my first pagan hand fasting

My girlfriend priestessed a lesbian, pagan hand fasting last weekend at a retreat center in Charles Town, West Virginia, on a former plantation. It was on the last full day of spiralheart witchcamp, so we took the red-eye, or the shut-eye, as the airlines like to call it, to Washington, D.C. and then drove to West Virginia.

I actually liked West Virginia, at least the part of it that we were in...the NE corner about 1 hour outside of D.C. where West Virgina, Virginia, and Maryland all meet. You can always judge a place by the reaction when I walk in to an all male, all white barber shop and sit down in the queue. I think shock sprinkled with southern hospitality trumped any potential hostility.

The ritual was beautiful, the bride was stunning, and the butch groom had dress clothes on for the first time in years. It was mighty powerful, as most of the people in the circle had been at the witchcamp for almost a week, and the energy in the octagonal wooden room was palpable.

In addition to D., there were at least five other participants. Four different women called in the directions and welcomed the ancestors, and a gay man welcomed our queer allies and reminded us that certain kinds of love are still illegal, at which point, my damp eyes gave way to sobs.

They jumped the broom on literally the same land where slaves had jumped the broom in unions that were also not recognized by the law, and the rings were passed on a purple ribbon around the circle of at least fifty people, and everyone gave a blessing and a wish to the couple.

After the ritual, D. came over and asked me how I liked the hand fasting. “ I want one”, I said. She laughed.

Our hotel was in Harpers Ferry, WV, where John Brown led a slave uprising in 1859 and seized the Federal Weapons Arsenal. The town is very old, especially by California standards, and had an old haunted hotel with a view of a gorge on the Potomac River. (Click on the other pics on that page to see how beatiful the gorge is.)

There was a great flea market one block away from our hotel (not the haunted one), and we got sick at some of the LOW prices on stuff that was way too big for us to schlepp home. All in all, the vibe in West Virginia felt good to me.

We spent the rest of the weekend in a suburb of DC with the witchcamp teachers and organizers, and I was privy to hours and hours (and hours and hours) of camp debrief and some deep pagan theological discussions. One of D’s friends asked me if I was pagan, and I said “No, but now that we have been together for over a year, I am familiar with all of the holidays.” D. asked me which one I liked best, and I said Brigid, because I like all the books of poetry on the altar and the Brigid poetry slam in blogosphere. Although for Beltane, the antique postcards of maypoles are also very beautiful. Oh yea, and the sex part is good too.

The changing of the seasons means the changing of the altars at the house, and as a visual learner, just noticing the changes in the altars teaches me the meaning of the holidays. This weekend opened up a lot of questions for me, mainly just about the nature of “the divine”.

As Marga Gomez would say, “Who has it ? Where can I get it?”