Many people have shared with me that upon discovering Wicca,
They experience an undeniable aha moment at some point in the juncture.
Those who do typically tell me something such as,
I finally have a name to go with the way I've felt my entire life.
In statements such as these,
There is always great elation.
They have finally found how the puzzle fits together.
There is now an explanation for the way in which their instincts were,
For so many years,
Attempting to function under suppression,
And are now finally being heard.
In a lot of cases,
Their original spiritual views were given to them at birth,
And never explored or questioned.
They will attempt to force-fit themselves into something that they might or might not fully believe,
All the while professing their unchosen faith as convincingly as they can to others,
And,
Sometimes unknowingly,
To themselves.
I know this is true because I survived it.
Wicca and witchcraft don't tell you what to think or believe,
As is the case with a lot of spiritual paths.
And then go on to enforce that faith with dogma.
In fact,
To describe either Wicca or witchcraft as of faith is laughable,
Because faith implies believing in an unknown.
With the old ways,
There aren't any unknowns,
Only matters that have yet to be personally discovered.
Faith and hope are made obsolete by certainty.
When I reference the old ways,
What I'm speaking to is the way in which our ancestors viewed and related to the world,
Which does include spiritual practices.
It was far more of a reality-based existence than we know today.
Namely,
Faith-based concepts that have obscured what the ancients understood without the necessity of belief or hope.
The aha moment experienced by those upon discovering the old ways is basically a somewhat rapid reconnection with our roots.
For some,
The experience is so powerful that it has parallels to past life regression.
That's because,
In many ways,
It is.
This might sound a bit weird to some who are listening to this.
Weird meaning strange.
But weird is exactly what it is,
As it is known in the Old English concept that means fate,
Destiny.
And a powerful force that shapes outcomes.
In this instance,
Weird is pronounced the same way,
But it is spelled W-Y-R-D.
This is stated quite intelligently in the book,
Wisdom of the Weird,
By Brian Bates,
Where he writes,
Which prevent us from knowing what it is we already know deep in our tribal cultural memory.
The past is always with us,
In our hearts and minds,
Just beneath the surface of life.
Encoded and embedded in a multitude of cultural forms and linguistic patterns which reach back to our tribal times,
But which we no longer recognize as having a special significance.
This knowledge is in each of us,
But confined to the deep unconscious,
Locked away.
Banished from everyday life.
Sometimes it surfaces unbidden in amusing and surprising ways.
This describes and explains the aha moment.
Newcomers to the craft who discover this do so joyfully,
But the next leg of their journey is often met with intermittent turbulence.
The steps going forward will typically oscillate between excitement and assigning blame to whomever and or whatever caused their natural instincts to be suppressed.
In my experience,
Recognizing that a blockage existed at one time can be helpful,
But dwelling on it is usually counterproductive.
Without doing exactly that,
It is important to have an understanding of how we got to this point.
Most nature-based spiritualities are now often labeled as new movements,
Which is anything but the case.
In the context of world history,
It is the newer religions that are currently framing ancient ways as modern concepts.
I bring this up in order to embolden the forward motion of those who are now discovering the craft.
The new religion was indeed new at the time it was forced upon the ancients.
To the original practitioners of the old ways,
It was a foreign concept.
It was weird,
But not in the Old English way.
And now,
Because of its popularity and widespread acceptance,
This is the other way around.
And while this shift began with religion,
The mainstream contemporary view of the old ways is not completely based on theology,
Even though it remains an undeniable driving force behind it.
To this point,
Brian Bates writes,
Over the centuries,
Our early tribal culture was overtaken by the forces of progress.
But today we are questioning the quality of our lives,
Even in the midst of the relative material comfort afforded us by this very progress.
In the contemporary Western Hemisphere,
We have all the advantages of modern science,
Engineering,
And medicine,
But sophistication comes in many forms.
Recently,
We have realized that the surviving indigenous peoples of the world,
While less developed technologically than ourselves,
Nevertheless have knowledge about how to live,
Which seems to be in tune with the deep harmonies of our souls,
And to be in touch with the important truths we have lost.
It is the quest for this very knowledge and the need for a feeling of harmony that is likely awakening so many today.
This is the weird that's spelled W-Y-R-D.
People are discovering that contemporary ways of being,
Through the current states of religion,
Technology,
And so-called conventional thinking,
Are not able to back the promises they made insofar as being THE solution,
Or THE way.
These new ways have turned the old ways into what,
For so many,
Is now unrecognizable and the practice of them seemingly unattainable.
Yet our spirit and our instincts are continually begging for us to give them equal time.
They are calling for us to be weird enough to realize that what we need is already within us.
We don't have to believe that it's there or that we're capable of rediscovering it.
