I'm a writer, witch, and artist. My work explores ethics, Pagan spirituality, and magick.
My goal is to help people find happiness and be their best selves. My religious ideas are always evolving, but I'm heavily influenced by Hellenic (Greek) religion, Buddhism, shamanism, and ceremonial magick, especially Ogdoadic hermeticism. I'm devoted to Aphrodite, and try to bring love into the world through teaching and facilitating rituals, trance work, shamanic soul retrieval, and Reiki, but most especially through encouraging compassion and vegan living. My passions include veganism, ethics, spirituality, philosophy, neuroscience, lucid dreaming, and social justice. I write for the Pagan Activist blog and lead a shared blog at Those Vegan Hedonists.
This site features my writing, photography, and photo manipulation art. I'll share personal news and blogs, my thoughts on ethics, spirituality, magick, and my fiction. I want to give a lot away for free. My current passion is the photo series Archetypal - artwork intended for contemplation, meditation, and spell work. It explores mythic themes, including Kabbalah and Jungian psychology.
My vegan journey started when I witnessed a slaughtered pig being prepared for a roast at a Boy Scout summer camp. Like a lot of people, I'd always had a basic discomfort with the idea of eating animals, but had rationalized and ignored those feelings. I told myself that humans need to eat animals, that their lives were offered up for a good purpose. Seeing the pig was a wake up call. Here was a being that, if I had encountered it alive and well, I would have tried to befriend. Instead, an innocent being was lying covered in their own blood, with a hole carved into their rear end so that the workers could shove a spit through it. The camp workers grunted with the effort of their work, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this was not just a big piece of food. This was a once-living being who didn't deserve this.
I didn't partake of the pig roast, and I made some effort to remain vegetarian. As I was 14, and received no support or dinner-time concession from my family, I quickly went back to eating flesh. It was easier to deal with the teasing from friends and peers than it was to go without good food, at least for me. For the next four years, my only concession to my vegetarian ideals was that when my family ordered pizza, I would get cheese only.
It wasn't until I was 18, and felt more in control of my own life and choices, that I fully decided to go vegetarian. About two years later, realizing that the dairy and egg industries cause even more suffering than the flesh industry, I finally went fully vegan.
Becoming vegan opened up my horizons to food. It showed me another side to human interactions – I mean, I was a bit of an outlier anyway, but this added a whole new minority to my stat sheet. My hair and nails grow almost too fast. And I am finally living in alignment with what I always felt to be true: that other living beings are not ours to do with as we wish.
Books: The three Thomas Covenant series by Stephen R. Donaldson, Practical Guide to Creative Visualization by Denning and Phillips
Movies: Ninotchka, Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Blogs: Rune Soup, Vegan Street
Podcasts: The Young Turks, Food for Thought, Common Sense with Dan Carlin, The Brain Science Podcast, The Interdependence Project
Words to Live By: "Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." ~ Iris Murdoch
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." ~ Philo of Alexandria
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men." ~ Alice Walker
"Evaluate each of your desires by this question:
'What will happen to me if that which this desire seeks is attained,
and what if it is not?'"
~Epicurus
The Theosophical Society in America
Theosophical Order of Service, USA. I was honored to join the Board in February 2017.
