In response to the question, ‘how did you become a Pagan, and what does it mean to you?’:

In many ways I believe that I have always been spiritually Pagan. While my parents, “home Catholics”, tried to expose me to organized Catholicism as a child, by the age of 5 I had convinced them that church wasn’t for me. By the age of 8, after watching lots and lots of PBS (Nature and Nova) I had well thought out and eloquent arguments as to why I was an Atheist. Strangely enough, I was still experiencing spirituality in my personal life.

As a child and a teen, living out in the country without access to like minded individuals, themed reading material, or the Internet, I still had a complex and satisfying spiritual life. I didn’t know that you could reject Christianity as your own personal path (God) and still be “spiritual”, but I was living it. I remember once when I was a senior in high school, the Witnesses came to call. I didn’t let them in the house because they were strangers, but I had a nice long conversation with them on the upstairs porch. “Don’t you want to know God” they asked. I replied, “when I stand here in the dark, and the wind moves my hair, and the night is so perfect and powerful that I feel like I can step off and fly… that is my God. The trees, the earth, the sky and all the stars in it, those are my Gods”. Then I knew what I was feeling was my personal path. They were perplexed that nothing they could say or put in my hands could shake that peaceful confidence.

Shortly after graduation the world opened up. I had access to the Internet, and the freedom to go where I wanted. I found a coven, and while it didn’t end well, I learned a lot. I have been a Pagan for 13 years now (I’m 31), and I am content with it. From time to time, especially in my early 20’s, I yearned to coven, and it bothered me how secretive and protective many groups are. A part of me felt that to really “be” a Pagan, I had to pick a named Path and coven, otherwise I was missing out. Thankfully, many of my friends are Pagans of varying stripes, and I am lucky to have them.

Since then I’ve learned that my relationship with Deity (Lord & Lady) is enough as it is. When I feel like my skin is too small for my body, and I’m on fire with the need to create, we are at peace. When I step onto my porch and am compelled to be still and open to the night and the wind whispers around me, we are together. And when I photograph the light, the plants and creatures, the land around me, I know that there is no other Path for me, and that I am loved. My Path has roots in no one culture, and no one holy book. It lives and grows inside of me.

My beliefs are always slowly changing and growing, and like many other Solitaries out there, I don’t fit in a box. There are times I don’t believe in a conscious Deity, but I believe in the power that archetypes hold over the human mind and heart. Then again, there are times when I have been in need, dreamed of the Goddess and have gained wisdom… and I open myself to the idea that They are manifest.

These things I know to be true: Paganism, by and large, has never told me that I am less because I am a woman. Paganism has encouraged me to believe that I was born full of potential and with a clean slate, that my choices are my own to make, and that I own the resulting consequences. Paganism has taught me to respect all paths and people who hold true free will and respect at their cores. Paganism has run true to my inherent belief that the earth around me is more than just rock and water, that it holds the potential for magick and mystery, if only because that is what it inspires in me. Paganism has taught me that all acts of love are sacred, and that while evil may exist within us, that we are not beholden to it. Paganism has taught me that I am powerful, full of a great and terrible beauty, as are we all.

I still have a lot to learn, and I know that I’ll never be done with the learning of it. Truthfully, I’m content in that. Those who love me know that I am still their little girl, their friend, their lover, and I am blessed in that acceptance.

I have a strange memory. I can remember things from when I was on the far side of toddler age, and yet, during the height of my depression there were times when I’d disassociate so badly that I’d lose whole days like sand through a sieve. I remember things I wish I could forget and have forgotten things I’d give anything to remember. Just as things were just starting to get black around the edges (I would have been only just sixteen) I remember lounging in my friend Carol’s bedroom, one lazy summer day in 1994. I was visiting for a long weekend at her home in Newburgh, New York and glad to be away from my own one horse town. As most kids my age did then, before the ubiquitous Internet hookup and despite her having cable and my own home not, I was reading her recent copy of Seventeen. Flip, flip, flip… pages of useless trash depicting ads of women who were thinner than I’d ever been and clothes I couldn’t have afforded in my wildest dream. The only thing that was even remotely interesting was the section on upcoming books, movies and music. I scanned, barely even paying attention.

You’ve read those reviews yourself, just because it was a teen magazine doesn’t mean that it was any less a.) gushing, or b.) deliberately snooty as a rule than any other collection of reviewers. I really can’t tell you why this particular review caught my eye more than any other, it was only a short collection of sentences and a tiny thumbnail picture, just like all the rest. The picture showed a man who looked like every other grunge rocker of the time, perhaps slightly better dressed, but just as scruffy. He clutched an old fashioned microphone in his hand and his face was bowed away from the camera. It wasn’t his picture that caught me so much as the way the reviewer described the album. I can’t tell you now, thirteen years later, what they said, only that there was a naked passion to the way his music had obviously touched the writer. Why I, a cash-strapped teen, should feel suddenly compelled to fork what little I had over on a complete no-name crooner is beyond me, but that I did when we took a trip to the mall the next day.

