2005: Rowan trees and big changes
2005 began with what I described as a ‘death in the family’–that being our family of pets, and the death being one of our terrapins (turtles). We’ve still got the remaining three today, though of course there have been other deaths to deal with since then. Later that year I lost a dear friend, Tony Grundy, who was dying of stomach cancer but somehow managed to slip away peacefully in the bath one morning. He remains to this day in my thoughts often, for he was my mentor and guide, always seeking to encourage me. Since his passing I’ve had to find much of what he gave me from within myself, most likely instilled by him in the first place, ready for me to access when he was no longer around. But 2005 wasn’t all sad news and loss, far from it—this was the year that my partner and I sold the London flat and moved to the countryside of West Yorkshire. My beloved’s career took off within the year, and I enrolled on the MA in Creative Writing that would see me immersed in the study and writing of poetry for two years.
This was the year that the US government said vegan diets for children were ‘unethical’ while continuing as ever to support genetic modification and intensive farming, deny global warming, and happily rain bombs on the heads of ordinary people in a foreign land as a means of bringing them democracy gaining long-term control over an important source of oil. This was the year in which gay penguins refused to go straight, and it was announced that two-thirds of the world’s resources had been used up. Doctor Who returned to our TV screens, brand-new and shockingly good, featuring a dour northern Time Lord and a former pop star, while I took a break from blogging in the month of July, bar one post commenting on the London terrorist bombings that month, and how goodness could be found in the ways in which the people of that city responded.
2005 was the year I left the Reclaiming tradition of witchcraft behind, all my enthusiasm burned by the coagulation of a group of people who not only treated me very unfairly, but took my money and ran with it when I couldn’t attend a summer camp owing to having been crippled for a number of months by an insect bite on the leg, received while travelling on the London tube. Overnight, it seemed, people I’d thought of as friends severed all ties. It wasn’t the first time I’d been burned in that way, but I never thought my experience with evangelical Christians in my late teens would be echoed by the rallying together of a bunch of witches to lie and (try to) bully me. The inner, psychic wounds took even longer than the insect bite to heal. I thought I never would heal, so deep was the betrayal and so mind-shattering was the way in which sound ethical and magickal frameworks could be sidelined and ignored in favour of adopting a vicious pack mentality. I was a solitary witch for half the year, but I didn’t know then that January 2006 would see me discover a new and far more diverse group of pagans to work with and befriend. I was to gain incredible friends, but in the summer of 2005 I was spiritually knocked back.
I learned that spiritual beliefs for some seem only fairy stories, unacknowledged as such, the means by which they can join a group and belong, with principles packed away when they step outside the circle. I went on to gain real friends, but for a while I held out hope of reconciliation—even a group apology—from former friends turned pagan bullies, but while I stayed open to that for a very long time, and wished for it, it never came. We each walk our own path, we are each responsible to ourselves, and our own gods—but I am pleased to say the bitterness invoked eventually melted away like ice exposed to sunshine. The one thing I don’t know is how I would respond were I ever to meet any of those people again, but, as they tend to stand apart from all other pagan traditions, I won’t speculate as to why, then a chance meeting is very unlikely. I hope, if it ever happens, that I can be big of heart and generous in spirit. I just don’t know.
A big part of Reclaiming is supposed to be environmental and political activism. Ironically, I’ve gone on to become far more immersed in these than I ever was while involved in Reclaiming. Reclaiming in the UK, for all its talk of engagement with wider society, remains invisible to most, even the wider pagan community, many members of which have never even heard of Reclaiming. That’s because, for the most part, Reclaiming fails to engage with anyone outside it. Its members spend too much time in my view, moving from one spiritual hit to another, and they seem to hide away in their secular homes and lives whenever they’re between camps and circles, staying invisible in situations where visibility could do a lot of good. I hope that changes. The creeds outlined by Starhawk in her revolutionary book, The Spiral Dance, remain resonant for me and even more relevant and important in 2008 than they were back in the late 1970s when the book first appeared. And I’ve gone on to see all those flights bringing Reclaiming teachers to and from the UK, with British initiates flying to and from San Francisco, as carbon-belching betrayals of the otherwise easily achievable ideal of uniting spiritual principles with environmental action.
I could never go back, nor would I want to. Druidism, I’ve been discovering of late, does everything Reclaiming promised, and also engages with other faiths whenever it can, even Christianity.
As I sit typing this entry today in 2008, I can look out of the kitchen window into the back garden of the house we bought last year, and see a young female rowan tree covered in ripe berries. I’ve long had a love of rowan trees, for their beauty and for the ancient traditions and beliefs attached to them, relating to magick and witchcraft. We didn’t know it was a rowan until the spring came and the buds grew into leaves, and so it was a wonderful surprise, taken as a good sign, to find one of my favourite trees on our own land. Back in 2005 I wrote an entry all about rowans, and as with yesterday’s retrospective, I am once again struck by how so much of where I’ve been, what I’ve long believed, has led me to today, with a clear and coherent lineage of beliefs, experiences and spiritual development. Druidism has much to say about trees, especially rowans, and oaks. So I commend my short essay on rowan trees to you now as my entry of choice to represent 2005.
2005 was a tough year, as so many are, but one in which changes were decided upon by me and also decided for me, or so it seemed. Now I see that everything happened as it was supposed to, but when we find ourselves in transitional times we never have the benefit of knowing where we’re going, only where we’ve been. My faith kept me going, and the love of my partner and family. That’s still true today.
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