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1. Conversation with Myself
2. Grudges

Related posts:

1. Update: Workshop
2. The Course of My Studies Part One
3. Look! A Press Release!

It’s a funny thing, being a country this big, the second largest in the world land-wise. Being this big means that sometimes the west coast doesn’t know what the east coast is up to and the south almost forgets there’s more to the north than ice, snow and oil.

There is a Canuck tradition to do the Great Canadian Road Trip at least once in your life, traveling from one end of this gigantic country to the other. A trip that can last two weeks or two months depending on how much of a hurry you are in and which route you take. Even still, there’s only so much culture you can soak up staying in Moose Jaw … or Medicine Hat, or Thunder Bay … for a day or two before moving on. It takes a while to get to know a place and its people.

It’s a big country, a young country, still being colonized you might say. And there’s a lot of land between cities in some parts of it, you can drive for days between one major city and the next.

So this is why you might meet someone from Winnipeg who seems to think you only have to worry about moose wandering onto the highway in Manitoba. Or someone from Ottawa who thinks that the weather in all of British Columbia is the weather you find in Vancouver. Or you might meet someone from Banff who can’t bear the sight of the great prairies in Saskatchewan, because they are just too darned BIG and FLAT. Or meet a young person from Nunavut who suffers from culture shock standing in the famous West Edmonton Mall.

This is why folks in parts of the west coast brag they get the highest snow fall in the world … and folks in parts of the east coast brag that they get the highest snow fall in the world.

And this is one of the reasons why you might meet a gal from British Columbia who can’t speak a word of French. Even though its one of two official Canadian languages.

Shortly after moving to Ontario I was taking the bus from one end of Ottawa to another. Only I got on the wrong bus and didn’t realise it. Tired from job hunting, I dozed off and a short time later woke to find myself crossing a bridge. Adrenaline hit me like a sledgehammer and I struggled not to panic. Oh my gods! I had crossed the river … into Quebec!

A dozen irrational thoughts raced through my brain as we passed under a road sign written in French. Should I just stay on this bus and hope it loops back home? If I got off how would I find my way back? Should I walk back across the bridge??

I looked out the window trying to get my bearings and came to a sinking realisation. In Anglophone Canada you have to have a French translation on all signage. The reverse is not true in Francophone Canada. Would I be able to ask for directions? Would people refuse to answer my request for directions because I spoke English?

I told myself to relax, to calm down: This is not an appropriate situation to have an anxiety attack. The folks here speak French but they are still Canadians. Polite, quiet, helpful, self deprecating Canadians …. Right? I have travelled down in the States; I’ve wandered extensively in a foreign country. But oddly enough, as I woke up on that bus in Gatineau, just across the river from my nation’s capitol, I felt more like I was in a foreign country than in English speaking Colorado. I comforted myself with the memory that if I could order a Big Mac from a Spanish speaking person in Texas, surely I could find my way in French speaking Quebec.

In the end, I simply hopped off the bus (it didn’t occur to me to ask for help from the bus driver, who is probably required to be bilingual) and crossed the street. Where I caught another Ottawa bound bus back home.

As I crossed the river back into Ontario I first felt relief. Then I felt shame, a guilt ridden shame that caused my whole body to flush with embarrassment.

How could I dare to call myself a Canadian if I was not only incapable of speaking French but feared it? Why was I so afraid of, and uncomfortable in Quebec?

Over the last year I have thought about this a great deal, here are some of my thoughts, feelings and conclusions (read ramblings) on the matter.

First of all, we are not *really* taught French out west, as much as we are taught to hate it. Yes, it is mandatory to take French in schools in all of Canada. But it is how it is taught that encourages the dislike to outright hate of our country’s second language.

First of all, out west it’s hard to find teachers who are bilingual. Because of this, the people whose very job it is to teach you French barely speak it themselves. They just stumble through the required textbook, avoiding the verbal components as much as they can get away with. This means most westerners have next to no understanding of spoken French. Not only that but your exposure to the spoken language is this horrible, sputtering, mispronounced mess. Which makes one of the most beautiful languages in the world sound no more pleasant than Klingon. This also means that we are not taught how to pronounce French properly.

