Spiritual growth has been important to me since early in my childhood. With both a Catholic and a Mormon grandmother teaching me their traditions, I voluntarily spent many hours on my knees praying for guidance and for the release of the souls in purgatory. I was confused because those traditions never answered the yearning of my spirit, even though I tried very hard.
At 10, I found Buddhist poetry. When puberty began, I stepped aside from Christianity -- I could not reconcile the wonder of the world with the hatred of the body, and of women, that I found in those teachings. I remember a priest laughing at me when I tried to explain that everything seemed alive to me, and conscious. I found comfort and spirituality while being outside, and with animals, although I had no other person to discuss or share it with.
Nature is powerful in Montana. Storms could just swat you off the face of the earth unless you treated the Great Mother with respect. The mountains are immense and obviously alive. I searched everywhere for teachings that answered my craving to know life at a deeper level. I studied with the Rosicrucians and the Theosophists. I read the teachings of the Buddha, and the Vedas. Slowly, I began to meditate more regularly, and slowly the gods and goddesses responded. I often felt the presence of other conscious beings.
At age 23, having left Montana and recently divorced with a small daughter to raise, I became determined to focus my life on a spiritual path. I began praying and meditating for hours at a time, drinking all kinds of herb teas that promised to help me awaken, ate a very pure and restricted diet, slept little and pushed as hard as I could to either understand life or die trying.
One night, when I had only a few hours to sleep before returning to work, I meditated until I got too cold. Then, I got under the covers and continued my prayers; begging to understand; to break through; to get an answer. Suddenly, a huge eye appeared in front of me. My eyes were closed, but the vision was so powerful that I blinked to see if they really were closed, or what. The eye looked kind of like the stylized eye of the Buddha from Indian paintings, although a little more like an actual eye. The vision was the same with eyes open or closed. Well, that completely blew my mind and all I could do was gasp for air.
It was good I was lying down because surges of energy came from it to me and rushed through me, almost overwhelming me. It said/thought to me: "Yes. We are here, and we see you. When you call out to us strongly, as you have been doing, we answer. We are well aware of your spiritual desires and growth, and we are always available to guide and help you."
A wave of love poured over and through me so strongly that I almost couldn't breathe. Then it thought to me, "This is what your kind of consciousness looks like to us." Suddenly, I was looking down a dark hillside, across a vast plain with other hills and valleys. All I could really see were points of light, some very dim, some brilliantly shining, and every variation in between. I understood that each light was a person or a consciousness, and that every kind of life is on a spiritual path, whether understood on not. Then, the lights faded and the eye reappeared.
My eyes were again closed. I felt a little less overwhelmed, and curious, so I opened my eyes. The eye began slowly fading away, thinking to me, "We are always here when you need us."
As I lay there, trying to grasp what had just happened, again with my eyes closed, Hector, my big orange cat, who had been lying beside me under the covers, got up and stood on my chest. I opened my eyes to look at him, and he was staring straight into my eyes. He held my gaze for a few moments, put his paw on my mouth, then closed his eyes. I knew, somehow, that he wanted me to close mine. When I did, I saw a black and gold energy pattern that I knew was his. I opened my eyes again; he opened his and took his paw away from my mouth, crawled back under the covers beside me and curled up to sleep.
Needless to say, I was totally charged. I may have drifted off to sleep occasionally that night, but mostly remember the sensation of being suspended in space, cradled in love, and joy, and awe.
All I could do was smile for the next couple of weeks. I was in love with everyone and everything. It was contagious, too. Everyone smiled back; strangers started conversations with me; and all my friends agreed that if I had taken some new drug, they wanted some. I have never felt totally alone and abandoned since that time, over 30 years ago.
A less pleasant vision, but just as important in my growth, happened in the early 70s. I was living in a communal house in Vancouver. Someone had told me that it was really interesting to set the alarm early, have acid and a glass of water beside the bed, take the acid, and go back to sleep and let the acid wake you up. So I tried it. The result was perfect proof of the saying: "Good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from poor judgment." Not that the visions were not worthwhile; they were. But that procedure of getting stoned should be avoided.
I awakened to my daughter, then 8 years old, lying in the next bed, and crying in pain as she held her ears. Talk about disoriented! It took me a few minutes to figure out that the acid energy was zapping her. We did some slow deep breaths and I rubbed her arms and back until she went back to sleep. I was now totally awake and totally stoned, at 7 a.m., in a cold house full of sleeping people. What could I have been thinking to do this?
Unable to sleep, and bummed out that my acid trip had caused my daughter pain and fear, I got up and very quietly began wandering around the house. The house pets, two dogs and a cat, joined me and demanded food. I fed them and then sat down on the kitchen floor to think about the issues I had taken acid to resolve.
In the early 70s, the women's movement was just beginning to assert itself, but the people in the household I lived in were not interested. We all worked at our candle factory, but the women left work an hour early to come home and fix dinner for everyone, and then did all the cleanup afterward. From the minute the men came home from work, they sat around and talked, or smoked, or did whatever they wanted to do. They never wanted to do any housework!
