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I\u2019m 41 years old now, and I look back at decades of thoroughly enjoyed antics and I will admit to you right now, in front of the Gods and the entire internet, that I can appear to be completely ridiculous\u2026 compared to a muggle. I\u2019m not everyone\u2019s preferred cup-of-tea, but I am SO OK with that.<\/p>\n
You see, some time ago a secret came busting out of my broom closet, to the shock and dismay of my conservative family and neighbors.\u00a0 That pointy-hatted truth just refused to stay politely tucked away.\u00a0 It was a wild, unfettered and jubilant truth\u2026my raison d\u2019etre\u2026so why should it stay hidden?<\/p>\n
Even though many fine and respectable people thought I\u2019d lost my mind, people for whom I\u2019d so long bent and subverted my truth in exchange for their acceptance; even though it meant that I\u2019d leave broken-hearted from my long marriage, and cherished stay-at-home-mom gig; even though I\u2019d choose not to use my college degree, and leave my well-paying profession behind, I eventually took my fundamentalist Christian mother\u2019s advice and let my \u201clittle light shine\u201d freely for all to see.\u00a0 She used to say that we, as Christians, were a \u201cpeculiar people\u201d and we should be proud of that. As it happens, I was even more peculiar than she would have appreciated. That, and witchery is an unstoppable force. Go figure.<\/em><\/p>\n Today, I am a public Witch in a deep-fried southern town, and as a matter of course, I do many of the things my mother said were \u201cof the devil.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I own a witchy store<\/a> in our downtown in full view of my conservative neighbors. I teach openly about neo-paganism in religion classes at local colleges. (So far, no lynch mobs have formed, fingers crossed.) I am a priestess within a coven I\u2019ve helped to found, teaching the occult mysteries year-round\u00a0 to all responsible seekers.<\/p>\n On weekends, I offer past-life retrievals, magickal consultations and tarot card readings to clients.\u00a0 I drum until my hands are numb, bellydance around bonfires, adorn beautiful people with mehndi body art at pagan festivals and have a fabulous, sovereign life of love and happiness.\u00a0 Most days I will tell you that by taking the less-traveled path, it made all the difference, but that is the happy ending.<\/p>\n Gather \u2019round, my lovelies, and let Mama Heron tell you a story, the back-story, a Witch\u2019s Come to Goddess<\/em> tale\u2026or as they say in the Southern Baptist church, let me !TESTIFY!<\/em> about my \u201cburning bush\u201d moment, how I was \u201csaved,\u201d and accepted my sacred mission to be an agent of Divine Love.<\/p>\n I now serve Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, but I was raised in \u201cthe fear and admonition of the Lord,\u201d as my evangelical mother would regularly say.\u00a0 It never felt right to be terrified of god<\/em> like that, but when you are a child, what mama says is the gospel truth. What she preached to me was very upsetting, to say the least. I had my own truth, things I just knew, <\/em>but mama would squash any of that talk. I remembered when I was a man in a past life, dying in WW1, but there was no room for reincarnation in her paradigm. This was very confusing, so I\u2019d suffered through some childhood depression.\u00a0 The adults in my life didn\u2019t know what to do about it so it went untreated and not talked about. What does a middle-class, white kid in a loving family have to worry about anyway? I know now that this is pretty common for a young girl just awakening to the witch blood.<\/p>\n Eventually, I rejected both the religious teachings of my childhood, and any authority my mother held over my soul. Not to mention any respect I may have held for her. That sent me into a tailspin. I\u2019d rejected the hatefulness, bigotry and isolation taught me by our church, but what else was there?\u00a0 If I wasn\u2019t a Christian, was I doomed? \u00a0In that black and white world of \u201cwith us or against us,\u201d I thought I had only two options: Christian or Atheist. To them, atheism was on par with dancing with the Devil. \u00a0Yet, if there was no higher purpose to life, why bother?<\/p>\n Around that pivotal time of menarche, I lie in bed wide-awake one night when the room seemed particularly moonlit.\u00a0 Clearly in my mind\u2019s inner dialogue I admitted my worst adolescent fear: \u201cThere is no God. I am a freak<\/em>. I am absolutely alone and this is all pointless.\u201d\u00a0 I pronounced it with petulant finality, anger and self-loathing.<\/p>\n That is when everything went haywire. Immediately, my senses were arrested. I lost control of my body and was pressed into the bed as though the gravity of God Almighty was in the room. I was unable to move, heart beating like crazy; flooded with adrenaline, I became\u00a0hyper-aware.\u00a0 The room became ten\u00a0times brighter, filled with bluish moonlight. The silence screamed<\/em> and my mind rang with the surety that I was NOT alone and I DID have a purpose to fulfill.