Midsummer finds me face-to-face with the realization that 
the whole new world I'd looked for, longed for, dreamed of for 
what seems a lifetime--is here, all around me. Possibilities
sing through me like a band of strange angels, confusing and
compelling, frightening and exhilarating at once. Things have
lined themselves up in such a way that this place I've come to
seems inevitable. Even as I write this, the radio has just
kicked on with "Your Wildest Dreams," as though to hammer home
the revelation: I'm standing right on the threshold of living
them, for good or ill.

     Having always been secretly and gleefully heathen, despite
a moderately Christian upbringing, I can't say that finding
myself on the verge of formal Wiccan Initiation comes as any
great surprise. When the other kids were decorating their
school notebooks with boyfriends' initials and the logos of 
their favorite bands, I was inscribing mine with eyes-of-Horus
and jolly little pentacles. I preferred reading Tarot cards to
reading romance novels, conjuring to carousing--a most unnatural
adolescence! It was a phase I gradually grew into.

     My passion for Egyptology dovetailed with my interest in
the Occult to lead me naturally to an investigation of Egyptian
magick and religion, which in turn led me to a love of the Lord
and Lady. Very simple, the pieces falling into place so neatly
the click was literally audible. Shortly thereafter, I found
someone who led me to the group which will soon become my
magickal family. Click. That simple.

     This complicated. Seeking entrance into a coven, into a
tradition leading far back beyond me, is not a thing to be taken
lightly. Strange how Wiccan Initiation seems so much more final
than did my Christian baptism years ago. Both events share a
common theme, after all: Symbolic death and rebirth into a new
life. I guess I'm just one of those people on whom Christianity
didn't "take". Since the Lady wrung out my life and hung it up
to dry, I've been unable to imagine any other course. It is a
simple truism that "what She touches, changes."

     Going back to where I used to be feels impossible--not
that even in my wildest masochistic nightmares I would want to.
It hasn't been easy. There are people I fear are gone from my
life forever, at least in part because of the path I've chosen.
People who are hurt and confused by the things I can't confide
to them; people who think I'm a few sandwiches shy of a picnic
for dressing up like Halloween, running around waving a ritual
knife and doing "all that Voodoo shit" (as one thoughtful
acquaintance put it). I have relatives who would be profoundly
offended if they knew. I am embracing a journey understood by
very few, conscious not only of the awesome responsibility that
attends it but also of the fact that even now there are those
who would happily persecute me in so many loathesome ways were 
I to publicly declare my beliefs. *If* they didn't just haul me
off to the Ha-Ha Hotel and fit me for a nice new jacket with
sleeves that fasten in the back, instead.

     But this is the life I have chosen--or that has chosen me.
I feel fortunate that when I finally "got religion" it expanded
my life, opened me wide instead of narrowing my focus. Magick
*happens*--I feel it in myself, all around me, every day. And
when I ask what is happening to me, always I hear the same reply,
faintly amused, coming from a place so deep within me even I am
only just learning to perceive it: "Well, you said you wanted to
investigate the other side of life..."