I practically wore that cassette tape out. I played it over and over again, struck dumb at first at the raw emotion recorded on that thin brown ribbon of tape. Play, rewind, play, rewind. One song in particular was in danger of wearing through. I didn’t know that it was a cover, I only found that out years later, from my father of all people (who has very limited American cultural references before a certain age), not that I cared then or care now. I used to carry around my Walkman every where I went and I’d sit in the darkroom at school and surround myself by that red glow and his angelic voice. It was seven minutes of escape, seven minutes when I was utterly transported and all that mattered was a darkness I’d chosen, and the sound of his voice. I’d try and match him note for note but there was no way I could hold a note as long as that man could. He could draw it out to it’s shivering end, long after I’d run out of breath. I’d force other kids, people who were barely friendly to me, to listen to his song. I’m surprised I wasn’t teased about it, they were probably freaked out. While the tape is long gone, I’d (illegally) downloaded the song a few years ago and then lost it again.

Two days ago I had one of my mental zig-zag moments that ended with the intense desire to download the entire album off of iTunes, instant gratification at it’s finest. God… pressing play was like pressing hard on an old wound, one that never quite stopped aching somewhere deep inside. Every time I hear that song I’m taken back in time, to that darkroom, to complete and utter silence where only his voice filled the darkness behind my eyes. Listening to him sing is like taking out a photograph of a dead lover, long gone but still possessing the power to move you to tears though you’ve very much moved on. It has that bittersweet ache and I’m sixteen all over again. I listen and close my eyes, I listen and I raise my voice in time with his. I watched the video and I’m reminded how sweetly he gave his heart to me, to everyone.

Summer of 2007 marked the ten year anniversary of his death and I’m not surprised I’ve been thinking about his music more and more subconsciously. I’ve always said that drowning’s not a bad way to go, having been mostly there myself once. I only wish this video was sung the same way as the studio recording. While passionate and sweet, it lacks that breath at the beginning that makes me close my eyes and remember, every single time. I miss you Jeff.

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I breathe, deeply, letting the air rush from my lungs in an almost gasp, and I stay silent. My jaw clenches in an effort to hold back the tirade that surges against my teeth like a tidal wave, sharp and salty, it stings. Sometimes, when I’m almost sure I’ll burst because I can’t stand it anymore, a fine tremor shivers through the inside of me and my eyes close in slow motion. It’s exaggerated, that slowness. Like counting to ten while wishing away the monsters under your bed, maybe when I finally open them again you’ll have disappeared. Vanished into thin air like a bad dream, leaving behind only a racing heart and a fading feeling of unease. I should be so lucky.

Fate placed us side by side, surely no choice of mine. When you set up your nest next to mine I knew it was ill fortuned, but what could I do? Mine is not the choice to make, such things are decided by more powerful people than I. Your proximity is dangerous, and it eats at me daily. You burn, every day, simmering with the poison of your lifetime’s choices and their deadly by-blows that multiply as demented rabbits. How can it be that you don’t hear yourself, how you sound, venom dripping from your lips, anger and frustration shimmering off you like a haze, every – single – day. Is that why you walk so quickly, talk so quickly? Are you, like a shark, in constant motion by sheer necessity? For surely such high metabolism is the only thing that keeps that poison from eating you alive, you have to eat it first. Stillness might very well mean death, but you’re dying anyway, wasting away to taut skin over brittle bones.

My skin crawls with the nearness of it, your poison leaking over the meager barrier between us and hissing as it trickles in through my ears. Slowly that venom has seeped its way inside of me, settling into my brain and heart like a secret well of dark and bitterly scented hate. It gathers there, quietly, drop by drop it grows deeper and more fathomless in every way. Dark things have taken up residence there. Moving silently beneath the surface they are blind eyed and sharp toothed. I am exquisitely aware of what your poison is doing to me. I am overcome by a feeling of helplessness when I feel those dark things stir in me, rising up towards the surface, drawn to your endless ichor and clamoring to reach daylight.

A better person would ignore you, set up some sort of metaphysical barrier, a shield that would protect me from your contagion. I would be able to virtually stopper my ears, but for that we needs work together, you and I. I could look on you with pity and move on. Move on, or make peace. A stronger person would be untouched. A kinder person would feel compassion. A wiser person would rationalize. I am not that person. I am the person who came to realize one bright summer morning that if I found out you were dead by some grace of god or happenstance, I would breathe a sigh of relief. I can already imagine the weight lifting from my heart in grateful freedom. The truth hit me, unblinking and naked in its honesty, and who am I to call it ugly or unkind? I didn’t ask for any of this.

