A Pagan Path 2: Starting Again

 Hi, 

Welcome back to the Shores of Night, or welcome if you're new. My name's Grim, and in this piece I'm going to talk about why I still call myself a Pagan. 

When I moved to Bournemouth, I was still wobbling. I wasn't sure if I believed in anything, really, but at the same time I felt there had to be something. I was still drawn to the esoteric, but I wasn't sure what spoke to me any more. What I suppose was curious was that I wasn't tempted back to Christianity, and nor did I think about becoming a Muslim or joining any of the Western faiths. 

One of the things I wanted to do when I moved down here was to reconnect with myself on an authentic level. That meant, for me, therapy and facing my trauma. As anyone who's gone through that knows, it's a slow process, not a wonder drug. There's no moment where you click your fingers, and everything's suddenly better. Even four years in, I struggle with the narratives other people had bestowed upon me, as well as my own inner critic. 

The other thing was that I'd discovered Alan Watts. I found his take on things fascinating (though I started listening to him because I thought he was funny), and that began to shape my perspective of the world. One thing he'd said really stuck with me: that in life we're constantly being told who we are. Only in solitude do we discover who we are once we strip away everyone else's opinions. A new start, with a focus on healing, seemed like a good place to start that process. 

Among the many things I learned was that my old belief remained. Gaia, the spirit world, nature as a powerful force: none of it had gone. In some respects, my therapy and my embrace of the spiritual began to align. I would meditate, focusing on my inner child, but I travelled by dragon, and the place I encountered my younger self was goddess-touched. I found path workings on YouTube and walked to witches' houses, which my spirit filled with cats - one of which seemed to follow me home. To be clear, I don't mean literally - this cat was perhaps something from my imagination, or dreams. All the same, it felt right. It felt powerful, and as if this, at least, was true.

I began to embrace a more emotionally driven side of myself, walking through the surprisingly common patches of woodland that fill Bournemouth or along the Bourne itself. I centred myself. I'm still a solitary, though I'm looking to change that, but I reached out for new resources and in the past few months overcame my fear of tarot - a "gift" from my Mum, if you want to call it that - and found my hands stopped itching whenever I handled a deck. One of the things I'm doing now is learning how to read it, not as a fortune-telling device but as a way to delve deeper into my subconscious and connect with my intuition. I don't believe in trying to tell the future (and, ironically, the one time I tried, I think the deck I use most knew that, because it gave me a snapshot of what's going on now and changes I need to make). 

My beliefs have grown more nuanced. I no longer believe in anything outside of nature. Angels, demons, Heaven, Hell, I now perceive as man-made explanations of something much older. What I picture when I talk about a spirit world is much more related to nature. I see almost everything as having a spiritual echo or reflection. If we could step through into the spirit world, we would see the spirits of trees, rocks and rivers. Here in Bournemouth, I would be able to see the spirit of the English Channel, its waves still pounding on the beach. 

I haven't formally studied the history of religious ideas, but I've been exposed to enough of them to think our idea of what gods are has evolved over time. The way we explain the divine has shifted until in the West, deities are viewed as separate from creation. My gods, though, aren't sitting on lofty thrones looking down at something they made. They're here, and I feel that when I look down at the planet, I see them. In the same way, this life, this existence, isn't something I need to escape.  It's where I'm meant to be. 

I also don't believe in mythical spaces or time, or that as a Neopagan I'm reconnecting with an ancient lineage. That last is with a heavy heart, but I have to accept, I think, that the things my Pre-Christian ancestors believed in are gone. Things like Christmas Trees or Easter Bunnies as the remnants of a Pagan past have proved to be false, and it makes me sad to think that the world before Christ was so thoroughly destroyed, and that so many of us today have so little empathy for what our ancestors experienced. 

Instead, I focus on what feels right to me now in honouring the Earth and Gaia, and I accept that the world has changed since the Pagan pantheons were openly worshipped. For example, there's a great video by Angela's Symposium where the host talks about the Green Man and how the way we see him now is uniquely ours, and that's a good thing. I respect Reconstructionists, but it's not for me.

Generally, this looks like not only spiritually honouring nature but building a practice away from shopping. I would prefer to find or make the things I use and to avoid buying things that are "special". To quote Terry Pratchett: 

"It had taken many years under the tutelage of Granny Weatherwax for Magrat to learn that the common kitchen breadknife was better than the most ornate of magical knives. It could do all that the magical knife could do, plus you could also use it to cut bread."

This is something that rings very true to me now. A lot of the things Pagans and Witches are told we need to be authentic are pretty but not necessary. This only adds to the pressure Capitalism already creates in the world, and encourages overconsumption the Earth can ill afford. It also reduces spiritual practice to little more than a way to shop. 

That's not to say I don't buy magical goods, but I try to be as ethical as I can, checking that crystals weren't dynamited out of the ground and mostly focusing on things like Tarot decks. Ideally, I'd like my ritual tools to be multipurpose (like the bread-knife athame). I try to eat a vegetarian diet, not always successfully and believe in living as lightly on the planet as I can. 

Beyond that, I'm building and trying to do the work. Most days that looks like doing some sort of tarot, but also includes meditation and just walking in nature. I try to return to whatever "natural" looks like for a human in 21st-century Britain. The path might have a dragon above and a cat at my side, but it always leads back to healing and to my spirit. For me, that looks like Paganism, albeit looked at through a lens of Gaianism and Animism. 

It may not be the path for everyone, but it's mine.