\u00a0 This did not come as a voice or in words and gave no clues to its identity, or\u00a0gender. \u00a0 I struggled against this force but I could not move, and it wouldn\u2019t stop until I\u2019d acknowledged it directly.\u00a0 I gave in and admitted, \u201cOK, I hear you! Maybe there is a god!\u201d<\/p>\n As quickly as it began, it was gone. I was released and all returned to normal. \u00a0Still panting and tingling, adrenaline rushing, I looked around at the ordinary room.\u00a0 I moved my fingers and stretched. I sat up and craned around to look out the window with it\u2019s ordinary darkness. My rational mind kicked-in, skeptical. I thought, \u201cI\u2019m losing it. God did NOT just speak to me.\u201d And I laid back down.<\/p>\n I am here to tell you that the whole thing repeated itself again twice as strong. I was taken hostage by my own body, pushed back into the bed.\u00a0 The moon light intensified once again, as though a floodlight was at the window, and this time a voiceless chorus screamed through my\u2026.everything.\u00a0 I was a budding clairvoyant, and I had a vision of what my sacred mission would entail many years in the future\u2013the message was basically that I had to prepare myself. Just a glimpse and a knowing that there was a specific purpose for me in the future. I surrendered with, \u201cOK, OK, I believe you!\u201d\u00a0 And it was all over.<\/p>\n \u201cHello, I\u2019m Aphrodite\u201d might have made the interpretation easier, but no, that is too easy, and it was not any one particular deity.\u00a0 What I got was that it\/he\/she\/they were BIG, INEFFABLE, and POWERFUL. What I heard was, \u201cShut up and listen, kid: THE UNIVERSE is ALIVE.\u201d<\/p>\n Today I believe that the greatness of Spirit quickened within me, to give me just the right nudge so I didn\u2019t give up in despair.\u00a0 At the time, I thought I\u2019d been \u201ccalled to Christian ministry.\u201d\u00a0 My whole life I\u2019d listened in church as preachers and missionaries took to the pulpit and testified about how God spoke to them and they knew they had to serve Him.<\/em><\/p>\n I was horror-struck.\u00a0 I assumed the message was that I had to preach the gospel of Jesus<\/em>. I started running from that fate\u00a0<\/em>by exploring just about any forbidden thing my mother warned me about. I read the banned books; I tried all the verboten things. I didn\u2019t want the job and so I answered HELL NO.<\/em>\u00a0 In true, rebellious, teenager form, I struck out to find just about any other way of being, come hell or high water.<\/p>\n \u2026but I digress\u2026<\/p>\n This story is about a night years later when I was 19. It was May of 1993, as I drove back from a freshman year at Marlboro College<\/a> in Vermont, to my home town of Greenville, South Carolina. It was a hard first year out on my own. My parents separated just as I left for school, and moved away. To escape the drama, I\u2019d chosen to go as far from home as my father would finance and lived through six months of snow-entrapped winter for the first time in my life\u2026in a liberal<\/em> arts<\/em> school.<\/p>\n I\u2019d crawled out from under my mother\u2019s protective rock in the bible belt, and into progressive New England.\u00a0 It was like being released from captivity in a dark room\u2026onto a foreign planet.\u00a0 I thought I was there for the creative writing program, but I\u2019d mostly studied religion, history and anthropology. I was exposed to the WHOLE story of the bible, ALL the major religions, the ways of indigenous people and their plight under the spread of Christianity. I asked the question: what did my ancestors believe before they were forcibly converted? I\u2019m an Anglo-Saxon-Celtic genetic blend. I resonated with what I found among neo-pagan beliefs based in these cultures; it was like coming home!<\/p>\n By this time, I\u2019d met a few actual Witches and began an obsessive study of Goddess religion and Wicca.\u00a0 As the rite of passage for all witches of the nineties, I\u2019d read Spiral Dance<\/a>,<\/span> Drawing Down the Moon<\/span>,<\/a> A Witches\u2019 Bible,<\/a>\u00a0 but I was still in a confused, reactionary state, and so had laid that aside in frustration as well.<\/p>\n My problem was that I was trying to replace the patriarchal form of we are the only right way<\/em> with an even older matriarchal form of we are the only right way<\/em>.\u00a0 Of course, Witchcraft doesn\u2019t play that game. It\u2019s metaphors, and non-dogmatic, seek the truth from within<\/em> approach, would not give me the same comfort of absolutism in which I\u2019d been raised.\u00a0 I was still too much the sheep to take the needed responsibility for my own path. What if my mother found out? What if I were wrong?<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t wait to get back home to South Carolina, where I at least knew the lay of the land, but\u00a0with my parent\u2019s 25 year marriage falling apart, and each of us now cast to the four winds, I had no real home left.\u00a0 That year, I\u2019d also fallen deeply into an unhealthy romance, and after six months barely pried myself out of the black hole of partying to which my lover was already lost. I cried \u201cuncle\u201d on the harshness of New England and went into full retreat from my long-held dreams. This wasn\u2019t my first heart-break and it wouldn\u2019t be the last, but in that moment, it felt like the end of the world. I was in deepest mourning and I didn\u2019t have a clue who I was anymore.