I have long had a recurring dream. The sun above me is bright and mild, the breeze is warm and gentle, and I have just stepped--from somewhere, I know not where--into an unending apple orchard. The birds sing, and all about me is that sweet scent; I drown in the perfume of apple blossoms. Then I hear a voice behind me and turn, and the sight that meets my eyes is beauty itself; one of the Sidhe, the Tuatha de Danaan, standing and waiting patiently, a smile on his face as he greets me. They have all been waiting for me.

I've had people tease me before about my fascination with the Sidhe--my 'elf fetish', it's been called. I've had other obsessions--my vampire fetish, my demon fetish, my angel fetish. Those have come and gone, for the most part, but I still dream of that exquisite Sidhe lord, waiting in the apple orchard while birds sing overhead and the sun filters down through green leaves. Probably the Tuatha de Danaan and the Sidhe don't look like fantasy or Hollywood elves. No doubt that's just my imagination. But that apple orchard, and that lord...perhaps it is my ideal of Heaven, my vision of Tir N'a Nog.

I call myself religious, but belief eludes me. I try to believe, but my faith is weak. A skeptic for over twenty years, I give voice and action to my religious beliefs but inside my heart is hollow. Call me Thomas, if you will; I doubt. I have never seen any action attributable to the gods that could pass Occam's Razor; chance, coincidence, and odds all easier to believe in than any deity. I have prayed to hear a god's voice in my ear--at times, any god, just to have proof; but I have never heard it, never seen anything I couldn't explain away without resorting to the divine.

And I know, deep down, that I am an evil person. Too easily frustrated, too easily enraged, too little will to hold back angry impulses. Too glib. Too quick to do the wrong thing, too willing to give so many reasons I shouldn't do the right thing. I think of the lies I have told in the past, the little thefts, the giving in to temptation.

If that apple orchard and the one meeting me in it is Heaven, I know I will never go there. You can say it is my Catholic upbringing and the deeply-ingrained notion of Sin speaking, but I wonder how I could ever be worthy of such a place? Some things can never be forgiven, and even if they could be, such a paradise is only for those with real faith.

I stepped outside tonight, right at midnight, to take the dog out to do her business. We'd been out 6 times in the last 2 hours; every time she whined--her signal that she had to 'go'--nut she resolutely refused to shit, easily distracted by every passing car, wind-blown leaf, and siren in the distance. I was furious, ready to scream, ready to smack the dog, enraged that she should so inconveniently disrupt my schedule, angry that I had to tend to her needs instead of my own pastimes. It was hot out, and all I wanted to do was go back to my couch and the fan and the TV on, instead of sweating my ass off and being devoured by mosquitoes while she sniffed around the yard, looking for that perfect place to poop that didn't, apparently, exist.

Midnight is a between-time, I've read somewhere...between one day and the next. A gateway time, if you will, when possibilities exist that can't or won't exist elsewhere, or at other times.

The hot Summer breeze brought to me the scent of apple blossoms, long past the few weeks in Spring when the apple tree in my back yard would have been in bloom.

I can rationalize anything. I can say the smell came from the soap factory ten blocks away. Sure. Of course.

But inside, part of me wonders if a gate hadn't opened somewhere close that I couldn't see--and if it wasn't a warning, a reminder that I always fall far short of what's expected of me, that I'm a failure as a decent and honorable person, and that I wasn't being given the tiniest glimpse of what I was never going to have.

The dog finally did her business, while I stood there in the darkness and wept.

 

Addendum:

 

I should add that the bit with the puppy is just as an example, not the main crux of this post. There are a million little things a day that make me feel the same way, and a million big ones that I can't do anything about--political, corporate, etc.

I should add that I'm not 'backsliding' to Catholicism; I'm not afraid of going to Hell. If anything, I'm afraid of ceasing to exist when I die. Oh, it's not that I think I'm so much more special than everyone else that my contributions to the world are more important. Just the opposite, rather. I'm not deluded that I'm some 'unique snowflake' that the world must preserve at all costs. I just...don't want to let go of the only joy, beauty, friendship, and love that I've ever found, when I have no guarantee that it will continue in some otherworld after my body's physical death. I suppose that's why this dream affects me so deeply; I don't want to just...stop. After all, I can't bring myself to believe in the gods, so how can I believe in a Heaven, either? Or maybe that I'm afraid, deep down, that it's it only that it's for everyone else and not for me. All the gods I've worshipped for so long--Brigid and Danu and Lugh and the Morrigan, Apollo and Artemis and Hestia and Hermes--I'll never see them. Look on their faces. Speak with them. Hear their voices.

Feel free to write this post off as depressed, self-pitying, maudlin melodrama. Really. It's fine to do so; I would, if I were reading it and not writing it.

I probably won't reply to any of the responses if anyone posts any to this; it's too intimate. Just writing this post and putting it here felt a lot like I imagine dancing naked in front of strangers would--much more vulnerable than the things I put in this journal usually make me feel. But for all of you who do leave a reply--and to those of you who just read it--thank you.

We celebrated Lughnasad here recently.  While Lughnasad is supposed to mark the beginning of the end of summer, if you go by the climate rather than the mere calendar here in NW Indiana, summer is in full swing. The high yesterday was 93*F; with the heat index factored in, it felt like 100*. We've been mostly staying inside with the air conditioning not working and the fans going full blast, and not cooking if we can help it. The dog has not been getting tethered outside in the yard much. The gardens have been getting more watering than usual.

