Just keeping collecting kindling.
When I first began to feel drawn toward pagan practice, I was searching for an outlet and a vessel. A place – a way – to pour all those moments I encountered in contexts that seemed unsuited for them. Hearing a song during a party that transported me to a more somber, serious place; wanting to dash out of the coffee shop at the season’s first sign of rain to welcome it; attempting to convey to skeptical Skeptics the overwhelming feeling of ecstatic experience that made the term “spiritual” unavoidable for me. Such moments had been with me as long as consciousness, but as I grew into my young adulthood they increasingly made for an awkward fit into the rest of my life. In college I discovered how much I loved to think – critically and purposefully – and that moreover, I was pretty good at it. After graduating I went straight into a PhD program for history, and as my intellectual confidence grew (an unusual dynamic in grad school but, I was lucky in many ways in this regard) my p