Tuesday, December 12, 2000

More Changes

Oh, hi there! Remember me? I know I don't write as much as I would like, but to be honest, I don't really write much. I've lost contact with most of my friends back in Hawaii. I still talk to Anthony and Angela, but I don't know how long that will last.

Well, summer sucked. I spent most of my time hopping from one friend's house to another until my brother found us a place to rent for a while sometime in August. Which reminds me, I don't think I've mentioned him in any of my previous entries. I don't think I've mentioned anyone, really. Well, as you can see, I have an older brother. He's six-and-a-half years older than I am. I also have an older sister who is 12 years older than me, but is married with kids and doesn't live with us so that's irrelevant. Anyway, we are currently moving again, into our new house, which by new I mean it was just finished being built last week. My mom and brother pitched in together and bought a house for us so we wouldn't have to rent a crappy one in the ghetto. Yeah, I said it. We are poor and lived in the ghetto. People kept getting shot or raped in my neighborhood and well, seeing that I was a tiny little girl coming to age physically, my mom was scared I was going to be the next victim if I stayed out past 8 pm. So, we packed up and left and are now living in our new house in a new development where there are not enough people here to have crime in. I'll give it a couple of years before it all goes to shit.

High school sucks. I'm too smart for my classes, but when put in the advanced placement program, the teachers don't actually teach you anything and expect you to know everything just because you are in the program. They called my mom trying to put me in it and I told them they could shove it (nicely, of course) and to not call my house again. My mom was confused, but I let her know that it's a bunch of crap that I don't want to be a part of. I can take my classes, fly by them, not really work, and still get a passing grade. I don't even care for A's or anything. Minimal effort to get a C. It's a win for me.

I found a few people at school who were or are interested in learning more about witchcraft. I'm not just looking into Wicca anymore. There is apparently several different kinds. A lot like Christianity having different sects, you know, like Catholicism, and Protestant, and then Protestant channeling off into Lutheran, Methodist or Baptist, etc. Well, Wicca is the same. Witchcraft is just an aspect of the whole Pagan umbrella. Apparently paganism was the term used back during the reign of King Constantine. The pagans of that time were actually country dwellers who believed in their own family gods, or harvest gods, or other spirits and entities. When trying to convert the people of his kingdom, Constantine separated them by pagans and Christians. A lot of the holidays we celebrate today are based on old Pagan celebrations. King Constantine only created them to fit with the pagans for easier conversion. It's actually pretty clever in my opinion, but it makes you wonder. If the Christians of today knew where the roots of their celebrations came from, would they be so adamant about forcing their religion on others or worried about keeping Christ in Christmas?

Anyway, I digress. My friends at my school were only interested in cursing people or hurting people with magick. Now, before you look at the spelling funny, I'm only using the K to differentiate from illusionist's magic and the magic that witches and Pagans use. That way, when I say magick, you know I'm talking about the practice, and when I say magic, you know that I’m talking about sleight of hand. I wasn't down on cursing people or hurting anyone, so they became disinterested. I was kind of bummed to have to move on by myself, but some sacrifices need to be made on a quest for knowledge. The Wiccan Rede states "and it harm none, do what you will." Basically, that means to choose your practice carefully, trying not to intentional cause malice on anyone. Not to hurt anyone on purpose. Granted, I think it's inevitable to hurt someone when working magick. For example, if I were doing a spell to get a job, or project, or something, the other person going for it would be at a loss if I got it and not them. In essence, I just hurt that person from doing something only because I wanted it. So sometimes, it happens. I think the main message here is to be mindful of what you do, and not to do anything irrational for both you and whomever else is involved. The harming part also includes self. That's debatable, but I think it makes sense. Self is a living, breathing soul. Why harm yourself?

I'm hoping the new school I go to has a lot more information than I was able to find at the school I'm currently at. I know they're not going to keep a bunch of things on practicing witchcraft easily accessible to the youth of America, seeing as, even though this country was founded on trying to get away from religious persecution, Christians feel more entitled than anything else, but maybe there is something else I can use or find at this new school. Maybe I'll even make friends with people who are actually serious about practicing witchcraft. Hell, who knows, maybe I'll even find someone who already knows more than I do and can help a sister out! All in all, I have a lot of expectations for this school. I'll be stuck in it for three more years.

