Southern Fried Witch

My mulberry haven.

The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Albert Camus

Someone asked me yesterday which would I rather have: money or time?  After I picked myself up from laughing until I tinkled (and resisted the urge to shake them back to reality) I simply said:  Laws, child.  We weren’t sent here for gold.  Or a 401k.  Or a badass new Lexus.  Naw, I think folks are a little scrambled in the noggin over this one.  I want you to do me a favor.

Sit down.  Clear your head.  Now, think of every truly wealthy person you know, then consider their (apparent) happiness level.  Mmm hmm.   Now, think of a relatively poor soul you know, then consider their happiness level.  Interesting?  Ah, yeah babe.  Now, I don’t advocate the haphazard abuse of credit, or the dumbing down of career drive and the like.  What I am here to advocate is a bit of common country sense of the meat of life, the marrow of joy and the juice of extracting every real moment out of this little cosmic trip.  Everything else is just an anxious, exhausted and logical march to the grave—complete with a hefty legacy of debt and misguided intent.  Manure on a silver plate, it is.  And people order seconds, every day.

Now, I had to file for bankruptcy several years back to save a wayward son.  He had given me every indication that:

1. He was brilliant, had potential and could apply it.
2. He was kind, earthy and steady in a way that reminded me of a grandfather.
3. He was bored, angry about an absentee father and had stepped in a huge, stanking pile o’ shit.  And smelled like Bob Marley.  Ahem.
4. I loved him more than myself, my 780 credit rating and my career.
5. A momma gon’ do what a momma gotta do.

I had taken care of all three young’uns all their natural lives without any child support, pulled myself through decades and degrees and a doctorate with little help.  And still, there it was.  Financial ruin or save my son.

What kind of natural born fool picks the former?

And so, after the 11k in fees—let’s just call them fees—the fat lady had sung and momma went to bankruptcy court.  It saved him, by the way.  My longhaired hippie boy went on to college, bought his own trailer with his own money and turned twenty-one this past week.  Solid as a rock.  And not in prison.

Currently, he’s a crepe chef at a private little café and has a modest savings account.  What price that child?  Why.  Everything I could give.  And I did.

You know, I tell my university students quite often: it takes so much more courage and tenacity to pull oneself up after a hard fall than to walk straight and have never stumbled.  I reckon folks don’t often have the good luck to discover what they’re made of, rocking along with parents who buy them houses and cars and pay for their educations.  But there exists others, those whom have scraped their knees on a hunger so deep that starvation becomes something you just survive.  That same child struggled through last winter with only one space heater that he wouldn’t turn on—‘cept at night—on account of he didn’t want anyone to shoulder his burdens.  And he didn’t tell a soul until after.  Looks he learned to be a man along the way.  Many of us could use those bruises if they could make us shine like that, all strong and noble and self-sufficient.

(This is going to be a long one.  Wine time, y’all.  Go pee, settle in.)

Just today, I drove home after teaching freshman and thinking about the idea of “healthy rebellion.”  I’m quite the seed of the paternal tree: rebellion seems to be the only real language I speak, natively, that is.   Our present culture has vilified rebellion in such deep-rooted ways that we no longer allow even the smallest venture outside of lock-step American values—and as a pagan, I rebel.  I rebel against the normalization of college at eighteen, a closeted spirituality, the unbridled passion of teen acculturation and the mindset of “normal.”  One of my favorite quotes is from I am Legend by Richard Matheson:  “Normalcy is a majority concept,” and in my experience, the majority is usually the most base and mundane example of institutionalization that exists within society.  No philosopher is born of that barren and dusty mistress; no revolution is founded in its logic.  And yet, we demonize and proselytize at those young souls who seek to their own voices while handing them a checkbook and a waning Capitalistic system as their divine inheritance.

But not my sons NOR my daughter.  Yes, they know that certain rules and laws are in place (some of them quite ridiculous) that they must follow in order to fully enjoy their lives.  Yes.  They have grasped the concept of saving money, paying their debts and working hard for what they want.  What they have not lost?  Hmm, lessee:

The wild fulfillment of a day at the creek, a case of beer and a sack of barbeque and the necessity of bugspray at dusk.

Standing up for what they believe it—regardless of popularity or the possible black eye.

That critical space of family, regardless of their perceived sins, as necessary to a healthy life.