I pray for grace to wash me clean of you and call it kindness that I might not become you instead.

When you’re young, it’s almost a prerequisite that you dream. You build imaginary castles and kingdoms in your backyard, fight monsters in the woods, and consort with fae creatures of every stripe. Most children are allowed at least a few precious years to be silly, be free, be all that you can be. How many of us know exactly what we wanted to be “when I grow up”? I knew a girl who’s dream changed several times a year and I still wonder what she finally ended up deciding on. What happens to so many of us that we lose the luxury of dreams? What hard choices do we make to survive that sometimes leave us with no good choices at all? Somewhere between hopeful child and barely adult a chain reaction of decisions and events coalesce into The Right Thing To Do. During that journey many things get lost along the way. For quite a few of us, those things are our dreams.

It’s a funny thing, how something so integral can be so quickly put away. When need demands it the deed is done in a timely manner, part of the process of coping and making ends meet. And yet, not so long ago, a passion burned inside your heart, with the fire of a thousand suns. You loved to do something, you wanted to be something, something that gave you joy and peace. Stoppered with cork, sealed with tape, locked away in a dusty closet; a quiet ember still glows, you can be sure of it. Do you remember your passion? Does your day to day allow for expression and growth, or does it stifle you with ‘mommy mommy mommy’ and ‘honey, can you’? Do you even bother anymore?

People like us, people like you and me, it seems like we’re not allowed the luxury to dream or create. As if the hardworking every-man, is believed cowed by lack of profitability and therefore immune to a desire for anything more than simple creature comforts. Much like the church once viewed peasants of being incapable of needing, or even wanting, anything more than their hand to mouth existence. Obviously, if you didn’t make the effort to go to college, then you couldn’t possibly want anything more. There is an arrogance to so casually writing off of a person’s dreams, needs, and situations, that staggers me. Worse yet, we feed that assumption. Sedated by television and computers, our eyes stare barely blinking at flickering lights delivering sex, gossip, and violence, cheap vicarious thrills that merely paper over the holes in our souls left by grim compromise. And yet we lament, ‘I have no time’! We rush from one hour to the next until we fall asleep exhausted, perhaps thinking we can make up by doing too much for what we aren’t doing enough of.

I may spend the rest of my life working for someone else, starting my day when they tell me to, coming home after they’re done with me, but the rest of my life is mine. I may spend 2/3’s of my life asleep or working, but the rest I protect fiercely. I set aside, any which way I can, time to do that which fills me with fire. My fingers make needles dance, fingers flying as I craft objects from miles of luxurious string. I use my hands to tease wool into a tightly twisted new form, and mix poisonous dyes to paint brilliant swathes of color on waiting bundles of yarn. I carry my camera with me everywhere, ready in seconds to capture a moment in time, candid studies of everyday beauty. I make lifestyle choices that allow me the time, because without these things, these precursors to my dream, I would slowly become numb and die inside. I may never realize my dream of owning my own shop, or be employed doing exactly what I love for a living, but I make damned sure that what I do on the clock is only so much what I do so I can afford to do the things I love.

It’s never too late to find or rediscover the fire inside yourself, no matter how young or old you are. We each have something inside of us that can lift us out of the every day and make our spirits sing. Do yourself a favor and take the time to dream.

Do you believe in magic? Do you believe that it is possible to transport oneself out of the ordinary and into realms untold? That one can visit a past now moldering and decayed, and see it gleaming as if not a moment had elapsed? Do you believe that the future isn’t something that happens to someone else far from now, but is instead something to be explored here, and now? What about angels, and demons? How then monsters and heroes, queens and rogues? Deadly secrets, sacred texts, and pirates. What about pirates?

I believe that all these things are imminently possible, and in fact I dare you to deny it. I dare you to prove that I don’t experience every single one of these things, and more, within the course of a month. Magic, mystery, and wonder are afoot. Right here, right now, I’ll tell you a story.

Tell us a story, that ageless request, as old as humanity itself. Gathered together after a long day of the required survival tasks, early humans faced each other across a fire pit and together they contemplated the dark and all the forces within it. The women held their babies close and eyes shifted towards the night, blinded by fire, that impenetrable darkness must have surely seemed limitless in it’s vastness. The men would have struggled not to grip their weapons a little tighter at the call of something wild and hungry. It is left to the storyteller, the repository of all known myth and legend to lift them out of themselves. His job, both sacred and practical, to take the unknown and unknowable and make them real would be safeguarded for thousands of years. He was holy, the living history of an oral people.