I became an annoyance as I did my share of the housework but kept up a running commentary on the injustice of the women doing all of it. I got no support from the women, so finally I quit doing housework, saying I would do as much as the men did. Needless to say, tension was rising.
I was trying to find an identity as someone other than the girlfriend of, wife of or mother of, but without much support from others. In fact, I got a lot of outright hostility and ridicule. So, there I was, sitting on the kitchen floor very stoned in a household that was sometimes friendly, sometimes tolerant, sometimes angry, trying to understand why there was so much conflict between men and women.
The house was cold, and I had to be quiet because everyone else was still asleep. I began concentrating on asking for answers -- why was society the way it was? Why did men look down on women so much? Why did women defend their role as behind-the-scenes servants to their men so desperately? Why was I so upset by it when so few others seemed to think there was anything wrong? Suddenly, a huge beautiful gold and black yin-yang symbol appeared on the wall, up near the ceiling. It was vibrating as energy poured though it. A voice in my head began repeating, "There are two kinds of energy in the universe. Remember this. There are two kinds of energy in the universe. Life is the interaction between the two kinds of energy. There are two kinds of energy in the universe. Remember this."
I listened for awhile and then said back: "Okay, okay, but why is there so much anger between men and women?" The voice said, "The two kinds of energy are thought of as male and female in your world, but individual men and women only somewhat reflect the pure yin and yang energies. The apparent conflict between yin and yang is a dynamic tension that enables the universe to exist. The anger between men and women comes from the human desire to resolve this apparent, but not real, conflict between yin and yang. This cannot be done because there is no conflict there. Both are necessary for the existence of the universe.
As I was trying to think about what I was learning, the animals reacted strongly. They could tell I was completely different than usual. I have no idea if they were aware of the yin-yang symbol, but I was sitting on the floor talking out loud to the wall. The cat began meowing loudly and walking all over my legs, finally putting his face right in my face and meowing over and over. I pushed him down onto my lap and started petting him. He promptly looked up at me and carefully bit my thumb, hard enough to leave deep dents in the skin. Startled, I pulled my hand away while the dogs started running in circles around me barking and nipping at me. My little terrier jumped right at my face and nipped me hard right between the eyes.
I swatted at them to make them stop and went back to my discussion. The yin-yang began fading as I said: "Wait, wait, why are men and women so mad at each other? Help me understand!" The kitchen was an "L" shape, with the shorter leg of the "L" being a storage pantry with floor to ceiling shelves. Up near the ceiling of the pantry, big, blocky god forms slowly became distinct. They were somewhat Aztec looking, as if a humanlike form was squatting within a cube. Completely indifferent to me, they appeared to be having some sort of meeting or conversation.
I continued my pleas for help to understand the hostility between men and women. Slowly, several of these gods/goddesses looked in my direction. The feeling I got from them was one of annoyance. I got a mental picture of a bunch of adults playing cards in the living room on a summer day who did not want to be bothered by the kids.
At my childhood home, we had a screen door with a hook and eye latch that the grownups would hook when they were playing cards. When we kids would come and rattle the door to be let in, the grownups would yell, "Get away from that screen door and go play or you're going to get a spanking!" I saw the image of myself rattling that screen door as the god forms slowly said, "Go home and grow up. You are demanding knowledge that you cannot understand. Stop bothering us. Go home and grow up." Their energy, and their thinking/speaking to me, was very slow and immensely powerful. It felt like I had run into a solid wall of energy that was very old, and massive. As I continued to look at them, they slowly faded away.
Completely chastised, and noticing that blood was tricking down my face from where my dog had nipped me between the eyes, I decided I needed some outside help. I went upstairs to wake up the one woman who slept alone in the house. Tapping on the door and calling her name, she awoke to see me upset and bleeding and asking if I could come in and talk to her. Those were the days when we all knew how to help people who were too high, so she had me sit down on the bed and explain to her what had happened. She looked so earnest as she listened, I suddenly began to laugh. Being told by the gods to go home and grow up has stuck with me, and I became more careful about demanding anything from the Goddess.
I have had several more significant encounters, but I will mention only two for the sake of space. In the mid-70s, I was, again, praying for guidance. In a dream, the Great Mother came to me and said, over and over: "Follow the Goddess." Shortly thereafter, I had a pentacle tattooed on my arm, and I have done just that.
The last encounter I will relate happened a few years ago, when my coven led the women's mysteries at Spring Mysteries. I was the crone. We each allowed the Goddess to enter us as we led the ritual. I began drumming and singing my power song, dancing around the fire to encourage the women attending to open themselves to the energy of the Goddess. She entered me completely. A friend told me later that as she walked up to the circle, she did not know it was me. All she saw was the shining energy body of the Goddess pouring through me. As I danced, Kali, a goddess I follow, came to me. She told me I am Her warrior and held out a short sword for me to take. I took it, while saying to her: "I accept your wishes, but I am not certain I am prepared to use a sword." She smiled fiercely, as only Kali can, took back the sword and handed me a computer keyboard, saying: "Use this."
Blessed be....
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