The Traveler
By Sol Smith
Copyright 2008 by Sol Smith
ISBN# 978-0-9820050-6-4
Smashwords edition published by Jupiter Gardens Press at Smashwords
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Table of Contents
Part I: The Hedge Witch 3
Part II: Traveler 89
Part III: The Burning Witch 140
We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey.
—taken from The Pagan Outlook mission statement.
Part I: The Hedge Witch
Chapter One
The carpet is beige. The chairs are a darker beige. The typing, gabbing, and phone calling from all the secretaries sounds beige.
“What are you in for this time, honey?” Mary, the secretary who is several years past retirement age, asks me.
“Disrupting class,” I say.
“Again? Haven’t you got anything better to do?”
I smile to recognize the polite humor, but I really think this is a good question. Don’t I have something better to do?
“He’ll be right with you,” she says.
Waiting on the hard plastic chair outside my guidance counselor’s office has become a weekly ritual. One I don’t look forward to. The meetings are perfunctory and frustrating. Why can’t I just be sent to stand in a corner or pick up trash or something? Why does everything have to be so damn serious?
“Uh oh, Abbie.” Mary is typing up some kind of report about my arrival to the office. “This is conference number four. You know what that means.”
I collapse in my chair. It’s going to be a long wait before my dad gets here.
The door to the office opens slightly and I see Erica’s eyes framed by her black hair peering through.
“What, again?”
“Just come in and talk.” I pat the plastic seat next to me.
“I’ve got math class. I think there’s a quiz today.” She’s using a stage whisper, like no one noticed that I’ve started talking to the cracked door.
“Just sit down for a minute.” I try not to whine.
Erica slinks in and sits down next to me. “How many does this make?”
“Four.”
“Man. Are they calling your dad?”
“I think they already did.”
“He’ll be pleased. What class did you act-out in this time?”
“History. This is the second time for history this semester.”
“Can’t you just sit there and not listen? Can’t you just pretend to be somewhere else?”
“No, Erica, I can’t. This is important. This is our minds being polluted. I can’t just sit there and listen to it all.”
“What was it? You have some beef with the signing of the Magna Carta?”
I heave a breath. “Salem.”
The word wipes the smile off of Erica’s face. She leans back in her chair. “I don’t know what your issue is with Salem, Abbie, honestly,” she says. “I don’t really see how that all is related to who we are.”
“It’s a validation issue, Erica. Get with it.”
We’re interrupted by Mary leaning over her desk. “Girls, you need to keep it down. Erica, were you sent here?”
“No, ma’am. I was just leaving.” She picks up her bag and moves to her feet. “Are you coming to the party?”
“I doubt it. What party?”
“The Halloween party at Mark Hill’s place.”
“Like I’m going to a Halloween party, Erica, come on.”
“Vic will be there,” she smiles.
“Please, please don’t talk about him, okay? I just want to forget about it all right now, you know?”
“Girls, please,” Mary reminds us.
“Sorry,” Erica says. “I’m leaving.” Then she turns around one more time. “Hey, I found an apartment. I’m getting out of my aunt’s house next week. Can you help get some furniture for it this weekend?”
“Maybe, if my dad doesn’t kill me. How are you planning on paying for that place, anyway?”
“Mom and Dad. Berkley pays a lot more than Ashlan State, Abbie. They think it’ll be good for me. Maybe you can be such a pain in the ass that your dad will kick you out, then you could move in, too.”
“Cool. I’ll set the curtains on fire when I get home.”
“And drink all the milk straight from the bottle. That should do it.”
“Abigail,” Mary says. “Do you mind not having so much fun when you’re being disciplined?”
Erica closes the door behind her, only to reopen it a second later. “Your dad’s here,” she says.
“Thanks for killing the suspense.”
I’m getting to know Mr. Taft’s office pretty well. The way it smells like a musty closet; the way the motivational posters hang just a little off balance on every wall; the way his wife and twin sons shine their happy faces through a silver picture frame. The chairs in his office are just a bit more comfortable than in the waiting room, equipped with a layer of padding from 1983 or so. Looking around his office, the only real difference between this visit and my previous visits here is that my dad’s sitting next to me.
“It’s not a matter of who’s right or wrong, Abbie,” Dad says after listening to Mr. Taft’s side of the story. “It’s about respect for the teacher.”
“Dad,” I say patiently. “It’s not like I can just respect someone who asks the class to believe a load of shit like that.” My response, and perhaps that one word in particular, seems to have a physical affect on my dad and Mr. Taft.
“Abigail, Mr. Richer is an expert in history. Just like we talked about last week, how Mrs. Oltorf is an expert in physics.”