So moving is the urge to record and share the stories of our lives and the legends of our peoples that eventually ideas became symbols, and symbols became words. A secret language known only to the elite few, written first on stone, then tablets, papyrus, and parchment. The power in the written word and its ability to transcend the every day long after the writer is gone is epic. Books written before the birth of Christ are still read to this day, held up as magnificent examples of ancient literature. Even then, the hero got the girl, even if it took him a really long time. It is said that the burning of the Library at Alexandria set back the intellectual evolution of man centuries, if not more. Enter the Dark Ages and behold the power of the written word and collected knowledge.

The course of human history changed forever when words were made cheap. No longer was book learning the pursuit of only the rich. Now the common man, if not the peasant, could afford the textual pleasure of the turned page. The press brought the word of the Lord and every other Tom, Dick, and Harry to the world. Politics, literature, current events and how they were reported, all trembled with the promise of seemingly instantaneous content. Such power, words in the form of books. Power both dangerous and heady, that would both inflame dark hearts and uplift the purity of the human soul.

Tell us a story, and so they did. They told tales rife with flowery prose, delicate and genteel. Tales fit for kings and tales for paupers. Stories written for the every man, full of hard knocks and hope that things could be different. Stories to delight and mystify, with heroes to whom no mystery was too obscure. The people were entertained as never before, but it didn’t stop there. Words were powerful beyond the ability to awe, the written word could also change the world. Tracts on religion, politics, and morality all flooded the civilized world, food good or evil, and couched as truth. At least some of them found a home, like intellectual darts, inside the hearts and minds of people who’s paradigm might now suddenly… shift. Books are banned for a reason, spiteful and fearful though that reason may be. Books can be dangerous, and a single story can shape nations.

And so, we return to the ability of the written word help us transcend our singular selves into something more, to places we’ve never been but might like to someday. We give of ourselves to people, places, and times we’ve never seen but are so real that for those moments we are lost, and happily so. Books, stories, give us worlds to explore and other people’s lifetimes to do it in. For the span of a few minutes, hours, or a day, we are expanded beyond ourselves. Our histories are now not only our own, but everyone’s, anyone’s, and they reach past the dawn of man as far back as science will take us. Our futures are limitless, terrible and wonderful. From cover to cover we uncover fantastical tapestries woven for the pure delight of young and old.

My challenge to you is this: turn off your talking heads and glowing screens. Unplug your fingers from plastic keys and remotes, and step away. Do something radical, something dangerous. Turn the page and see what lies around the bend and beyond the horizon.

The dictionary defines love as:

1. A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.

2. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.

3. A person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction; beloved.

Sounds good to me! Personally, I can’t find anything wrong with that, and I’m guessing that you don’t either. Or do you?

Take away all the frills, the songs, movies, and books, and what you have left are those simple definitions. Aside from the dizzying expectations, healthy or not, the core of love is very simple and ageless. While love is primal, (and fundamentally chemical I’m told), it is, and always has been, governed by what even our earliest societies considered “normal”. Normal is such a loaded word, shaped by politics, religion, and general cultures. One can only wonder at what is or was considered normal at any given time. Normal to ancient Pharoes was marrying your sister, for what it’s worth.

If you’re old enough to be my parent then your parents may remember when it was unthinkable for a white to marry a “person of color”. If you’re my parents age, you may remember, though you would have been only a child at the time, how in 1967 it was made illegal to prohibit interracial marriage in the United States. And while no one my age could imagine things any other way, it wasn’t until the year 2000 that Alabama finally removed their constitutional law stating: “The Legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or a descendant of a Negro”.

Ummm… hello? Negro? I don’t know what scares me more, the fact that the law was on the books that long, or the fact that, when polled, only 64% of Alabama State residents felt the law should be removed at all. What a hateful legacy, and apparently one that quite a few people are quite all right with, even to this day. The times may change, but very slowly. They change, yes, but there is always someone else to hate, and love to damn. We give them titles and labels that polarize a people immune to caring into zealots of purity and tradition. Now we say faggot-gay-homosexual with the same deliciously evil fire that we used to say… well, I won’t go there. Names have power you know and I won’t feed that fire.

Oh, how that fire rages. While most of us may not be bothered by Sapphic love, gay love, there are bastions of power, institutions of learning and faith, who feed that fire with an unholy (and thoroughly unseemly) glee. Individuals, just like your boss, your coworkers, your brother, your mother… yourself? They burn the faceless ‘deviant’ with the surety of an unyielding faith based hate, and for what? What do we gain? I’ve heard children spout the most vile filth, filth they hear from adults who should know better, and it’s so safely couched in religious truth. Little mouths spewing poison, sanctioned by “God”. Forget what the bible says, forget those words of man. Jesus loved everyone, thieves, whores, and the righteous alike. What sin, love?

