"Whoa!" said a friend who hadn’t seen me and my house in six months. "You remodeled! Painted! Cleaned!"

"I like cleaning," I said. "It’s just the fibromyalgia had kept me from doing it. Lyrica is amazing for me."

"You like cleaning?" she said, in tones of disbelief. "I hate it. It never gets done."

I really do like doing housework. It’s a source of great pleasure to me to make a room clean and beautiful, to restore order, to know as I pass a chest of drawers that everything within is orderly. And I find that sometimes I am most connected to my Goddess when I do this. Sometimes when I am churning with emotion and thoroughly off my balance, I seek Her in the cleaning and reorganization of kitchen cabinet or underwear drawer, rather than going outside to weep at the moon or sit under the apple tree.

I’ve wanted to share this for a while, but things kept coming up. Right now seemed like a good time for some reason.

This past Beltane, May 1st, my coven performed a Wiccaning of my daughter. The Wiccaning was also for Evie, the daughter of a fellow coven member who is the same age as my daughter.

The Altar

As with all things Pagan, there exist a multitude of interpretations, spiritual purposes and intents for having Wiccanings, all dependant on how the Wiccan, or the Coven or the specific tradition interprets the ritual. I will not attempt to explain or address all of these different interpretations of the ritual, I’ll just explain what my particular Wiccan tradition teaches.

Disclaimer: I speak for myself and my tradition: other witches and pagans may differ, and most likely will. Our diversity is our strength.

Wiccan worship follows both a solar cycle of eight holidays (discussed earlier) and a lunar cycle that follows the phases of the moon. Commonly in Wicca the moon is seen as a Goddess symbol, and so the phases of the lunar cycle are correlated to the differing aspects of the Goddess we worship. Whether in coven or in solitary practice, Wiccans often use the current phase of the moon to both organize their spiritual work and to assist their magical practice.

"You can never be too rich or too thin," said the Duchess of Windsor. And we’ve all had an exchange like this one: "What are you working on?" "Knitting myself a new scarf." "That’s nice, dear. I’m knitting blankets for the premature infants in the NICU." We’ve watched as someone else did something faster, better, or with more elan than we have, and we’ve all struggled with envy.

One of the downsides of choosing a life that isn’t all about "he who dies with the most toys wins" is that frequently other people have more toys than you do. When you’re still on dialup and everyone’s posting Youtube videos for a giggle, you’re out of the joke. Cell phones that do everything but brush your teeth are coming out every day. You can have the biggest SUV or the greenest hybrid, but what do you mean your car is ten years old? We may be laying up treasures in heaven, but the glittery stuff does occasionally catch our eye.

The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, the day in which the powers of light have triumphed over darkness, the day when our Lord is crowned King in the Wiccan wheel of the year. He is not king by right of birth. He is King by decision. The position is offered to him. He must decide to take it. And with the privileges of kingship, come the responsibilities. It is a double edged sword. It is one we take up when we become adults.

Adulthood is a slippery thing; to some it happens when a parent listens to their opinions, to another when they get the right to drink, when they move away from home, or become parents themselves. But it all has the same paradoxical nature. When we move away from our parents’ supervision, we don’t have anyone telling us to get up in the morning. This is freedom! We can sleep as late as we want! But with freedom comes responsibility. You may theoretically be able to sleep as late as you want, but you have the responsibility to get up in time to make it to work. This is adulthood, and this simultaneous embracing of freedom and responsibility is our own way to grasp our own kingship and truly know our true will.

Healing can be a touchy topic among pagans. While we believe that we are co-creators of our reality with Deity, cowriters of the plot, it’s easy to spin that into "It’s your fault you’re sick." This view helps nobody. Sometimes our cowriters throw us one hell of a plot curve, and we’re knocked for a loop, and it takes us a while to figure out how it is we’re going to continue the story. I have some experience with this. Fifteen years ago, an orthopedic surgeon looked at me and said, "You understand, this surgery won’t restore normal mobility. You aren’t going to be hiking or skiing or anything like that again. You’ll be able to get from chair to bed to bathroom, and stand long enough to make a sandwich or take a shower, but not much longer." I went home, hugged my toddler son, and cried. The accident seemed such a small thing to have such permanent disabling consequences. I had to figure out how to heal.