“Oh, God, don’t get me started on her again.”
“Abbie,” my dad says. “This is very serious. Please take this seriously.” Dad has that look in his eyes, looking through the tops of his eyes. That same look that he would give me when I’d have a friend sleep over and we were being too loud, too late in the night.
I try to explain it to them. I try to explain how every October, some class ends up discussing Salem and the witch hunt. Sometimes it’s an English class, sometimes it’s a history class, but every year some teacher decides to “educate” the students about witches. This time it was Mr. Richer.
He talked about the hearings. The swimming of the suspects. The hanging of the condemned. The tragic circumstance brought on by ignorance and fear.
“Of course, most witch lore comes from age and class discrimination,” Mr. Richer told the class. “Something happens that can’t be explained, and they blame it on someone who fits the classic description. The witch-hunts really represent the xenophobia and paranoia of a society immersed in ignorant superstition. The idea of the witch was a convenient scapegoat for so many of the society’s shortcomings.”
And what he’s doing there is striking down thousands of years of tradition. He may be right about xenophobia and paranoia and all of that, but he’s telling the class—right before my eyes—that the very idea of a witch is concocted from the same material as dragons and unicorns. He’s planting the idea that it’s all just an old wives’ tale or something. Like witches don’t matter.
In many ways, this type of education is worse than a witch-hunt. At least witch-hunts verify the existence of a counter belief system. How can Dad sit here in this office and act like that’s not important? I really worry about how much he’s changed sometimes.
“And I let him have it,” I tell my dad in the counselor’s office. “I told him what he was doing, how he was striking down a way of life, a religion thousands of years older than the dominant ones of today with a simple lesson about paranoia meant to serve as a Halloween story.”
“And how did the other students react to this?” Mr. Taft says.
I guess his point is that the other students didn’t appreciate my passionate interruption. Like they were there to learn and I was ruining it for everyone or something.
“They laughed,” I say. “For whatever reason, speaking your mind in class always seems laughable. Mr. Richer got mad, I said a few more things that I guess were disrespectful, and there was more laughter. Finally, they called me a witch, like that was supposed to be a bad thing, and there was more laughing, and there was more yelling on Mr. Richer’s part. You know how these things go. A dead end.”
“A dead end,” says Mr. Taft. “So, what did you feel like you gained from this?”
I think about the question for a second. They both look at me like there’s some kind of lesson here that I should be receptive to. They look at me with expectation, like I’m going to come to some kind of realization that being laughed at made the whole thing not worth it.
“I learned that I should speak my mind no matter what the consequence.”
By the looks of their falling faces, I learned the wrong lesson.
Chapter Two
I cut up rose petals and put them in an infuser. Next, I add thyme, yarrow, cinnamon, and cloves. It smells sweet, musty, with a full floral body. I lock the infuser tight and put it in the boiling water.
The water that I am using is full moon water. It sat outside my window in a clear jar all night, soaking in the light of the full moon. I don’t always use full moon water, but I try to make some every month for use in something. It was something that Mom, Dad and I used to do together. It was the mark that another month had passed when we would gather our jars from the kitchen and fill them with water to set outside for the long night.
Like they said in class, I am a witch. But don’t jump to whatever conclusion you were about to make. When I was younger, Dad taught me that there are at least 17 different meanings for the word witch. Saying I’m a witch is an unspecific description. So if you’re disgusted, if you’re intrigued, afraid, mad—it says more about you than it does about me. You can learn a lot about someone’s upbringing, their preconceptions, and their vocabulary by their reaction to the word witch.
When I say I’m a witch, I don’t mean that I’m goth. I don’t mean that I wear purple lipstick against pale skin. I don’t wear black lace and my fingernails aren’t pierced.
I’m not a heretic, either, and I don’t worship Satan—two Biblical interpretations. To be a heretic or a Satanist means that you do in fact adhere to Christian dogma. I don’t.
The tea has to boil for 10 minutes, forcing me to listen to Dad and Teri talk in the other room. They are listening to Some Kind of Blue and drinking some kind of red wine that they’ve been into lately. They talk softly, painting murmurs over the sound of the boiling water. Dad doesn’t mention the unpleasant business at school to Teri. I think he wants her to believe that I’m still a good student. He thinks that will help us get along through this whole transition.
The tea doesn’t taste great, but I don’t cut it with cream or milk. I never cut it with cream or milk because they just aren’t part of the tea. Besides, I remember Mom telling me, it would just make more of it that I’d have to drink.
When mom was alive, we recognized Samhain as a family. We’d carve pumpkins and light them, and then decorate the whole house with them. We’d set up empty chairs with black plates and black candles lit on them and sit to eat a feast of mostly homegrown food. It was always a quiet, happy banquet with the loved ones we invited who had passed.
