I knew had never mentioned, something that I would learn decades later was generally called energy or Spirit, a phenomena that was eternal, neither created nor destroyed.

I didn’t trust grown-ups; they lied about most everything as far as I could tell and I knew from experience that there was a whole lot of truth that was not allowed to be spoken of… or else. So I kept what I learned from the trees and from the earth to myself just as I kept my dreams to myself. My truths, I had found, were not welcome in the world of adults.

What I learned in the trees was that good and bad did not exist in energy and that no person was better or worse than any other person, just as no tree or insect was of more or less value than any other. Every living thing deserved respect as it was part of a kind of divine wholeness. I learned that many of the adults I knew did not respect that energetic balance… or other living things. As a result of this dichotomy, when the first catechism book I ever saw was placed in front of me at school, I rejected it before I’d reached the middle of the first page… all this talk about a “God” -a three-part god for that matter! The whole thing seemed a cumbersome contrivance and a far cry from the gentle, natural and welcoming energy of the earth and trees that I’d come to know.

Before I was ten, as the result of a television documentary, I became obsessed with the plight of ‘witches,’ women whose relationship to nature I had immediately identified with. I spent the next few summers lying on the bottom of the neighborhood pool practicing holding my breath; if I was found out, I wanted to be prepared to escape the consequences. I began studying metaphysics before I was thirteen, searching for validation of the truth I felt so passionately about. I found more concepts that I resonated with than I’d found at the hands of the nuns but something was still missing in helping to bring me and my latent but passionate spirituality full and comfortably into the world.

I found the missing link in my freshman year of college when I stumbled across my first tarot deck, the Rider Waite. It was unbalanced and too full of sexism, religion and politics for me, but there was something going on there – a structure – a pattern that captured my attention. I recognized in the images and their implications, a glimmer of the truth I knew.

I was reading for others quickly but something about that process didn’t sit right with me. Back then, in the 60’s, the concept of creating your own reality was not common knowledge. Forty years and one life threatening illness later, it had become so… and I began to see the flaw in ‘fortune telling.’ I stopped reading for others and spent the next decade exploring more deeply the energies, concepts and relationships that tarot had to offer as signposts to one’s own energetic proclivities and I ended up back where I began: in the earth.

I’d learned a lot about living through almost dying and I came through the process with a desire – eventually – after the celebrating was over – to help others relate to life as the Divine process that I’d experienced. I took courses, became ordained as what I have come to call an Inner-Faith minister, then studied more and acquired a D.D. (honorary Doctor of Divinity degree) with a specialty in spiritual counseling.

My spirituality, which is very personal and very much my own relationship with the Divine in me, has saved my mind and my life more than once. It has illustrated for me the potency of feeling a part of something incomprehensibly larger than even the universe I am aware of. I have no need to name, qualify or quantify any aspect of it. I surrendered to The Mystery long ago and I expect that I embrace the Divine Knowingness – the knowingness that is so very comfortable with not needing to know – in every dimension in which this energy that is me exists.

Namaste.

Victoria Pendragon is an Artist and Wordsmith. She is the author of Sleep Magic, Surrender to Success  and has an Alternate Reality show on You Tube