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We'd had a good month in Malta and the UK, and the night before our flight out of London's Heathrow airport I spent nearly an hour carefully wrapping and packing my carry-on bag of ceramics and other fragile objects.

Just before boarding—this was back before post-911 air paranoia—they pulled me aside for a baggage inspection.

“Ye gods,” I thought as a young South Asian woman began unwrapping the objects on top. “If I have to repack all of this, half of it will be broken by the time we get home.” I stood there, fuming but powerless.

The clerk gave a little start. “What's this?” she said.

She was holding a little statue of Kali that I'd bought a few days before.

Playing dumb American, I said, “Isn't that a wonderful little Kali?”

“You know Kali?” she said, looking up.

“Oh, sure," I said. This was no more than the truth. Every witch knows the Void, the Dark Mother.

"I got her in a little Hindu religious goods store in Forest Gate," I continued. "Isn't the detailing beautiful?”

The woman looked at me. She looked at Kali.

"Let's not forget our Taíno culture, " Abuela Antonia said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Guabancex gets angry when we forget our Taíno ancient ways.  You don't want to provoke Guabancex," Abuela said in a strident voice.

I swallowed hard.  My six-year old brain did not understand.  "Who is Guabancex?"

In our fast paced society, stress and distress can occur over seemingly small occurrences, in addition to the large stressful life events like death, divorce or accidents.  Seeking solace to relieve any or all stress is a common practice.  Comfort can be found within the family unit, rocking a child or in the arms of a lover.  Stress can be relieved by escaping into a good book, movie or taking a long quiet bubble bath.  Exercise, good food, time alone or with good friends can offer comfort and a release from stress and chaos.  Solace, to find comfort, is one of the most common reason people to turn to religion.  During difficult times most people, even those who are not religious, turn towards the divine to receive some type of comfort and release. Pagans, Witches, and Wiccans often find this solace by turning to one of a multitude of Gods or Goddesses and to nature.

Paganism offers a multitude of divine beings to aid in this process. From the compassion of Kwan Yin to the vengeance of Kali, most of the pantheons have a representative of home, compassion, and the underworld, all of whom can provide solace or comfort at any time.  The crones and sages of paganism remind us that each phase leads to the next.  As a popular crone goddess Hecate will drag you kicking and screaming to the next phase.  She can be the “tough love” goddess who reminds that first you let go and then you begin the new or next phase.  

Sex and Death! Sex and Death! 

That's the running joke whenever anyone in my circle pulls Kali Ma from one of my Goddess Oracle decks. Kali evokes a sense of simultaneous awe and revulsion, devotion and recoiling, from many people. The Hindu Dark Mother embodies so much that seems paradoxical -- endings and beginnings, creation and destruction, nurturing and punishment, love and hate, and -- yes -- Sex and Death. Her fearsome visage, her girdle of severed arms, her necklace of skulls all draw on our darkest fears. And yet the ultimate lesson of Kali Ma, it so often seems, is for us to be willing to find beauty in the horrific, to find the love in the dark nights of the soul, to find the new beginning in the fiery ending. 

The hag, or the cailleach as she is called in Scotland and Ireland, has been much in mind this past year.  Partly this is because I am getting into stride with my own inner, physical and emotional, crone.  But in the way that these things happen,the micro is just a reflection of the macro world. I am increasingly called to address the hag goddess and to evangelize acknowledging this dark side of the divine feminine.

I am reminded that everyone loves the springtime maiden aspect of Brighid. They revel in the bounty of the maternal Brighid.  But little is written about the encounter with the fierce hag aspect of Brighid.  The gloves are off with Her; She is well capable of giving you the proverbial Zen shove and bitch slap if She is ignored.  Shortly before I turned fifty I cried out for Brighid to get me out of somewhere.  In the manner of 'be careful for what you ask for' she complied. What came was a tidal wave of painful change, a demolition of my ego, a period of depression requiring medication, and a recalibration of everything I thought about loss and power. It transformed Everything. But it also set me on the path that I reckon She wanted me to take but that I had resisted. (The ego is often the enemy of our highest good.) I actually prefer the life that Brighid forged for me out of the ashes and pig iron leftovers, but the transformation was a scorcher. But, like the goddess Brighid herself in Ireland's culture, I survived.

As I came down from the muddy hillside, sweat dripping off my brow, my head reeled over what had just occurred. The Indian heat had certainly affected me, but I was somewhat sure the events of the past two hours were not a hallucination. Trekking up earlier in the morning, I had been greeted by two black-clad young men who beckoned me in Hindi to come. Yes, I had hesitated; but their insistence was smoothed by a sweet kindness and the sentiment offered that it was their Babaji, their “respected father” or guru, who was asking me to make the detour.

The year was 2003, and it was just after Solstice. I followed the men, two devotees of Lord Shiva in his most fierce of forms, to Babaji’s encampment on the top of Nilachal Hill. I was in Assam, and the place was called Kamakhya, abode of the lover’s dance, place where Shiva and Shakti, the eternal Female Force, joined. At this time, Devi, Goddess, bled. Her moon cycle came but once a year, and now the red earth and menstrual blood metaphor mixed in a harmonious shout out to the life Divine. I was enthralled to be there once more, my annual pilgrimages since 1998 necessary soul-felt recharges of all my mind, heart and spirit.