Reaching the point in one’s life where a person can knowingly express where they stand is often understood as a point of achievement and maturity. You’ve done it, you understand where you come from, family, friends, culture, etc. You know where you’re going, work, education, relationships, etc. It’s a wonderful feeling and makes new events and tasks in one’s life accessible and easy to manage. You are doing you.

What the world and life fails to tell you however is that standing point, that ground with which you have rooted and bonded tends to move. Often like those moving platforms in that damn videogame you once played. The roots of family and heritage, of learning and commitment, although always there, tend to shift and form new strengths, and that sometimes leads those roots to new waters. And where the branches grow, they grow into new spaces and those spaces are often filled with other trees, bushes, rivers, cliffs, and sometimes man-made walls.

Recently, I’ve come to several cliffs on my path’s journey that I frankly fell and rolled down rather than stepped assuredly. I’ve found myself at the bottom. In a large and barren valley, there, somewhere, in the mist is the path that leads back up the mountain. However, the great question recently has been, what mountain? Which one of the many on the horizon do I take? And, even if it’s the “right” mountain, what will the climb cost me? I have already lost much in the valley, and the wounds and loss have left deep scars and some permanent damage I’m not sure I’ll ever fully recover from. Now, I face an arduous climb that ready or not is coming at me very quickly, and I have to decide how I’m going to meet it.

My standing point is shifting. My life in constant crisis is leading me somewhere. My path has called me in a new direction. All the crashing and falling, and the endless loops and wandering about of the past three years to this point tell me, “This shit’s gonna hurt.” What’s new?! But in truth, there is always something that isn’t expected, even in a path filled with painful and difficult decisions.

Twelve years ago I made the first conscious decision to leave the Catholic Church and start down a path of paganism. At the time I was dealing with situations in my life that I didn’t realize had such impact on me. Looking back now, I don’t know how I got through college let alone living on my own. I was dealing with “post-sheltered kid” syndrome, and some unacknowledged and misunderstood PTSD from verbal and terror abuse during my high school years. Unacknowledged mostly because I barely knew what PTSD was back then. That is something soldiers deal with right? I ran out into the world with plenty of skills but no idea on the direction I needed to take. I was running free and learning to not only depend on myself for any support but quickly realizing people I thought were there to support me, wanted nothing to do with me. And the only true understanding and support I’d ever known, my mother, was a thousand miles away and dealing with her own trauma. I was basically, literally and figuratively, on my own. Into all of this came paganism and finally an acknowledgement of my bisexuality. It overwhelms me still just thinking about all this. I for one never want to be that young again.

Now, college and my sudden abundance of new friendships wasn’t my first foray into paganism, nor queerness, but it was the first time I felt free enough to embrace these things. When I was younger, perhaps twelve to thirteen, I discovered my interest in Magick, with a K. Through the well placed pop-culture and high fantasy that poured forth onto my tiny 12 inch television set (complete with VHS player!) the appeal was automatic. Thus, my voracious reader appetite took over as well and at my local library my first book on witchcraft fell into my hands. It was titled simply Magick with a simple white cover with occult symbolism in black. To this day I can’t find that same book again, but I still remember the energy it brought me and how much time I spent pouring over the information on spells, herbal magick, elemental journeying, and even (gasp!) naked moonlit solo rituals.

Now having been a recently confirmed Catholic, it’s interesting to think that somehow I kept both these worlds going. I was quite devoted to my Irish Catholic education which included weekly mass, and I memorized all the creeds, the rites, and the prayers. Hymnals still resonate deeply in my soul. I can still recite to you many of them. However, at home, we didn’t attend church. None of my family did, despite being quite adamant about their christianity. And their Catholic war against Protestantism. What? You thought that ended with James II?

At home, it was all magick and empowerment for me. The not going to church helped keep my worlds of Catholicism and Magick separate at the time and this continued until adulthood. Sure, my mother and I recited “Now I lay me down to sleep” every night before bed, but I feel nowadays that was more our bond together than any real devotional. I explain all this as it helps set the context for my transition later into paganism. After sadly returning that first occult book to the library, with some old-fashioned black and white xerox copies in hand (Did my mother know what she was copying? I still wonder.) I spent a lot of time with those papers until we started packing for a new life, and then they disappeared along with many other physical memories from our house, and my dream of a happier life for myself and my mother.