But the harvest of first fruits goes apace. My herbs are burgeoning, and I've taken in plenty of lavendar, thyme, cinnamon basil, foxglove, belladonna, mints of all kinds, sweet marjoram, rose hips, pennyroyal, lemon balm, oregano, fennel, and sage. I cut the raspberry canes back severely; they were threatening to overrun the fence we share with our next-door neighbor. I've saved those canes to dry the leaves and bark for my apothecarium. They produced two whole cups of raspberries this year, a bonanza compared to the dozen or so berries they made last year.  The Roma tomatoes are coming in well, and I harvested my first cucumber, and lots of peppers of all sorts (red, yellow, and green bell peppers, cayenne, and jalapeno).  The onions are almost ready to pull up, too.

Certain aspects and facets of my faith have been in my thoughts a lot lately. One of the lacks I feel most keenly as a solitary pagan is that I have no one (other than my husband, who is rather new to his faith as an Asatruar) to discuss and debate matters of belief with, faith-to-faith. Internet/online discussions have their moments, but to be honest, the level of knowledge, experience, and awareness from some of the people I know online is rather intimidating, and has the end result of making me clam up rather than say something stupid or make an idiotic/fluffy mistake (just such a fluffy moment back in 1997 ended up with me leaving the pagan message boards on AOL in embarrassment from something I'd said). I really don't feel comfortable discussing such things very deeply online; it's all too easy to take umbrage for the wrong thing or a misunderstanding, and the inability to judge context and meaning through facial expressions and body language, which online discussions lack, is a major drawback as well.

In this sense, the Catholic tradition of a confessor-figure is something I could almost envy; not because I feel the need to confess any sins, but just out of the desire to have someone well-versed in theology and understanding of where I'm coming from to talk to. There's a local pagan community here--mostly Wiccan, IIRC--but my own innate shyness tends to keep me from attending their events (other than PPD every year) and getting to know people there better. Perhaps it's not a confessor or even a mentor that I want, but just someone to talk to about these things face-to-face; the one person I'm close to (Doug), is still learning and finding his own way. His self-dedication on Mabon five years ago has evolved from a generic pagan intent to a very deep and devoted following of Asatru; not my own Celtic path, but close enough to it that we have a common background of ideas for discussion.

But that difference between us is enough that it leads to questions that I wonder about, questions that would probably seem stupid to pagans more secure in what they believe, and more informed about it. I've lain awake wondering whether the fact that he believes one thing and I follow another path means we won't be seeing each other any longer after we pass on because we'll be in different afterlives (Tir Na N'og/Valhalla). Yes, I know--stupid and silly, but there you have it.

I'm all too aware that my own flaws--shyness and that damned infernal inferiority complex--go a long way toward preventing me from making any new pagan friends either on or offline to discuss these issues with. It's easy to see the problem, but a little harder to come up with a solution. After almost 35 years of this shyness, I don't think I'm just going to wake up one morning and magically be un-shy. My belief that written communication like this is an inherently inferior mechanism of communication to face-to-face speech only exacerbates the problem.

I'm not really looking for a solution to my problem...just hoped that rambling on about it would at least get it off my chest. But I'm not sure that it has. Oh, well. Hope no one was too bored by all this.

I've been thinking a lot lately about most of the Pagans I know, both on and offline, and last night was forced to come to the conclusion that even among them, I really am a minority of one.

(No...this is not my attempt to feel speshul, or anything like that. Just musings.)

I'm a Pagan...but I'm not a witch. Specifically, the context of my paganism is solely religious in nature. I don't do spells. I can't see auras, or energy flows. I don't ground and center or anything of that sort. I don't call circle, call down gods, call down the moon, or do rituals of any sort. I don't work magic(k), even when I could.

I do pray. I light candles as a form of prayer, but not as a sort of spellwork. I talk to the Gods. I don't expect them to talk back to me in dreams, portents, omens, or what-have-you. I do take long walks as close to nature as I can get, especially in the Spring and Autumn, to feel closer to the Gods. Often I'll leave offerings for the Gods, but I don't feel tied down to any particular schedule of holy days (I probably should observe those days more closely, but I don't).

More and more, lately, I get the feeling that this makes me pretty strange. I do not, for the record, think that my difference makes me superior in any way. But it does have the unintended side effect of making me feel rather segregated and alone when I talk with other Pagans and listen to them talk about the spell they did lately, or the last ritual they attended, or the weird dream they had that surely meant something.

Do I believe in magic? Yeah, I do. It's just never been all that important to me. Oh, I have all the requisite paraphernalia--crystals and stones and herbs and candles and oils and daggers and jewelry and books and so on. Mind you, I feel that real magic doesn't necessarily need all those trappings--and that's all they are, is trappings. But I do like the way little bottles of herbs lined up on the kitchen windowsill, or drippy candles in ornate antique holders, make my home look, so I have them.

I don't call any of my five cats (even the black one)--or my dog--my familiar.

Is it just that I'm so uber-rationalist and skeptic that I can't see myself playing with magic? I dunno. I was raised to value Occam's Razor, and to look for the most likely and scientifically-reasonable cause behind any event. My dad was a devout Catholic, but he wasn't a fundy, and he'd had an excellent education growing up.

I can believe that the gods created the universe at the same time I believe in the Big Bang. Does that make me the Pagan equivalent of an Intelligent Design proponent?

I still crave community, though...I still look for like-minded people to talk to. They're harder to find offline than on the Net. I wish there was a Recon group closer to where I am.

Bah. Rambling now. I don't know any more where I was going with this, or what I wanted to say beyond what's said, so I guess I'm going to wrap it up. Time to get ready for work anyway.
Tags: magic, paganism