Friday, July 7, 2000

Your Personal Book of Shadows

The purpose of your Book of Shadows is for it to be a place to record all of your magickal workings and information.

A good formating can make things easier to find. Here is an outline of how you can organize your Book of Shadows.


Dedication-
The date (or date range) you started this BOS
A book blessing/dedication
Rules & Beliefs

Spiritual Goals -
Short term
Long term
Dates accomplished
Altar Diagram

Correspondences -
Moon
Colors
Days
Hours
Planets
Herbs
Incense & Oils
Etc.
Deity Information -
Organise by pantheon
Tools -
purpose
consecration
Spells & Charms

Recipes

Rituals



Here is some food for thought: Why do you keep a Book of Shadows? A lot of covens and/or traditions do not allow their members and practitioners to share their BOS, would you? If so, who and why or why not?

Friday, June 2, 2000

White Rooms, White Walls

I know. Months have passed, yet again, and I haven’t written at all. Not even to say hi. To be honest, I’ve been busy. Today is my fourteenth birthday. In a couple of days, we move from this house, fly to California and then drive for about a week to get to stay with close friends until we find a place to live on our own.

With my step-dad's funeral, packing and getting ready for this move, and then all the school that happened in between, I’m pretty tired. I haven’t had a lot of me time during it all. I feel like I've been wandering aimlessly for a while. My friends don't really understand. I ended up being gone from school for two weeks after my step-dad's death and everyone had written me letters telling me that everything would be okay and that hiding at home wasn't going to help anything. I know my friends meant well, they just have no clue. I haven't told them the real story. They think that my step-dad died of natural causes. No one knows what really happened in February or in my past.

Learning about Wicca has pretty much taken a backseat in my life. I had a bad experience with one of the exercises Lizzie and I had been practicing. It's a little led-on game called White Room, White Walls. The entire thing is led by one person who is there as a guide, and the ones participating fall into a trance-like state while doing the exercise. It starts off with everyone chanting "white rooms, white walls" over and over again until you are "in" the area you need to be. Lizzie and I would do this with each other, alternating turns. However, Lizzie and I wanted to do this together, so we asked our friend Anthony to be our guide as he had watched us do this on multiple occasions and knew what was supposed to be said and so on. Anyway, while the three of us were on the bus ride home from school, Tony led us through the exercise.

First, when you're in, you come across a large building, similar to a hospital, that you must enter and walk through its halls. On the many occasions that Lizzie and I did this, we tested each other to see what each one would "see." We would separate and write down the descriptions just to get back together and find that they were almost identical. She and I would "see" each other in the visions and we could describe the same clothes. We also saw the same building and architecture. The only discrepancies came with colors. For example, while we could both agree that I "wore" a tank top with slacks, tennis shoes, and a heart drawn on my chest, the colors of the clothing or accessories wouldn't always be the same. Regardless, we knew we were doing it right because of how eerily similar the "visions" were without the prompting of anyone else.

Second, after walking through the hallways you walk into a room, more like a cell really, that is of pure white. The way you get to the room differs from guide to guide. It could be right, right, left, right, third door to your left one day, and a totally different route the next. Regardless of what paths you take to get there, the room is always a blinding white and has a teddy bear sitting on the floor. No one ever chose a color during any of the times we did this. When we all drew the bear, it looked the same, with the same red bow tied around its neck, however, the color of the fur was different. Lizzie had a black teddy, mine was brown, and our friend Angela, who only tried the exercise once, saw a pale grey teddy.

Third, you talk to the bear on the floor. I know, it sounds silly, but that's part of the game. The bear is supposed to give you some sort of message or insight. The last part of the game is taking with you what he told you and then being guided out of the building by the guide. The problem that Lizzie and I had, though, was that we had played this game too much. We had been talking to this bear on an almost daily basis. He seemed to have gotten annoyed with us, as we saw this as a game, and one day had us "kicked-out". We didn't even have the time to be guided out. Lizzie and I literally fell out of our chairs at the same time with Angela asking if we were okay and why we hadn't waited for her cue to go.

