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A Tale of Two Necklaces
by Lupa©
Sometimes the best rites of passage are the ones that aren’t
planned. Some pagans assume that these rites are things that are stationed
along our path at certain intervals, marked by formal ceremonies and
celebrations, and ushering in new stages of life to much fanfare. Life has a
way of initiating us all on its own, though, and the more we consciously
evolve, the more opportunities it hands us.
In the
summer of 1997, between my senior year of high school and freshman year of
college, I visited Seattle,
Washington for the very first
time. I have family up there, and they took me in for a week to show me around
the area. It was the first trip I’d ever been on by myself, and the first time
I’d ever been to the Pacific Northwest. It was
also a life-changing experience.
I’d
recently gotten interested in esoteric subjects, though I’d kept it mostly
hush-hush. They continued a lifelong fascination with Nature and the spirit
that I suspected lay within it. I was also a very creative and artistic person
(and still am, at least in my opinion). Coming to Seattle
was like finding a little spot of Paradise.
Here I was, getting to be relatively independent in a new territory, and I was
surrounded by the things I liked. I found a busy, Earth-and-art-friendly city
that was full of green spaces, a thriving public market that featured
everything from flying fish to crafty vendors, and a wolf sanctuary a little
over an hour away. What wasn’t there to love?
Needless to
say, I fell hard for Seattle.
And I came home with a few souvenirs, the most prized of which was a necklace
that I picked up at the Frontier Gallery at the Seattle Center
(right in the shadow of the Needle!). The pendant was a small piece of
fossilized mammoth ivory scrimshaw. The artist had taken a very sharp craft
blade and painstakingly carved a wolf’s face and a full moon on it, then rubbed
India ink into the carving to make a lovely design. That necklace, to me,
symbolized everything that was perfect about Seattle—using fossilized ivory instead of
new, created by a local artisan, and featuring my primary totem, Wolf.
I rarely
took that necklace off over the next decade. When I had my student I.D. picture
taken the following fall, it hung around my neck, and it was featured in
several driver license photos. It became my favorite necklace, and the one that
symbolized my connection to Wolf the most.
Calling Me Home
Fast-forward
to the summer of 2005. I had the opportunity to move wherever I wanted within
the United States—and
guess where I decided to go? The city that had stolen my heart years ago, and
called to me every time I had thought about uprooting myself and moving
elsewhere. At the time I lived in Pittsburgh,
PA, all the way across the
country. I was still wearing that necklace, and in fact I was wearing it 24-7
except when I showered. After I made the decision to move the following March,
when my lease was up, it became a symbol of a hopeful future. And I could feel
the pull of the city that much more because of it.
Nine months
and one fiance-slash-travelling-companion later, I headed across the country in
a 17 foot truck towing my car behind it. Was I scared? Who wouldn’t be? But I
was excited, too. I enjoyed feeling the energies of the various places we went
through—we liked New Mexico
so much we just about stopped there for good. But Seattle continued its call, and so on up the
coast we went. I knew once we hit Northern California
and got into the mountains that I was heading home.
When we
arrived the city was sort of how I remembered it, though I hadn’t remembered
there being quite so much traffic! Still, after a couple of months staying with
very understanding family, we arranged jobs and a place of our own, and got
settled into rediscovering the city that I’d been called to. I knew there was a
reason for me to be here—and now was the time to find out what that was.
And Reality Bites
Did I mention there was traffic? Seattle
is a huge city, and it and the surrounding area contain well over 500,000
people and counting stuck in a narrow strip of land between the Cascades and Puget Sound, spilling across the Sound onto the
peninsula. There are only three major highways going north-south, and less than
half a dozen going east-west—and they’re not meant for half a million people!
This was
the crux of one of our major issues of living here. Because there was so much
traffic, it took us over an hour to get out of the city proper into anything
resembling wild areas. Taylor, whom I wed in July of 2006, and I are both rural
people at heart. We like the people we meet in the cities, but we need the
woods and fields to be truly happy. While Seattle
has tons of parks, they’re packed with people. The traffic made commuting
tough, too—at one point I spent over three hours a day, five days a week, on a
bus. We didn’t get to see as much of our friends up there as we wanted, either.