I have to be honest. I couldn’t give a crap what two consenting adults do in their bedroom. I couldn’t care less whether or not they hold hands in public, get married, or have kids. I am no less uncomfortable with gay PDA’s than I am with two straight teens thinking tonsil hockey is the next big thing. Everyone, get a room! I really don’t care who you have sex with over the age of 18, or how you do it, as long as you do it with a condom. I don’t care if you bake yourself an apple pie Aphrodite and do obscene things with Cool Whip! Knock yourself out! I really… don’t… care.

You know what I care about? I care about the fact that 39.5 million people are living with AIDS every day, and that those numbers rose for the last two years in every region in the world, including our own. I care about that fact that every six seconds someone dies because of it. I care about the fact that 200,000 people a year, (mostly women), are raped in the United States and that 44% of them are children under 18. I care about the fact that the national deficit is 8.8 TRILLION dollars. I care about the fact that nearly 46 million people have no health insurance and many are suffering from things they can’t afford to treat, in this, the most wealthy and powerful nation in the world.

These are the kinds of things I care about.

I don’t think I can stress enough how there are so many more important things to worry about than how people love each other. Just love each other. Love with your whole heart. Love like there may not be a tomorrow. Love your neighbor, hell, I’d settle for you introducing yourself to your neighbor. Love like it’s going out of style, like you and the person you love are the last two people on earth. Tell your parents you love them, tell your kids. Tell someone you haven’t told in a long time. Tell someone who doesn’t know it yet. Be a part of something beautiful, something positive, something other than hate, hellfire and damnation. I ask again, what sin, real sin, the kind that actually matters, is love?

Ever since I was a child I would play a game with summer. I would attempt, through sheer force of will, to keep the trees green indefinitely. Each day the leaves were green was one more day before Autumn would come and I could hold back the dark a little bit longer. Each leaf a talisman against the slow decline of mind and soul, fragile tokens of reprieve, transient and finite. There is power in the green and growing things, even a child knew that. But even as a child, I had long ago figured out that everything dies, and if I wasn’t careful, I would too… sooner rather than later. The only question was, was that such a bad idea?

I started out a bright child, both in mind and spirit. I wasn’t always so dark, though it wasn’t long before that wasn’t the case anymore. A new home, a new school, and suddenly everything changed. Suddenly my enthusiasm was unwelcome, and my love of learning marked me as different. A naturally gregarious child, I was left with nowhere, no one to turn to, and all that intense energy focused inward. My light grew dim, shuttered, defensively protected. Summer was heaven, freedom from the expectations and malicious glee of my peers, I could just be.

Barely a year or two passed before something inside started to twist. As autumn approached internally and externally my world would inevitably narrow down to the singular focus of survival. Each day that passed I would pray to the trees, to summer, and beg that autumn would never come. I would pray that I wouldn’t have to choose between making it through the day and breaking down in front of the hobgoblins I’m told were my classmates. I would pray that the slippery slope into the dark wasn’t quite so easy, or quite so welcome. The enemy wasn’t just the gauntlet like halls of education, now the enemy was me.

There’s a moment when you realize that you’re broken, and you have to make order of the pieces that are left. A moment when you realize that you’re not quite right anymore, lost perhaps, and you have no idea how to find your way out of that forest alone. What then when the forest becomes your home? What then when you look around and find yourself comfortable in some weird way, all alone and neither loving, nor hating it.

It’s a strange thing to love something, and yet dread it all the same. Regardless of everything, I’ve always loved the fall, that slow burn of a season, where passion and dreams go to die. It reminds me of a dying woman who has decided that she will live life to the fullest, that she will have that one last fling in Paris. She bares herself naked, unashamed of her skeletal beauty and fading glory. I love that woman, even as she breathes her decay over me, a legacy I’d carry over to winter for her, every year without fail. I grew up the heir to her legacy, knowing that with her last dance I’d be dancing around my own, wondering if this time the darkness would ever lift. The never ending cycle of it became familiar and true, a constant all my young adult life.

Like Persephone, I spent ten years splitting my time between the warmth of the sun and the numbing dark. Unlike she, I wasn’t duped, and I’ve always felt that I had a choice. Do I eat of these seeds, knowing each one condemns me to shadow, or do I put that fruit from me and fight back as best I can? And so, I fought. Every year I’ve fought to limit my time served, for haven’t I served enough? Madness may be a permanent state of being, but I will not go easily into that living death. I’ll spend my time amongst the living, thank you very much.

I’m fully aware that I can’t turn my back on the dark, anymore than I could stop breathing. It’s a part of me, a part of life and death, and the universe, and it would be awfully presumptuous of me to pretend otherwise. The trick, the hard part, is to find a line and walk it, arms outspread and graceful. That’s the truly hard part, and the part that takes the longest to learn. Once you’ve got it though… it all gets easier from there. Or shall I say, less hard. I started to walk that line a few years ago and I’m getting good at it.