The majority of French class (by class I mean an hour or two a week) is copying words and phrases from the text book or blackboard into your notebook over and over and over and over. Until you start to feel a bit like Bart Simpson writing lines on the chalk board. In fact, writing lines is exactly what you are doing. Somehow learning French begins to feel rather a lot like punishment.

Did I mention that most kids receive only an hour or two of French a week? From roughly grade 2 to 4 until grade 9 to 12. After you enter high school it is often no longer required and most kinds sign up for German or Spanish or Japanese or whichever language class is also being offered.

Maybe once a year the teacher will put on a French film for you to watch. Which usually only serves to reinforce how poorly you understand the language.

Then there is the teacher’s barely contained resentment of having to teach this shit. I recall more than one teacher stress the fact that Canadian French is looked down upon in Europe. This serves to give you the impression that you are not even being taught a real language, a language that is only going to serve you in a few areas of our own country. If you were to travel abroad you might get laughed at for your terrible Canadian French.

Another crime is that you are taught nothing about Canadian French culture. If you’re lucky you might get a teacher who has been on holiday in Montreal once who will tell you about her trip. They might talk about the big winter festivals in Quebec and that snowman guy with the big red hat. They will teach you how to find the major cities on a map. And that’s about it. My first trip to Montreal I was shocked to see people doing that kiss both cheeks thing. I thought the only people who did that were Parisians in movies.

Of course, you could take French emersion. This means you are placed in a separate class where only French is spoken. Sometimes the French emersion kids don’t even take lunch and recess at the same time as the other kids. Totally separated from the other kids, its common to look upon the French emersion kids as weird or different. If a French emersion kid decided to enter regular classes, they may be behind in their English compared to their peers. They might also have a harder time integrating into their peer group at first. IN a part of the country with more French speaking people this is less of a problem I’m sure. But imagine being a French emersion kid in a part of Canada where no one but the other French emersion kids (and some of their parents) speak more than a few words of French. Talk about isolating!

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1. Ramblings on Womanhood and Feminism Part Two
2. The Course of My Studies Part One
3. Juniper Rambles About Feminism and Womanhood (Part One)

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“At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman. Do you remember?” – From: When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone, 1931 – 2011

Like many Pagans, Merlin Stone’s book was amongst the first I found. Interestingly, I find that many Pagans my age or younger have, in fact, not read this book; as well as others like it such as “The Wise Wound” for an example. I was not like many of my generation’s young Pagans in that my very first book on Paganism did not come from the hand of Silver Ravenwolf.

This is a blog post I have been considering writing for a little while now. I was also considering reading it for the podcast, but I worry it might be boring to listen to. So, in honour of the memory of such persons as Merlin Stone, here goes …

My first literary foray into Magick, Witchcraft and Paganism came from fairy tales of course; Jack and the Bean Stalk, Disney, Mom reading ‘The Hobbit” to us. Like many children I played witches brew with mud and crud in the back yard, tapped stones with my sparkly cheerleading baton to wake the fairies, pretended I could control the wind and wished I could change into any form I desired in the blink of an eye.

There was also a small amount of traditions and lore passed on from family members and friends of the family as well. Not outright pagan and witchy things, just the sort of things you pick up coming from an immigrant family or coming from farm folk and outdoor enthusiasts. Things are done this way because they’ve always been this way, or because someone’s grandmother did it this way.

This is how you tell which direction you are facing, this kind of moss can be packed into wounds, don’t mess with the well-head you idiots.

The cat likes to sleep in the lavender patch because it’s soothing.

These are moose tracks and those are deer tracks.

The little witch gets hung in the kitchen because she’s always hung in the kitchen.

You can climb the oak tree kids, but not the rowan.

You can eat these berries but not those.

Fill the hollow with compost, then top soil, add some fish guts and transplant the local wild rose on it.

The previous owner must have planted the juniper bushes by the door because they protect the house, but your mother thinks they smell like cat piss and so she’s digging them up for her water garden.

Never wash a teapot with soap, use salt.

Place a miniature house in the garden and don’t let it fill with debris.

Place a miniature well in the garden and you can put pennies in it to make wishes.

Scatter clippings of dog hair and bits of yarn in the yard in the autumn for the birds to use as nesting materials.

Don’t mess with the forsythia hedge, the chickadees live in there.