The freedom that comes from “allowing” others to be themselves, because it means that they can do the same.  (“You just do you, Imma do me.” My Z-boy likes to sing that one at me from time to time.)

I reckon that I have not belabored much time lecturing my children on the significance of stocks, bonds or the wonders of student debt.  I reckon we have spent more talking about trees, chickens, life, love, hate, regret and nobility.  But, riddle me this, Batchildren:

At the end of your life, what would you rather hold?  Another dollar?  Or another sweet, slow sunset?  Myself, I will be happiest if I can own a little house, tend a garden and spend the rest of my life “doing me.”  Everything else feels . . . lackluster.  What I have invested in have been in the area of friendships, gardening experience, forgiveness practice, long hours on a beach with my children, staining my fingers purple in mulberry blood and learning every single Van Morrison song from the seventies.  I paid off my van this year—struggled all the way through bankruptcy to keep the old bitch—and I plan to drive her right into the ground.  Pagan, enough.

So.  What does all of this have to do with rebellion?  Everything, y’all.  Everything.  In my estimation, one must have a healthy rebellion against the lust for a material world if one is to retain anything of real worth.  I will never hire a cleaning lady if my body can withstand the work—it’s good for the soul, and damn if my teenager is gonna get out that easy.  I will always strive to grow my own food, throw up my middle finger at Wal-Mart (the filthy bastard), make my children earn their own vehicles (seriously, folks, make them) and refuse the “label” sickness that keeps some of my friends in Dillard’s instead of Lowes.  I rebel against work gloves (hell, my ass is IMMUNE to poison oak/ivy) and revel instead in dirty fingernails and the feel of red clay working its way into fertility.  I rebel against clear cutting trees for “landscaping,” against careers that rot the soul, against techno music in favor of something played with a string, against religious fanatics (of both Christian and Pagan varieties) who would judge the spirit of another human being, against teaching magic for money, against misplaced guilt and policed hearts.  I rebel against emotional blackmail, for I have known the price of caving to another’s will and seen the culling of my own primal thump in its wake.  I rebel against placing primacy in “full enrollment” instead of “full education.”  And, I rebel against any system that systematically puts a monetary price on a family’s worth with terminology such as “middle-class,” as if such a label could ever qualitatively weigh their laughter across a worn dinner table.  Yes.  I rebel.

So have my children.

It has cost us, boy howdy.  We have learned to balance our need to rebel against our need for freedom, safety and security.  Ain’t no right way to get there without scraping yor knees a bit.  But man, we love these scars.  I don’t hanker to the supposition that the earning of them was payment for some unseen, long past sins.  Rather, they are of our own doing, our own learning, our own bleeding and sobbing and often our own sacrificing to level up on this mortal plane.

For me, healthy rebellion works like:

Does it insult my soul?  Rebel.

Does it infringe on someone’s heart thump?  Rebel.

Will it impede my progress as a child of the Goddess?  Rebel.

Will my silence hurt someone else?  Rebel.

Is it less important than time with my family?  Rebel.

The alternative is less than sweet, y’all.  It’s lying in a bed somewhere (or worse) wishing you could go back and waller in a creek with your honey for one more hour . . . counting freckles, smoothing soft hairs on a neck against the gold of late day sun.  Or listen to your best friend remember her childhood out loud.  Or spend more time under that pear tree with your best dog who only has another year or two (pick up the fucking Frisbee and put down Facebook, dumbass).  In truth?  I couldn’t be prouder that my son rebelled and threw my high-credit ass into bankruptcy.  Why, I might have spent the next ten years building my retirement instead of becoming proficient at living.

 No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Zora Neale Hurston,
How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Meet you under a tree somewhere.  I’ll be the one without gloves on and a Mason jar full of mulberry wine.

Love,

Seba

Do it like this:

It’s my birthday and all I can think about is lemon pound cake, drizzled in tart sugar glaze, in the shape of the sun.  My mother ate it by the forkfuls when I was growing in her belly (it made her sick to think of it later), and Granma made it for me every birthday all the way to the last days her hands could work a spoon.  I craved it like crack: that tang, that citrus burst, that buttery texture.  The last one, wrapped up tight in an opaque Tupperware cake preserver, sat on her buffet when I turned forty.  I remember her hands shaking, her voice forming my name in the only way I could ever bear hearing it, apologizing for its sloppy condition and lamenting that she could no longer cook.  I think I knew it was my last lemon cake.  I think I knew it was the last everything of being her Tater Head.  It’s a damn fine thing that we aren’t allowed to bargain—otherwise, there’s no telling what I’d give to be standing there, holding her hand, staring at a lopsided Bundt love cake.

