Now, standing under a velvet sky amid so much of that marvel, I felt like both a tiny speck of existence and a divine goddess.
“This is my church,” Sam whispered as he wrapped his arms around me.
I took a deep breath of the piney, leafy mountain air, finally feeling at home. I was certain there could be no greater cathedral than this. And I thought, “That will work nicely with what my church is, too.”
There’s no right way to be a witch—no laws carved in stone, no permanent documents of record. There’s no one book to guide you—not even this one. Being a witch simply means learning to own your own power and find your place in the universe. This is the story of how I strive every day to live that truth, and why.
There is wondrous magic in this world; I hope maybe this book helps you find yours.
That’s Me in the Corner
How I Became Wiccan
It’s not always a tornado and a whole house. Sometimes it’s just a door.
There is no one way to become Wiccan. In fact, there are as many ways to become a witch as there are witches. That’s the beauty of “unorganized religion”: you get to pave your own way and find a path that suits you. There are no hard-and-fast rules, no rewards or punishments for good or bad behavior, there is only this exhortation: Do no harm. This simple phrase is contained within the Wiccan Rede, a main tenet of our belief system. Essentially, the Rede states that one can live as one chooses, as long as it causes no harm to others. You be you, just don’t go interfering with me being me. It’s basically our version of the Golden Rule. (Hey, great minds think alike!)
The story of how I landed here, in my witchy ways, isn’t too complex. It involved no ceremonial candle burning, no spell casting, and no drawing down the moon. Rather, it’s the simple story of how I lost my way and found it again.
It’s the story of a closed door.
As I was getting ready to graduate from high school, amidst all the finals-taking and gown-ordering, I was also rehearsing for a final high school theatrical production with some of my very best friends. (Many, to this day, remain some of my very dear friends.) We were staying late at the theater and probably horsing around a bit too much every night. By that point, we had been inseparable for years: acting in every show together, spending weekends on school activity buses, accompanying one another in various combinations to every school dance. The idea that very soon we would not all be together anymore, despite looming over our heads, was still very abstract. In those weeks, it still felt like we would be together, just like that, always—the way things do when you’re there, in those moments.
One perfectly ordinary night, parents started coming into the middle of our rehearsal, disrupting the usual flow of things. A couple appeared and quietly took their children out of the theater. Everything started to feel wrong, as if it had all gone sideways. I had a feeling like I might be sick; my chest was tight and I couldn’t find my breath. Finally, the director stopped the rehearsal entirely and asked us all to sit down. I remember her asking us to be quiet, and I remember being terrified of the look on her face. She looked . . . broken.
“I have something I need to tell you, and it’s not an easy thing. Marc passed away tonight.”
I’m sure she said more than that, though I don’t remember what. I remember how the words felt, how his name sounded. She cried as she said it. At one point, I think maybe someone else stepped in to tell us more, but if they did, I don’t remember what it was. I just remember hearing Marc had died. I know they told us he had committed suicide, but I can’t for the life of me recall the words they must have tried to use to soften that blow. I can, however, remember in perfect detail how those words hit my heart.
I was in shock. Marc was the boy who teased me over our backyard fence throughout my entire childhood; the friend who taught me how to use a jigsaw during set construction in the theater while we blasted Garth Brooks on the stereo; the person who gave me my first beer, paired perfectly with a graham cracker and a brilliant laugh. Every year at Christmas, Marc would drive a group of us, packed tightly in his car, up and down the streets of our small town on his very own “Tour de Lights.” No matter what we were up to, he always managed to get me home just seconds before my curfew. Marc played a seminal role in my high school experience; we had sung and danced together, built whole worlds together out of plywood and Styrofoam. He had been kind when I needed it most, generous and joyful. None of that aligned with what people were saying to us in that theater. It just didn’t seem possible.
Marc was gone. I couldn’t understand how this had happened, how his heart had somehow irrevocably broken without any of us knowing it was even cracked. Despite the closeness we all thought we shared, he had felt alone. Despite our belief that our days together would last forever, he had chosen not to go on. The reality we had taken for granted came to a screeching halt.
The theater seemed unnaturally quiet. Some of the parents who had heard earlier what had happened stood sentinel behind our chairs. People stood and looked around, knowing they should be doing something, anything, but not knowing what was supposed to come next. I desperately wanted to find the friends I was closest to. I wanted to touch them and look them in the eyes and confirm they were here still—that this wasn’t the world tearing itself completely apart.
I slowly walked up the aisle of the theater, past the urgent talking and crying that had since erupted after the initial moment of stunned silence. I needed to get out. I needed to get to. I don’t recall how I got to Marc’s house that night to sit in his front yard, or who told my parents where I was going, if they even knew. I remember being one of so very many kids camped there, as if our sheer numbers would bring him back, clinging to the people around us while refusing to believe any of it was real. I don’t know what time I went home. I don’t know who drove me.
I spent the next days in the company of those friends: piled up like puppies at night in my living room, stumbling from diner to diner listening to bad Muzak versions of Madonna songs while drinking stale cups of coffee and eating giant bowls of canned chocolate pudding, watching movies in someone’s basement. Talking of everything but. Talking only of, until our eyes were red and our throats burned. We ignored the rest of the world, desperately holding on to one another, making promises, fervently asking if we were okay. We were scared to death that we weren’t okay, in ways we couldn’t see—the ones that truly mattered now, ones we had never even known existed just days before.
We had realized that we no longer had forever. All we had now was each moment before us, these fragile gifts we weren’t entitled to but had been given. It all felt incredibly fleeting and friable, unmistakably not ours to hold anymore.
Eventually, someone insisted we go back to class and finish out the year. We refused stalwartly, until another someone laid down the rule that we couldn’t have an opening night for our play without actually having a school day beforehand. So we went home to our separate beds, our separate rooms, to get ready for our first day back at school.
I remember praying we would all make it through the night.
The next morning dawned as if the world hadn’t broken. I ate my bowl of Cocoa Krispies, grabbed my backpack, and got in my car. But as I was driving up to the entrance of the school’s parking lot, I suddenly just kept going. I couldn’t bring myself to walk through those doors just yet. I couldn’t face whatever was there—or worse, what wasn’t anymore. So I drove to the one place I could think of where I might find peace:
St. Mary’s Queen of the Universe.
It wasn’t a grand church, but it was mine. I had attended mass there three times a week, plus holy days, from the time