Rub butter on a cat’s paw so it can always find its way back home.

The kind of random lore, superstitions, rules and customs passed on to a child by an outdoorsman father, by an elderly neighbour or a gardening mother. Stuff that one must do or not do, but the explanation for why may have been lost to time.

I also adored fantasy and sci-fi when I was young. Now-a-days I read maybe two or three works of fiction each year. But when I was a pre-teen and teen I read voraciously. My mother found herself desperately searching for books to give me to read, as I was reading at an adult level and yet there wasn’t much material available to me at the school library. The public library often actually frowned upon some of my book choices, preferring to only allow 12 year old to borrow books from the teen and children’s section. So, Mom let me choose whatever caught my eye in her own substantial library of fantasy, romance and science fiction. Being a permissible mother in some areas, she didn’t bat an eye when I read the Clan of the Cave Bear series as a pre-teen. I remember the first time I opened the hard cover copies of these books and found there the maps in the first pages. Maps that had little drawing of prehistoric artefacts, such as the Willendorf Venus, and little factoids about them. I was entranced, though I knew of Paganism (both ancient an modern) in a vague way somehow those maps brought it to life and made it more real.

I developed a love of myth, legend and (of course) more fairy tale, as well as history and archaeology. I was the only child in my 6th grade class reading introduction to Greek mythology books, or books about the pyramids of Giza, Neolithic cave paintings or Easter Island. I would rush home after school to watch documentaries on TV in these subjects and more. (Remember when channels like A&E, Discovery and so forth were kind of smart and played more shows about history and religion than people with OCD?)

This was encouraged by my parents who, along with me, dreamed of my growing up to become a historian, anthropologist or archaeologist someday. This was also very much encouraged by my mother’s common-law husband at the time, who was both a high school teacher and Pagan-friendly, having had many Pagan friends in his life (he has passed away now). Before the guy’s mental illness became unbearable to live with, he would photocopy pages out of texts books on mythology for me to read, loan out books from the library that librarian’s did not believe a 13 year old could read and so forth.

We did get dragged by Mom’s partner to a couple of summer solstice celebrations and small gatherings and such. But I remember for the most part being bored, there wasn’t a lot for a teen to do. The kids stuff was too childish and there just really wasn’t a lot of content for teens. My main memories from these events include things like walking in the woods, flirting with one girl I liked and getting bored with chanting very quickly. As well as doing our best to avoid the boys, who riled up by the sexual displays and nudity of the adults, stalked us girls like horny wolves desperate to convince us to let them touch our boobs.

By my mid to late teens Mom had married a new man. A man whose first wife had been a good old fashioned Feminist Witch (she passed away from cancer). He still had most of her library and allowed me to read to my hearts content. Books like “When God Was a Woman” by Merlin Stone, “The Wise Wound” by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove, “The Language of the Goddess” by Marija Gimbutas& Joseph Campbell, “The Body of the Goddess” by Rachel Pollack, “The Beauty Myth” by Naomi Wolf, “Psychic Self Defence” by Dion Forune, “Drawing Down the Moon” by Margot Adler, and the “The Spiral Path” by Starhawk were all just sitting there, waiting to be devoured. Oddly, I didn’t wind up a hardcore feminist or a Dianic Wiccan! Actually, maybe it’s not that odd. At 16-ish there’s a lot of content in these books that went over my head at the time. This is why it’s good to re-read things years later.

The internet was around at this time, but still somewhat new. Many of my friends didn’t have it in their homes yet and were jealous of my (dial-up) connection. So yes, I do in fact remember a time before you could find Witchcraft and Paganism on the internet. I have officially dated myself!

When I was 17 I met a young man in his early twenties who had been practising for a few years long than myself, he introduced me to some of his friends and from there I received all kinds book suggestions and such. I was also told to avoid website son Wicca because they were all terrible! I spent a summer looking over the shoulders of these slightly older Witches and Pagans before it occurred to me that they probably shouldn’t be having such close relationships with minors (such as myself a couple of my same aged friends). This was when I started in on the typical 101 studies, Scott Cunningham and Raymond Buckland for example. I remember trying to get through “The Necronomicon” (hehehe), “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” and Colin Wilson’s “The Occult” at this time too.

