For my first blog post on the new Moon Books multi-blog site, I wanted to share more about myself than the blurb typically found on a book jacket or a review. Rather uncharacteristically for me, I chose the category “shaman” to blog under, though I have long joked that a shaman is “someone who doesn’t use that word.” I write about nature magic, mainly animals, and that fits under the rubrics of “Goddess,” “Witch,” “Druid,” “Heathen,” and many others. I am under the impression that Pagans today mainly confine their explorations to highly specific areas, usually ethnically focused ones, whereas when I was starting out decades ago we studied Western esoteric traditions more broadly, even after we settled on a path. In part today's trend is a consequence of so much more information on Paganism being available. Some of it may be driven by the tendency of publishing to identify and even create niche markets. Much is undoubtedly a by-product of the current need so many have to find security in identity.

I’m not really into identities, in any worldly sense. By that I mean that there are labels which apply to me based on my birth, experiences, choices, and life circumstances, but these are things which describe me, not things that define who I am. The identity I have is what I bring from past lives and will carry with me in lives to come. It is a changing, evolving identity, and one that animates my labels; my labels do not give meaning to me.

People sometimes ask me what animal I identify as, but I am not an animal, except maybe a human one (labels again). I am a soulful being, not an archetype. Being able to speak from a secure sense of self, rather than from a sense of how a label would perform, is the essence of integrity. I am cognizant that integrity is, to some degree, a matter of privilege, that the more oppressed we are and the more precarious our life circumstances are, the more compelled we are to play “let’s pretend.” I try to at least be aware of when I am pretending. I was thirty years old before I realized that not only do many people lack integrity, they lack awareness of what integrity is or that it might be something worth having. It would be many more years before I realized that integrity is what gives you the ability to lose a power struggle and feel like you have only lost the power struggle and not yourself. To be misunderstood and feel like you have not been erased. To be wrongly criticized and feel like – well, that still feels rotten, but it doesn’t carry a sense of being violated. Validation of self can only come from within.

I am not concerned with sharing “my truth”; rather, I am interested in finding out more each day about The Truth and sharing my limited perspective of it. Why would anyone care about "my truth"? I get that the speaking of personal truth is desperately important to many people, but I can't take myself that seriously. I blame my parents, for teaching me to laugh at myself, for making me see myself as a part of a very big whole, for pointing out that some days I'm not looking at things clearly. I once heard Yogi Bhajan say, “The only thing I have to give is The Truth,” and I thought at the time, “What an arrogant male thing to say.” The post-truth society has taught me that, unfortunately, that’s also the only thing I have to give. I mean, what else am going to give a person, validation of their superficial self-concept? The secrets to unlocking their archetype, so assuming their temporarily aggrandized self-worth? I can suffer fools but not phonies. People want to feel good about themselves, and integrity requires affirmation of the good and the bad. You can’t have integrity and feel good about yourself all the time.

The truth is not popular at the moment. The message of postmodernism is that truth is nonexistent, always a matter of subjective opinion, which has caused some people to despair that we are at a dead end. But every age has its dead ends, along with the people who refuse to go down them. The message of the modern era was that God is dead, and yet She is still here. The only thing any of us have is the truth, in whatever small or very small quantity we possess it. I am not a shaman, but the label is congruent, and I will be blogging under that label.

I am the author of Invoking Animal Magic: A guide for the pagan priestess. My next book, Divining with Animal Guides: Answers from the World at Hand, will be available in February. Please visit my website and personal blog hearthmoonrising.com.

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