one weekend to the next

I had an almost perfect birthday weekend. My girlfriend took me to a beautiful hotel situated smack dab between Chinatown and North Beach. All weekend, when taxi drivers and the like asked us “where are you from?” we would laughingly answer “The Mission”. It’s great to be a tourist in your own hometown, seeing it with new eyes and fresh vision. Saturday afternoon we met up with some of my dear friends at Nordstrom’s on Saturday for a lesbian lingerie fashion show, and then it was off to a ritzy spa on Nob Hill. Do other cities have department stores that host lingerie shows for lesbians, complete with champagne and chocolate dipped strawberries? The flower festival in Chinatown, along with each meal being better than the last, made the weekend more than delectable.

It was a feast of a weekend, and now I find myself preparing for what comes next. This upcoming weekend, for some inexplicable reason, I will be going to Pantheacon, the big pagan conference disconcertingly held at a sterile corporate hotel in San Jose. Why am I going? I’m just not sure, but something is drawing me there. The last few years I’ve pulled back from participating much in public pagan events, instead taking time to review and reflect on my relationship to the two “traditions” I’ve been initiated into. I’m no longer in reaction to my disappointment in both, and am finding myself hesitantly comfortable being “Post Reclaiming Feri”, being a witch in my own right, not defined or confined by whom I’m associated with.

Anne Hill recently questioned on her blog whether “witch” is a name that she wants to be held to. I can’t imagine letting go of it, but am also feeling the yank of its limitations. The same “in your face” energy the word invokes that I loved as a young person I now find annoying. Spirituality is about connection, and it rankles that the word that describes my spiritual path I more often than not find disconnects me from others. My connection to the elements, my experience of the sacred as immanent, my non-monotheistic world view, and my deep understanding that we can change consciousness at will – all of this comes from my being a witch. It’s been a great boon to my work as a psychotherapist, which makes it all the more disconcerting that it’s so acceptable and even popular right now to practice psychotherapy from a Buddhist perspective, but not from a Wiccan one. Hopefully in the coming years this will shift, and the spiritually transformative aspects of living as a witch will become recognizable.

Like Thorn, who recently had some great entries on this subject on her blog, I find myself frustrated with the emphasis on “raw power” in the Craft as opposed to in-depth discussions on how our spiritual practice informs and shapes our lives and gives it meaning. As a psychotherapist, it’s sad to me that when recommending books to clients who are in pain and seeking spiritual comfort, I find myself recommending books by Pema Chodron , the Buddhist writer, as opposed to anything written by a pagan. Where is her pagan equivalent or something pagan akin to Scott Peck’s (a Christian) The Road Less Traveled?

I went to my first pagan “conference” well over twenty years ago, and what I most vividly remember is the goat with a deformed horn that was being passed off as a unicorn. To be a witch is to be a part of Freak Nation, a citizenship that sometimes is confining, confounding, if not downright embarrassing.

Perhaps this coming weekend will not be in such a different vein as this past one. Perhaps I’m drawn to Pantheacon because it’s time I viewed it too with new eyes and vision, attempting to be a tourist in my own theological home town. I’m hoping that our theology and the way it is practiced have begun to show signs culturally of depth, that we are crossing the border beyond Freak Nation to something more universal. Sam Webster is doing a workshop on something that looks promising, called “The End of the Occult…Should We Be Using the O word?” I think there just might be plenty of us who are in a period of reviewing and reflecting, and who are ready to make a contribution outside the borders of our little nation. So, I'm off soon for another full weekend. If only I loved San Jose like I do San Francisco.