Hello World!
Hello, World! My name is Rowan, and I'm new on my journey with the Craft. I started studying and participating with the Pagan community about six and a half months ago, around Yule. I was raised in many different churches, the ones I remember the most were the Unitarian Universalist Church and the Orthodox Christian Church. At the start of my journey with religion, I was pretty open to these concepts. However, I began noticing things in the church that I disagreed with, and eventually drifted away from the church, much to the dismay of my mother. Being raised in the Orthodox church primarily, some of the things I found problematic were the insistance that Our Way Is The Only Right Way, and the general air of misogyny in the church. I just have a hard time believing that Orthodoxy is the only True and Right Way to worship, and that our relationship with God should include excluding women from positions within the clergy. Now, I know there are Christian churches who include women in the clergy, but they just didn't have some of the things that I liked about the Orthodox church, primarily the sensory experience of the liturgy and the connection I felt with God.
After I left the church I drifted listlessly, largely giving up on my relationship with God and turning to chemicals to fill the void within me. This lasted for over a decade, and I attempted to get sober several times during this time, largely unsuccessfully. I managed to string together about two years at one point, but I was not participating in any recovery programs, all my friends continued using, and I was miserable for most of this time. I got a degree during this period, and moved to the second largest metro area in my state for a job, where I met someone who would re-spark my journey toward the divine.
This person, K, introduced me to magic. I'm not talking about stage tricks, but honest-to-goodness magical powers to alter reality. My curiosity was piqued. I devoured six books in the period of a few days, and decided that K's path wasn't right for me. However, I was still curious about what other kinds of magic there were in the world. It was at this time that I turned to The Craft, also known as Wicca. The more I read, the more I started to feel that I had come home. The viewpoints, the beliefs, the Rede, all spoke to me. It was at this time that I was sure I had finally found a path that suited me. It also happened to explain very well some of the experiences I had had following some of my experiences with some very powerful psychedelics. Here was someone talking in plain English about the mystical experiences I had been having, and explaining the nature of these experiences in a way that was approachable and unsecretive.
I'm talking, of course, of Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. I proceeded to read several other books, from Lisa Chamberlin to Gerald Gardener to Margot Adler. The more I read, the more I felt connected to the Divine again. Except, this time, my experience was of warmth in my chest. Visceral, present, and undeniably Divine. I searched out a coven in the area, and signed up to volunteer to set up for their Yule celebration. The people I met there were some of the most kind and welcoming people I have met in my life, and they shared the views I have had my whole life, but was just now rediscovering. It was truely a homecoming.
At the same time, there were some things in my life I knew I had to change. I had to drop the chemicals and alcohol. I had some experience with AA from nearly a decade ago, and decided that now that I had the "Higher Power" they were always talking about, I could finally go back to the rooms and start my sobriety journey in earnest. As I write this, I am now five and a half months clean and sober, and am so grateful for the gifts that God/dess have given me. I have been challenged here and there, but largely I'm working both the program and my Craft, and these together have allowed me to become myself again, rather than the shell of a human being that the chemicals and alcohol made me.
These gains that I've made in the last six months could not have been possible without the presence of a God/dess of my understandig, that matched the path I was to be following, and the community around me. In short, I would not be clean and sober without Wicca. Mom, if you're reading this, I'm sorry, but this is my path, and I will not leave it for anyone or anything.
Bright Blessings,
Rowan