My Current Read....

Lately, I find myself wanting to explore the path of Paganism in greater depth.  I have been familiar with it for years, but am considering more seriously if it may, in fact, be a viable spiritual path for me.  Towards that end, my beginning point is to re-read a perennial favorite of mine, Phyllis Curott's engaging memoir, Book of Shadows.  Originally published in 1998, the book tells her story as she moved from someone with an Ivy League education and a lawyer's occupation (whose approach was mainly intellectual) into the world of Wicca.  It entails what she found there, the things she at first grappled with, and how she came to reconcile her intellect with the stirrings and yearnings of her own heart.  I'm about 130 pages into the re-reading.  Check this one out if you can; it's a good read.  Here is a thought-provoking quote from the book which I found particularly worthy:

"Unfortunately, our culture has dismissed the religions and metaphors of Native Americans, aborigines, witches, and other indigenous earth religions as primitive pantheism in which trees, and rocks, and springs were superstitiously worshipped.  Oblivious to its own prejudices, our Western world demeans their religion as an idolatrous, frightened inability to know the one “true,” transcendent God.  Erroneously dismissed as godlessness, paganism is actually just the opposite: It is a spirituality in which everything in the natural world is experienced as holy.  These were people who lived close to the earth, intimate with her changing seasons, her generosity, and her mystery.  It was from this familiarity, not fear, that their knowledge of the sacred arose. 

 Contrary to the old Western patriarchal interpretations of the Divine as transcendent and the earth as fallen from grace, [these people] believed that the body and the earth were sacred, so neither required conquest or denial.  The body, and the earth, are not only temples of the spirit, but its living manifestation.  The wisdom of the body and the earth is the spirit's wisdom, and therefore to be revered."  (pp. 116-117)