These are the moments that carved me out of tepid air and wormy mud and made me real.

When I was younger, there was no magic in birthdays.  They were bereft of romance and true friendship and celebration of life.  My forties shifted that focus from what I thought birthdays should be to the truth of trips around the Sun.  These are what they have been thus far:

40th:  Robin Bates.  In truth, I could just stop here . . . but she granted me this shimmery, champagne party that year in which I felt so blessed to be adored by someone like her.  RB is noble, classy and classic, poetic, hard-edged in that sentimental kind of way and my first flesh and blood friend.  She redefined “sisterhood” for my life and taught me to trust women again.  She loved my proclivity for theory and my temper (albeit usually as she was ducking, giggling, at its raised head) and I loved her tenacious, stubborn hold on history, Shakespeare and fashion.  Very few folks have been lucky enough to actually be RB’s close friend.  I still don’t know how I deserve that caliber of esteem and never will.  (We are WELL over a decade in now.  I keep waiting to wake up.)  I “became” the woman I am next to her, because of her, for her, in honor of her.  Healing takes many forms.  This one made up for an entire childhood.

42^nd:  Jillian Smith brought me back to the Craft after a terrifying hiatus.  I had met a bad witch, early in 2002, and in self-defense had gone so far underground even Hades had to move his toes.  And then . . . she was standing under a moss-dripped tree in Southwest Georgia.  She was my (grown-ass) student in my Women’s Lit course, I was an Associate Professor, and the sun was crooked across her shoulder and shining on her pentagram.  My birthday that year was wine-soaked and magical and solitary with her in the most healing sort of way.  Cam (her magic name) only desired sisterhood, nothing more, and was patient and kind and unobtrusive until all of my walls came tumbling down.  She didn’t want to BE me, she didn’t want to OWN me, she only wanted to share space.  It became sacred.  We have never spent another birthday apart.  And hopefully, never will.

43^rd: Terrin Webb.  I met him in my 42^nd year late that summer.  On my 43^rd Birthday, I received flowers and chocolates and a belated Honeymoon.  This was the only year in which I knew love, romantic love, would remain for the rest of my days on Earth.  I felt beautiful, sexy and grassy and alive and even allowed myself to put on a few pounds in celebration of it all.   This morning, there were potted succulents and screwdrivers wrapped up alongside necklaces and love notes.  Some men don’t leave.  Sometimes, there is a happy ending.  Sometimes, it makes you walk funny.  Sometimes, it just makes you.

45^th:  Trillium Meeks.  Ah, my “priestess in training.”  She was in my first batch of students and the only female.  Viciously loyal, territorially devoted, my little sister became “family” quicker than you can sing a ditty from The Sound of Music (and we do, every chance we get).  When I think of quitting, I see her face, hear her voice, and stand back up.  She shared her mead with me, the sun getting wise and gold across the backyard, and changed my life.  In teaching her, she has taught me where my value lies.  (Somewhere in my youth—or childhood—I must have done something good.)  Trillium also brought me my beloved BJ, my little brother and student, who in turn brings me clove cigarettes and is my army in one body.  And then . . .

46^th: After I launched PDS, there was an avalanche of friendship that followed.  Jason.  Gralyn.  Liz.  Erin.  Autumn.  Naomi.  Charlotte.  Nancy.  So many more.    We have grown and struggled and chuckled and sobbed our way through so many moments—brought together online, stuck together through kismet and time.

47^th:  Wow.  Where to even begin?  As if life had not replaced every family member I had ever lost, BAM.  Too many to even name.  But specifically:  a semi-truck pulled into my yard today with my student and Aries sissy, Jodi Keeling and Hubby, bearing wine and chocolate cheesecake.  Then there’s sweet, angelic Anna and fairy-frame Shanda and my nephew, Alex and my brother, David Talesky and Angie and Sheron and my niece, Rowan and a renewed brotherhood from my Craiggers and, and, and, and . . . then, this year, there’s Gran’s gift.

