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My journey on the Path of She began thirty years ago.

At this time, I was in my mid-twenties, totally lost in the mainstream culture, with a business degree and a promising career in a blue chip company, living a material, achievement-driven life that neither fed my soul nor gave me joy.

Then one fateful night, on a Winter Solstice eve, the Goddess came to me in a dream. Though I wouldn’t remember this dream until many years later, my life was set on a new course.

The role of the Priestess is to not only walk between the worlds, but to merge them together, to take the 'as above so below' truths and bring them into one, solid, grounded focus.

As I lay face down and naked on the massage table, whatever it was, came unattached, and began to pour out with each exhale, some moments it felt like liquid, others like a chain link slithering out, others almost like a rubber band unmoored from points stretched throughout me and snapping out. It seems to have been attached to every nerve strand in my entire body.  Then it felt as if a crust was cracking all over my skin and falling away in pieces and chunks.  After the crust was gone more seemed to break to the surface in tiny openings everywhere - I had a sense that the Earth was absorbing all of it, taking it and repurposing it.   Finally I felt a swirling galaxy expanding from my solar plexus through my whole physical and etheric body, swishing through and making sure there was none left hiding inside my cellular, and even subatomic structure.

I’m reposting this because it’s getting to be that time of the year for starting to plan how awesome you’re going to be in the new year.  You can definitely do this course in a self-guided manner and all the prompts are now posted here.  

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Recently I have listened and read and watched the Pagan community face transphobia. Again. Denora wrote a summary here and offered the challenge “How will you enact change?”

I wasn't around in previous years. I long to see our Pagan community become a healthy and welcoming place free from transphobia. I have no easy answers but I’ve been encouraged to tell the story of my personal struggle with transphobia. I used to a fundamentalist Christian and that meant also being misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, a creationist, and then some. So I offer here a glimpse of my own struggle and transformation.

I briefly lived in San Francisco, or “sin city” as we called it, with a Christian Outreach group over a decade ago. Someone in said group once warned me not to go to the “wrong side of the Safeway”, beyond which lay the Castro, the place where “the gays” lived their sinful lives. I once crossed over to eat at a Thai restaurant and felt frightened and guilt ridden the entire time.

There is a Divine Discord that exists within each one of us. I know this to be true because I see it all around me, consumerism is the easiest place to spot the divine discontent. 

Hildegard von Bingen wrote: “The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul.” (Vol XXII, No. 5). This is a concept that I’ve been thinking about all week, and how we have tried to place unnatural limitations upon the body and soul based on our dualistic way of thinking.  I suppose a true Zen answer would be the body is the soul and the soul is the body, but right now I’m enjoying thinking that the soul contains the body. Next week I’ll probably veer off into a more Zennist approach.

For this to happen, the soul must accept the body, not the other way around. As I’m not entirely certain that there is even such as thing as an individual soul, it’s an interesting concept.  What if the “life force” on this little ball of rock hurtling through space is all soul, all an expression of soul?  What if everything is an expression of the Earth’s soul, or the soul of the universe?