I wrote this for the book being published by The Humanist Pagan. Everyday I check my email for the inevitable rejection notice that my writing always elicits, but, so far, disappointment.

So I figured I'd publish it here, and hustle the process along a bit. Have at it.



If you want a pearl, you gotta irritate an oyster, the wise ones say.

I’d like to say that I arrived where I am by being irritated, thereby implying that my current state is pearl-like and lending myself a certain debonair air of oysterishness, but, Alas!, the best I can do is confess to being irked.

So I’m going to begin with irk, wander off the clearly marked trail (despite the prominent warnings) and then (assuming I survive) I will try to return to irk.

Wish me luck!

I’m irked. To understand the source of my irk, I have to tell you some stuff about me.

Like most contemporary pagans, I was not born a pagan. Nope – I was born into a Catholic family, raised as a Catholic, confirmed a Catholic, and educated by nuns. I know all about God’s Glorious Kingdom in Heaven, the saints who sacrificed for the Great Cause, the Living God who died that I may have eternal life. That isn’t a bad thing.

In fact, I’m actually quite grateful for it all.

I have no bad feelings about Catholics, I have no animosity for strict nuns, and I do believe that this current pope, Pope Francis, is the absolute schnitz.

I did not stop being Catholic because I was molested (I wasn’t), because I was oppressed (I wasn’t), or because my peers, parents or other authority figured discouraged critical and/or independent thinking (they didn’t). I got here by following the startled deer in my own headlights.

Despite the pride that some folks express in lineage, I don’t see any great virtue in being raised in some particular religion. Those who are raised with certain beliefs see those beliefs as an insider does – normal, right, acceptable, laudable. On the other hand, those who convert go generally go through a process of learning, comparing, contrasting, thinking, and arriving at a conclusion.

Maybe this is done consciously, or unconsciously, or intuitively, but generally, in some way, it is done. This is one of the reasons I raised my kids without beliefs, and they did not die, are doing quite fine, and have found the way to their own inner life, each in her own way.

So – no problems with Catholics. I actually like them. The history, the art, the theological speculation; all sublimely beautiful and engrossingly interesting.

Much like a well maintained park.

ButePark_1962a.jpg
This is where I fall into a deep stupor

But I was born strange and twisted. I was born (dare I confess it?) an “Explorer.”

Whew! Now that that’s out in the open I can get on with it.

So… here we go again…

Here’s the thing about Explorers; while they are perfectly capable of enjoying the manicured and sanitized lawns, the carefully trimmed shrubs, the groomed and healthy trees of a park, they find it impossible to live in one for long.
An Explorer requires – withers and dies without – dangerously strange twisted trails, new vistas of awe and despair, inexplicable discoveries and loss, and unexpected traveling companions of dubious reliability.

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This is where I wake up and live

Therefore, I abandoned the Catholic park and high-tailed it into the wilderness.

Such mad journeys in the realm of the spirit lead inexorably into the lawless Wild West of modern paganinity, that realm of the Terra Incognita of the Spirit…

…but imagine my surprise to discover in the midst of the Badlands how much of that beguilingly seductive and much longed for alternate landscape had already been plowed, paved, fenced in, and posted with this notice “Unconforming need not apply.” The oceans already have concrete banks, and the few remaining oysters find themselves seriously shucked.

All the unrestrained urban sprawl has resulted in the creation of a series of designated parks.

Having begun with irritated oysters and irk, I am now performing the juju of twisting this ramble back in upon itself to create a Mobius strip. Having dispensed with oysters, I now turn to irk.

What irks me is this: Where did all the Explorers go? How can there be so much certainty of belief, the acceptance of “truth” written in new books, or old? Where is the exotic taste for uncertainty, for the ground that trembles beneath thy feet, the uncertain footstep toward the deepest unknown?

Explorers don’t move from one manicured park to another. That’s for tourists who long for the amenities – flush potties, hot showers, raked beaches, electrical outlets, three-bar reception.

Explorers are compelled to turn away from all that. They give up the security of belief, thumb their nose at the certainty of historic texts, and, sometimes, they even abandon all hope in the places they enter.

If you’ve missed the meaning in this selection of carefully mixed metaphors, allow me to make it entirely plain to you. I cannot, I will not, abandon the security and comfort of one carefully worked out belief system only to flee to another. I cannot be told – by Catholic, pagan, Rastafarian, Pastafarian, anybody – what is real and what is not, what is right and what is wrong, what God(s/dess/es) are and what they are not, or what the airy thingamabobs want of me.

I’m gonna figure it out myself, via risky experiments, and by chancing a cosmic fall.

I want the oddly sweet strange terror and illumination of The Great Dark beneath the wild trees in the uncharted forests of the spirit, where the monsters may roam, and nobody pretends to know what the hell is ahead.