Her name is Cynthia Jurkovic.  And I will cut a bitch with a butter knife over this one.  My Cynthia (yes, I pee all around her like a tree) was an unexpected, blond-bombshell of an Alabama goddess who landed in my lap last fall in a last-ditch, ballsy effort to find clarity about a situation.  I don’t often speak of it—as we both know the backlash is simply not worth it—but forgive me.  It’s my birthday, and I want to speak about . . .

Cynthia.  On a scooter, late summer in a blue dress and skeptical gaze in my backyard.  I thought we were evading “battle,” perhaps just sizing up the enemy, and Big Momma busted her buttons laughing at us both.  I was prepared to despise her—had even made up a joke about her name—when she came to me, investigating the woman she had been told was the epitome of trouble and antagonism by a shared acquaintance.  There was no foundation for friendship—I thought.  I wanted nothing more but to have peace and a stalemate.  And then . . .

Her grandma’s recipe for peach cobbler is the same as mine.  Her upbringing has the same red clay on its heels, the same deeply Southern propensity for irony and sentimentality all bound up in its veins.  Our ethics were aligned against our backbones, nice and firm, dictated by heritage and carried out by some sense of legacy and truth.  Today, I got a birthday call from her.  And that’s when I knew that for all of my midlife crisis, every year brings a new gift (albeit lopsided) as sweet and tart and real as Granma’s cake.  Since she left this plane, my presents have all tasted like lemon pound cake.  I am, for all intents and purposes, many people’s “Tater Head.”

I think we all quite humanly forget what magic feels like as we trudge through tax season, garden weeding, house cleaning and the drudgery of daily (muggle) life.  Perhaps, magic does not happen all at once as if life were a Harry Potter movie, but slowly unfurls like a moonflower in the dusk of a worn day.  An eleventh-hour god, it is: close your faithless, tired eyes and it blooms unseen against a pine tree.  For me, magic is my forties.  This measured, fluid unfurling of a life lived against the wind, this drip of an ocean tide against the rock of my resistance to accept love and peace.  Magic.  Moving molecularly slow with such determined purpose despite civilized notions of time, schedules and goals.  Showing up in whisks of hair against my cheek, a stain of wine on my altar, a feather twisting to the ground without wind.  Life.  Slicing itself onto my plate like lemon cake.

And becoming a memory, woven against a memory of what it feels like to be loved.

For all the birthdays to come, I found a fork.  (Miss you, Granma.  Thank you for sending them all in your stead.  Love, Tater)

P.S.  Haven’t forgotten the rest of you.  Suzie Q, Malcolm, Sam, my blogger friends, Kass and Don, Linda, Heather . . . and most lovingly, Anya and Wiebke.  I just (now) have too many friends to list.  My cup runneth over.

Picture rights and article at: http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2013/03/steubenville-rape-cultures-abu-ghraib-moment

In every situation where atrocity is normalized, in every death-camp and gulag and apartheid city, there are those who refuse to participate.
Laurie Penny

In a bang with the gang

They gotta catch me if they want me to hang

Cause I’m back on the track and I’m beatin’ the flack

Nobody’s gonna get me on another rap

So look at me now I’m just makin’ my play

Don’t try to push your luck just get out of my way

Cause I’m back
“Back in Black” AC/DC

Oh, my sweet man-children.  I am so sorry that I didn’t tell you both, so sorry that this will make you uncomfortable and so sorry that I cannot protect you from the awkward pain of knowing this about your mother.  Forgive me.

It was 1981.  The Back in Black album was out and I ran down to Alabama in the sweat of summer out of guilt and confusion.  My adoptive father was so busy railing in his divorce, using me as a pawn and drinking himself ten kinds of stupid that he cared not where I landed at nightfall.  He had sexually abused me, himself, for most of my life—and no one stopped him.  And no one cared.  But my flesh was too old to toy with anymore, and his new Camaro had too many places to take him.  And so, I ran away every night: Van Halen concerts, so much pot, so many bottles of Boonesfarm Strawberry Hill, so many tubes of Bonnie Bell gloss and so much ignorance and innocence wrapped up together in the fubar that would be that night.  My t-shirt was black, a snake writhing its way through an image of a skull, my hair was long and black and it was so hot that summer.  We arrived to the party as the local “hotties,” (Momma was young once) and there was this boy named Alan leaning against a fencepost.  And I was so smitten.  Batted my eyes, swished my hips, and laughed at every stupid, lame joke that fell out of his perfect mouth.  I remember telling someone:  I want him to be my boyfriend.  And then:

