by Elisabeth Morris

Created on: January 04, 2009

Why am I Pagan? I don't know. Why am I human? It's the same question to me. And the answers are one and the same; I was born that way.

At an early age I felt I was in contact with what my mom called fairy folk. By in contact I mean I could see and speak to them (I know that makes me sound weird, but it was true). My mother had been raised Catholic and my father Mormon, so we attended services from time to time. I never paid attention though. I was a small child after all. I just wanted to get to the end part where we had bread and grape juice and then went home. There came an Easter when I had several epiphanies; the first was a realization that my mother never came to church with us. To this day, I still don't know why; looking back on it though, I believe she was a Pagan behind closed doors. She used to allude to things when I was a child that now makes me believe she was practicing paganism, although she won't admit to it today. Second, I had to wonder what a cute bunny who delivered colored eggs and baskets had to do with the horror story they had told us in church. That's what it was to me, a horror story. Some poor guy tries to enlighten the world and they torture and kill him. Three days later he becomes a zombie (that was my take on it at eight). Unfortunately, at that time, all I had available to me were the main stream religions. All the wonderful branches of Christianity were there for me to explore, but none of them seemed right. By twelve I had come up with my own ideas about life.

I believed people could see the future, communicate with spirits, and heal with the mind if they could focus their energy correctly. I also believed that you could make anything happen through a wish. Spells to me were taboo at the time (thanks to movies), so I never really tried one, although at times I imagined doing one. The closest I remember coming was I had collected some leaves in the yard, one for each wish I wanted to make, at the full moon. I held up each leaf to the moon, whispered my wish, and then let it loose into the night. At nine I had decided there was not just a male god (the visions they put in my head of god at church seemed more like Santa Claus and less like an almighty creator), but there was also a goddess. In my mind, the sun was the god, and the Earth itself was the goddess. Their spirits were the controlling power behind everything, not some invisible man in the clouds. I hated the idea of hell so at ten I came up with the theory that we just

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