How It Began
The first apartment I ever rented was the first floor of a three-story house, and I shared it with my then-boyfriend. We never really had any furniture except random pieces we'd inherited from our respective parental units and other odds and ends that we'd salvaged from street corners. The place was spacious and cheap, but we never had enough "real" furniture to fill it up, so it always felt oddly put together. It was easy to keep warm because it was wedged between a basement and the upper stories, both of which had thermostats controlled by the landlords, who lived above us. So, lots of room, cheap and easy to keep liveable.
But there were problems. The people who lived above us (yep, the landlords) were incredibly noisy at all unreasonable hours of the day and night. They didn't bother to fix things in our apartment when they went wrong — like the bedroom window, that was cracked when we moved in and was never replaced — but any temporary fixes to those problems caused huge issues — like me putting duct tape over the cracked window and then hanging a thick blanket up instead of a curtain. Boy did they bitch about that. Also, the basement flooded all the time, and the toilets tended to clog and back up. Eventually, too, the boyfriend and I broke up, and then it was just miserable, because he moved out and I had even less furniture and I spent about six months sleeping on a mattress on the floor, curled up watching hours of X-Files reruns at 3 AM on a tiny 13-inch TV (and this was before HD-TV and LCD flatscreens, people). I eventually came to hate it there, and the landlords didn't like me very much either. Even though it could have been a nice place — it had the space, and everything in it was new, carpets, paint-job, kitchen appliances — underneath is was all falling apart, and the fact that nobody wanted to talk about it or try to fix it, and they always had a problem when I tried to patch things up with my limited resources, just made it worse.
In this story, this apartment represents my relationship with Christianity.
Adorably Retro
Because I couldn't afford to stay in that place once the boyfriend moved out and stopped paying rent, I moved into my own place when the lease was up. This new place had been described as "adorably retro" by the rental agency, but I never figured out why. It had real hardwood floors that must have been about fifty years old, banged up and scratched and splintering, and its walls were covered in some sort of weird stucco plaster. But beneath the plaster was good, solid brick. I got permission to paint, and so the living room ended up being a refreshing ice blue, and the single bedroom was a deep, relaxing lavender. It had a balcony that looked out over a small gravel lot lined with trees, past which you could see the neighbors' gardens. In the hall, there was a little nook that used to house an old-fashioned telephone — I used it as a place to set up my main altar/shrine. Although I kept some of the old furniture that I'd inherited, I also got new furniture — and though it was mostly inexpensive, I got a few nice, solid items meant to last, and I picked them out carefully so that each room had a cohesive feeling, a kind of aesthetic wholeness to it. I spent some years in this apartment working as a waitress, swinging midnight shifts and feeling desperately lonely, but no matter how lonely I got, I still felt like I was home. And that meant something. The world, especially the natural world, would not abandon me.
In this story, this apartment represents my finding a home in Druidry, and wandering in the wilderness of this new spirituality, making it my own.
Townhouse Posturing
I met Jeff while I was still living in this "retro" apartment, and he did the unimaginable and moved to Pittsburgh. In part it was to be with me, but it also happened that his ex-wife's new fiancé had family in Pittsburgh and they were looking for a cheaper city to live in. (Although his ex-wife tried to dispute it in court, we have the documented email evidence to prove that she actually bought a house in Pittsburgh before Jeff ever even started looking for apartments; so it's not like Jeff abandoned his children in order to go live with his mistress.) When Jeff decided to move to Pittsburgh, I helped him find a place.
This apartment was what we could arguably call a "townhouse." It was two-stories and was one of two townhouses that made up a single building on a block of similar structures. Jeff needed a place big enough for the kids to visit every weekend, so it was a three-bedroom place, even though most of the week it was basically empty. This townhouse tried too hard to be a "house." It aspired to all kinds of legitimacy. It had carpeting, and a yard, and what could pass for a front porch. It had two whole bathrooms, and a real kitchen instead of a closet-sized space with a fridge and mini-stove shoved into it. It even had a fireplace.
I continued to officially live in my own "retro" apartment for a year after Jeff moved to Pittsburgh, but I spent more and more of my time at the townhouse. Eventually, most of my clothes and day-to-day stuff ended up over there. But Jeff, having been through a divorce where his ex-wife took everything except the debt she'd wracked up on their joint account, didn't really have any real furniture except for a few old pieces that were too crappy for the EW to have wanted. All of our money went into making the place liveable for the kids — we got bunk-beds and we doubled up on toys and clothing because the EW was pretty awful at getting them to pack anything for the weekend. I felt tremendous pressure to suddenly "play mom" and prove that I was "mature" enough to "handle kids" and all of the adult responsibilities that I quickly discovered the EW was fond of passing off onto other people because she herself was not very good at handling them.
