branches up, roots down

I wrote this at 63. I'm 70 now. I shared it on a my local Reclaiming Facebook page. As per usual, I got private messages lauding me and thanking me. Publicly I was lambasted and there was a move to ban me from the page.  As per usual, critical thought was perceived as ar vicious personal attack. Sigh. I stand by every word. And... someone recently told me the tagline about extraordinary people at the local camp has been taken down. I'll take that as a win.  I am a Witch. I became a Witch almost 5 decades ago, when as a 23-year-old feminist, I turned to nature for healing after three sudden familial deaths within three months. It was the only spirituality that made sense. I found solace in the idea of Goddesses, as opposed to the punitive father God I had grown up with. Holding nature as sacred, being comforted by her cycles, having a personal relationship with all the elements of life, and tuning into the Divine Feminine, this is what drew me to the path and keeps me walking i...

In the past week, a week I've been missing writing, two different people told me they had read this blog and wondered why I didn't keep writing. The second person, someone new (several years) to Reclaiming, the spiritual "community" that I was part of for the bulk of my life,  asked me questions that continue to be hard to answer. As I lay in bed last night I thought about what I wrote to that community's email forum back in 2016 and  knew I should post it here. It does not include, of course, the hubbub.  I knew that, as per usual, naming the elephant would bring castigation on my head. And of course, it did. I was accused of getting into other people's personal business, of once again gossiping about something that was not mine to talk about. What really should be saved for history is the reaction to articles and posts I wrote over the decades in Reclaiming. They, to tell the truth, are the real story. They are hard to explain, to fathom. Readers not entrenc...

I go religiously to the Alemany Farmer’s Market on Saturdays. I’ve been going for decades now. Farmer’s markets have sprung up all over the city, but I am faithful to Alemany. It now has it’s share of “foodies”, of which I have to be one of the first, but it remains wildly diverse, a relic of the San Francisco I refuse to let go of. I’ve been a Pagan since my early twenties. It was then, after my father’s suicide and the death a beloved cousin, that I moved to a small town on the Oregon coast. Recognizing the cycles of the moon and the turning of the tides became a lifeline as I moved through the shadowland of grief.   When I got sturdier, I moved to San Francisco.   It has been here that for most of my adult life I celebrated the turn of the wheel at public rituals. The days of public ritual are past, but the farmer’s market remains. Here, I celebrate the first asparagus and rejoice during the brief weeks that asparagus, fava beans, and cherries are all in season. ...