Myth Woodling: How and Why I Became a Pagan

I was “loosely raised Episcopalian” but “married Methodist.”

This answer usually confuses the inquirer enough to get them to drop this line of questioning.

If they persist, I can always add in that my mother was an ex-Catholic or Apostate…and my Father was an Agnostic (Relaxed Agnostic, meaning he didn’t know and he didn’t care and he didn’t think it was worth worrying about.)

The Christian churches we (my biological family) attended at different times and locations seemed to focus on how much we owed Jesus for dying on the cross for us, and we (all of humanity) had to pray constantly for his forgiveness. Because we could never be worthy of salvation in our own right.

And it all had to do with Eve and Adam and the fruit of Knowledge.

That seemed awfully unfair to me at somewhere in my years of age 7 to 13.

In the meantime, my parents sent me to Catholic school—because in the public elementary school, I was constantly hit, picked on, and bullied because I was a skinny little thing.

Say what you will, but the Nuns and Catholic school teachers did not allow me to be bullied nor picked on.

Oh, by the way, I was dyslexic too. However, my mother wouldn’t accept the dyslexia. Her children were genetically perfect. No learning disabilities were permitted.

Yet, I did love poetry and mythology. I remember reading The World Is Too Much With Us, which had the the phrase: “I’d rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn…”

I decided that I did want to be a Pagan. I wanted to do Magick. I wanted to effect positive change in portions of my life. I wanted to honor Mother Gaia and her son, Pan. Basically, I took a religious path less traveled by and THAT has made all the difference.

The World Is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.