My life, like the townhouse, aspired for a while to be "respectable" and "serious" and "mature" — but I only ever really half lived there, and it always seemed to be other people's ideas of respectability and maturity that did the dictating. Unlike my little "retro" apartment, which seemed to have no pretensions at all. My retro apartment had incredibly old, scratched up wood floors, but at least they were real wood. The townhouse had carpets like a "real house," but they were old, shitty carpets with random ugly stains from previous occupants and they never seemed to get clean despite Jeff's motorcycle-like vacuum. My retro apartment may have had wires randomly sticking out of the walls here and there, but all the wiring worked. It may have only had a gravel lot for the backyard, but beyond that you could see trees and gardens and even the park. At the townhouse, the front yard wasn't really a yard, so much as a cliff, but it still required mowing. The backyard wasn't a yard so much as a weed-bed, but we did our best to plant some flowers and a vegetable garden and try to beat back the tangle. It was a lot of work, and not much pay-off. This seemed to be the way with a lot of things — lots of things that seemed like good ideas, but ended up being difficult or awkward in practice. A door that led out onto the roof from the second-story seemed like a good idea because the roof could be almost like a balcony.... Except that the door didn't open unless you pulled up the cheap carpeting in the corner, and the roof sagged a bit so that it seemed to be possibly dangerous to be up there for any length of time. There was an oddly shaped nook that seemed like it could be a good place for a "library" — a nice idea, except that none of our bookshelves seemed to fit the space properly, they were either too big or too small, and the room was always freezing cold and uncomfortable to sit in. (This was generally true — the place was impossible to heat. My old retro apartment had been super-warm and cozy in the winter, and the heating was included in the rent, but the townhouse had thin plaster walls and leaky windows that never seemed to hold in any heat at all and our heating bills were huge. Also, none of its windows seemed to let in any light even on the sunniest days.) The fireplace, which seemed like such a cute, good idea, didn't work. But it somehow remained stubbornly sooty anyway even after we repainted it, and all the furniture in the living room ended up being awkwardly arranged around this sooty, cold and dead fireplace in which no hearthfire would ever burn.
In this story, this townhouse is like the reconstructionist/hard polytheistic approach.
Interestingly, my time struggling with hard polytheism coincided with this time in my life, when I was kind of half-living in a place built and furnished by and for other people, which aspired to be "respectable" and "real," but wasn't. It tried to hide how old it was while aping (poorly) the comforts of stability (epitomized, in my mind, by the absolutely shitty wall-to-wall carpeting). In the same way, my time struggling with hard polytheism always seemed to be full of other people's opinions and expectations; it seemed impossible to relax and ground in my own relationship with Spirit and with the natural world. Even though I might have been lonely and "irresponsible" living alone in my retro apartment and working as a waitress, I was home. Even though modern Revival Druidry was a bit new-agey and a bit meso-pagan and some of its wiring showed, it still worked and it had warm, sturdy walls.
Smoke Tree Condo
Then, Jeff's job moved us across the country to Seattle, and we found a small, affordable place. It's bigger than my old "retro" apartment, but it's not nearly as big as the townhouse. We have neighbors, and although we rent, many of our neighbors are permanent residents and meet quarterly as members of the condo's management team. We get so much sunlight, especially in the summer, but even in the winter on the rainiest of days, the rooms are well-lit and pleasant. We donated almost all of our old furniture except a few select pieces, and used a bit of savings to buy a few new pieces, so once again, each room feels like a real room, with its own sense of space and style. Our kitchen is smaller than the townhouse kitchen, but has so much counter space that it's perhaps the first truly functional kitchen I've ever had. We have an entire wall of bookcases in our living room, and two more bookcases in the den. All of our sofas fold out, so we have plenty of room for when the kids visit, but the rooms don't sit empty and non-functional wastes of space when they're not around. We have lots of closet space (so much, that we're able to temporarily convert our one walk-in closet into a recording studio on podcasting nights).
There are only a few draw-backs. There's no porch or balcony, nowhere private to sit outside and enjoy the weather. The floors are "wood-like" linoleum... which is a huge improvement over crappy carpeting, but still not as good as real wood. And it's the first apartment I've had that isn't within a block of a wooded park. It's so close to being a perfect fit, and it has many of the best things that I loved about my old "retro" apartment while also having some really nice things that that apartment didn't have (like counter-space and new, energy-efficient appliances and windows). It's the perfect size for us, and I feel very happy here. But I already know that I won't be here forever, and one of the main reasons I know it is because it's too far from green space — "nature" is a thing I have to go out of my way to get to, and even though that's resulted in me volunteering with the parks and learning all sorts of stuff about ecology and natural history, it's not the kind of intimate, immediate relationship that I enjoyed in my old, run-down "retro" apartment.
In this story, our current apartment is like my current spiritual path. It is so close to being perfect, and there are lots of things about it that I love. I feel at home, but I also know that I will eventually need to move on. The biggest reason I know I'll need to move on is because, right now, my relationship with "nature" is somewhat distanced and intellectual, and in this way it parallels my work as a volunteer naturalist and how that's different from being a poet wandering in the wilderness. Eventually, I want to be the poetic ecosophist, the wise sage who can wander in the wilderness and also teach practical, useful wisdom to those who come to seek her out; who has both an intellectual understanding of her gods and their theology, and an intimate and ecstatic relationship with them in way that allows both perspectives to enhance each other.
For now, I finally feel like I can start grounding in my own path again. I have a happy, truly stable place to call home that gives me the time and support I need to prepare for that next step, and I know that the next step means lingering for a little while in this place with "nature" is a little more distant. I also know that, wherever I end up, it's not going to be the metaphorical "respectable single-family suburban house with white picket fence" that the townhouse, in this metaphor, was trying so hard to pretend to be. It's not going to be the respectable, structured, organized religion that reconstructionism/hard polytheism tries so hard to be. I have a better sense of what works for me and what doesn't, and I no longer feel pressured to apologize for not wanting that kind of life, or that kind of religion. So now it's a matter of figuring out what kind of spiritual (and physical) space I do want to live in, and spend some time daydreaming, saving for and working towards my dream-home.
The Moral of The Story
All of these places, despite their differences, were still apartments.
All of these paths, despite their differences, are still Paganism.
(Except, of course, for the first example of Christianity.)
(Damn it.)
(Shut up.)