Pagan Godspell

Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise…. Our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency…. Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to Ronald Hutton…. Our four…no… Amongst our weapons…. Amongst our weaponry……are such elements as fear… surprise…. I’ll come in again.

In continuation of addressing this potent series of questions that I began in the previous post, I happily deliver unto you Part 2: Pagans and Nature:

Are you a Pagan because you are drawn to or feel a connection with nature?

Boy howdy. Damn straight. Darn tootin’.

That’s the short answer.

Here’s the longer, more expository one:

Not all Pagans identify as earth-centered, of course. It’s important to point that out. For me, however, well – safe to say it’s pretty central to my worship. Though it wasn’t always, at least not overtly.

It is true that as a dreamy-eyed preteen I spent a lot of time outside in my backyard, peering at snowflakes and trying to see fairies. I loved the wind and grass. I was shot through with a visceral love for the west and the southwest in particular (one memory that stands out in the passage of my spiritual journey was a moment when I was about 10 years old – I stepped from the car at a truckstop in Arizona and felt the December desert air rocket straight through my body, filling me instantly with a fierce, white-hot tumble of pure joy). I felt ecstatically overwhelmed by red rocks, deserts, sunsets, mountains and fire. I was enchanted, as so many are, by the silver astonishment of the moon. I knew that these things were alive and thinking beings and that they were speaking to me, and I had no qualms about speaking to them in return, despite some fairly substantial language barriers. There is no question that many of my early spiritual experiences were rooted in relationship with the natural world. Yet, while I did have a profound spiritual connection with nature and was thrilled to find a religion that spoke to that part of me, I admit that my attraction to Paganism was dominated primarily at first by another issue. I was obsessed with magic. I was a baby geek, soaking in a glorious medium of Princess Bride, The NeverEnding Story, and a veritable avalanche of fantasy novels – and nearly crying myself to sleep at night haunted by a desperate longing for something that I couldn’t put a name to – when I found out that there were actually people out there who believed that magic was real. You can imagine my level of enthusiasm upon the revelation of this miracle.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out however that magic, for me, is simply another word for the rush that consumed me at the truckstop that day in Arizona, or the liquid glory pouring to earth in the spill of moonlight. That magic is natural and that it springs bubbling out of the earth and the trees and the rocks and moves with a sweet, shocking grace through the marrow of all things. And that there are no real boundaries between me, the natural world, magic, relationship, the gods, the planet, or any activism on the planet’s behalf. That indeed, magic is happening with every breath and in every move of my body (and that the web of ultimate connection can be touched, yes, and threads plucked to shift the tides of the world in one’s favor in harmony with the Isness). Magic can be complex or simple – a weaving or a seed, Fibonacci numbers, a handful of roots, an exquisitely complicated series of movements and words, an Emerald Tablet, the making of medicine, the pouring forth of prayer. No matter where I have found it, it always seems that magic has led me back to the Mama – to Her mountains and Her forms and Her Beauty, and to my body as an expression of Her and the medium through which I experience Her far-flung, lavish, decadent, gritty, sharp, gobsmacked, outrageous being.

Eventually, in addition to the flowering of my rapture in the deep, these connections led me to become inspired by the radical application of spirituality to the struggle on behalf of oppressed communities and the Land.

The development of my spiritual life has directly impacted my political and personal decisions. I became an activist for the queer movement out of my moral belief that all human beings had a right to consensual loving (I know – ridiculous me and my ridiculous beliefs…destroying American families since 1976, huzzah!). I became a feminist out of my religious belief that all peoples are blessed and powerful, possessors of their own worth and agency (*case of the vapors*). And I became an environmentalist because for me there is nothing else that I can be and still call the Mama my home, my shelter, and my god (among several, of course), as She is and will be forever and ever, amen. Though I began as a seeker on the path of the Pagani in order to touch that hungry, secret part of me that wept and yearned towards something ineffable and grand, as I read and prayed and enacted ceremony and ritual over the course of time, the Land began to speak to me, and what She was saying was that if I wanted to lead a life that was in concert with the magic that was in and through her, maybe I ought to start thinking about some of the choices I make. It is remarkable how much I’ve found that each action I take strengthens my religious commitments, which by turn strengthen my resolve to act. These actions are ongoing, and my moral convictions are consistently being changed and deepened through this process. The more I learn, the more this process keeps growing and changing, and the more I become enchanted with the dance – action, movement, change, growth, knowledge, revelation, ecstasy, action, movement…

The Mama is my heartsblood. She is in and through and of me. I am in and through and of Her. A Mystery forever and ever amen. Sometimes it’s too big for any words…which is just how it should be.

So. I became a Pagan partly because I felt an original connection to nature, and through being a Pagan, my connection with nature has been charged and deepened to become the delicious core of my polythea/ologies. I guess it would have been more concise to simply have said that. But it’s more fun to wax ridiculously slap-happy rhapsodic instead.

Do city dwelling Pagans find it difficult to practice in the City?

This has always been an interesting question to me. For the majority of my life I’ve lived amongst the concrete streets of a variety of metropolitan areas (though none as immense as Chicago, New York or L.A. – I’m still really just a bumpkin at heart I guess), though I have also sampled life in the quieter, cricket-chirpin’ districts of the wild places and the cultivated fields of this country. I have been both a citymouse and a countrymouse, though admittedly more of the former, and while I certainly can say that for me, there is something slam-bam fabulous about being able to walk out the door and touch god with my bare feet, lift my hands cupped with fresh water from the river or the pond, and leave offerings at the roots of gnarled trees that shade my window, I have always felt able to connect to the Mama, even in the city (the wind and sun are always wild), so I can’t say that I ever found it difficult to practice within metropolitan areas. Now, from an ecological viewpoint, I personally find cities to be inherently unsustainable enterprises, and I loathe the oppression of concrete, the deafening roar of air-polluting traffic, and all the ecodestructive, human-rights-denying activity that is vital to the survival of a city environment (cities are, after all, the hallmarks of civilization, which has as its fundamental project the killing and suffering of the coded Other for the benefit of the privileged). So certainly, there is a struggle there for me with cities that stems from my earth-centered thea/ologies, but I cannot say that I have ever felt unable to pray, do ritual, perform magic, touch the Mama, feel the blessing stars overhead or the blessing grass underneath me, fight for ecological and/or social justice, or mark the passing of the holy year in the city. And, of course, many, many, many Pagans are city-dwellers, and some have adapted their polythea/ologies and practices to suit that environment. While I choose to cleave more to my countrymouse ways as I grow older, there are cities that remain a precious piece of my multiple souls and I cannot and would not release them. For me it’s yet another manifestation of the quandary of the ecoconscious living within the structures of civilization.

Et Voila!  Next up: Part 3 – Pagans and Community…