The summer of 2015 was when I first began to explore paganism. I was born and raised Roman Catholic, and for much of my life, that faith had given me all the comfort and confidence I needed to face the world. But for several years, I had been having doubts; questions were rising in my mind, and I couldn’t fully accept the teachings I had been brought up with anymore. My interest in the occult (spirit work, witchcraft, etc), which had always been a part of my life, was reaching new heights and Catholic tradition could no longer offer an explanation for some of my recent experiences. I thought a pagan path might.
I had met a young woman–first online, then for lunch at a noodle place–who was herself a practicing pagan, and she was instrumental in helping me to accept this new walk of life. We spent long hours talking about what religion meant, what gods were, what it meant to follow them, what it meant to worship them. She got me involved with a local group she had started with another friend of hers, which met to talk about many of the same things.
In mid-October 2015, she posted a song in our group chat that drove most of us to tears. At the time, I was still working up the nerve to dip my toes into paganism–I still had trouble accepting that I could pray to deities other than the God of Abrahamic tradition–but this song was so powerful that I thought I should chase the feeling. Trouble was, I didn’t think I knew how.
Fortunately, the decision wasn’t mine to make.
Climbing the Ash Tree 