Leadings and Stops--and Intuition

Part 1 of 3. 
(Part 2 is here.) 

Every now and then, I try talking about my peace testimony to others who do not share my sense of how our political values are rooted in our spiritual lives.  Some have visions of God or gods who are far away and unconcerned with human life; others do not believe that the world of religion is relevant to ordinary life; many do not believe in any sort of God or Spirit or spiritual underpinnings of life in the first place.

Some of my best friends are atheists.  They are remarkably tolerant people.  I suppose my going on and on about God and Spirit and religion sounds a lot to their ears the way listening to friends who are obsessed with stamp-collecting or quantum physics or the latest high tech gadgets sound to mine.  I mean, I'm happy that they're happy, glad they are interested and have no doubt that it's all very meaningful... to them.  But I'm not about to join them at the philatelist's convention, and past a certain point, I have to admit, this thing that they love does not mean anything to me.  It's just noise.

I feel for my friends.  Sometimes, when I'm done talking about whatever it is that has lit my fuse and got me popping like a firecracker, I'll just smile, sigh, and say, "I'm just trying to do what my Rice Krispies tell me."  Because, from a rational point of view, what's the difference between listening to God and listening to your breakfast cereal, anyway?

However, the truth is, I think that gods do talk to us.  And the Light of Friends, whom they have called Christ...She speaks to me.

I know, I know.  To me--a nice Pagan girl from suburban Massachusetts.  Sounds pretty freakin' unlikely, doesn't it?  But I learned a long time ago that the quickest way to cheat someone out of their birthright is to embarrass them out of it, and so even if it sounds ridiculous to say so, I might as well admit right here that I think God talks to me.

This is the story of what it is like for me, when I try to hear Her.

Spirit talks to me most often in a series of gentle tugs and nudges; when those add up to a direction, that's what I have learned to call a "leading."

Sometimes those are hard to hear.  Sometimes, when the gentle tugs and nudges aren't getting through to me, God takes out a kind of metaphysical 2x4 and wallops me across the psyche.

That's what I've learned to call a "stop."

I have been experiencing leadings and stops my whole life, not just since becoming a Friend and getting a new vocabulary for them.  To me, this makes sense.  Spirit is too big to fit inside of any one religion--She gets into 'em all, like water into basements. 

In fact, I think it was exactly my training as in Wicca that opened me up to sensing leadings on a regular basis at all.  So before I tell you about my experiences with leadings and stops, I think I have to tell you what it is like to train in Wicca, a magickal religion, rich in the tools of intuition.

So, what is it like to become a Witch?

For one thing, it's about being willing to experiment with ideas that most people dismiss as nonsense.  I remember telling my first husband, back when I began studying Wicca, "I think I'm going to go ahead and let myself not make too much sense for a while.  I'm going to go ahead and act like this stuff made sense, and see if it works for me."

And while I never found myself levitating in the air or saw blue flames spouting from the tip of my athame, being willing to act as though there might be something real and true in the crazy notion of "magic" did allow me to reimagine the world--to see it new, and make new discoveries in it.

From a woman with a mechanistic, purely conscious and rational view of life, I flowered into someone with much more nuanced views--richer, in the ways that candlelight is richer and more evocative than the light of a compact fluorescent bulb.  CFCs have their place--they're energy efficient, and very useful for finding lost socks.  But they have their limitations, too: they're not particularly useful for finding lost parts of your psyche, your soul.

Candles, firelight, and intuition are more helpful for that.

So much of training in Wicca is about honing intuition, about learning to think outside of words, and to observe with your whole mind, not just the part that is conscious.  We construct stories out of Tarot cards, interpret dreams for one another, sense auras... all kinds of things that, if they have a reality to them, have such a fine and subtle reality to them that it's certainly not the sort of thing that physicists label and measure.

I remember when I learned to feel my own aura, holding my hands an inch or two above my skin and gliding it softly over or through... what?  Something?  Nothing?  And playing with the auric energy between the palms of my two hands, moving my hands back in forth, slowly, patting them together till they didn't quite touch and easing them away again... until it felt as though something was there, resisting the inward and outward movement of those hands, like water or like honey.

