Pathway Here

On the path in Haleakalā National Park on Maui with Morrow.

This website is in its way my coming out party. When you face down the sheer wall of your mortality for a sec in emergency surgeries, experimental chemo treatments, and increased routine scans you stop caring so much what the world thinks and get down to the business of being here, now, and real. This entry is something about my coming of new age, reclamation, and arrival.

My first yoga class was with Teri Veireck in 1985 in the basement of the Fairbanks Athletic Club in Island Homes. After about an hour of stretching, Teri had us lie on the floor and imagine the room filled with blue light. Breathe in the blue. This was my first guided meditation instruction. It reminded me of when I would lie on the living room floor as a kid eating peppermint airball candies and trying to levitate. I would hold the puffball confection in my mouth, close my eyes, and concentrate on air. Light as a feather. In the 80s, we didn't have yoga studios. We had to study with books or VHS cassettes. I practiced on my own for a while and taught my first yoga class as part of a health fair for the Tri-Valley Area at the Healy High School. That wintry weekend in 1996, I was carefully instructed by the school nurse to guide only stretching, nothing spiritual for my yoga class. I understood and offered no meditation, made no prayer hands, no sound of OM at the beginning or the end. Despite my physical fitness focus, the nurse still received complaints from parents "...when the mind is empty, the devil gets in!" And I got my first taste of witchy persecution.

My first Tarot deck appeared on the side of the road in the Goldstream Valley in 1996. A German guy was having a garage sale on Miller Hill Ext and sold me his Thoth deck with the Angeles Arrien interpretive book. This is likely my first formal introduction to the Occult. Occult which generally means of, involving, or relating to supernatural, mystical, or magical powers or phenomena somehow bears the mark of the beast. And so does Alister Crowley's Thoth deck. People get scared and demonize things. It's what we do. There's a pretty big conversation we could have about othering the shadow and repressing the dark. Suffice it to say for now that my learning of this deck stayed in secret for a long, long time. The roots of the word occult from the Latin celare, occulere, and occultare point to hiding, secrets, and the need to conceal. I was a secret for the first few months of my existence and remained hidden from my biological family for 37 years. Tarot is an efficient system of containment for the greater and lesser secrets, the Major and Minor Arcana, and the Thoth deck is a contender for packing the most potent imagery into its 78 cards. In my view, Tarot is a mirror revealing our current stance. Pull the cards again in a few minutes and that reflection shifts with our perspective. The oracle of the Tarot helps us to see into ourselves, our narrative and how that shapes reality to us. I'm writing an oracle deck now with my partner Don Spear called 36 Seeds which aims to guide methodology for inspired opportunities of ritual agency on the daily.

In 1997 I was called to what I now know was my first coven when Cathleen Doyle invited me to a book group with three other women--Carolyn, Pam, and Colleen. I feel myslef hesitate to even name all of us here without express permission as that persecutorial pressure is so alive in various religious sects these days. Various witch hunts continue, and I ask that our wise and well ancestors keep us in protection as I allow these narrative to escape the concealment in this teeny corner of the web. We met weekly for snacks and sisterhood on Mondays at 5:30 for five years straight, and our first book was Anodea Judith's The Sevenfold Journey: Reclaiming Mind, Body & Spirit Through the Chakras. The Chakra Group went on to study many other forms of healing, magick, and power. I remember when Cathleen first suggested we all take Debra Chesnut's core shamanic journeying workshop I felt a pang of concern for what my partner at the time would think. How I might be met with disdain or skepticism, how my own doubts crept in. I took the course anyway and found the Four Winds Foundation at Moose Mountain BnB community.

This entry is in progress and to be continued!