Season and Spirit: Magickal Adventures Around the Wheel of the Year

The Wheel of the Year is the engine that drives NeoPagan practice. Explore thw magick of the season beyond the Eight Great Sabbats.

  • Home
    Home This is where you can find all the blog posts throughout the site.
  • Tags
    Tags Displays a list of tags that have been used in the blog.
  • Bloggers
    Bloggers Search for your favorite blogger from this site.
  • Login
    Login Login form

Pagan Dharma 3: Love and Pleasure, and the Absence of Both

For the first time in 4 years, my rose bush is blooming.

After years of not blooming, I was pretty shocked, one morning in late May, to go into the back yard and notice that the rose bush was covered in hundreds of tight green buds. A few weeks later, the roses—small red ones—began to open, just a few at first, then more every day, until the whole thing is livid with scarlet petals and crawling with bees. Every few days, I cut off some of open blooms, and put them in water, but there are always more every morning. Every morning the cool air in the garden smells of roses, the apple trees and cottonwoods are damp with dew, birds are trilling and flitting between the branches. It's sweet and luscious, this moment as the day is beginning, in those sweet weeks as Spring ebbs into Summer. The world is beautiful, the weather is beautiful, the world is throbbing with life. Every cell is full of pleasure and joy, the world vibrates with it.

Paganism places a high priority on an array of values that are devalued by the over-culture. When we quote the Charge and say, “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals,” this is neither hyperbole or wishful thinking or an empty platitude. Sexuality and its pleasures are sacred, and not merely because procreation is privileged in the fertility cults. Love as a moral force is asserted by many religions, including those responsible for unspeakable violence. So why do Pagans claim for ourselves as an innate human need, and a human right, pleasure in its many guises?

Our spirituality is embodied. It is not abstract, or theoretical, and it is not removed from the messy, untidy business of our actual human lives. Pagan spirituality does not just operate when we are at our best, our most enlightened, sparkly selves. No matter how much we work for it, or plan for it, no matter how much practice we do, how much time we spend on the mat, how many rituals and meditations we do—our lives contain frustrations, limits, obligations. We miss the bus or misplace our phone. We eat things we know we shouldn't, and skip the workout. We avoid our Shadows, and deny the empty spaces inside, that we may try and fill with any number of distractions and substitutes. These are places where we may feel disconnected and not in alignment with our intentions; these are also the places where we can witness ourselves, where we can ask for help, where we can perceive the hand of the Divine latching on. Rather than liberating us from the world, and from our own humanness, we are brought back into a conscious relationship and engagement with every piece of our life, every part of our self. And the means by which all of this reveals its secrets, is through our sensory experience, our emotional and etheric bodies, our desires and fears and everything in between.

The ability to see the Divine manifest in the world, not separate from it, is a short step from being able to recognize the Divine spark in everything that lives, in the connections we make with those we love. Beyond that, it allows to see beyond the illusion of separation, that keeps human beings locked in cycles of oppression and distrust, and encourages us to fear and hate others. In this worldview, it becomes very easy to make distinctions about who or what is worthy, acceptable, and who or what is not. It becomes easy to dehumanize people, to declare individuals or groups dangerous or degraded, to deny that the divine spark burns in those different than ourselves. It becomes easy to withhold empathy from those we have been encouraged to look down upon, and to shrug off their suffering if it doesn't effect us directly. When pleasure and connection are considered positive values on their own, a shift happens in our thinking, as we consider the suffering of others not as the way of the world, but as something that can, and should, be eased.

So even when I'm cutting my roses, there is a pall of sorrow, of grief and anguish and anger, that is not normally associated with the lush, sweet days of Midsummer. But the ways in which love and pleasure are constrained, suppressed, and vilified, the ways in which empathy and kindness have less place in our shared culture, all of that creates suffering and violence, it burdens us with sorrow and helplessness. Again and again, we are confronted with failures of empathy and humanity that shake us breathless. The white supremacist shooter in the Black church, the angry misogynist, the unapologetic rapist who refuses to acknowledge his victim's suffering, the armed “lunatics” with their weaponized alienation—again and again we confront the ways in which doctrines of separation, doctrines that demonize the most vulnerable people and offer up them as scapegoats, will erupt violently to injure or kill. We confront the ways in which we are all of us at risk, but some parts of beloved community are at greater risk than others. We confront the ways safety and security are lacking, the ways the protections and care that are part of our social contract are not extended to everyone, the ways in which our failures of empathy and compassion cause suffering. We are, more than ever, encouraged to draw lines, who deserves our compassion and who doesn't, who is credible enough to be believed, whose bright future is worth protecting and who is expendable. In this way, our love, our care, our pleasures, are weighed as unimportant. We see the wreckage from this bankruptcy every day.

 

As we celebrate the Summer Solstice, and bask in that joy and pleasure, let us remember all the ways in which our vulnerable selves, so fragile and sacred, are at risk. And that we have the power in any moment, to increase or decrease someone's suffering.  

Last modified on
Tagged in: Summer Solstice
Leni Hester is a Witch and writer from Denver, Colorado. Her work appears in the Immanion anthologies "Pop Culture Grimoire," "Women's Voices in Magick" and "Manifesting Prosperity". She is a frequent contributor to Witches and Pagans and Sagewoman Magazines.

Comments

Additional information