I remember sliding down a wall.  I had only drunk one beer, but the world went sideways and Fantasia and all of my toughness mattered no more as I was carried into a back bedroom with little violets on the wallpaper.  I came in and out, fighting to stay conscious, as one, then the other climbed onto me and into me laughing, slobbering spit onto my face, singing, clapping.  I can count only five distinct faces in my memory—but there may have been more.  And you know what, my beloved boys?  My children?  I fought to stay awake.  I wanted to scream and could only moan.  I wanted to kick and slice and hit and could only mumble—which was followed by grunts as they shoved and bruised and desecrated everything sacred in me in films of sweat, semen and spit.  And then, the last one climbed on.  His name was Mike.  He’s now a councilman in my hometown, has three kids.  And my curse.

The drug was wearing off and I heard them.  “Do it.  Pussy.  Do it or I’ll do it to you, you fucking girl.”  And he did.  As I stared at him through that haze, he did.  His body betrayed him in his lust while his eyes died locked in mine.  When he climbed off, just as I regained use of my arms, he drew the covers over my body, my head, as if in burial ritual.  And as he walked out, last of a tribe of young men who will never know what they broke in my heart that night, he turned back as I finally, FINALLY, was able to push the sheet from my face and said: “I’m Sorry.”  And locked the door behind himself, against himself, in his final moment of sin.

It is him that I hate the most.  Him that I have had the hardest time forgiving.  You see, he looked into that pain and ejaculated upon it.  He reckoned with his physical need to rape me against his knowledge that I would never forget him, those callous thrusts, that fracture in my heart that would take thirty years to overcome.  He . . . felt my pain, and came against it, despite it, for it.  It is him that I cannot forgive.  Do you hear me?

My sons.  I was that girl in a short skirt, excited about a party, listening to “Hot Child in the City,” feeling my sexuality like a wild, unbridled horse.  I want you to see your mother in the picture on this post, as harsh as that sounds, see the mother who bore you, loved you, made you pancakes, rocked you in your fever.  And when you do, remember this: that night, with AC/DC in the background and violets dancing on the walls, it wasn’t about sex.  It wasn’t about bravado.  And it wasn’t about manhood.

It was violence.  I spent decades thinking I was meat, a piece of female T & A trash that only could be validated by my abstinence, my acquiescence to the patriarchal, masculine propaganda that could forgive my seductiveness at fourteen.  Nothing saved me.  Not the pills, the suicide attempts, not my Grandma’s love, not the absentee parents, not my friends.  One night.  And it cost me decades.

I beg of thee.  Consider the mothers, the sisters, the daughters, the sacred thumps of all that has made “woman” when you think of these moments as “forgivable bravado.”  It is, quite certainly, unforgivable.  We cannot escape the flesh we inhabit: it is our only resource, our safe place, a haven in which we reside for this time on Earth.  The manly impulse that would defend your home and land with all weapons within your reach should be the same one that would defend that of a woman’s flesh, from which she simply has no escape.

And for those who would transgress that sacred threshold, in the name of anger or rites of manhood or even that of fear. . .

We hold you accountable.  For this life and beyond.  If there is no escape for our souls under the mounds of breast and birth canal, there is certainly no escape for those who would desecrate them.  Those who would do so are cursed, doomed, without hope or mercy, regardless of circumstance.  There are no “extenuations.”

And: Mike.  I hear you have born daughters.

May the Great Mother Bless Your Heart.  And save them.  Oh, please.  Save them.  Can you see me?  Can you see them?

With all that I have,  I beg of you, Zach and Jacob.  Remember me.  Defend my echo.  Be . . . a hero, of the child I was, the mother I became, and the men I know you can be.

Love,

Mom

Photo credit: http://www.tricycle.com/blog/meditation-month-day-22-buddhist-black-sheep

I was considered the black sheep of the family.  Neighbors didn’t want their kids playing with me.  Michelle Pfeiffer

We speak figuratively of the one black sheep that is the cause of sorrow in a family; but in its reality it is regarded by the Sussex shepherd as an omen of good luck to his flock.
The Folk-Lore Record, 1878

The rest of the family cannot allow the role of scapegoat to go unfulfilled, because it serves an important purpose — it gives them a place to toss their unwanted psychological garbage. If they did relinquish the need for the role, they would have to face reality — there are problems they have found impossible to accept and address.
Lighthouse.org

O, ye villain! you – you – you are a black sheep; and I’ll mark you.
Charles Macklin’s The Man of the World, a Comedy, 1786

This one’s gonna hurt.