For high school, I ended up out in the “bible belt”, hot bed of all things Baptist, a true Catholic’s greatest test of fortitude not to set fire to everything. And for a girl from Suburbia Detroit, it was true culture shock. Surprisingly however, I discovered this barren and open land of fundamentalism and country music was not completely devoid of the occult. Despite not even continuing to look for magick anymore, magick found me.

Two friends came into my life, and left just as quickly, but one read the Tarot and the other was reading Animal Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small by Ted Andrews. I still remember her reading that book today (although being far more “woke” nowadays I never pick it myself) and later discovering her parents were also in the occult. When my mother and step-father found out this caused some problems and eventually the friendship ended, but the spark had reignited in myself. For the rest of highschool I would waffle between my loyalty to Catholicism and my call to paganism.

Finally, to make a long short story shorter, I left for college, a trip that took me a thousand miles away from the “home” of my mother, and returned home to Michigan. Here I thought I would find myself amongst family to support me while I attended college, escape a harsh home reality, and return to a place I idealized in the memories of my childhood. In reality, returning home was a far different wake up call than I expected. I was back amongst family, but in truth, a lot had changed in the four years I had been gone, and I didn’t fit in as well as I thought I would. On the other hand, Michigan itself opened up to me with arms wide. The seasons, the waters, the people, the way of life was all as I remembered. So, in the face of living again in circumstances that were less than ideal, I started meeting people through my sister and quickly found myself face to face with paganism, the occult, magick, again. This time, the third time, there was no turning back. I had been called.

Here in the land of my birth, amongst people who would be of my closest and longest withstanding friends, a family of my own choosing, the spirits and the gods and the ancestors held me close and were no longer going to let go. I resisted at first, I was raised Catholic after all, but eventually I embraced it. I had to embrace many things about myself at the time, as I dealt with personal trauma and learning to be myself in my own space and on my own. I embraced my “weirdness” and never looked back except to honor my past and my Catholic ancestors…eventually. I owe a lot to the time, space, and people that allowed me to form and weave my true self in this context. Through this tapestry I learned to understand my calling. Today is not then however. That world, that journey is now just story.

My new journey takes place in the last three years of my adult life. Years after I completed my first “initiation” and established myself as a Celtic Reconstructionist, as a solitary practitioner, as a lay-pagan who enjoyed delving into the philosophies of those far more practiced than myself, I find myself with all the questions again. And here is where I find myself in the valley, here is where I stand, unsteadily, ready and not ready, to complete another and far more heart-wrenching journey of initiation.

The truth is I walk alone. My greatest fear has always been being truly alone, forgotten and ignored, feelings leftover of unstable relationships in my childhood, where the only one that was always there was my mother. If I think on it however, this fear has really always been, not a fear, but a reminder, a reminder that I was always alone in many ways. Even my most intimate and closest people, I am separated from them on some deep level that I can only grasp at times like this. We are separated by time, by distance, by mutual trauma, by bad blood, by differences of fundamental philosophy, by apathy and at times even by fear.

This pervasiveness of separation has become clear lately, and has taken root as a definition of my current initiation to my new calling. I think this, above all else, has been the deep seated reason why this one has taken even longer than my first initiation. For truth, I did not realize for such a long time that I was in an initiation, or finding a new calling. In truth again, I was quite comfortable in where I was with my practice, with my life, and where I was headed before things started to unravel. To meet these trials and then have to face never fully recovering from them, to face that my basest comforts were harming my spiritual freedom is agony. As a follower of the Morrigan I should have known better. As I have said on many occasions when asked how I work with the Morrigan I say, “My life is anything but benevolent.” My trials are always long, difficult, and filled with laughter and tears.