<\/p>\n As I drove down Interstate 85 that starry night, just past Charlotte, my mind churned in an anguished, lost pleading for answers.\u00a0 Why even bother to keep living; to keep opening myself up to loss and anguish? \u00a0Was this just one long monotonous parade of day following day, months repeating themselves, the grinding of seasons, suffering the relentlessness of staying alive until at last I would succumb to nonexistence?<\/p>\n For what purpose? Why not skip all the bother and just go ahead and snuff out? I was young and I thought I was faced with a life of nothing more than constantly battling the inherent forces of entropy and decay for no other reason than to make another generation who would just continue the struggle. In short, I was deathly afraid of meaninglessness. My hands shook on the wheel as I seriously considered taking a hard left into a concrete embankment. In another moment of existential crises, I was hyper-aware once more, wide open and pinging the Universe for any kind of clue what to do.<\/p>\n Beside that black highway, I passed by this peach shaped water tower in Gaffney, South Carolina, that looks like an enormous ass glowing in the night. It is a ridiculous spectacle, totally unnecessary for the purpose of being a water tower. It is also fantastic in it\u2019s over-the-top expression of pride in that being peach country.<\/p>\n *click*<\/strong><\/p>\n The moment of gnosis that bloomed within me was like a fourth of July grand finale.\u00a0 The point<\/em>, I realized, was that we decide<\/em> to give life meaning beyond the mundane. WE DECIDE to celebrate, to make art, and to live beautifully, not just functionally. We CHOOSE to throw fabulous parties, and to revel in the sumptuous delights of existence along the way, not just exist.\u00a0 We make wild, juicy, orgasmic love, not just procreate. We gather the tribe and share feasts on the holidays, not just sustenance.\u00a0 We eat birthday cake.\u00a0 Why? Why not?!\u00a0 We<\/em> make the key points along the never-ending cycle sacred<\/em>.\u00a0 Why waste energy struggling against the cycle when you can celebrate it, flow with it, glory in the sureness of the dawn and the spring and the new babe?<\/p>\n It occurred to me that life truly was in the details.\u00a0 The efforts we put into making life grand and enjoying it are worship. \u00a0We decide <\/em>that it is meaningful, then we back that up with effort and trappings and it has<\/em> meaning. The struggle balances the reward; the gain balances the loss; the love balances the fear.<\/p>\n Religion shouldn\u2019t be about being \u201cright\u201d, or worshiping \u201cgod\u201d or duty, or heritage, or fear of a distant doom.\u00a0 It should be about fulfillment, growth and love.\u00a0 I <\/em><\/strong>choose if this is heaven, hell or purgatory.\u00a0 Do I focus on suffering, sacrifice and atonement? OR do I focus on love, balance and attainment? \u00a0These were choices.<\/em> <\/strong>\u00a0I opened my eyes and saw that it is *ALL*<\/strong> Divine and the Divine is LOVE<\/strong>. I changed my mind, and the world around me changed;\u00a0 I emerged from fear into wonder and \u201cgod\u201d was everywhere, saturating the world in delight.<\/p>\n I choose to live a life of love; I make cake and decorate for the holidays; I throw parties, carve enormous jack-o-lanterns and wear crazy costumes; I dance, make love, and howl at the moon, all as worship. What I sought, I found it within, and I was saved from fear.<\/p>\n My answer to the age-old existential question?<\/p>\n I love; therefore, I am.<\/p>\n Blessed be,<\/p>\n ~Heron<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gather ’round and let Mama Heron tell you a story, the back-story, a Witch’s Come to Goddess tale…or as they say in the Southern Baptist church, let me !TESTIFY!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":12719,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,29,19],"tags":[56,57,58,46,59,60,10,11,22,61,62,63,15,16,17,18,20,64,65],"class_list":["post-10605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prayers","category-theology-ethics","category-witch-on-fire","tag-awakening","tag-existential-crises","tag-gnosis","tag-goddess","tag-love","tag-marlboro-college","tag-pagan","tag-paganism","tag-religion-2","tag-salvation","tag-southern-baptist","tag-suicide","tag-teaching","tag-wicca","tag-wiccan","tag-witch","tag-witchcraft","tag-witchery","tag-women"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Heron](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/agora\/files\/2015\/11\/PointyHatHeron.jpg\")
The Witchling Awakens and Completely Misses the Point<\/h2>\n
From Existential Crises to Personal Gnosis<\/h2>\n
Road-Side Salvation via Giant Glowing Peach<\/h2>\n
(No, I wasn\u2019t on drugs.)<\/h4>\n
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<\/a>
Bruce Tuten<\/a> \/ Flickr.com<\/a> \/ Some Rights Reserved<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"Heron](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/agora\/files\/2015\/11\/IMG_06831.jpg\")
To Live a Life of Love<\/h2>\n