Lizzie felt that she should go in and apologize to the spirit that controlled the bear. Mind you, we weren't actually sure what the bear was, whether spirit, or god, or whatever. I felt that this was a crazy idea and I didn't want her to go alone. I also believed, and still do, that this was something that we shouldn’t have been messing with in the first place being new to the whole practice. Regardless, we asked Tony to guide us through on the way home. Everything went without a hitch until we reached the white room with the bear. As soon as we entered I was immediately kicked out. The bear's eyes had turned red in our vision, took one look at me, and I was knocked right out of there. When I opened my eyes, I panicked, signaling Anthony, telling him that Lizzie was stuck. I was the only one who had come to, and there was Lizzie, limp and unconscious beside me. I didn't want to shake her for fear of hurting her, so I tried to get back in without any luck. Oh my god, did this suck hard. I can't even begin to tell you the amount of fear I had running through my veins and choking at my throat. He we were, a bunch of thirteen-year-olds without a clue of what we were doing.

Anthony told me to calm down and wait, he was still holding on to one of Lizzie's hands and he could still feel her heartbeat and see her breathing. Anthony, as calmly as he could, slowly guided her back out of the trance and she came to on her own. I was shaking. Lizzie seemed to be okay. She smiled and told me that the bear had accepted her apology. That day on, though, I decided to never do anything like that again. I needed a lot more knowledge to go on "adventures" like that again.

Needless to say, when I have the time again, I'm going to be doing a lot of reading before trying anything out. The occult world is so different from what I have been brought up in. While it's sparkly and inviting, I didn't realize just how bad things could get. Sure, the experience I had was pretty mild, but still, it showed me that there are things out there I shouldn't mess with unless I truly know what I'm doing. I'm a novice, and a kid at that. For now, I'm sticking to reading, note taking, and never messing with anything again until I am absolutely ready.

Saturday, February 19, 2000

Suicides and Histories

Oh wow. I haven't written to you in a long time, have I? I'm sorry about that. I promise I'll get back into the swing of things soon. Or at least, I hope so. Things have been pretty crazy here and I don't even know where to begin. First off, we're going to be moving to a new place soon Today, my step-dad committed suicide. He took some kind of cleaner or something on his way to work or PT, I can't remember which, and someone took him to the hospital when they saw him convulsing in the car.

First off, the man my mom was married to wasn't my biological father or anything super special to me. He was a nice guy, for the most part, but I wasn't attached to him. He was very controlling and abusive to us to fit his needs. His and my moms religious views were clashing. He believed since he was the head of household what he said went. He felt that being the head meant that everything he ever said and chose was right and no one could argue it because he was the boss of the family. My mom totally disagreed. Though she agrees that the man has the final word, for a marriage to work, they both need to be a team and take what each other has to say into consideration. He quoted scripture. "But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ," 1 Corinthians 11:3. She got upset and argued that just because he was the head, didn't mean he was the ruler. God was above them all, and God had made them both to be as one as it said in Genesis 2:24 "For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh." She continued on and quoted scripture again with man was not created for the woman's sake, but woman for the man's sake. 10 Therefore the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels," 1 Corinthians 11:9 - 10. The ridiculous amount of Bible spewing and arguing gave me a serious headache.

Unfortunately, the reason for my step-dad's suicide wasn't due to the constant bickering between my parents. I finally told a counselor at school what he had done to me when I was a child. Well, I'm still a child, but I was 9 then, and being 9 seems so far away from being 13 these days. Anyway, he sexually abused me for three years. Lately, I've been having nightmares and locking my door for fear it would start up again. I stopped eating, hoping I could control something in my life, but my friends started noticing the changes in me. They knew I was scared of something and that I had been skipping meals, so they went to the counselor and told her. They thought I was slowly killing myself and became worried. Sometimes I wish I hadn't said anything to the counselor. Sometimes I wish my friends had just left me alone. Then, there are days like today where I realized that the fear of being hurt is finally over.

After I told my counselor, she had to call the local child investigative services. I wasn't allowed to go home until almost dinner time and my step-dad was removed from the house. I had to tell my story, what he had done to me, to three different people. It was torture having to sit there and say everything to one lady who typed out my statement, just to head over to some building into a room behind a double-sided mirror to be recorded and tell some other dude the same thing, using dolls and everything. It was humiliating and embarrassing and all I wanted to do was to take it all back and go home. This was the reason why I didn't want to tell anyone, why I was okay with suffering in silence. I didn't want more problems for my family.

