Vocation

Thinking about vocation because of the retreat with Matthew Fox.  There were people there who felt called to the priesthood, but were rejected by the organized religion, and spoke about their pain about that.  I realized how lucky I am that I have a vocation, and I’ve been able to live it.  I was called to bring back the “Old Nature Religion of Western Europe.”  To create a place for the celebration of diversity, where people feel at home and accepted as soon as they walk in, where our prayers are dances, so we don’t have any doctrine to disagree about.
How do I know this is my vocation?  Partly from the ease with which certain steps happened along the way.  My initiation as a shaman came by way of childhood trauma.  In 1964, I received a degree in Astronomy, went to Stonehenge for the first time, read The White Goddess about the tree calendar and the “fire festivals”, and danced folk dance with a bunch of Greeks.  How did I not immediately perceive and pursue this calling?  Well, I didn’t know that’s what it was, there was no recognized path to where I would end up, struggles with the legacy of PTSD, an abusive childhood, and a toxic culture derailed me for a long time.  The struggle to heal was both my path and my training.  Along the way, I weathered suicidal depression, spent some time practicing Buddhism, and settled down in Brunswick, Maine, where I found folk dance, a group of subversive women, and was guided back to Stonehenge.
The “subversive women” were the Womens’ Counseling Service, a group of fierce feminists.  The second meeting I attended was on February 2.  Inspired by the date, and a gibbous moon, I took a candle and a pottery chalice to the meeting.  At the end of the meeting I announced “It’s Candlemas, and I want to do a ritual.”  I lit the candle and spoke the words of the Prophet Odo:  “You cannot buy the revolution, you cannot make the revolution, you can only BE the revolution,” and passed the cup of water.  When every one had drunk a sip, one woman said with a sigh “THIS is what was missing” and another said “Blessed Be.”  Only much later did I realize that I had just come out as a witch.  I came from that meeting with the inspiration to write a book.
It’s called The Feminine of History is Mystery, and it has “righthand pages” and “lefthand pages.”  The topics include, but are not limited to, the Sun and the Moon, masculine and feminine, the two hemispheres of the brain, megalithic monuments, science fiction, and Atlantis.  The right hand pages discuss the topics in linear, logical, “Scientific” fashion.  The lefthand pages are a series of discrete writings from a variety of sources: my dreams, descriptions of real ceremonies, descriptions of fictional celebrations, entries from journals I kept while traveling in the British Isles and France.  The left hand pages are more intuitive and associative.  (Yes I know the hemispheres of the brain are the other way around, but I use right and left as we experience them in our bodies.  If you turn right in a dream, you are turning to a more linear and logical way.)
As a result of writing the book, I went to Franconia to present the ideas at a conference.  Here I met the man I married and moved to Franconia to live.  The next step was the discovery of Sacred Circle Dance.  I had already been teaching Folk Dance, so it was very easy to add the sacred dimension.  After dancing with many other teachers I realized that God/Spirit had gifted me with all the skills to teach circle dance.  I can talk about what I’m doing as I do it (I was surprised to learn that not everyone can do that).  I have a good sense of rhythm and a good sense of spatial orientation.  I also have some kind of capacity in my brain to construct an image, or a gestalt of a dance.  At one point I tried to draw one and couldn’t — it’s really an “image” in four dimensions, one being time — and it has a kind of “shape.”  I teach the dances because I love them and want to share them, so most of the time my ego & self-consciousness don’t get in the way.