A year and a day

I have waited since last summer for admission to a Wicca internet class, and was finally accepted. I signed a contract on June 30 to be a student “for a year and a day,” to complete assignments on time, and to send $20 to my teacher (Wiccans—at least these Wiccans—don’t accept payment, but a token gift is required). There are five students, four mentors, and the teacher. We have weekly assignments, a newsgroup, meetings on mIRC, and a great deal of personal attention. Much is given and much is expected. So much that I am quite overwhelmed, but also quite delighted. It is a new and strange world, and I look forward to learning more about it. Here is a part of my application form.

1) How do you define your religion/spirituality?

I feel spiritual mostly when I am in the woods or some other purely natural setting. I do not believe in supernatural entities, yet I am often drawn to particular objects (rocks, trees, colors, smells, locations) with trust and affection. I would like to think that the affection of which I speak is returned, but I doubt that it is. I also feel myself to be immortal, but again my feeling is in conflict with my intellect. Likewise, I suspect that awareness pervades the universe, but I see no evidence for this either. If something does not make intellectual sense to me, I cannot embrace it consistently.

2) What led you to your religion?

The desire to believe that the universe is not indifferent. I want to feel permanently and deeply connected to what is as opposed to feeling like an ephemeral being that doesn’t matter. Do I then get these things from my religion? No. What I do get is a sense of overwhelming, and, at times, excruciating, wonder. These are not feelings that I seek out but feelings that come to me naturally. As to the other things (like believing in connectedness or purpose), I don’t really know what these things mean much less whether they are true.

3) What are your strengths?

I am a good writer and handyman, and possess a fair amount of knowledge about a variety of things. I am also good with dogs, resourceful, sentimental, gentle, frugal, orderly, humorous, personally and domestically clean, consistent in my affections, thoughtful in small ways, and willing to do what must be done.

4) What are your weak points?

I am prone to loneliness, depression, feelings of futility, and obsessing about things that scare or anger me.

5) Does your immediate family share your religious beliefs? If not, what are their beliefs?

My wife has no religious beliefs. She gives religion too little thought to even qualify as a theist, atheist, or agnostic. I have never known her to be different, although she was brought up a strict Southern Baptist.

6) How do they feel about your being a witch?

I have belonged to four churches, was a non-resident editor for American Atheist, and briefly attended the local Self-Realization Fellowship, so she would neither be surprised, nor would she expect me to stay with it. She would consider it one of my weirder attempts at what might be called a religious affiliation, but she would not give me a hard time about it.

7) Are you ‘in’ or 'out' regarding your religious beliefs? To what degree?

I would talk about my religion if asked, but no one asks. My experience is that the older people become, the less likely they are to discuss religion. I am an active Freemason and an Odd Fellow, and most of the people I spend time with are in those fraternities. A belief in God is required, but the term is undefined, and not considered a proper topic for discussion at lodge events.

8) Is there anything else you think we should know about you?

I consider all forms of divination as things that might be interesting to study, but not as things to be taken seriously. I do not believe that spirits can be called into a circle because I do not believe that spirits exist. I would interpret such things as meaningful contemplatively, psychologically, and socially. By way of comparison, I would offer that I feel very positively about the religious aspects of my lodge memberships, although I am aware that my actual beliefs differ greatly from those of my fellows.

My lodges give me permission to define my beliefs for myself, and this makes it possible for me to worship with a completeness that I could not feel within the context of a group in which well-defined beliefs were required. I can feel connected to both my lodge brothers and sisters and to WHATEVER IS without having to worry about whether my beliefs are so different that I don’t belong. If I can do as much within this class, I am likely to prosper.

My conclusion about god is simply that he does not exist, at least not as a conscious, purposeful, caring entity. Despite this, I believe in something that might be called a higher power. Call it energy, beauty, love, or whatever; I cannot completely let go of the notion that there is something greater than we of which we are a part. I mean by this that we are of it rather than it being of us. It is the ocean, and we are the droplets, and I take some little comfort in that.

Synvisc

I had my second injection of Synvisc today, a lubricating fluid that is injected into the middle of theknee from just below and a little to the outside of the kneecap. I get three shots, seven days apart, and they are supposed to relieve the pain for six months. I’ve never had a doctor do anything that hurt half so much as to stick that long needle into my knee. I don’t flinch or even stop asking questions during the injection (she’s in and out of the room in the time it takes to stick me, so I have to take advantage of every second), but if the pain were any greater, I would have cried.

Peggy has a new bike, a hybrid between a street bike and a mountain bike. We took it and my bike to the mountains Wednesday, and rode nine miles on a gravel road while the dogs ran alongside. My hands tingled for the next three days. Yesterday I was unable to hold a glass of water.

I feel like I’ve aged twenty years since my surgery in February. I always thought I would hold up at least as well as my father—who could put in a hard day’s work in his mid-seventies. Maybe I got some bad genes from my mother.

Sleeping with magnets

I slept with hardware store magnets wrapped around my knee for the past three nights. I read that magnets might alleviate the pain and swelling, but the relief is more marked than I could have hoped for. Since the swelling is as grotesque as ever, I suspect a placebo effect, yet I should think that a placebo effect would require that I be deluded, but how can I be deluded when I can see the swelling in my knee and fully expect it to hurt?

Dream friends

Twice lately, in my dreams, I created friends who I knew would disappear when I awakened. Each time, I held them tightly and said, “You are real here, but when I wake up, it will be to a world in which you have no reality. There will be no house in which I can visit you; there will be no grave to mark a life that used to be; and there will be no one else on the whole earth who has any memory of you.” The thought that they were imaginary wrecked me because where can a better friend be found than in one’s dreams? For their part, they accepted their fate, telling me that they could not leave me because they came from me, and were me.

I knew this was true, but I wanted more. I wanted to see and touch and hold them, and the wrinkled face that met me in the bathroom mirror did not remind me either of myself or of them. The dream was the reality, and the face was the alien. Or so I wished it to be. In reality, I knew that the face was a constant (or at least as constant as anything in my life), and that the dream creatures were so ephemeral that I could not even count upon seeing the same one twice.

My last dream friend was a blind man. The previous day, I had consoled myself about my knee problem with the thought that things could be worse—I could be blind. That night, in my dream, a blind man took me by the hand and led me through many dangers. He could do this because he saw by wisdom while I only had physical eyes.

Oh, but I look so old when I get up! The face that first greets me looks ten years older than my normal face, which means that it will my normal face ten years from now. The years roll on despite my protest and disbelief. Only yesterday, I was a boy. Now that boy is like a recently remembered dream person who I can almost reach out and touch, but not quite because we are separated by realms rather than miles. It’s as though he exists in an overlapping universe that I can only see from the corner of my eye. When I was that boy, old people said life would be this way, but no boy would have believed them. If an old man appears wise, it might be because that is the only respectable role left to him; so it is to wisdom I aspire.