I remember when I learned to sense the auras of others, and to use that sense to defuse a conflict by changing my own--what?  Connection to their energy?  Body language?  Was it subtle senses or simply a willingness to be intuitive and trust half-conscious visual cues around body language and position that made me begin to know when this client of mine or that was feeling low back pain or a headache, for instance--because I could somehow feel it in my own body?

I'm probably freaking out even the Quakers and non-Wiccan Pagans reading me here, never mind any stray rational humanist atheists who might have stumbled on my blog today.  This stuff is so subtle, so open to subjectivity and the projection of all kinds of crazy stuff, that we've all had (haven't we?) the experience of having some palpably crazy person offer to read our aura for us, or rid of of that pesky past-life experience that is going to cause us cancer some day, or whatever crazy thing they're offering.  People who believe they are reincarnated Atlantean priestesses, or vampires, or (I am not making this up) Vulcans somehow trapped in a human body.

There's a fine line, at times, between intuitive and crazy, between empathic and personality disordered.  It's fine for me to say I'm not crazy: I know me--you don't, or not as deeply as I do.  (Which is the key, by the way; crazy people work very hard at not being known to themselves.  More than anything else, in my last years as a therapist, I came to dislike the burden of knowing people better than they would allow themselves to know themselves.  No fun.)

In any case, I forgive you if you're feeling a little uneasy about my sanity right now, and I promise not to offer you an aura reading or a past-life cleansing when next we meet.  That would be intrusive and weird, and even if I do have the skills for doing some fairly weird stuff, I can be trusted to know when not to push that into the middle of our conversation.  Hell, I know how to ski, too, but I promise I won't try to do that at your dinner party if you decide to serve ice cream.

I can't promise not to be intuitive, though.  That stuff, one end result of fooling with magic, just happens.

For example.

One bright, hot day several years ago, my in-laws were staying with us for vacation, and we decided to talk a walk downtown where there are all kinds of fun, vacation-y things to do.  There was the usual bustle of activity that happens when a group of people on vacation decide to do something together--the finding of keys and wallets, the closing of doors and windows, the tying shoelaces--and Peter's mother Sheila and I were the last to head out the door.

When she got to the door, sunglasses in one hand and purse in the other, Sheila put her hand on the door and hesitated, and turned very slightly back into the house.  At the far end of the hallway, and up a staircase from Sheila, where I was putting on my sun hat, I saw that movement...

...and grabbed a second hat from a hook and tossed it down to where she stood.

She blinked up at me, her eyes wide.

"How did you do that?"

It took me a moment to realize the cause of her surprise.  She clearly had wanted a hat; I had an extra, and I handed it to her.  What was odd about that?

Oh.  Yeah.  Right.  It's not like she asked with words.  Come to think of it, how had I known?

I just had, that's all.

"That's almost... spooky," she concluded.  And put on her hat, as the two of us strolled out the door.

Now, I'm not going to tell you that knowing Sheila wanted a hat against the sun was magic or mind reading.  But I am going to tell you for a fact that, if I had never been open to the possibility of magic in the world, never tried to bottle that particular flavor of lightning, I never would have been open to whatever it was, whether body language, logic, experience, or even--just maybe--magic, that let me understand that my mother-in-law wanted a hat.

That is what I mean by intuition.

It's flaky, and it's unreliable, and when it works it can mostly be explained (or explained away, if that's your bent) by a hundred little circumstances around it.  But to use it, to be open to it, you must actually commit to trusting it, at least conditionally, and then practice it.

And when you do that, you discover that it can be pretty startlingly useful at times.

For instance, it can open the door to gods, some of whom have something to say to you, if you allow yourself to hear it.


(To be continued.)


Image credit: Vintage Rice Krispies box from the Michigan Historical Museum; courtesy of Wikipedia.

Fireflies

Officially, summer begins on the summer solstice, June 21.

In actuality, as any school-child or teacher can tell you, summer begins on the day that his or her own school lets out for summer vacation.  This year, summer begins on June 23, at least for me.  However, it's doing a very nice warm-up act already.