All we need to do is realign ourselves.
This realignment is certainly attainable.
For a practical working example of this,
One need do nothing more than to spend time in nature.
Simply observing what is and what isn't going on.
Notice the plants and wildlife you encounter.
Nothing in nature begins its day looking at a rectangle to learn what it should be afraid of for the next 24 hours.
Nothing in nature,
Is hyper-focused on following the rules laid out in a book,
So as not to jeopardize its place of existence in the next life.
Nature does not base its self-worth on how many followers it has,
Nor does it allow potentially inaccurate information to govern even one day of its existence.
What is nature doing instead?
Go outside and have a look.
Then come back and tell me what you observed.
Better yet,
Tell yourself.
It's easy for us to view something that happened,
Say,
A hundred years ago,
As ancient history.
It might be to us.
But when taking into consideration how long the Earth has been here,
That occurrence was mere seconds ago.
It is this very perception that gives both the new religion and the new ways a leg up.
And now we think of such things as the OG without any question.
What we are experiencing now is not,
By any stretch of the imagination,
The way things always were.
It's the way things are now,
And just because they've been in place our entire lifetime doesn't mean that this was always the case.
It most certainly was not.
But these things are in place today,
Working relentlessly to,
As Bates pointed out,
Prevent us from knowing what it is we already know.
When we've had enough of things,
We often go inward.
And when we do so,
Something W-Y-R-D happens.
The wisdom of our ancestors that is hidden deep within us,
At least partially,
Starts to become relevant again.
A colleague of mine,
Bex at The Witch's Path,
Originally shared what I'm about to read to you in a post on social media.
She has kindly given me permission to read these words here.
If you are not able to give this your full attention right now,
Please either stop what you're doing or pause the playback so that you can return to this later.
It's just that important.
The cost of never meeting your ancestors can be spending your whole life trying to understand yourself without knowing half of the story.
It can look like wondering why,
No matter how much you earn,
Money never quite feels safe.
Why having enough still somehow feels temporary.
Or why you keep repeating behavioral patterns you have promised yourself a hundred times you would finally change.
It can look like wondering why love always seems to be so complicated.
Why certain relationships feel strangely familiar even when they hurt.
Or why you keep finding yourself playing the same role with different people.
It can look like feeling guilty whenever you rest.
Struggling to ask for help.
Or believing that being useful is somehow the same thing as being worthy.
Or carrying standards for yourself that you would never dream of placing on someone you love.
It can look like spending years trying to fix something about yourself.
Without ever asking whether that behavior once made perfect sense in the family.
Culture,
Or circumstances that came before you.
But the cost can also be losing things you never realized were yours to inherit.
The recipes nobody wrote down.
The songs nobody remembers anymore.
The stories that disappeared when the last person who knew them died.
The language.
Your family stops speaking.
The traditions nobody continued because,
Somewhere along the way,
Nobody remembered why they mattered.
It can look like living somewhere for years without ever knowing the stories of the land beneath you.
The plants people once relied upon,
The old customs shaped by its seasons.
Or the thousands of ordinary lives that unfolded there before yours did.
And sometimes the cost is simply the feeling that you appeared out of nowhere.
As though you are supposed to invent yourself completely from scratch,
Without knowing the people,
Places,
Stories,
Ideas,
And tiny acts of survival that eventually made your life possible.
Meeting your ancestors does not mean discovering one magical explanation for everything that has ever gone wrong in your life.
And it certainly does not mean blaming people who lived generations ago for every questionable decision you have made.
It means finally giving yourself more of the context.
Asking where a belief might have begun.
What somebody before you had to survive.
Why a particular rule became important.
And what was loved enough to be preserved.
It also means asking what was painful enough to be buried.
What was never spoken about again.
And which pieces of all this eventually found their way.
Into you.
And yes,
Meeting your ancestors can be emotional.
Sometimes you find grief,
Loss,
Silence,
And patterns you wish had ended long before reaching you.
But you may also find extraordinary resilience.
Humor.
Knowledge.
Recipes.
Rituals.
Stubbornness creativity.
Stories.
Belonging,
And pieces of yourself that suddenly make far more sense.
Because ancestral work is not only about looking backwards.
It is about understanding yourself more deeply in the present.
Deciding more consciously what you want to keep,
What you want to transform,
And what you would like to leave behind.
Sometimes meeting your ancestors gives you answers.
Sometimes,
It gives you better questions.
And sometimes it simply gives you this strange,
Beautiful feeling.
That your story did not begin with you.
Keeping our weird concealed is something that modern culture compels many of us to do.
As unfortunate as this is,
Losing are weird altogether.
Would be catastrophic.
The crow flies from me to thee.
To send the message.
Blessed Be.