There’s a comfort in knowing the natural order of things. I know when I spot that first amber leaf that my time is coming. I know that I’ll have to be vigilant, that I’ll wake to sorrow for reasons I can’t explain, and that’s all right. It’s all right because I’m not afraid of the fall anymore, and it’s not my enemy any longer. I know how to work around it, how to draw a line in the sand during that time, and the whole year long. I know how to shift my mind just a little to the left, how to hold a light up in the dark. I know that I will fall, but I know that it’s not forever, and it’s not nearly so far as it used to be. I also know that I am not alone, and that should I fall, (and I know I will), that I have your arms to fall into.

Unfortunately, he had been blessed, if that’s what you want to call it, with a long life. Looking back with the benefits of age, hindsight was a cruel mistress. The sun was warm on his face and it soothed his aching bones. It wasn’t often that he got company these days, his kids were busy with lives of their own and his wife had long since passed away. At his age you took what pleasures you could, when you could get them. He closed his eyes and remembered, god he only wished he could forget. If only he had been blessed that way.

In truth, he’d never really been ready for responsibility. As with many children from wealthy and powerful families, he’d been groomed for greatness, but got the short end of the stick when it came to true passion. His father was a great man, widely respected, with a long and illustrious career. No one should have to grow up like he did, a son who always knew he’d never fill his father’s shoes, and yet it was preordained that he would spend his entire life trying. Inadequacy, even the perception of oneself as inadequate, is a sharp and bitter pill.

As a young man it was easier to put on a good face, to shake hands and smile. Just smile, say the right things, it was easier that way. Smile, get by on good looks and charm, do what’s expected. Get a degree, get a job, get a life, of sorts. He never really excelled in school or business, didn’t have much of a record of achievement to speak of for the first half of his life, but man did he love to run. He’d run like the wind any time he could get away from the office. It was the only time he felt free, felt like himself. No one, nothing else mattered except the road under his running shoes, the miles melting away, there and back again.

For a brief time he’d rebelled. He drank too much, used a little, and even he himself didn’t really know why. Perhaps it was freedom again, freedom. It didn’t take long for the pressure of his life to form him back into the shape he was meant to have. To mold him back into an upstanding man, the pressure inexorable and unrelenting. He did everything that was expected of him. He got married to a girl from a good family, a girl he’d hardly met but three months before. He barely knew her, but she fit just right. God, she was so pretty, and so were their daughters. Fatherhood was a blessing, but ultimately terrifying. Work kept him away from home for long hours and maybe it was better that way. His wife too knew what was expected of her and she fit in just right.

For a while it had seemed like it was all falling into place. He was carving out his own place in the world, even if it was stomping around in daddy’s backyard. Eventually he was the big man in town, and he’d shown them all. He’d found god, given up vice, and he was being rewarded for his sacrifices with all the prestige and respect that anyone could wish for. But damn it all if it didn’t seem that everyone was out to get him. Disaster after disaster landed at his doorstep and everyone looking to him to do something. It seemed that the best thing to do was to be bold, and bold he was. God had blessed him with dogged perseverance and he was going to be damned before he’d let the family business fail on his watch. Though he’d been offered the opportunity to move on, step down, he kept at it, blindly sure that he was the man to solve everything, sure that he could recoup his losses and turn a sows ear into a silk purse.

Maybe god was testing him. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was a test to see if he and his friends were worthy of the mantle placed on them. They’d been at this business longer than he, and he’d relied heavily on their expertise. He knew that some of the deals they pulled were shady, and maybe even ill advised, but when you’re a little fish in a big pond you look to the sharks to keep you safe. Except it wasn’t working. His advisors and confidants were increasingly the focus of scrutiny, none more so than himself and the flames had gotten hot. Every time he thought he had a plan, a sure fire way to turn things around, things just kept getting worse. He hadn’t slept well for years and it seemed his prayers were going unanswered. He’d been publicly vilified, burned in effigy, and barely escaped prosecution for his part in the many crimes committed by him and his cronies.

Eventually his tenure was up and he was able to finally step down, still protesting his innocence and purity of purpose, but desperately glad to have handed the reigns over to the next generation. Oh, how the experience had changed him. His legacy was one of missed opportunities and freezing in the face of a challenge. His legacy was one of hatred and fear, for he had almost single handedly set relations with both friends and foes back decades. Remembered as a blowhard, a bully, an obstinate, unyielding and foolish man, this wasn’t how he wanted it to end. Why couldn’t they see that God had a plan for him, that his vision for the future was divine in inspiration? His shoulders slumped as he was washed with waves of bitterness and maybe even a little bit of guilt. The faces of those he’d wronged, those who’d suffered as a result of his vision haunted him from time to time.

