Spring Equinox is Soon

Spring Equinox is coming up soon.  The High Priestess and High Priest have agreed that my partner and I should be the ones to lead ritual.

It's not the first one we'll have done, but it's something that we will probably be doing more often.  Leading ritual.  Because this is also part of working towards the goal of coming into our Second Degree in our tradition.  Competently creating and leading a ritual with the coven.  

I've wrote rituals before.  Preformed them.  This will be the second one within the Tradition that I will do.  But honestly, I feel like nowadays, I fall to pieces.

When I write, a lot of it comes fluidly, even if it isn't entirely cohesive.  More like a stream of consciousness type of writing.  But in particular, when I do spellwork, my words come in such a way that rhyming runes feel as if they are fluid.  

But over the years, the ADHD and stuff, I have the hardest time remembering things.  No matter if they actually are written by me.  I can totally memorize something but when it comes to basically 'being on stage' or it coming to my part in front of others, my mind goes blank.  I lost it.  And I have no idea why that is.

Younger, I've sang in front of hundreds of people.  I've given speeches.  Read aloud written letters.  Debated and spoken in front of crowds.  But now?  Now I feel like every time I take the lead on something, somehow, I'm being graded.  Which makes me nervous.  Which makes everything go completely out of my head.  And I wonder, if it is something that I used to be able to do for the most part, how come with even less people and less to do, that I have such a harder time doing it?  Is this common for people with ADHD?

Doing personal spellwork and ritual isn't difficult for me, whether I am using things remembered and taken from other pieces or I'm reading off something I just wrote.  I feel the strength I've mustered and can put the clarity and strength into my voice upon reciting.  In a group?  Even trying to read words off paper, words I know I've memorized, can sometimes be difficult at best.  And I'm not entirely sure why.

Regardless, even beyond my issues, I'll share a story with you that has nothing to do with my personal challenges of memorization, but does have to do with my personal experiences in witchcraft.  This is more a practical lesson than a magical one.

When I was much younger and studying, I went to have a moonlight ritual with a teen group.  It was strictly teens and advertised at a local metaphysical bookstore.  Out of about fifteen people, I knew two in passing and one was a good friend.  Someone I didn't know lead the ritual, a nice young woman I can only remember whose name was Rhonda.  It wasn't something I would do normally, as they used some sort of named dragons for the elements when they called to the four quarters, but it was a nice ritual.  With all the teenage angst and hormonal energies banging about in a circle where half of the people are literally wearing black robes over the teenage uniform of t-shirts and jeans, there was some unusual happenings (but that's another story for another time), but nothing foreboding or dire.

As we finished the ritual and everyone is around this large cauldron chatting quietly, I'm just taking in my surroundings.  The cauldron that was in use was a literal cauldron, as large as four five-gallon buckets grouped together, so I suspect it probably was used as a yard planter at some point, as opposed to the original jobs a cauldron that large would have.  They'd put wood in this cauldron and was using it as a small contained firepit.

Now one of the things that my friends would say about me back in the day that was no matter how furious or crazy I could be, that I could have a calming voice and presence.  The only problem with having a calm voice is that in a time of crisis, sometimes that voice can be missed.

I was standing with Rhonda on my right and someone else on my left, chatting quietly.  Rhonda was deep in conversation with the person to her right, her laughing figure relaxed and her left booted foot resting on the rim of the cauldron.  Her robes had been pulled back, her arms crossed with the one leg up.  Her jeans were nondescript in the firelight, the cuff tucked into her Doc Marten that rested on the cauldron's edge.

As I was making idle chat and looking around, I realized that the Doc Marten she was balanced on the cauldron with was beginning to melt and smoke.  Not wanting to cause any sort of panic, I leaned back towards her and very quietly stated, "Rhonda, your boot's on fire," then went back to my conversation.

In the span of about five minutes, the third time I actually turned to her and said quite calmly, "Rhonda, your boot's on fire-", I was cut off by wild screaming from the person she was talking to, yells of fire, and Rhonda suddenly madly stomping on the ground, trying to put her foot out.  Across the way, someone who knew me asked me why I'd not seen the fire, I'd turned and looked at her several times.  I stated I did.  They asked me why I didn't say anything.  I said I did.  Three. Separate. Times.  

The person I was talking to?  He takes me by the shoulders and turns me towards him. "While I appreciate you being calm," he said, "there are probably times where you need to be a little more assertive in getting people's attention."  He kind of cracked a smile.  "When someone's on fire, please make sure that the first time you tell them, they understand what you're saying."

While that sounds like a more grown-up conversation, it's really how it went.  

I grew up in the area near NASA, so a lot of people I associated with were from families that had better opportunities and education than I did growing up.  The children my age that acted like children bored and irritated me, so I  always sought out friends that were more intelligent, and a lot of times that lead to making friends sometimes twice my age.  This was no different, save for the young pagan kids that I was hanging out with, a majority of them were also from the same kinds of areas.

When you're a child and studying witchcraft and/or the occult, there's only a handful of reasons you're doing it.  The most shallow of them being shock factor, in that you're attracted to the woo-woo ideas and the issues that they can cause to people who don't know too much about those kinds of things.  Another reason would be the idea of gaining control over the situations of your life.  At the bad extreme, you want to control and manipulate people and at the best, you want to find a way to seize power to gain control over the things going on in your life.  I had two reasonings.  One was that I believed in my heart that there were things at work in the universe most people couldn't see and didn't know about.  The other reasoning was that I was looking for some sort of truth in those unseen things. 

Those two reasons are probably still part of the reason why I practice the way I do.

Think about it.  Very little of our communication deals with actual words.  Facial expressions, body language - these things can communicate more than your words.  It is not unusual to say words and actually behave in the opposite manner of your words.  It happens often.  But how much would be lost if all you had were the words?  It is looking for those signals from the universe that generally goes unnoticed that continue to drive my outlook on life and the way I practice my Craft.

So wish me luck.  And if you have any thoughts or ideas to help out with the Equinox, let me know.  Thanks. ;)