For the past three years I have run from one difficult situation to the next. As of the new year of 2016 I found a close family member in possible legal trouble and job loss. This led into the rest of the year with continually being a shoulder for many going through hardship, job loss, family loss, and other financial trouble. At the same time, my job was in transition from one supervisor to another which ended up changing everything about how I dealt with my profession. By 2017 so much had changed and I had shouldered so much of other people’s pain and sorrow that it led into a continuous spiral of depression which manifested into physical deterioration and pain. I suddenly found myself unprepared to deal with that much emotional labor and it cost me dearly and opened my eyes to so much that I was lacking. This pervaded throughout 2017 until finally by the time the dumpster fire election of late 2017, I started falling down my proverbial mountain, through the mist, and was fallen and broken on the valley floor by 2018. However, the trials were not done. Death followed the pestilence with great familiarity. First, my husband lost his grandmother, followed in March by my father suddenly dying of a heart attack after homelessness and alcoholism. By June, my great and reverent idol, Anthony Bourdain took his own life. By November this year, a very well loved Aunt of mine passed away from cancer.

Before all this I had been very successful in my health reclamation, losing a lot of weight, eating very well, gaining strength, etc. During and after all this, I have gained back to where I started, and my overall health and well-being has deteriorated to the point where medical help is very much on the table. Could I have dealt with all this better? Probably. Was I prepared? No. Now, despite all the pain and frustration and death, a deep delve into Death Positivity culture, support from unexpected places, and thankfully the skill on insight I was made aware of through therapy, I have been able to start reconciling all that has happened and put a stopper in the deterioration, so to speak.

Only recently have I been able to face each of these trials and see them clearly. To look at each one like a faceted stone and decide for myself how it impacted my life. There have been readings, there have been talks, there have been rituals and even some spell work. Lately, over and over again as I take part in paganism as a community, as I reclaim my heritage, my ancestors, and evaluate my place and needs on the pagan path, do I realize what this time has been. Over and over again I have been hearing, “life in crisis”, “initiation as a journey of trial”, “A calling pervaded by a wound”, and even “Embrace the chaos”. These phrases and meanings have resonated with what has been happening to me these three very long years. Particularly as I’ve developed my new path as an animistic druid, which requires very different perspectives on the world.  For a long time I was stuck on the time frame. How could something like this take so long? Why would I only now have clarity enough to see the pattern? Today that’s pretty obvious. It simply took that long for me to realize the true essence of this new calling. It took this long to set the groundwork for me to be able to radically accept the needs of this calling, to accept the new sacrifices and efforts necessary to complete this initiation. To present myself at the top of the mountain. To stand alone and unaided as I accept my new path.

To many, and especially myself for such a long time, being alone is seen as a negative thing. All through my childhood I searched for companionship and belonging. I was a lonely and withdrawn child with few friends. My romantic relationships were defined for a long time by a need to be wanted and loved despite obvious signs to the contrary or even signs to me even returning the love. It didn’t matter the reality, I just needed people. I needed to be needed. I spent so much time, money, and energy making sure everyone around me was happy and that they would stay with me. In reality, life carried me away from all them, despite all my efforts or even their love for me. It was my curse to spend so much of young life living for others, only to end up sitting alone staring out the window. Today, so few of those people are still in my life today I’m surprised to find them still there. On the other hand, through this initiation I finally rid myself of a few toxic people that I clung to them even when they poisoned my very being. As I near the edges of the new path I must embrace a new aspect of myself, fortitude in individualism. I have been a very collective individual for most of my life. This is actually strange coming from an American born white person, but it’s true. Perhaps leftover from my Eastern European ancestors, I spend a lot of effort working toward the collective good even when it works against my personal needs. In my objective mind it seems sad, what good could come from being alone? You’ve fought it your entire life, isn’t this the antithesis of what you should strive for? Maybe, but maybe it’s what will finally open up my path to what I really need to be focusing on for my calling. Maybe it will finally set those boundaries, those narratives, the ability to take hold of my real and true tasks of spirit, without being closed in by the rules and boundaries of familial chains. Maybe…

Perhaps my real decision is whether to revel in the aloneness, in independence. To embrace the collective experience but step apart from it as an individual. To understand and be understood. To take my insight into this tragic avalanche and really hone it to a betterment. To find my peace, to find, and answer my calling waiting out there for me want it.

I walk alone…and I feel fine.