Recently, I’ve been the soothing end of many a cast-out Pagan from their blood family roots.  Seems to be the case that either 1.  Pagans are terrified that this will happen to them and therefore keep silent and a bit alienated from their kin OR 2. They come out and get confused but solid support from their families OR 3. Come out/get found out and are yet again knighted as the Black Sheep OR 4.  Come out and get promptly ejected from the hearth and home of their Christian kin.  What’s wrong with this picture?

Oh, just about everything.  Pixelations are all off and blurry.  Let’s start at the start and work our way through this clusterfuck.  Let me tell you a story.

Susan has been the black sheep of her family her whole life.  As a teen, she worked to earn the title a bit: played with drugs, ran away, stole cars and variously acted a hormonal asshat.  Now, even though all of the counselors told her Parental Structure that she had all of the symptoms of sexual abuse, she was still dressed up in the Black Sheep t-shirt, special edition circa the Eighties, and was promptly pranced about in times of familial distress as the reason for a lack of general happiness and contentment for the family as a whole.  A myriad of fun ensues:  jail, suicide attempts, dismissal of education, rape, abortion . . . you get the idea.  All against a Christian backdrop, Susan is hung up to dry on the cross of the family Tree of Dysfunction as the reason for their malaise.  Shockingly, Susan does not find comfort in the cross–nor its benefactor.  And time marches on.

Three failed marriages later, Susan stands up and does the unthinkable:  She goes to college.  Graduates with honors.  Becomes a teacher.  Supports herself, raises her children and finds true love . . . and a path that tells her that she is not put together in bones of sin and the blood of sorrow.  It was a path that she had as a child–a hidden one–and one that her mother knew all too well, but it was a “family secret,” tightly hidden (with all of its casting magic) in Sunday pantyhose and the Lord’s Prayer.  (Confused yet?  Imagine how Susan feels.)  No longer bound for hell, Susan “publicly” outs herself under a pseudonym . . . and gets fundamentally disowned by her family.  Wait . . .

What?

Then we have “Rose.” Rose was raised by missionaries, taught to love Jesus, fairies, trees and mysticism and . . . magic.  (Imagine her confusion.)  Brought up on an island fraught with magical lineage, raised on songs like “Puff the Magic Dragon,” Rose (much like Susan) has a strong ethical core and still holds the firm position of Black Sheep for her family.  While her brother and sisters flounder, she graduates college, supports herself and, inevitably, “comes out” of the closet as a pagan.  And: her family quietly, but purposefully, re-knights her the Black Sheep of the Family.

Sigh.

Both were taught that forgiveness was key to an afterlife in heaven.  Both are the eldest of their siblings.  Both have worked harder, and gone farther, than their family unit ever dreamed of doing.  And both are unequivocally denounced as worthy by their blood kin.

Because they are Pagan.

But wait!  There are other stories.

“James” is raised by educated, devote Christian parents.  As he grows towards adulthood, he realizes that his path is an ancient one, speaks to his mother and is told that she supports him in his spirituality.  No condemnation, rather, she joins his Pagan church (while remaining a member in her own), attends his holiday ceremonies and becomes a warm beacon of hope for his kindred.

“Mike” is raised by a devoted Christian mother.  She remains Christian, attends his church, offers love and words of wisdom to his kindred and understands that “there are many paths up the mountain.”  (And ye gods, do I love her.  I call her “momma.”)

RB has had a long, sustained and healthy relationship with Susan while maintaining a membership in her Presbyterian Church.  They have long talks about their similarities, the nature of “god,” the importance of growing an ethics of responsibility . . . and supports Susan fully in all that she does on her Pagan path.  RB has even considered joining Susan’s church–out of solidarity.

And I’m not even nicking the surface here.

Cam was raised in Texas by a war veteran/Republican Christian.  She is an outed Pagan Priestess and the light of his life.  He follows her blog, educates himself on her path and buys her “witch” trinkets on her birthday.  And knows damn well that his grandson is being raised in that same path.  And tells her every chance he gets what a wonderful mother she is . . .