Ronald Hutton’s “Triumph of the Moon” came out when I was 19, I remember reading that and becoming quite interested in the history of modern Paganism. I then read whatever I could find about or by Dion Fortune, Doreen Valiente, Gerald Gardner, Robert Cochrane, and the Farrars. Crowley thwarted me (and disgusted me). “A Witches Bible” by the Farrars had to be read twice in a row, the second time with a notebook, dictionary and thesaurus (I read it again a few years later and was amazed at how I struggled with it, but hey I was 19-20 when I first read it). I made a valiant attempt at the tarot around this time.

In my very early twenties I met up with a teaching coven, Alexandrian based. This was when I came to a couple of realizations:

A) I knew rather a lot more than most 21 year olds.

B) Still, I knew next to nothing.

C) An 18 year old can understand something like (for example) “The Sea Priestess” only so much.

D) Wicca (of any size, shape or flavour) was NOT for me. Full stop.

E) I didn’t really know what was right for me (aw shit)

I went back to my first love: Mythology. Somewhere along the way I realised I knew next to nothing about the mythology of my own heritage. I knew Greek, Roman and Egyptian very well, but somehow Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and such had escaped me. WTF? So I dove in. Finding suggested reading lists on Druidry, Celtic spirituality and Celtic Reconstruction websites and working my way through the books that were recommended by the most of them. One book I tried reading was “The Encyclopaedia of Celtic Wisdom” by the Matthews, which for the most part went over my head. I needed to back track and focus just on history, lore and myth.

(This is getting long, so stay tuned for part two in a few days. Also this post is about study, not practice, which is why practice doesn’t get mentioned much. Okay.)

Related posts:

1. The Course of My Studies Part Two
2. Horned God Devotional
3. The Devotional

How do I train in Hedgewitchery? How does one learn Hedgewitchery?

As Hedgewitchery is such a personal Path it is hard to tell someone how to find formal training. After all everyone is going to practice somewhat differently.

First, you might be lucky enough to find a teacher or another Hedgewitch to train and/or practice with. Of course we are all, always, students. For example I can only teach what I know, share what I have experienced and explain the mistakes I have made. My personal tailoring of Hedgewitchery may not be exactly what you are looking for either, just as if I met another Hedgewitch who has more experienced than I, there might be much of her Path that does not resonate with me. Some Hedgewitches are more interested in herbalism and botany, while I am more interested in animal healing and animal husbandry than others. Quite the conundrum eh?

This is one reason why I set up the website and forum, so folks can share what they have learned, what they are experimenting with, as well as what they are hoping to learn. So we can all help each other along the way. You can join the forum (The Wild Geek Hang) at my website and there are a few yahoo groups and such kicking around as well.

Well of course if you are lucky enough to meet another Hedgewitch or someone who follows a similar Path then you can learn a great deal from each other.

There are books than you can read. Some are better than others of course. Some may be more or less along the lines of what you are looking for. There are some great recommended reading lists on the Hedge that myself and others have posted, go to the “A Witch’s Studies” section and then into the “Reading Lists and Recommendations” category.

You don’t have to go to another Hedgewitch to study hedgewitchery. This may sound a little odd but hear me out. Hedgewitchery is a jack-of-many-trades Path, the main ones being: Some type of shamanism or seership, some form of healing, working with Nature in some way and folk magick. So decide which types of these subjects interest you and study them. For example you could take shamanism workshops or study under a seer or sied worker. You could take a course on herbalism or reiki; I am going back to school to study to be a Vet Tech (not only as a career path but also as part of my hedgewitchery).

It also doesn’t hurt to study other forms of Witchcraft and Paganism. You can learn a lot from a Wicca 101 course, or taking a course through a Druid organization. Many Hedgewitches study the Feri Tradition, Faery Seership or heathen traditions such as Asatru.

Don’t forget to read/study up on wise woman, cunning folk, conjure practitioners and folk healers throughout history. Also mythology and any other subjects that interest you and you wish to incorporate into your Path.

How else it this Path learned? From your spirits of course. One place all Walkers Between Worlds gain knowledge from are the gods, ancestors and other spiritual helpers and guides they meet along the way and build a relationship with.

Related posts:

1. The Course of My Studies Part One
2. Horned God Devotional
3. What is Hedgecraft?