home.
Interesting to plant starts in containers. Fascinating to consider roots and growth - the plants, and my own. Has the pandemic changed me? Have I simply grown, as I am just over a year away from 30? Because even with all the socialization options before me, the only thing I really want to do is be at home with my daughter and husband, listening to music, container gardening, reading, worshipping my gods, and laying in the sun. Even chores are preferable to wasting emotional energy pretending to be who I was in 2019. I'm not this extroverted, talkative, high-energy person who will chameleon herself into whatever she thinks the other person wants her to be for them - not anymore. I just want to be quiet, and study wild flora, and do my little classes, take care of my daughter, watch dumb shows with my husband, and find peace despite the chaos of the world right now. There was a time of my life that the thought of being rooted was frightening, impossible even: I was starting to become convinced I was not meant to be a stable person in any way, shape or form. The challenge has always been in staying put, because staying put didn't seem like safety, it seemed like vulnerability of the worst kind. But, at the Southern foot of a sacred mountain, at the Northern tip of a valley, shrouded by nothing but the trees and my own thoughts, I cautiously put down one singular root. From it, more grew, bit by bit, and slowly the masks fell away and I started to become more myself. And I am still becoming. And I am still becoming.
Easter has never been my thing, really. Even when I was a kid, even though egg hunts were fun, there didn't seem to be any real point to them. I knew churches liked to do them, so on occasion I'd ask my mom to take me to church because I was interested in spirituality (and that was what seemed available at the time), but that was the extent to which I was involved in Easter. Even as a teenager, when I became heavily Wicca-influenced, Ostara was too much like Easter symbolically for me to feel particularly close to it on an emotional or spiritual level. Nominally celebrated at best, Ostara/Easter was just never my thing.
Fast forward to now, and I'm texting my witch friend who lives across the country while my daughter runs amok on the playground. We had just come from a hike at an aboretum (focused on native flora), where I had driven her crazy with my frequent stops to identify flowers and trees using my newly-acquired knowledge of binomials (I'm in college, and taking a wildflowers biology class). It was my ideal Sunday morning, and now it was her ideal Sunday afternoon, spending long unstructured hours at the playground.
I texted my friend: "So funny. A witch mom and a Christian man." My husband is spiritually Christian, though not particularly reliant on the Bible or on services (he'd like to find a service he feels comfortable in, however). It's something I respect, because he's not Christian because he was indoctrinated into as a child; he found his own way to faith, not through proselytization on the part of others, but through spiritual experiences that convinced him there was something more out there. "Christianity feels the closest to what I experienced," he explained to me once, "and it's also what feels the most culturally available to me." Even as a child, however, Easter was his favorite secularly-celebrated holiday, and thus the pop version of Easter has married with his faith-based one, and so even though I'm someone who doesn't much care for it, he insisted on making a big deal about it today and I let him. Easter basket, egg hunt, Easter dinner - he wants it, he gets it, because he loves it and I find that endearing.
In a way, his explanation of his movement into Christianity isn't that different from my own movement into Witchcraft, all those years ago. I, too, had strange experiences I couldn't totally explain. Christianity didn't fit the bill of those experiences for me, but when I eventually discovered witchcraft and paganism, that did, and so I dove in. As far as "culturally accessible" goes, I suppose that's why I started with Wicca: I'll get some serious flack for this in the occult/pagan communities, but Wicca is the Catholicism of Paganism, after all. It's why I don't think it's entirely coincidental that new witches who live in Western societies - especially racially-white ones - gravitate to Wicca first. Western culture - that is, colonialistic industrialized "first world" culture - is heavily Christianized, whether those values are acknowledged in the mainstream or not. Wicca may not be Christianity, but the values and structure of it is much the same, minus a Bible.
In any case, it's interesting, being a pagan witch by lifestyle (it's so integrated into my self-concept now that I don't think I'd ever fully extricate myself from it - no part of my life is uncolored by its influence) married to a Christian. In addition, I'm raising a daughter who has proclaimed a lack of belief in God, a skepticism but openness to Mother Nature, and an occasional explicit belief in the metaphysical (she has her own tarot cards that she uses, and has made a couple spell jars before). There is a dance to be had between expressing myself authentically, and respecting his lack of desire to be involved in my spirituality; in terms of parenting, there is also a dance to be had between giving her the information for what she's interested in, while not accidentally indoctrinating her, because I have a value of my child being free to believe whatever she likes. I'm sure my husband feels much the same way on his end.
But, I digress. It is Sunday, it is Easter, I have had an excellent day outside, and finishing with working on this website is just the right end to it. I've been percolating on what to add to this site. I think it may be fun to have a little chatbox somewhere, like some of the geocities websites I used to go on in the 2000s had. On someone else's site, they had their blog set up as an image of a Moleskine notebook that you could click to open and turn the pages, each page being an entry - that was SO cool and I am dying to figure out how they did that. I'm also trying to figure out what the best way to add new articles and tutorials would be . . . putting them on their own pages and linking to them in their category pages? Doing it right on the category page itself? Should I make an "enter" page? My mind is buzzing with possibilities and I'm excited to figure it all out.
Until next time!
You know, when I decided to make a Neocities account, I thought maybe some part of my brain would remember my mid-2000s coding experiments, back when I was too young to be on the internet unsupervised yet did so anyway, and created my own little corner of the internet back then. I can't even remember what platform I used. In any case, it's increasingly evident that coding is not, in fact, like riding a bike, and so I am learning it all from scratch. It's fun, though. It's been a long time since I felt so genuinely creative on the internet. Algorithm-driven social media and advertisement-heavy platforms have really cast a dark cloud over the wifi... So it's lovely to touch on that fascination and wonder that the world had in those first decades of the internet.
I woke up this morning after not a lot of sleep. What sleep there was were riddled with anxiety dreams, mostly to do with the relationships in my life. Consequently, I was exhausted, yet my 7 year old was all energy. "Her energy is a blessing, not a curse," I told myself, but I was still glad when my husband offered to take on parenting responsibilities for the day. As soon as they scuttled off to her ballet class, I finished up some homework for my Addiction and Abuse Recovery Counseling Certification, then after an attempt at a nap, I fed my inner child with good food and Disney movies before diving into creating this website. I feel a lot better now, and I must say, I don't think I've done so bad on this website for one afternoon of coding...