The interviewer’s seat creaked as she leaned in, bringing him back to the present. His eyes fluttered open as the woman spoke.

“My readers very much want to know, why did you go to war, Mr. President?”

Hello, my name is Tina, and I like to do it in public. I’ll go to extraordinary lengths, including but not stopping at, buying special gear just so that I can get my freak on outside the walls of my own home. Sure, people stare, some even interrupt me to ask questions, but that’s all part of the fun! I know that not everyone shares my passion, and even most of the people who do aren’t quite so gleeful about the public exhibition of it, but in the end I feel both myself and those who watch get something out of it. Believe me when I tell you that there are few things on earth as sensuous, fulfilling, and gratifying as fondling your fiber in public.

Uhhh… let me start over again. Hello, my name is Tina, and I am an addict. Yes, it’s true. I think about yarn, about knitting and spinning, as much as the average man thinks about sex. I can reach heights of euphoria, peaks of ecstasy untold, just stepping into a well stocked yarn shop. And no, I’m not talking about a big box store with a few aisles of yarn, most of it strands of petroleum products spun into “yarn”. I’m talking about a YARN SHOP. I’m talking about wall after wall of glorious fiber, books, and tools… as far as the eye can see.

I remember the days when I would only occasionally pull out some craft or other, fiddle with it for a while, maybe even a couple of days or a week, and then throw it in a bin, most likely never to see the light of day again. As a kid, a teen, I had this vague sense need, the need to “make something”. I took every art class I could fit around such inanities as Science and Math, not particularly great at any of it, but trying to satisfy the gnawing ache to create. Nothing really did it for me, nothing really fit.

That all changed when I strayed from my crochet hook, my long term lover of 20 years and answered the siren’s song of the pointy sticks. No longer were synthetics enough, cheap and easy fix that they are, oh no. My new Mistress Knitting demanded finer fibers than that. My Mistress whispered things to me like “Merino”, “Silk”, “Angora”, and that glorious paragon of non-itchy goodness, “Alpaca”. You too, upon stroking this silken goodness, will agree that rolling around naked in it is not beyond the pale. I remember, once upon a time, when I’d actually buy clothes and jewelry with my free money. Heh. Imagine that!

My mistress is not above sharing. Soon, mere months after we found each other, the bloom still flush with new found love, she introduced me to her good friend Spinning. Mistresses Knitting and Spinning were notorious in their appetite for devotees, thinking nothing of sharing them between each other. Mistress Spinning had even more demands, good lord! One word: Qiviut. Plucked from the underbelly of the Musk Ox, crack would be cheaper. I’m still working on that one, you just give me time. It’s probably a good thing I’m a non-breeder, place me not into temptation with the selling of the first borns.

I am shameless in my obsession, positively shameless. My husband, dear heart that he is, is tolerant of my fevered fetish. He even put together the shelving in our dining room so that I might have a Wall of Wool, displayed right out in the open for all to see, floor to almost ceiling. This shrine is the object of much admiration and dare I say, pride? Yes, I am proud of my obsession, damned proud of it. And you know what? I am not alone in this. There are many, many tens of thousands of junkies, just like me, all around the world, all of us blissfully in thrall. Willing disciples we are, every one. You can find us at every single fiber festival, proudly wearing our creations, reaching out to stroke the work of others, uninhibited in our glee. We are online, the fastest growing community of bloggers in the WORLD. We are in your coffee houses and your pubs, freaking out the muggles and loving every minute of it.

In the end really, this is all about creation, truth be told. The addiction ultimately lies in watching something come from almost nothing… a puffball of woolen fiber and a wheel, or a couple of sticks and some string, and your own two hands. You finish one project and quickly start another, but only after much aching deliberation over just which one is the right one. Every holiday, every baby, another opportunity (*cough* excuse) to dive headlong into your stash, and yes that’s what it’s called – a stash, or head over to your nearest yarn store (or as we call them, suppliers). Never mind that you have hundreds of skeins of yarn at home. NEVER     YOU      MIND!

So, if know someone like me, I say unto you: Do not pity or fear us, we’re people too, just like you. It’s just that somewhere down the line we took a path less traveled and ended up here, deliriously content with our archaic skills and camaraderie. We’re not deviants, we’re just… different. So what if we get giddy when we come across fiber bearing barn yard animals? So what if sheep are nervous in our presence? You listen here, if society ever collapses guess who you’ll be cozying up to so you have nice warm socks and sweaters to wear, hmm? Yup, that’d be me. So be nice to the knitters in your life, and those you meet in the wild. You never know when you might need someone skilled with the pointy sticks.