My step-dad was staying over at our pastor's house for a few days before he headed out and killed himself. We had had the house to ourselves. for a while, which was nice for me, but was really hard for my mom. She had no idea what he had done to me, and apparently, he did the same thing to my brother. My mom was devastated and heartbroken and she pretty much lost her damn mind. A couple of days ago she comes barging into my room, convinced that my step-dad was going to kill himself, and that I need to go back to CID and tell them I made the whole thing up. Sure, she wasn't far off, but my mom telling me to go back like that? I did, for her, but I lost any faith I had in her that day. I know she's heartbroken that the person she had been married to for the past 11 consecutive years and thought was a great father-figure for her children ruined this family, but to ask a kid to go and say “Oh, hey, sorry about that, I made it all up. Silly me.” . . . I have no words for it. It didn't matter that I went back to try and take it back. They knew I had told the truth. The lady who had typed up my statement talked to me again and told me that she believed the first story. She knew there were things in there that no one could just make up. I hugged her. She was a nice lady.

We're moving back to our old hometown in Texas and living with friends after I finish middle school. here in Hawaii. My mom doesn't want to pull me out of school yet just because I need to keep my head up and put on my daily mask to deal with everything. Frankly, I don't care. I'm not worried. I can always make new friends.

Speaking of friends, that reminds me another tidbit. I found out my friend Lizzie has a witch in her family. Lizzie was looking through old photographs in her attic with her older sister when they came across one of their great grandma. It was a very old black and white photo, and she was wearing some kind of fancy robe of some sort and holding a journal or book or something. Betty asked her mom about it, and her mom kind of got pissed and told her to get rid of the picture. Apparently, no one is allowed to talk about this relative. Lizzie did some snooping, calling up her grandpa, and finding out that his mom, her great grandma in the picture, practiced witchcraft and was disowned by her born-again relatives because of it. Frankly, I think that's just shit that family would do that to someone they care about. I don't think religion needs to be something that breaks people apart. It's stupid. Anyway, Lizzie was really excited to learn this information. She and I have been talking about witchcraft, Wicca in particular, and are interested in practicing a bit here and there. I'm a bit nervous about it, seeing as I'm still technically a Christian. I don't want to be a hypocrite, but I don't want to follow a religion I don't feel comfortable with. Like I've said before, Christianity is all fine and dandy, it just hasn't felt all that great to me in a really long time.

Anyway, Lizzie and I have been doing a lot of visual exercises. We watched a movie called The Craft that's about witches. I had never heard of it before (no surprise, considering how my parents are and the fact that it is an R-rated movie), but apparently this movie came out a couple of years ago. Mandy, Lizzie's sister, had a copy of it and we watched it on the VCR after school one day. It seems like a decent depiction of witchcraft. I wouldn't really know, you know? Sure, there are a lot of special effects in there, like, real witches can't actually fly. It was an old myth created a long time ago. There's a whole story about how they would dance around campfires hopping on brooms, but they were celebrating. People who were afraid of them would say they were actually consorting with the devil and actually flying on the brooms. Don't take my word for it, though. I'm reciting this all from memory and I could be wrong. Anyway, I went off topic. What I was trying to get at with the movie is that the way the girls in the movie practice seems to be legit from what I've read. Also, the information from the store owner seems to be on par. Everything else is all Hollywood trying to make a buck.

So as you can see, I've continued researching it, there is a lot of ground to cover, but it's been very hard considering I'm pretty much doing this by myself. My friends are curious, joining me in practicing little things here and there, but not in the way that I am. They think it's something fun to do, but I really want to learn about this and see if maybe this is the sort of path I should take. I just wish I knew someone who could help me out, or someone who knew more about this stuff that could tell me if I'm getting the right books and understanding the information correctly. It's very frustrating not knowing if what I'm learning is right. I'm afraid to ask anyone, considering I'd have to tell my mom what I've been doing, and she would seriously not be happy about it. Remembering how she reacted when I brought home a book about it, she would go completely nuts if she found out I was serious about looking into it.

I wish I wasn't thirteen years old. This would be so much easier for me to deal with if I was just a bit older and could just move out if my mom went crazy over this.