We kept the tradition for a few years after Mom died. Dad and I would do all the decorating together. We’d hold hands at the table, inviting Mom to join us, sit right between us. He never shed a tear at those Samhains.
I don’t know if the medications kicked in or what, but all of a sudden one year he just stopped caring .Or, he stopped pretending to care. Now he just doesn’t seem to think about Samhain. Or Wicca.
My mother was a witch. She was beautiful. She was stunning. I’ve heard more than one person describe her as bewitching. You can also use witch to call someone a hag.
I don’t know if I’m bewitching. But I’m not a hag, either.
Back in my room, I sip my tea as I draw my circle for the banishing ritual. I set up candles at the four cardinal points. I ask The Lady to be with me tonight, to protect me within my circle. I ask the forces all around me to help, to lend me their knowledge, teach me, help me grow, connect, become one. I draw the circle with my dagger; white handle, silver blade, and a cherub carved into the hilt. It was my mother’s dagger. And her mother’s. We don’t know, really, how far back it goes. But Mom once said it was hundreds of years old.
Outside the circle, I light incense. Incense has been used by more than Wiccans. Hindus, Buddhists, Catholics, and countless other belief systems use incense ceremoniously. The scent of the incense cleanses the air, keeps impurities out of the system. It wards off spirits, and awakens inner parts of you.
I’m not a magician. And I don’t have a wide-brimmed conical hat. I hate cats.
I know herbs, but I’m not a witchdoctor. I don’t practice voodoo, hoodoo or Santeria. I’m not a Celtic Druid. Or Asatru.
Two days ago, I made the incense using Dad’s old formula by grinding rosemary, cinnamon sticks, makko and sandalwood. I added sage and frankincense that I had bought from a shop down the street and mixed it all with water—river water—and made a paste. The paste I rolled into cones and then set on a window sill in the sun to dry. Dad used to spend Friday nights making incense. I still can’t get it quite as good as he does.
In Exodus 22:18, they describe a witch as an evil sorcerer. I’m not a sorcerer. I’m not a wizard in a fantasy book. I’m not Harry Potter.
I call myself a witch, and I don’t mean that I dowse for water.
Dad’s incense is to help with the meditation. To take me deeper within myself. His specialty was meditation. Yet, even that couldn’t get him out of the depression that he was in.
Mom’s tea is to help with the projection. She never told me where she got the recipe, but it’s not in our family’s grimmerie. She was great at projection, better than her mother ever was. And she taught me everything that she knew before I was 10.
But there are other parts to my solitary Samhain ceremony. I write five words on a strip of paper:
Depression.
Resentment.
Weakness.
Pain.
Fear.
Each word is representative of something I want to get rid of in my life. Each one is something that troubled me the previous year. It is a banishing list. Sort of like a reverse resolution.
The list has to be dipped in alcohol and then dropped in a black iron bowl in the center of my circle. I light the list and in a flash, the words are gone. I let this image resonate within me, hoping to banish them thoroughly.
Witch can be used as a general slur, a substitute for bitch. I can be one of those, I guess, but that’s not what I mean.
I sit down within my circle, feeling comfortable, at home. I can sense that the energy of this Samhain is right. I can feel my body agree with the night. I make another list, but this one is just in my head. I humbly ask for growth in my arts. I ask for growth in my music. I ask for self-discipline and focus in my personal life.
I don’t do banishments at the end of the Wiccan year because I have been told to. I don’t make resolutions because it is tradition. I feel the need to renew in my blood. I feel the need to move on in my bones. I know this in the same way the trees know this. The same way the rabbits know this. The same way the sun knows this.
When I say I’m a witch, I don’t mean that I was born with supernatural powers. In fact, I don’t think there’s anything supernatural about my practice of witchcraft. The idea of my witchcraft is to be close to nature. To establish rhythm and harmony between me and the natural world.
I’ve heard it called Neo-paganism. Or Earth-Centered religion. Or Animism. I’d even say that some of the connotations of the term white magick aren’t far off.
I come from a long line of witches; women who passed their beliefs, their practices, down from mother to daughter for more generations than we are aware of. It isn’t done coldly, without meaning. It is part of me. It is inherent to who I am. I must do it. I am driven to. It’s a beautiful thing, a beautiful way of life. And I suppose that’s the reason I get so upset when it is trivialized. That’s why I get angry when a teacher tells a class that there never were any witches in the first place.
It just doesn’t seem fair. It’s heartless, really, to say something like that.
I sit in the middle of the circle. The tea, I remember, is to help with the projection. I already feel light and tingly.