Many people might consider humility an odd virtue for pagans to value. We speak a lot of the wonder and promise of the individual, our strength and beauty, our abilities and callings. So where does humility come into this?

Wicca is firm on the point that we are not islands. We are not set above the rest of creation. We are part of the universe, and for all that we are profoundly inventive and clever and capable of relating to the gods in a way that no other creature can, we also are one among many.

Part of understanding any faith is understanding its liturgical cycle. In Wicca, there is a narrative element to the cycle that is often used to do spiritual work on the individual level and to guide worship on the group level. Wiccan holidays  run on both a solar and a lunar calendar; most covens celebrate services on the full moon each month, and further celebrate a cycle of eight solar holidays that remain the same every year. We celebrate the solstices and equinoxes, and a further four days that fall somewhat between them.  It works out to be about every six to seven weeks. We start, as does the God, at Yule.

Over the last few waning moons, we’ve been talking about various emotions that a lot of people consider "bad" and "wrong". A lot of people wonder why, in a faith that speaks very much of love and joy, why we have to talk about these. We talk about these because we all have them. We all have to deal with them. We all have skeletons in our closets.

I used to read Bloom County, and I nodded with wry recognition at Binkley’s anxiety closet. I borrowed the term. We all have them. We stuff our fears and anxieties in there so they don’t leave us unable to function, and shut the door and lock it. This works for most people. However, the thing about Wicca (and, I suspect, most spiritual paths, though I can’t speak for them personally), is that when you commit yourself to the path of the gods one of the first things They do is to head straight for your anxiety closet, unlock it, and say, "It’s time for spring cleaning."

One of the toughest things to talk about with non-Wiccans is the Wiccan view of sexuality. It’s fair to say that most people in America are conflicted in various ways regarding their sexual nature, and so see sex as a mixture of profoundly soiled and yet profoundly titillating. Some elements of Wiccan approach to sexuality leak out into public knowledge  and inflame the imagination....they worship naked?!  They have sex and it’s this ritual thing?! There's still an association in some parts of the public mind of witches with strange and lurid orgies. The reality of sexuality for most Wiccans is both less exciting, and more fulfilling.

One of the older bits of liturgy says that "there are three Great Mysteries, Birth, and Love, and Death"... And, indeed, any woman who has borne a child, or a man who has watched his lady give birth, knows it’s not something you can properly fit into words, a transformational experience...both characteristics of a sacred mystery.

One of the great questions every religion has to answer is, "What happens when you die?" Wicca’s answer, in common with many religions, is that the body dies and the soul lives on. We differ, however, from many Western religions, in that there is no heaven and no hell. Most of us believe that once the soul is done with a life, there is a sort of debriefing that takes place. We review our goals, our needs, our wants, from a different perspective that can see the events of the life we lived differently. We relax for a time, perhaps, in what many of us term the Summerlands. But the Summerlands are not an eternal destiny. They are a place of rest. Soon enough the spirit grows restless, and seeks rebirth, in a time and place where connections forged over previous lifetimes may be remade, where the things that the spirit needs to accomplish can be done. And life begins again.

Disclaimer: I speak for myself and my tradition: other witches and pagans may differ, and most likely will. Our diversity is our strength.
We are called by the Goddess to honor, as contrasted with humility. What is honor, then? It’s not ambition, nor is it vanity. We’re called to be ourselves with pride in who we are and what we do.

When asked who we are, a lot of us name our jobs. I’m a doctor, a lawyer, a systems designer, a cook, a garbage man, a trucker. We edit our jobs, call the garbage man a "sanitation engineer", and the trucker a "cargo transport facilitator." There are "good jobs" and "bad jobs". Some of us name something else. I’m an actor, a writer, and my work that pays my bills is my "day job", something I just do until I can do my real job. But then where are you when you can’t do that job? Who are you then? Many people find they don’t know.