And that was just one problem.
Bad things
kept happening. The car got broken into, and almost all my CDs were stolen. We
ended up taking our car to a mechanic who ended up (we suspect, anyway)
sabotaging the vehicle to get more business—less than 70,000 miles, and the car
ended up in the shop three times in less than two weeks. While Taylor had a steady contract, I kept getting
ditched because the contracts I ended up in were terminated early (though I at
least got good references out of the situation).
By the
following winter, looking towards 2007, I was seriously beginning to wonder
just why I’d come out here. I was miserable, depressed, and wishing I could be
in a better situation. Taylor
hated the city—he tried to like it, but the love I’d found in this metropolis
just wasn’t in him. We began discussing our options.
Through the Ordeal, and Out the Other End
I never did give up on Seattle
entirely, though. I hadn’t found what I’d felt compelled to find here, and I
knew there was something that I couldn’t leave the city without. Call it
instinct, call it intuition—heck, call it imagination for all I care. There are
few things that I’ve felt so strongly as the idea that there was something here
for me that I’d been called to find.
As 2007
began, Taylor and I did a ritual on New Year’s Eve at midnight to divine our
options for the year. I saw a lot of work and development ahead of me, though
things looked positive if I put in the effort. So amid my depression I began
digging into my life, internally and externally, to clean out the excess
baggage. I tore through layers of negative conditioning and behavior patterns,
and I evaluated my mundane situation—job, resume, home life, hobbies, etc. I
spent months figuring out what was causing me stress, and how best to deal with
these things.
It wasn’t a
particularly fun experience. I ran up against some nasty tangles in my mind
that I thought I’d never sort out, and I spent entirely too much time being a
rather unpleasant person to be around as I sorted through all this baggage.
I’ll spare you the details, but needless to say I came out of the winter of
2006-7 sore.
But it was
more than worth it. I learned a lot about myself, and I got a lot of
unnecessary stuff out of my life. I rid myself of bad habits, and became aware
of issues I hadn’t realized before. As spring arrived, slowly but surely, I
began to recover both physically and otherwise. The main turning point was
after Daylight Savings Time ended and I was able to enjoy more sunlight; my
mood improved exponentially. Along with it I saw a lot of other positive
changes in my life, and I knew that the ordeal was just about through.
And at the
heart of it all was Seattle,
with the necklace pulling me deeper into it even as part of me yearned to flee.
The city had provided me with just the right experiences to teach me the
lessons I needed to learn. Of course, you could just chalk it up to chance and
coincidence. But that wouldn’t be in line with the mythos I’m creating, would
it? And who’s to say that “chances” aren’t at least partly orchestrated by the
Powers That Be—including the Genius Locii of a city? I find it much more
spiritually fulfilling to believe that it wasn’t just coincidence, and the
result is that I feel a lot more positive about my experience.
The Changing of the Guard
Even after this learning experience, though, I still hadn’t
felt like I’d found what I’d come here for. It was important, to be sure, that
I went through all that. But the feeling of need persisted. As spring continued
on in its warmth, Taylor and I made the decision
to relocate to Portland, Oregon,
a smaller city that still had a lot of the same things we liked about Seattle, only in smaller
doses. And three hours away, too—not such a bad distance for visiting.
As the time
for relocation grew closer, I felt some anxiety. Once again we were moving
without jobs in hand, and weren’t quite sure what we were getting ourselves
into. But the move felt right, and once again we trusted our intuition. Sure
enough, just as I’d start really worrying, we’d get a sign that maybe it wasn’t
such a bad idea after all—we found out that the other half of the duplex that
some of our friends lived in just happened to be going up for rent right before
we were scheduled to move down. Then I got a job interview and a few more leads.
Things were looking good for our adventure slightly southward.
One of the
last things I did in preparation was to bus around the downtown Seattle area to enjoy
some of my favorite places once more. After hitting up Pike Place market, I continued to the Seattle Center. I stopped in the Frontier
Gallery for a peek at their scrimshaw, just as I had almost a decade ago. I’d
been there a few months before to inquire about my necklace. The ink had faded
almost entirely away, and all I could see were the wolf’s eyes, ears and nose,
and a faint outline of the moon. Could they perhaps fix it for me, renew the
design?