We are solitary practitioners; hedge witches. My mom met with a coven a couple of times, but found it to be too shallow and ritualistic. No, our relationship is with The Lady, Earth, Nature—not with other witches. But still, I know there are others. I respect others.
But I’m the last of my line. My mother died when I was 12. We’ve been in contact since then—I am a witch, after all.
While we have a family Book of Shadows, we adhere to no other scripture, books, or documents. A Bible can be torn. A Koran can decay. The Vedas can burn.
Our bible or scriptures are the wind, the rain, the trees, and the moon. The stars guide us. The seasons ebb and flow in our blood. So maybe that is why it is so easy to discount us. We don’t attract attention, when we can help it. I guess that we learned that lesson the hard way.
Now it’s time for the part of the ceremony that I look forward to all year long. I have a simple wooden flute that took me all summer to carve. I play a single note—solid and unwavering at first, then a slight vibrato. The candle light flickers with the vibrato. I feel the note in my core. I resonate with the note.
Then, when I can totally feel the note in every fiber of my body, I lower the note.
The candle light lowers. My body’s vibration lowers.
And again.
And again.
I breathe in the smell of frankincense; dark, musty, smoky.
I taste the rose petals and cinnamon.
And when the vibrations are low enough, and the candles are low enough, I step out of my body and look around.
Chapter Three
I remember my first out of body experience. I was ten and staying home sick from school with the chicken pox. My mom had drawn a bath for me and added salts (three parts geranium, one part frankincense, one part rosemary—she never did anything without telling me exactly how she did it) to cleanse and relax my body.
She had run to the store and I stayed in my bath, periodically warming it up and adding more salts. I was relaxed until near sleeping when I heard my mom’s car. At the time, I wasn’t great at the meditation stuff, but I knew, at least on an intellectual level, what it was all about. Mom had gone over what projection was, and Dad was teaching meditation workshops in the living room on the weekends. So maybe it had all sunk in all of a sudden and that’s why, without thinking, I found myself standing naked in the driveway watching my mom’s car pull in. I was embarrassed beyond belief.
My mom got out of the car and grabbed a bag of groceries. She didn’t notice me, which was more relaxing than disturbing. I followed her into the house and watched in awe as she called out to me.
“I’m home,” she said, and walked down the hall to the bathroom.
I followed and was getting panicked, as she still couldn’t see me. Standing in the doorway behind my mom, I saw myself lying in the steaming hot bath. I wasn’t afraid I was dead, because I didn’t recognize myself immediately.
We are not used to seeing our bodies in three dimensions. It is an alien experience to us. I stood there wondering who it was in the bathtub, and I was suddenly incredibly close to my own sleeping face.
I awoke with a start, pulled quickly back into my body as my mom touched my arm. The itching chicken pox were a welcome feeling.
As I stare at my body this Samhain night, I am no less astounded by what I look like from the outside. My jaw line has a soft curve from the side that looks just a bit sharp from head-on. My blonde hair pulled back behind my head looks full, while I always think of it as stringy and thin. Though I can’t see much cleavage from the front, I’m surprised my breasts are perky from the profile.
Overall, there’s a certain prettiness about me that I don’t usually see in myself. And I can chalk this up to a couple of different things. First, I’ve noticed that while you are spending time out of your body, petty insecurities and self-criticisms are left in the body; it’s just like deep meditation, where you learn that your thoughts are not you. And secondly, I’m not photogenic. I don’t look good in a two-dimensional, head-on, squashed flat vantage point. But, I seem to look fine from all around.
I think that we tend to think of ourselves in some kind of a portrait way. Most pictures that we see of ourselves are taken bust-line up from the front. We look into mirrors in the same way. We keep thinking that this picture is what we look like, while everyone else is isn’t locked into a frame in our minds.
The world is richer than the pictures I think I look like. But I don’t see the other people in my life this way. When I picture my mom, I see her from an angle below her, looking up. I see her cutting vegetables in the kitchen in full motion, while I tug at her long flowing skirt. She smiles, white teeth under pink lips. The sunlight comes through the window, changing and washing over her face in the gentle sway of the tree branches.
Or I picture her picking those vegetables from the garden. On her knees, dirt on her face, she reaches into the earth and pulls up her carrots. Her long fingers burrow holes in the soil, showing me how to replant.
Or I picture her playing cello. I’m crouched low on the hardwood floor in our living room. She’s playing a slow, strong song that I feel vibrating in the floor beneath me. Her eyes are closed, her face oscillates between a contort of pain and a soft sigh of comfort and relief, as does the music.
Pictures don’t capture this. Mirrors squash it flat under their glass feet.
