About a year later, I came to the conclusion that Christianity was not right for me. It's a great religion, and I think it has the potential to help a lot of people (if the fundamentalists will stop trying to restrict human rights, that is). It wasn't Christianity that caused me trouble, but religion itself. The unproven, untested belief in one of many cultural ideas of a supreme deity? That may work for some people, but for me it just raised more questions, the most important of which was, "If everyone believes different versions of the same thing, and no one can prove any of them right or wrong...who got it right?"
Instead of picking one god over another, I simply realised that I don't believe in one. Now, before you jump down my throat, let me say: I'm not arguing there is no god/are no gods. I simply don't subscribe to any of them. Since I have always believed in magick/psychic abilities/divination, I tried Wicca for some time because it explores those things and it relies on a non-exclusive existence of deities. I thought this was the perfect solution! I thought it would be beneficial to acknowledge ALL the gods, and simply call on the ones I needed. This immediately became confusing, and I found I was spending so much time just trying to decide which god to choose (there are so many...I didn't want to offend any of them) that I wasn't actually getting anywhere.
My next stop was Buddhism, which is a world-view which relies not on an external being to guide us in our lives, but rather on the self. A self-driven, deity-free lifestyle which promotes the pursuit of true happiness in one's own life? Sounds great! I studied Buddhist principles for about 2 years, and though that gave me guidelines to live my own life, it did little to indulge the nagging thoughts in the back of my head.
I've had some experience with magick and divination before, and I fully believed they existed, but Buddhism offered me no real way to explore these aspects of myself. So, with my newly-absorbed Buddhist principles in mind, I continued on to try and find this spiritual fulfilment I had so-long desired. Not in an active search, but in a very mindful, introspective search. And then, I remembered the Gipsies.
A few years back, a friend of mine had mentioned that I have "gipsy eyes." When I asked him what that meant, he simply stated that he wouldn't be surprised if I were to tell him I come from Gipsy lineage. Being adopted, this is a very difficult thing for me to research, but I did my best with what I knew.
- I have always been a traveler. I was raised by homebodies, and have always been the one to want to go out, go somewhere, go somewhere new, try new things.
- I have a very VERY strong penchant for divination.
- I also have a lot of clairvoyant dreams.
- I have shown great promise as a psychic healer.
- I am a very strong herbal healer.
- I love crafting. I love to work with my hands. I have a degree in oil painting, but also very much enjoy knitting, woodwork, jewlery making, yarn making, and am frequently trying my hands at new things.
- I believe in magic, but not necessarily in a deity of any kind. I don't doubt their existence, but don't require their existence either.
- My biological roots are Native American, English and Spanish; and my biological surnames are very common surnames among Gipsy clans in those regions (recognising, of course, that Native Americans are sort of like North American gipsies).
And we're caught up to now. I practice a very intuitive form of magick, based on things I've read about Gipsy magick (as well as the cumulative practices of every other religion I've ever subscribed to), and I'm happy.