So.  What the hell is wrong with Susan’s and Rose’s family?

You tell me.  Last week, Susan’s mother (who apparently has left her witch ways to adhere to something more *proper* in the public eye) told her daughter that she would have “rathered (Susan) had been gay.  At least that wouldn’t have been a choice.”  SIGH.

A choice?

Where do I begin?  Let’s start by dropping my dry blog voice for my Southern one, deal?

What jar of uppity nonsense has someone downed some lily-white throat to become that pretentious?  At what juncture do we rip away from our beating chests that GODDESS thump and call it a choice?  Why, I reckon I could “choose” to also live somewhere without fireflies and cotton fields, sweet tea and sunsets, or my soulmate and his sweet smile.  I reckon I could “choose” to forgo my relationships with my own younguns when they hurt me, disappoint me or live outside of the realms of my own.  I reckon I could “choose” to be gay, Republican, Christian (all at the same time would be amusing) just as easy as I could “choose” to walk away from the very path that nourished my soul and brought me back to my *right mind.*  But I don’t reckon that would be healthy.  Nor right.  To have heard Her breathe inside of me, to have felt Her move within my flesh, to have seen Her light this dismal, technological wasteland of a second millennial world and “choose” to walk away?

I reckon I cannot “choose” to be a white sheep, either.  Turns out, it’s in my skin.

Isn’t it just the cat’s pajamas to see folks who would balk at the option of choice offer it up like a dollar menu burger to their kin?  Denounce my Goddess because you have walked away?  Naw.  My soul is not for sale, even to appease another’s discomfort, even to make Thanksgiving more Christian, even at the (chosen) loss of family and hearth.

Hell.  No.

It’s simply this: most families who desire/force a black sheep position on a member are in desperate need of a little therapy of their own.  Those of us who grow up in these darker wools believe those legacies and myths of having a darker matching soul.  However:

“While dysfunctional parents dance around the obvious real problems right before their eyes, they play a toxic game with the scapegoated child — the game is called, ‘You are the reason for anything and everything that is bad or wrong.’  The whipping boy cannot escape this role, which is typically assigned in early childhood, long before a child can think objectively about messages given to them.”

More Here: http://lightshouse.org/lights-blog/outcast-scapegoat-or-black-sheep-of-the-dysfunctiona-family#ixzz2NHHolmID

The problem lies where the heart begins to see such a message as a profound truth: we feel guilty, bad, sinful for our natural elemental state.  Left with only two choices (sell out or stand ground), most of us become fractured in a war between our love for our birth family and our need to thrive.  Healthy families never present this choice to those whom they truly accept and love.  My answer to this sorted, contorted asshattery?  My soul is not for sale or public consumption.  I sincerely do not care the cost to others, as this is my soul.  If you love me, this request would never hit the food table.  I am only *perceived* to be the Black Sheep of the Family for their own amusement and need–but this is not my actual self, nor will I allow it to be.  In my *real* life, I am a mother, a sister, a Priestess, a friend, a leader and a minister.  We only carry the concept of sin and banishment if we choose to do so.  I do not.  It’s too heavy.  I would rather carry the weight of Earth, karma and truth than the burden of sin, blasphemy and regret.

I hope that Rose will struggle through the mire of emotional-familial blackmail and come out just as clean.  For those families who have chosen to condemn their beloveds in judgment for the Pagan path:

Re-read your Bibles.  Read them closely.  No reckoning is as severe as that which counters love with condemnation and pain.  We will survive the loss of your arms around us, just as our LGBT brothers and sisters have done.  The question remains:

Will you survive your own premises of judgement?

For my ownself:

I have no “choice.”  My heart beats with an ancient thump, I hear Her voice when I close my eyes, I feel Her when I plant my okra seed in the dirt, I see Her in the ritual fire–surrounding by love and a humming older than trees and wiser than church buildings.  I cannot walk away, for in doing so, I walk away from myself.  I will be your Black Sheep, for as long as you need, but I will never be anything antithetical to my own truth.  I am only orphaned on this plane, in this time.  For you are my blood family . . .

But She is my soul.  (And Her favorite color is black.)

Love,

Seba

For more on this phenomenon, see this or this.  But for sure read THIS.