That Breakthrough I Mentioned a Week or So Ago. . .

I don't know how common this experience is, but for a very long time I've felt both a strong attraction toward and an even stronger resistance against actually practicing magic. One of the most challenging aspects of my priestess training has been actually doing the basic energetic and magical practices. There's all kinds of simple, reasonable explanations for this: my "low church" orientation that just wants to go inward and connect without a lot of mumbo-jumbo hand-waving and chanting of dead languages; my "rationality filter" that's a side effect of growing up in a modern, rationalist household with a King of Swords for a father; and my life-long impatience about repetitious learning (dooming my study of foreign languages and limiting the scope of my musical abilities). But there's always seemed like there was more behind it than the simple and obvious explanations. Over the last couple of years I'd become semi-convinced that there were bindings of some kind on me, preventing me from fully engaging my actual abilities.

I've tried to avoid making it an excuse for not doing the work, but fear I was only partially successful, especially in recent months. I started to focus more on finding the roots of the bindings (if indeed they existed at all) rather than just doing the work. But I was growing tired of feeling like I was putting more effort into simply motivating myself to start my daily practices than I was actually doing them. For the last few months I've done only the simplest of my assigned work.

Then, on the evening of August 28th, a few days after my balcony vigil, I reached a crisis point.

( Direct from my practice journal. Square brackets are my comments from today. )

The Power of Story & Creating a Calendar

For all that I'm good at abstract thinking, I crave story. Among other things, I crave stories which provide context for understanding. I crave stories that give meaning to action, especially in the area of the spiritual.

For more than a year now, I've been thinking about creating a personal sacred calendar, establishing holidays that are meaningful to me, to provide points of emphasis and celebration in my personal spiritual life, to give me a way to share my beliefs with my daughter, and perhaps to provide opportunities for community. So far, none of this has happened. It's easy enough to write dates on a calendar, but unless I have an emotional connection to a why beyond "it's a good idea" it's not going to happen. I'm not a ritually-oriented person any more than I'm an extroverted social person. If I'm going to make the effort to do something, it has to motivated by more than "should" or "good idea."

One of the realizations I had in the week following the breakthrough mentioned in my previous post is that I always found the Jesus story compelling -- especially as I got older and began to study it as a graduate student and seminarian. I realized then that one of the problems I've had with the 'usual' Pagan holidays is that they are far too generic for me -- and I haven't ever connected the seasonal observances to a more personally compelling story, nor tried to take the stories which do move me and create observances from them in a deliberate manner.

The one exception to this would be the Hades-Perseophone story. That's an Equinox story I can feel and relate to in my blood and guts. And it's about sex and loss and transformation, which are major elements of my path.

If I'm going to create a sacred calendar and use it as the basis for ritual-making and celebration, it will have to be formed from stories which move me. And then I'm going to need to feel free to celebrate on my own terms, not according to an inherited sense of "how it's done."

One of my ideas is to have a minor feast honoring Enheduanna, a priestess of Inanna who is the first writer whose name we know. I want to hold a salon in her honor where people bring and share sacred poetry and literature.

I've spoken with Wolfling about creating a calendar, and need to engage her again. I want to be sure we have a household calendar which includes the powers with whom she works and the cycles which are important to her.