Sadly, the
answer was no. I’d worn that piece of ivory for so long that it was fairly
soaked in my skin oils. It would have to be entirely sanded down and recarved
from scratch. Neither I nor the necklace wanted that—even the lady who owned
the shop said that it was full of my energy.
I was
undecided as to whether to replace the necklace, or just do what I could to
care for it. I tried putting some clearcoat on it to preserve what was left of
the ink, but it just didn’t feel right. Still, I continued to wear the
necklace, including on the day I walked into the shop, just to take a peek.
As I
approached the glass cases where the scrimshaw was kept, I scanned the pieces
for wolves. I saw bears and lynx, owls and roses—and wolves. One in particular
caught my eye, a ruddy wolf peeking out from a field of dark green. The price
tag was a bit steeper than I had expected, but the work was lovely, and quite
worth it. Still, I decided to wait. I could always come back up and visit from Portland, right? And if
that one wasn’t there, there’d be others.
I walked
away that day, but the image of that particular piece stuck in my head. A
couple of weeks later, I talked to Taylor
about it. Rather, I simply stated, “I want to go to that shop and replace my
necklace before we leave Seattle”. He wisely didn’t fight me about it!
Instead,
today we went back to the gallery amid other errands. It took a bit of searching,
and enlisting Taylor’s
help, but we found that wolf again, hiding in the green—hiding so well, in
fact, that we almost didn’t find him.
The
purchase was made, and I walked out to the patch of green grass right outside
the shop. I made myself comfortable, and called on the spirit of Seattle. I thanked it for its time, and it assured me
that I was welcome back any time I liked—there’s always be a place for me.
Then I took
off the old necklace, and I thanked it for its companionship and protection over
the years, and for helping me to get back to the place I’d fallen in love with.
It felt tired, and old—ten years is a long time in wolf years. As I unclipped
it and placed it in the box the new necklace had come in, I could almost hear a
sigh of relief and relaxation as a decade of intense magic came to a close.
Time to let that old wolf retire in style on my altar.
Then I
turned to the new wolf necklace, sitting in my lap. “Are you quite sure you
want to do this?” I asked. “After all, you see what the past decade did to
HIM”. I think if that new wolf could have leapt out of my hands and around my
neck he would have, and I felt a definite sense of “Yes” as I fastened it and
let the pendant dangle against my chest.
And right
at that moment I knew—I’d found exactly what I’d come here for.
No, it
wasn’t just the necklace. If I’d wanted a necklace I could have bought one
online. It was the rite of passage that drew me. The experiences I’d had
between the move to Seattle,
and the moment I put on the new necklace, had brought me through a formative
point in my life. There were good things and not so good things, but they had
all come out for the best in the end. And as I changed necklaces, so I closed
that stage of my life, and opened myself to the next. I walked away from Seattle Center fully confident in the future,
and no longer doubting the decisions I’d made.
As I type
this tonight, the new necklace wraps around my neck, warm and comforting
against my skin. I still haven’t gotten quite used to it, and I’m still not
quite used to the idea that in just a couple of weeks we’ll be en route to our
new home. But it’s proof to me of what I’ve been through, and why I work magic
and allow it in my life. Sure, you could argue that these were just a bunch of
unconnected events. But the meaning that I have invested in them gives me
strength, and that has what has helped me to actually learn and grow from them.
I have paid close attention to what’s happened, and I have become a better
person because of it; not perfect, perhaps, but I’m still working on that.
To Taylor, to Wolf, and to Seattle—thank you for this rite of passage,
and thank you for seeing me through. Here’s to another great decade.
Lupa is a twenty-something pagan and experimental magician living inSeattle
with her husband and fellow author,Taylor Ellwood.
Lupa is the author of Fang and Fur, Blood and Bone: A Primal Guide to Animal
Magic, A Field Guide to Otherkin (March ’07) and Kink Magic: Sex Magic Beyond
Vanilla (withtaylor,
November ’07). Her website is http://www.thegreenwolf.com .
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