Throughout the years people have asked me “so, what are you?” and no matter how young or old was at the time, the answer has always been the same. I am Puerto Rican, and that is that. Most of the time my answer is good enough and no further explanation is needed. From time to time though, when the topic of identity comes up there’s a person who will say “no you’re not, you’re an American!” and they’ll glare at me like I’m a communist. I smile a little on the inside. I’m sorry, I didn’t think you were asking what my nationality was, I thought you were asking who I am. Here, let me ‘splain it you.

You and I grew up completely differently, and even my childhood was light-years from my parents. Yes, we may have gone to the same kind of school, gotten a job at the local fast food restaurant, baby sat, washed dishes, you know the drill. We drove a crappy car and were glad jus to have the wheels. We took SAT’s, went to the prom, and all that jazz. But there’s where many of the similarities end. My childhood was shaped by the embrace of cultural identity, and it wasn’t entirely all that “American”.

I grew up, from time to time on any given week, surrounded by the pungent and mouth watering smells of Caribbean cooking. The smell of annatto and garlic sautéing in extra virgin olive oil, the sure smell of something delicious for dinner. I grew up eating arroz con habichuelas, my favorite being the kind with white beans por que no me gusta gondulez. I grew up picking the salty codfish out of ensalada bacalao because that’s the best part, and wishing my mother would stop putting Spanish olives in our garden salads. I grew up with a father who could cook as well as my mother, but who had no childhood reference for American food and therefore, to me, tuna fish sandwiches with celery, onion flakes, and American cheese were completely normal. We won’t talk about my dad and the octopus salad.

I grew up listening to phone conversations in a language I barely understand to this day, company babbling around me, my head whipping back and forth like I was watching a tennis match, badgering people to speak in English. I grew up trying to make myself understood to people I saw barely once year individually, the phrases “como se dice” and “lo siento, pero no hablo espanol” tumbling from my lips in bashful plentitude. I’d drive my mother to distraction, harrying her with interruptions so that she could translate for me. It frustrated me that they never taught me, and it wasn’t until I was older that I was told it was because they felt it would be safer for me to have no accent. No one else I knew had more family that didn’t speak English than those that did. No one else I knew had a grandmother who smelled of Maja, and had an enormous glow in the dark rosary for her headboard.

I grew up dancing to music that you couldn’t help but move to, self-conscious about my size, and knowing I would never match the effortless grace my parents displayed. One of my biggest joys in life is watching my parents dance, better than any Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, beautiful in their lifetime of partnership. Our music is about passion and life, and it flows through you with an irresistible rhythm. My music is primal, and my people know how to dance. From the smallest toddler to the eldest abuelita, white haired, with leathery brown skin and aching bones, we dance. Imagine my confusion growing up, going to non-Latino events and watching people wait until they were “socially lubricated” enough to get up and move. Or worse, there would be no dancing at all. Isn’t dancing about life and love, and aren’t those good things?

But I think the day I grew up in truth was the day I was pressed against a wall by a boy from school and asked “what’s the matter, I thought Puerto Rican girls were easy, you’re boneless after all, right?” Sheer bravado and the fact I was my father’s partner for unarmed self-defense meant I walked away angry, but no worse for wear. I can’t say the same for him. I will say, if it matters to anyone, that he was white, and so was the next guy who tried the same thing. What they found out the hard way was that I grew up in a culture that feels the right way to discipline a man is a frying pan upside the head. What can I say, we’re a passionate people.

Despite that, I grew up wishing I were darker, wishing my hair were blacker. “How can you be the only person I know that wants to be darker?” my mother would ask me. Her milky white skin marking her more Spaniard that Taino or African slave. I grew up proud of how dark my father is, envying my brother for looking like him, and hating the fact that I could “pass” for white. Changing my name when I got married was a two year event leading up to the wedding. I pondered, “am I still Puerto Rican if I change my name? I hardly look it, and now my name will be gone…” No one else I knew understood why it was such a big deal, and no amount of explaining made it any clearer. There’s a certain disconnect when you’re talking to people who don’t have the same frame of reference. Growing up, and to this day, it confused me. How can someone go through life with no history, no cultural reference? Don’t they care where they come from? The 4th of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas do not a cultural identity make! I imagined it was like having a blank slate for a history, could you write whatever you wanted on it?

I might not have the language, I might not be dark enough, or dance well enough, or cook as well as my parents do, but I am Puerto Rican. In every way that counts, in my heart, in the way that the ocean speaks to my soul as I watch the sun set. In the way that the lush green of the forests and mountains soothes me, and the way that the warm rain, whether here or there, makes me turn up my face and smile. I grew up with these things inside of me, all of them, for better or for worse. I am American, and most of the time I’m damned proud of that, but I’m also something else very different. I grew up, isolated but fierce, a Latin girl in the great white north of Upstate New York, and I wouldn’t change it for anything. And if you grew up the way I grew up, you wouldn’t either.