I picture my dad teaching a workshop in our house. He speaks quietly, but his voice carries over the wooden floors and around the walls. He talks the same way in the classes that I used to watch him teach at the college when I was little, pacing back and forth in front of a chalkboard.
I picture my dad lying on the couch. He’s crying out in pain, like a child shoved into a grown man’s body. He begs me to find his pills in the kitchen. To pour him water. To sit with him. His rough hands hold mine. His eyes pinch out tears.
This was after Mom died. And no picture could show you the difference that I could feel in him when the medicine finally took hold.
I picture Vic with curls of smoke leaving his mouth as he looks over his shoulder, sullenly, at a coffee shop. And I try not to picture him naked, lit by candlelight.
I picture Erica with a half smile sneaking across her down-turned face. I picture her legs flexing under her skirt as she walks. I can see those same legs kicking and stomping on her bed when I shoved a needle through her nose. And I can see her smile from 180 separate degrees as she looks in the mirror gazing at her nose’s new diamond stud.
I picture Teri laughing on that same couch where Dad was crying, holding some fragrant glass of wine. Her upper lip pulls back so far that her gums are exposed when she laughs. She throws her head back and I can see every tendon and blood vessel in her elongated neck.
But we don’t see ourselves this elastically. We see ourselves as solid, unchanging people, tepid snapshots of dull and pallid lives.
Everyone should try this. Everyone should step out of their bodies and see the shell left behind as everyone else does. Everyone should see how real and solid they actually are. It should be an experience that we all go through—part of growing up, part of being a person. You have a more genuine respect for yourself after you’ve viewed your body this way. You take yourself more seriously as a functional person.
I finish ogling myself and turn to the window. It’s not quite a full moon, but I feel its pull strongly. Invigorated by the sensation, in my astral body, I run and leap into the pecan tree in our backyard.
Somewhere in the air, I have lost my body’s form and look more like the shadow of a cat—if anyone could see me. I have no definite edges or form; I change quickly like fast-motion smoke, only my center staying whole.
I crawl and leap from branch to branch, tree to tree, feeling charged by the energy of the trees and of the moon above. An ecstatic joy builds up inside me, pulsing kinetic energy that builds rather than dissipates with my movements.
I run and jump for I don’t know how long. If it’s for five minutes or for the whole night, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Energy transference from the natural world. I have practiced this method for about a year. My great-grandmother wrote extensively about the practice of it in our Book of Shadows. It is a way to commune with Nature. A way to build intent. A way to renew your energy and feel refreshed for days to come. A great way to start the new year.
I find myself blocks away from home, almost to the main drag near Mission Square before I decide to go back. And waiting on the back lawn under my window is Mom. Just like every Samhain for the past six years.
Chapter Four
“Mom,” I call to her as I come down the oak in our backyard, gaining my human form.
“Happy New Year, Abbie,” she calls back.
I always see my mom the same way since she died—beautiful and in her prime, how she looked when I was 10 years old. I never see her as the woman who was dying in a hospital bed when I was 12. Dying of a rare degenerative brain condition that was never satisfactorily diagnosed. God, how she hated hospitals. Maybe that was one of the reasons that she was a midwife.
“Abbie, you looked so beautiful up there, running like that.”
“I didn’t know you were here already, I wouldn’t have kept you waiting.”
“You’ve learned a lot and are progressing so well, Abbie. I’m very proud of you. And to think you are doing so well without me there to help you.”
While I’ve never wanted to be a midwife, I have always respected the role that my mom wanted to play in women’s lives. She wanted to be there for them during their most precious moments, to make sure that they were fully present at the birth of their children. It was a holy thing for my mother, to be there at the arrival of new life. She didn’t feel like a hospital was the right place for that.
I don’t know how I feel about that. I think I might run into a hospital with my shirt lifted up asking for the needle in the waiting room.
Mom and I sit under the stars, which shine very bright to your eyes when you’re projecting. Though I suppose we might not need it, we sit on the wrought iron bench that surrounds the oldest oak in our yard. We rarely leave the yard when we meet, which is only two or three times a year.
Tonight we talk about a lot. I think Mom can see that I’m feeling splintered. She even mentions my sleeping with Vic, which embarrasses me to no end.
“It’s okay, dear,” she assures me. “It’s normal to feel lost at times. It’s normal to act out. It’s normal to feel like a singularity. You should really consider talking to Dad more about his kind of thing.”
“He’s been busy lately. I talked to him more in the counselor’s office the other day than I had in months.” Suddenly I felt colder. I don’t want to talk to Mom about all this stuff. I want to bury my head in her chest and sob for a while. But I just stay kind of silent.