The Return of the Goddess (To Me)

This video is called "Clementine Cannibal Talks About Being a Witch." A link to another one of her videos which is about the return of the Goddess is below.

The beginning of the following text is an email I wrote to Clementine about identifying as a witch. I know this post is a lot of Clementine Cannibal, but I'm still working to find my own voice as a witch, to figure out if I even am a witch by the perimeters I outline below, so I'll be using other people's words a lot until I'm better able to articulate this on my own.

I was raised, and to some extent still identify as, Catholic. But I have dabbled in Wicca [a form of witchcraft]. But it’s interesting, because the Catholic Mother Mary, to me, is a big manifestation of the Goddess. It’s no secret that the early Catholic church "recruited" the visage of Mother Mary to get pagan converts. But in my spiritual journey, Goddesses from other belief systems, like the Greek Hekate, the Hindu Kali, and the Buddhist Quan Yin have come to me. While I admit it’s a form of cultural appropriation, these faces of the Goddess have taught me things.

Also:
I believe that the Goddess has returned, because I've been waking up. I quit smoking cigarettes over 3 months ago, I made a firm decision to stop ruminating over the past, and I've stopped shaving my armpits without worrying that it's a contradiction that I still shave my legs and pluck my eyebrows. (My husband loves the pit hair!) For more about the return of the Goddess, please see Clementine's video The Return of the Goddess or Demetra George's book Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess.

I think the main reason I haven't been identifying as a witch is that I'm not into ritual magic. The best rituals I've ever done were more like exercises in art therapy, wherein the artistic process transforms psychologically and spiritually, than they were casting spells. Sometimes I think taking a walk on a balmy summer night is magical enough! (Note: partially since I am now identifying as a witch and not Wiccan, I don't think I need to perform formal ritual magic to be a witch.) Some other ways I am a witch are that I really connect with the world and nature on a spiritual level through my art, I feel a really strong connection to the cycles of the moon embodying the cycle of life, death, and rebirth (as we also see in the seasons, and in contradiction to the predominant thinking of time as linear instead of cyclical) and as far as Christianity goes I feel a very strong connection to Mother Mary as a face of the Goddess.

Sick

I'm back at work... and, in a way, at life... after a looong weekend of flu/fever delirious bed-riddenness. And I think I've seen God.

I truly did have some fever delirious cosmic shaman experiences while I was laid up. Okay, well, maybe only one or two. But I have been having dreams so vivid I could paint them, or reconstruct them and photograph them. Have you seen the movie "Duets?" With Gwyneth Paltrow? You know the guy in that movie who's having a mid-life crisis? Not the Huey Lewis guy; I'm talking about the guy who killed a habitat for sea turtles to put in a water slide park and went off to get a pack of cigarettes and never came home. Remember that guy? Well, that guy was in my dream... only he just looked like that guy, he wasn't really that guy. He was really Robert Plant. And, as Robert Plant, he wasn't only the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. He was also in Fleetwood Mac. And he was wearing a park ranger hat. He didn't really do anything, but his eyes were a really clear hazel with a hint of green.

Then I had another dream that someone threw me in a hole and was about to suffocate me with a plastic bag, but decided not to. Then I woke up.

I guess the main Divine Experience I had while sick though was I realized in a very visceral way that, despite it all, despite my worrying and unhealthy habits and nagging pessimism, I think life is really beautiful and I want to live. I usually live pretty deep inside my head, but I came out for a few minutes because for some reason during my fever delirium I thought I was dying and I felt my being coming out of its hiding spot and fully inhabiting my whole body, down to the tips of my toes and almost making my eyes bulge with itself, extending out of my pores and shining like gold and I prayed to God to let me live, and I told Him I was so sorry I was always being so negative and taking my life for granted, but, dammit, I want to fucking live. 

And, somehow,  this whole experience made me feel that I really need to go to the zoo. I was convinced that if I really were dying, or if I had a day to live or something like that, I would spend that day at the zoo.

I asked T if we could go to the zoo.  He said no way. He said it's smelly and the animals are never doing anything and it's depressing to watch them in fake mock-ups of what someone thinks resembles their natural habitat. Then I asked him if I had a day to live and that's what I wanted to do, would he do it then? He said, "Of course, yeah, I'd do it if you had one more day and that's what you wanted." "Pretend it's my last day," I told him. It was obvious an explanation was required on my part.

So I tried to tell him about my epiphany that life is precious... sacred, even... and that every day I just took it for granted that I was alive and there were all these really little things... like watching a flight of geese take off, or being in the suburbs and looking south through layers of bare black tree limbs to the city-lit pink sky... that make me go, "Wow, I'm lucky to be alive to see this!" Where my explanation got goofy was how all this had to do with going to the zoo. I couldn't really explain the whole thing without laughing, anyway, because I was so self-conscious of its cheesiness, so T thought I wasn't serious... well, anyway we came to a compromise. (Ah, that magical word in a marriage :D) He really likes fish, and the aquarium we used to have just kind of self-destructed, and T found out on-line that they have free days at the Shedd Aquarium, so after the New Year we're going to go there.

Another, more minor epiphany I had that was more like a notion than an epiphany-- and I'm sure countless teenagers getting high their very first time to "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" have thought of this before me-- is that the difference between being sane and being insane is that sane people are all tuned in to the same radio station, whereas insane people are each tuned in to different radio stations. Usually, everyone is pretty much tuned in to separate stations from each other, but every once in awhile some of the people who aren't listening to the sane people's radio station will start tuning in to a radio station that another insane person is listening to, and as that station gets more listeners a kind of revolution of thought will occur, like in the Italian Renaissance or during the 1960s.

"Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo... I do believe it, I do believe it's true..." --Simon and Garfunkel

"I've never seen light, but I sure have seen God" --Tori Amos

"I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations"
"I can't stand my own mind" 
                                              --Allen Ginsberg