Last night, I was dumbfounded by the fireflies in my yard.

I grew up with fireflies--and crickets, and song-birds, and trees.  I remember that when I was perhaps eleven years old, I read a Ripley's Believe it or Not anecdote about a doctor who was able to perform a surgery, once, by the light of a jar of fireflies.  As a kid, that seemed utterly plausible to me.  I remember that many, many nights in my childhood, my brother and I would roam the yard, with jars in hand, catching fireflies.  We caught a lot--though never enough to light a surgery, I must admit.

But even in the years I lived in Vermont, as an adult, the fireflies seemed to have faded away.  There never seemed to be very many, anywhere I lived--certainly not in the small city where I've lived for the past eighteen years.

Until this summer.  Living here, in this new house that reminds me so much of my childhood, I've noticed the fireflies are back.  Last night, around bed-time, checking to see that the front door was locked, I noticed them twinkling in the grass and at the edge of the woods, and so I left the door ajar and went out onto the lawn to just sit for a few moments.

There were no stars overhead, because the night was one of those humid, murky ones where you just about pray for a thunderstorm.  Instead, the stars were all out on the grass.

As I sat and I watched them, I thought of references in Aradia to the magic of the firefly.  What if all the fireflies were fairies?  What if, as was once believed of moths, they were the souls of the dead, not yet gone?  It seemed almost believable.

I heard mysterious rustling from the edge of the woods.  I know my new neighborhood has a bear family living in it, and they've often been spotted crossing the yards hereabouts.  (It was probably a bear cub running across ours that lured our dog out into the road, and into his near-fatal accident last fall.)  And yet, I could not be afraid.  I thought instead of the anecdote Mike Novack tells, of a friend of his who once, out in early spring inspecting brush piles in his woods, turned over the top of one to discover a bear sow and two cubs.  Mike says he backed away, letting the brush settle back into place, saying quietly and politely, "Excuse me, Madam!  I am so sorry to have disturbed you."

And I thought of the story of my own friend, Kirk White, out meditating in his own back yard in Vermont, when he felt something small and warm climb into his lap.  When he half-opened his eyes and glanced down, he saw that he had made a new friend: a young skunk.

He continued to meditate, perhaps sitting even more quietly, until the skunk decided it was time to go.

Sometimes, the natural world seems so much like home that it is impossible to feel like a stranger in it.  Sometimes, I get to feel like a child again, in the best possible way: that I am eleven years old again, barefoot and in my pajamas, filling a jar with they mystery of fireflies.

Last night was such a night.

This summer, I hope for many such nights, and many such days.  There is so much busy-ness that can absorb an adult mind.  May I not be so much caught up in travel, planning, writing, correspondence, that I forget to take a few hours every day to look up at leaves from below, to watch ants traveling through the jungle of the grass, or to watch a hawk making lazy circles overhead.

So mote it be.


Image of fireflies from Wikimedia Commons: found at "Signs of Summer" at Jonski Blogski

Pagan Values: Community.

It's one of my favorite memories.

On the last day of the small Pagan gathering, perhaps a dozen of us had hiked down the hill, piled into our cars, and made our way to the neighborhood pancake house.  Sweaty and grimy, smelling of woodsmoke and insect repellent, clad in hiking boots and sneakers, shorts and blue jeans, we had taken one long table in the middle of the restaurant.

The restaurant itself is a celebration of all things down-to-earth and Vermont.  I've seen farmers enjoying a plate of eggs still wearing their barn boots--and been grateful to the ones considerate enough to hose them off first--as well as hunters stoking up either before or after a morning of deer hunting, families with babies in high chairs, and, of course, in leaf season, the occasional tourist.

There's nothing occult or New Age about the Sugar House.  It's just there, as it has  been for decades, with it's fluorescent lights, tiled floor, and picnic style benches and tables: a local fixture, and the home of the best pancakes and maple syrup in Central Vermont.

