Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth

In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.

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Pagan Grace, or: Still Life with Volcano

PHOTOS: Mount Etna erupts in Italy, spewing smoke, ashes, and lava 

 

Europe's most active volcano, Sicily's Mt. Etna, is erupting again.

Today, therefore, let me tell you a story of a previous eruption: a true story, a story profoundly pagan.

It took place during the 1980s.

 

The old woman had lived in the house on the slopes of Mt. Etna all her life. She had been born in the house; there she was married, there she bore her children and, after her husband's death, raised them herself.

Now the lava was coming.

Her son had driven up from Palermo to take her to safety. The car was fully loaded. Now she stands alone in the kitchen, for what might well be the last time.

She opens a bottle of wine, wine that she made herself from grapes raised and pressed on the volcano's fertile slopes. She pours two glasses.

She salutes the mountain with which she has lived in relationship all her life. She drinks a final toast.

Then she leaves, perhaps never to return.

On the kitchen table behind her stand two glasses: one empty, one full.

 

The end of this story, I do not know: whether Etna took her house or not, I cannot tell you. But the grace of that final act of hospitality, that waiting glass poured out, haunts me to this day.

“Elements,” magic circles? If that's all your paganism, I don't think much of it.

Lived intimacy with the living Land: that is the truest pagan experience.

 

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Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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