Over Christmas, we made a Christmas Buddha-shrine in our sitting room instead of a Christmas tree. It lit up and everything. My housemate is Buddhist, so it was the sensible course of action. Hooray! It’s still there – it’s too nice to take down.
This Ostara, after living here with my housemate and my boyfriend (name of Superman) for the last 5 months, I set up an altar of my own. Gasp!!
I’m not very good at being openly spiritual, and I find it so hard to talk about it with other people, as I think I automatically assume that they think I am crazy and stupid (even though when I think about what I believe, most of it is very common sense and super sane). I reckon it’s to do with my dad. We didn’t have a religous upbringing, and although my folks were never mean to religeous (ie. Christian) folk, it was kind of assumed they had a screw loose. I went to Avebury with my dad and my brother once (who is of the Cult of Budwiser), and some person had left a badly hidden letter to some witchy deity or other at the Gog and Magog trees without coding it, so my pop and my bro merrily ripped the piss out of this person and what they wrote for about ten minutes. I felt very uncomfortable and just kept thinking “OH MY GOD if you are a witchy person leaving a personal letter in an easily accessible tree root at a tourist destination, how can you be so FOOLISH ?!” Dont we have enough books forcing “magickal” alphabets on us?
So, before moving in together, I had vaguely discussed my belief system with Superman, and he was cool with it – as long as I’m not hardcore christian, I think, then I’m ok. He has long known my deep mermaid love. When we moved in, he quickly discovered my library of witchy/spiritual books, the meelions of candles all around the place and the tarot cards that live on his side of the bed when he is taking his sweet time to finish work and join me. He’s known witchy peeps before, loves Charmed, he knows loads of friendly weirdos and of course our housemate is propa buddha innit. He doesn’t care what I get up to, as long as I am happy and I recycle my cereal boxes.
I think I have a lot of deep rooted shame about being spiritual. I think it’s probably an ex-atheist thing. Logic And Science! Logic And Science! Thank christy for all that quantum physics/witchcraft tie in to give us a bit of cred.
So, a few weeks ago on Ostara Sunday when Superman was out at circus practice, I picked up my trusty little altar table (after hammering it back together first – that thing is definately in it’s last service) and plopped it in our room. Voila. Some candles, an Ostara set up and some incense wafting later, we have an altar! Woohoo! He comes home, goes in the room few times without noticing (he is a man after all) and then notices. “I like your shrine hon!” he says. “Our house will have more shrines than people soon!”
So all is well in the jungle.