2004: Maggie’s Moon
2004 was a difficult year, one that I would characterise as involving a dramatic life change. I started blogging the same month I was diagnosed with Mal de Debarquement Syndrome (MdDS), and for the first year of living with the disability my balance was at its worst. It’s nearly always the same for MdDS sufferers, as if the brain struggles to cope with whatever’s gone wrong, and doesn’t do a particularly good job of it. After those 12 months or so, compensatory mechanisms seem to kick in and you find yourself better able to deal with, or accommodating, the weird sensory effects that MdDS puts upon you. I couldn’t spend much time in front of a computer, perhaps fifteen minutes a day, tops, but you’d never tell from the number of poems I published in the first five months, the tail end of 2004, back when the blog was hosted on Blogger.
I was living in London, in a tiny flat with a little square garden. I miss the apple tree, but not much else about that property. The mortgage was almost as much as we pay now for a large house and big garden, but we lived in a part of the east end that was hectic and colourful and exciting. I had just begun my journey with the Reclaiming witchcraft tradition, and it was the first time I came across a pagan collective that was structured, and organised, and involved community building and training. Of course I didn’t know then what would happen the following summer, which is a story I’ll at least touch upon in tomorrow’s 2005 appraisal.
I could have easily chosen a poem to represent 2004 as a number are available for you to read in the archives. What strikes me as interesting today, as I began an explorating of Druidry (or, if you live in the US, Druidism), is that a number of them, despite being written when I was involved with Reclaiming, touch upon Celtic themes and gods. There’s a poem about Dagda you can go seek out, or one that explores the beauty of the Elements that all pagan traditions work with, albeit not always in the same way.
But while I’m linking to those, the one entry I want to highlight above all others from 2004 is the short story called Maggie’s Moon. I’ve never submitted it for publication anywhere, but revisiting it today I’m thinking I should start looking to pagan magazines as possible interested parties.
The story is quite simple, on the surface: that of an old woman accused of being a witch during a period of history when such accusations led to murder. She is forced to flee, and goes on a journey of final revelation that confirms her beliefs and completes her life. Like some of the poems penned in the same timeframe, it reads today as surprisingly relevant to the area of paganism I am setting out to explore in 2008. It makes me realise that while we may sometimes feel we diverge from the path we’re on, to go off in entirely new directions, there is continuity to be found when we examine where we’ve been, where we’re at, and where we hope to find ourselves in the future. We change, inevitably, but we carry with us lessons from everything, good and bad. The important thing to remember is that we can sometimes miss the lessons of good times, and fail to identify the good things we can learn from the bad, even the painful things that happen to us. But we can always look back and learn them later, when we’re ready to open our eyes and hearts, and listen with our ears.
So. Please follow the link and enjoy the story, whether you’ll be reading it for the first time or revisiting it with me as your guide this week. Do leave comments here or on the story’s own page, I’m always happy to read what you’ve got to say. Tomorrow we turn to 2005.
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