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You may have been wondering who it is who is writing these posts. Let me tell you a bit about the person on the other side of the screen. This will be the first in a series of five posts detailing my past and how I came to write this blog.
I come from a rather diverse background when it comes to ideology. Mom came from a conservative Christian background. Dad had made a study of many different religions and was a practicing Wiccan. I discovered this one evening when I heard things after I went to bed. I woke to hear my dad talking and, being rather a rather curious kid, went to investigate. I found Mom and Dad in the circle, and they gently explained to me what was going on (an observance of the full moon). Unbeknownst to me at the time, Mom was giving an alternative religion a try because she had always been very psychic, and was easily able to discern the presence of ghosts and so forth. This wouldn’t have mattered to me at the time. From that point on I was included in the circle and that was enough for me.
As I mentioned before, I was rather inquisitive as a child. I was always taking things apart to see how they work. From an early age, machines and mechanical objects had a tendency to do what I wanted them to do: Oftentimes I would just “monkey” with something and it would start working for me, even if I didn’t understand it’s method of operation. This fascination would and will continue for the rest of my life.
One night while I was sleeping, I was awoken by my parents, who brought me into the living room. Mom had a flourite crystal in each hand. She said that one of them was her friend, and one of them was my friend. She wanted me to put out my hand and find mine. I did as she said. I closed my eyes and paid attention to what my hand felt like over each one. It took me a minute or two, but eventually I knew which one was mine and which was hers. I picked it up and was very glad to be told that I had chosen correctly, this stone was mine.
Some years later, I started getting occasional nightmares. My parents taught me a technique to use when falling asleep and if I awoke in the night to keep them at bay. It worked rather effectively.
I was rather unpopular as a young child, simply because I was very different from the other kids, and as we all know that is a serious crime at that age. My bullies over the course of years of harassment and beatings convinced me that I was a scrawny weakling. This was not actually the case, but for me it became a truth and that only made me unable to resist further harassment and beatings from the bullies. Though painful at the time, this would serve for many lessons later in life.
As I neared my teenage years I started wondering why religion was a carefully avoided topic in public, or even with some friends of the family (this was the late 80s. It was not a good idea to let anyone know you were Wiccan at the time).
We had an Atari computer at the time and Dad explained to me that just as there are different programming languages, so too are there different ways of connecting to the Divine. He explained that both do much the same thing in much the same way. Some favor one, some favor the other. The problem facing us was the belief in some that one way is the only way.
This was to be a larger problem than I thought.
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(Thanks to sofi73 for the image.)
