by Dorean Malandra-Dara

Created on: October 26, 2008

Follow Your Bliss. As a former Roman Catholic, my faith was deeply important to me growing up. Yet as I grew older, I felt a calling in other directions. When I was very young, I felt that there was a certain energy about natural places and elements that I could not experience in the bounds of churchyards, or listening to mass in church. Also, from a very early age, I had dreams which defied explanation. Frightening visages that I couldn't understand. I forgot about them after a while. I made communion, but when it came to confirmation, I felt terribly ill because I knew it was not what I was destined for, and after discussions with my parents and the priest, who convinced my parents to leave my faith in my hands alone, I left the Catholic Church.

In high school a few friends of mine first introduced me to Wicca as it is understood today. I practiced for a while, but soon felt something pulling at me, directing me to look in more refined ways for the soothing call of twilight nightsongs. In the last ten years I have been developing a nasty habit of clinging to half-realized ideologies that don't sit right with me. All of this has been building up towards a climactic deconstruction for a long time now. In 2005 that is exactly what happened. I studied religion and magic from an anthropological perspective, in which I took part in a serious analysis of personal religious and spiritual reality broken down into sections, and applied it with those of other people in the class project to form a religion. This new religion was based on aspects of everyone's experiences, thoughts and concerns. At the end of it all, the end result was a sort of consecration - the kind which can only be described as losing one's faith and yet being the better for it. The experience paid lip service to the importance of change, and chaos as a prime moving element in life.

After that, everything else that I have done have become more basic, primeval forms of reverence for greater things. Perceiving the ultimate force of creation, what is sometimes called God, the universe, or the All became much clearer. I was better able to see the similarities in the spiritualities that cross over different regions. At that point I met a Cuban artist, whose work was based on fetishism and its role in Santeria. Her work helped me to remember my past. I was able to remember my childhood in Miami - my earliest exposure to Wicca through my brother's first wife, and the Botanicas, filled with musky incense,

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