Over pancakes and eggs and coffee and orange juice, then, our group of old friends had laughed and joked, told stories of our kids, our families, and our daily lives.  We'd caught up on the lives of community members who were not there this year--who had gone back to school, who was getting married or moving across country, divorcing or building a new house--in one last, loving effusion of our sense of ourselves as Tribe, before we would return to atomized lives among our non-Pagan friends and neighbors.

It was, as every year, a wonderful meal.

But my memory comes from a moment at the end of the meal, when a stranger from another table approached us, and hesitantly asked, "Excuse me.  I don't mean to be rude--I couldn't help overhearing a little.  Are you all... Pagans?"

We said we were, and she smiled, and nodded, and went back to her own table.

Understand, none of us were wearing anything remotely like flowing robes.  I don't even think there were any tie-dyed shirts in evidence; any pentacles or other occult jewelry were either small or tucked into the flannel shirts and tees we were wearing.

Nor had our conversation been overtly esoteric.  To the best of my recollection, we weren't speaking of gods or goddesses, ritual drumming techniques or magickal tools.  Instead, our conversation had focused on daily life: our kids, our plans, our small triumphs and disappointments.

But somehow, seeing how we interacted, this woman whom none of us even knew had figured out that there was something different about us from the usual crowd at the Sugar House.  Somehow, she had figured out that we were Pagans.

It is my belief that her clue was how we loved each other, how we belonged to one another.

We related to each other with the freedom and trust and happiness that comes of being in your deepest self with a group of others, not once only, but over and over again, over the course of decades.  We belonged to each other in a way that is rare today, in our society of nuclear families and individualistic consumers.  Perhaps only communities of monks or nuns have a similar experience--but an experience largely cloistered from the world, and, in any case, rooted in a religion far less world-embracing than Paganism.

The key to understanding us was our connectedness.  Wiccans and Druids, shamans and Hellenes and Kabbalists, we had stood together in the firelight and joined together in love of the Old Gods; students and retirees, athletic and disabled, rural and urban, we had shared the cycles of our lives over many years.

The years that have passed have changed that community.  Some of the faces that were at that table have been taken from us by death.  Bitter quarrels have divided us, and time has only partially reconciled us.  Formerly healthy adults have become disabled, children have become adults, and some of us have moved far, far away, never to return.

But the sense of connection remains.  My own daughter I remember rocketing through the woods with a mini-tribe of younger Pagans, when she was only eight years old. "Mom!" she called out to me, one day as she dashed past.  "Mom!  Mom!  We're playing we're like it was in the old days--like we're a Pagan village!"

"Playing" indeed--but it was no game.  It was real.  I was there.

My daughter no longer considers herself to be a Pagan.  Does that invalidate the time she spent in the "Pagan village" as a child?  I think not.  She is still close to many of the adults from that spiritual community, still discusses her spiritual life (which is alive and flourishing, albeit in a different form from my own) with not only me, but with many of those adults who knew her as that joyful wild child.

How common is it for our children, once grown, to remain close friends with their parents' closest friends?

I hope it is common indeed, at least within the Pagan world.  For, with my own daughter grown, my heart has room in it for my friends' children.  One of the joys of middle age, for me, is the sense of continuity and connection I have with my friends' children as I watch them grow.  This is true whether they remain Pagan--as some have--or not--as some have not.

This is, I think, because the connections we have with one another, whether within generations or spanning them, are much less about what we believe--a creed or common ideology--as about who we are.

We Pagans are a people in relationship with one another: a relationship deepened by our lived experiences of the Old Gods, but both wider and deeper than any single set of religious doctrines.  We are rooted, in the final analysis, in Life--in shared Life: in community.

There has been a lot of talk, in recent weeks, about how Paganism is not really a community, how even the concept of "Paganism" as a single anything, as an identity, is meaningless.

As someone who has drunk deep from the well of a diverse and tradition-spanning Pagan community, I beg to differ. At our best, we grow and deepen in our love for one another, love that unites rather than divides by ideology; love that is shared with the earth; love that lasts even through pain and aging.

I've tasted this water.  To my community, to my family, I say: do not settle for less.

If you build it, we will come.




Photo credit: Valerie Everett, under a  Creative Commons Attribution license.  This post is part of the 2010 Pagan Values blogging event.