I’m just checking in with a general life update, including my latest finished cross stitch and my attempt to restart my pagan-style spiritual practices.

We haven’t seen that creepy stalker for nearly three weeks so I’m hoping he’s not coming back. We also installed a Simplisafe alarm system and hooked up some motion sensitive security cameras, because we’re lucky enough to have money for things like that, and we haven’t seen him on the cameras since we installed them. The police are still working on identifying this guy; they had my daughter work with a sketch artist online and they’re keeping an eye out but so far they haven’t tracked him down for questioning.

Working with the sketch artist was really easy, actually. The artist had her describe the guy and then scroll through pages of noses and cheeks and lips and such looking for the closest match. Then he put together a preliminary right on his computer within a few minutes. Though my daughter didn’t exactly enjoy the experience she was satisfied that the sketch looked a whole lot like the guy she saw. It was a close enough match that looking at it freaked her out a little bit.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling much better and so is the kiddo. Still vigilant and more anxious than usual, but I’m not having constant adrenaline surges the way I was when this all started and she’s starting to put it all behind her. Hopefully it stays that way.

With all this stress, I’ve really been leaning into my most soothing hobbies to get me through. I’ve been reading a lot, of course, but sometimes I’m just too tense to give my imagination over to a fictional world so I put on a podcast or familiar TV show and stitch. The last coupld weeks I finished watching Lucifer on Netflix and I also finished the next pattern in the sabbat cross stitch set I’ve been working on. That’s Imbolc done, with only Ostara and Beltane to go.

I’ve also gotten more consistent with my spiritual practice. Nothing like anxiety to make you reach for a higher power. I’ve tried various forms of daily practice before but none of them really stuck. I tend to overcomplicate things in my quest for the perfect ritual, then get tired of working it out and quit. I even overcomplicate simple things like lighting candles. I tend to obsess over what color they should be, how long I should keep them lit, what to do with the stubs when they’ve burned down. It’s not that I’m worried about doing it wrong, it’s that in trying to get the feeling just right I totally take myself out of the moment.

So this time I’m keeping it super simple–apply some perfume, say a few words, and just be calm and breathe for a few moments. Most scented products give Mr. Robot migraines, but my For Strange Women perfumes don’t seem to bother him. I’m sure it’s partly that they’re all natural but I think it’s also that the scent is more subtle and clings closer to my body instead of permeating the house. That’s why I’m perfuming myself instead of using incense or scented candles the way most people do. Since I live a mostly fragrance-free life aside from this, focusing on the fragrance really puts me in a different headspace.

I’m pretty atheistic and I’ve never connected well with the magickal side of witchcraft–I was drawn much more to druidry and hellenistic practice for years because of this–I’ve found myself drifting back to the maiden/mother/crone triad lately. I tend to think of the various goddesses as different faces and aspects of the same inner light or universal truth, and lately I’ve come to feel like the triple goddess embodies that really well. Last time I was active in online pagan spaces, hard polytheism was a big deal, so this kind of soft and psychological polytheism might be unpopular but it works for me and keeps me from getting lost in the details.

When you get into paganism you notice really fast that Wicca is often looked down on as some sort of “beginner’s paganism” and many people move on from it pretty quickly into other forms of practice. Even people who stick with witchcraft seem to move on to other types. Myself, I mostly remember moving on because Wicca has some binary sexual elements that didn’t really speak to me (as a cis hetero woman you’d think it would but nope, not really), but after all these years I find myself circling back to some of the first things I ever learned from those Wicca 101 books and websites. Maybe I’ve finally spiraled around to appreciating them from a higher perspective.

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