I want to write about my experiences with Dionysos and meadmaking. Which of course bring to mind my experiences with jewelry and Hephaestos, and with the upperworld journey that deposited me at the feet of Apollo – to our mutual surprise. I want to write about my experiments with my Kouros and Cycladic figures, and my attempts to reconcile my fundamental queerness with the archetypal Divine Masculine and Feminine. But, because I’m crazy, I cannot tell these stories out of order. In order to tell these stories I must first tell about the first times I felt the direct hand of the divine.
My first direct, personal contact was with a god I have yet to put a name to, in Thoth’s Grove at Camp Gaea, on Beltane of 2009. There was a lot going on that night, apparitions the like of which I had never seen. But that touch in that grove … that was about me. I performed my dedication that night at his behest, utterly abandoning the ritual I had been planning and simply letting go.
The next direct contact was late November of the same year: a Tree of Life meditation at a public workshop led me further down than it was intended to, into the den of the Magna Mater. She had been waiting for me.
Each of these deserves a full post of its own, and will get one. But it’s interesting to sit here for a moment, to look back through my journals, and recall – and in some ways realize for the first time – the way events in 2009 set so many changes into motion. My dedication. My initiation a year later. The Name I tried to give up and the Name I took tor replace it. The gods who have come into my life, the powers I have navigated and been transformed by.
I am no longer the person who retreated from St. Louis, let alone the person who left Lawrence for St.L in the first place.