The below is the meditation/story I offered in preparation for Beltaine. Feel free to use any part of it with attribution.

You. You.  have been a caterpillar.

You have been not just any caterpillar, you have been a brightly black-and-chartreuse-striped caterpillar, chomping happily throughout your life, ever hungry, never satisfied, ever hungry, never full. Chomp. Chomp Chomping on the milkweed around you. You have been black and yellow, brightly striped. You have been a prize for birds, but you have lived. You emerged from your egg and you have been a caterpillar.

I’ve been thinking about spiritual and religious wounding. I have written about it in Your Journey Toward Wisdom and I think it bears consideration during this period of all kinds of special spring holidays.

As a Unitarian Universalist minister and a Pagan priestess, I see many people come into our faith traditions with deep wounds from the traditions, beliefs, and customs, and people in traditions from their past. Many people come to me/us because they recognize their own deep desire for spirituality or a more fulfilling sense of meaning combined with a mistrust, or even antipathy toward religions they perceive as being like those from which they came.

Many of my friends and colleagues who identify as Pagan are suspicious of prayer, as I’ve mentioned earlier.

When last we met, I quoted the last line from a version of the Charge of the Star Goddess:  “…if that which you seek, you do not find within yourself, you shall surely never find it without. For behold, I have been with you since the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.” 

I find this last sentence so compelling because it reminds us of Who we are. Some people say we are spiritual beings having a human experience. I’m not sure I subscribe entirely to that position, given that I believe in a theology of immanence, that the Holy is here and now in this place and this time, wherever one is, and that the human experience is holy of itself, and doesn’t need a separate category of spiritual-ness to make it sacred…but that’s for a separate time.

Good day, dear friends, and welcome to January 2018!

Today, and for the next few entries, I want to talk about the practice of prayer. Prayer is something of which I’ve noticed many of my Pagan friends and colleagues are suspicious. It smacks of Abrahamic religions (especially Christian traditions) by which they have been rooted, or seems somehow antithetical to our own practices of magic. 

Yuletide celebrations of most kinds from traditions all over the Northern Hemisphere, capture my imagination. Ice-skating on frozen rivers in Quebec. Outdoor festivals in the short days of Scandinavian winter where traditions ancient and new blend together seamlessly. The famous outdoor Christmas markets in Germany where people come together for all the sun they can get in the darkening days. The gorgeous, books-and-chocolate tradition of Iceland.

I have been away for some time. And I have, unfortunately been away for a reason many of us know all too well:  Depression laid me low for several months from early spring all the way through the summer. I did not take the election of the current president of the US well, and my depression was, I believe, a manifestation of the agonies that many people went through at that time. 

I am pleased to report, however, that as the season darkens, my mood lightens, and that as I prepare for my annual winter solstice retreat, Going into the Dark, I delight in the grey and the rain and the lowering clouds of the Pacific Northwest. There is still the occasional visible sunrise or sunset, the first late and the second early, but mostly we are now in the rains of early winter.