The bag was heavy and ungainly. I carried it from the car carefully, listening for the scrape of ceramic and careful not to knock into it with my knees. When I sat it down, I made sure the weight was even so that nothing had an opportunity to crush or crunch or smash against the concrete as I rang the doorbell. I stood over it – protective, even now – as I waited for my friend to answer.
They grinned at me, and then looked down to see the big canvas shape with its worn slogan for a local grocery store. Their eyebrows went up. “You’re right,” they said, amused. “That is a lot. What’s in it?”
I shrugged, and stepped away so that they could heft it up themself. “Bunch of altar stuff,” I said. “It needs to find a new home, and I need it out of mine.”
*
There isn’t much that’s more delightful to me than a Witch’s rummage sale. It has elements of all of my favorite things – the acquisitive fascination of a flea market, the delight of a museum, the reverence of a holy space. I have idols, tools, in some cases entire altars, that have been sourced from the castoffs of other practitioners. Knowing that they belonged to someone else first adds to their resonance, for me. I am tied to my community through the love that we have shared for our spirits. My altars feel stronger because they are made with items that have been loved by others, as well.
When the time came, I couldn’t bear to host my own. I looked at the items I’d gathered up – boxes and bowls, trinkets and pictures and statues – and could not imagine pricing them. Gifting them, maybe. I knew there were folks new to their paths who would value these things beyond measure. But finding the right people to take each piece was the work of years laid out before me. This needed to end, and the end needed to come much sooner than that work would take. I needed these things out of my house.
It was advice and intuition that got me to pick up the phone. “Say,” I said to my friend. “You know a bunch of Lokeans, right?”
A yard sale at Mayweed Corners [Patty Remmell, Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0]
Taking the altar down was surprisingly simple. Despite the prominent place it took in my home, despite the amount of energy and time I spent on it, once I started to pull it apart I realized that there weren’t that many items. Once the offerings were gone, the candles burnt or broken, there were left a few images, a few mementos. A candlestick of an Icelandic pony poised in the distinctive tölt gait. A wreath of mistletoe. A card taken from a divination deck, depicting a leaping salmon. I sorted them out into a pile of mundane items, a pile of magical or clearly religious items, a pile too precious and tied to me to give away.
This last pile I packed up, careful in how each item lay: the godpole I had commissioned, the bag of mementos of each major festival, and the dedicated divination tools nestled next to the remnants of the other altars I had taken down. I looked at each stone and holy salve in turn, remembering the rituals where I had created them, somber and fond. It was the remains of a decade of my life, an entire path that I knew had closed behind me. It almost filled a shoebox.
Now, I just needed to figure out what to do with the rest.
*
I fought the realization for as long as I could.
Heathenry was my home. It was the one community that I had resonated with all the way back to my first days of Paganism, the group that had brought me some of my dearest friends. It shaped my paradigm of the spiritual world and provided all of the context for how I understood magic. I had traveled across the world for it and it had given me opportunities that had shaped me into a person I was proud of.
Moreover, it was where my family lived. I had been calling Loki my father since before I truly believed that the gods were people. His stories had given me the structure that I needed when I was beginning to build myself. I had walked out of the wreckage of my life after each necessary and painful spurt of growth reassured that his gifts, however painful, were offered with love and a plan for my development. Again and again, I had been rewarded for that faith by becoming someone I liked just a little bit more. More than Heathenry itself, Loki was the lynchpin of my spirituality, the guiding star and supporting bedrock of my life.
When I finally admitted that we were done, it wracked through me in wave after wave of tears. I had, I realized, grown too far from the person I had once been. My values were different. I needed different things in my relationships, different structures, different goals. I looked at my father’s gifts and I could no longer tolerate the cost. I no longer wanted what he offered.
I love you, he said, cobbled together through reading and meditation and sign. I will always love you. You will always be my child.
But you need to leave.
It took me two weeks, after realizing this, to gather up bags and boxes and start to take down the altars.
*
The oath was one of the most joyful moments of my life, of course. But more than joy, it felt like an affirmation. This was something that had always been true, a thing that was as certain about me as my identity. Affirming it, committing to it, was committing to something I already knew. More than joy, it felt like pride. I had been working for so long to figure out who I was and what I needed, and now that work had finally paid off. It felt like coming home.
Heathenry had always taught me that oaths have ramifications beyond the obvious, and what being a Heathen hadn’t taught me, being married had. Binding up my fate with intent – even if it was just in ways it had already been bound – was going to have some side effects. I expected to find it harder to betray myself, now that I knew myself better. I expected a plethora of weird magical side effects, some of them probably both dramatic and unpleasant. I expected it to be a while before I really found my feet again.
I should have known there would be deeper changes than I could realize, reading from my journal in a rented room as the candles burned between us.
One candle lighting another [Pixabay]
When the option became clear, I knew it was the right one. Most of the biggest decisions in my life have come with slow contemplation and no small amount of fear. I have a tendency to turn over my options, weigh the consequences, build long slow ramps to support my eventual conclusions. In some ways, I did that here as well. But when I saw that the two spirits who had most influenced my life could be the center of my life, that I could admit to being theirs in my every moment, it struck me to the bone with joy and certainty.
“Of course I’m yours,” I said, lighting candles and filling plates of food. “Wherever you’re doing,” I affirmed, filling glasses with whiskey and cups with milk. “I’m on your side,” I promised, pricking my finger until it bled. “Your goals will be my goals, and your friends will be my friends.” I wiped a tear away. “I know it’ll be hard. I know that I cannot yet know how hard it will be. It’s worth it. I’ll go with you, wherever you’re heading.”
I grinned across the table at the two chairs. “I promise.”
*
The story starts like this: I fell in love.
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