A year and four months ago a good friend of ours was in stage four cancer.  Desperate to find a miracle that would not leave her daughter alone in the world, I stopped by a pagan shop.  The witch behind the counter was sweet and told me there was nothing I could or should do, that the Goddess loaned us time here, it wasn't ours to keep.  That the best thing I could do was to take care of the little girl left behind.  I am a skeptical SOB, and figured that was the pagan way of saying our stuff doesn't work any better than Christian prayer.  Then a day later my wife told me the pagan shop girl had been robbed and instead of beefing up shop staff she let her help go because she could not be responsible for harm that might come to them in her shop.  Then I found a few weeks later that she gave back to the community big time. 
So I began to research Wicca, I read and read and found that many of the tennants of this pseudo religion answered all the questions I had that Christianity could never answer.  The shopkeeper wasn't all mystical and vague she gave me hard core answers with straight matter of fact principles.  She told me about 'an it harm none' and what that really meant about taking care of others but also yourself first.  About how energy flowed through everything.  About reincarnation and how that everything in the universe recycles so why not souls? 
I began to read everything I could online as well and found an article very interesting on witches voice or witchvox.  It was written by some obscure witch I am sure what was her name, Amy?  oh yeah Amethyst.  I wrote her and congratulated her on an extremely well written article that moved me.  She wrote back and said she had this little school and if I wanted come check it out.......
My friend passed away, my life was in chaos, the economy tanked, we lost our house, because of cutbacks in the government nearly lost our jobs.  There stood Amethyst like a rock in a storm that would not yield.  She wasn't what I would call sympathetic, she was pretty straight up about things, fix it, you don't like what is going on fix it, the power to change your world is in you.  Not an exact quote but pretty much the jist of things. 
LESSON ONE  borrow energy from the earth (Gaia) and see it fill your body and drive out all the negative stuff.  That was about 1% of the lesson but during the course of that I thought lets expand that and fill my house with that same energy.  My kids were in as much chaos as us.  Busted ugly relationships, job problems, bill problems and BANG I did the visualization thing and about a week later my family was back.  Pulling together, crappy boy and girlfriends were dropped my son got a killer job, we worked as a family on straightening out messes. 
LESSON TWO I lost my faith a long time ago.  I missed God.  Knowing he was there, over my shoulder was a good thing, but so much has happened in my life that I had lost faith in Him.  I read and discovered that Wicca had a myriad Gods and Goddesses.  But that popular notions are that they came from one God who didn't want to be alone in the universe.  Made sense, so quietly I prayed, meditated, kept my journals as intstructed, and one day out of a clear blue sky it was just okay.  I felt the pressence again, now this is my personal opinion but I believe all those times I was looked after in my life was the Goddess.  And the God?  Well some pretty profoundly dangerous things happened to me and I survived them all.  So why not.  This is the simplified version but the bottom line is that my faith in the Wiccan Gods and Goddess runs rings around earlier versions of Christian faith.  Because along this path just crazy good things have happened to me and shown me we are looked after, and here I don't send a prayer off to a lofty heaven, I step into a circle and we me and my Gods and Goddesses we work together right then and there on building a relationship and solving problems.
LESSON THREE magick.  Now I don't consider myself a trusting soul.  I read, study, and learn before I even do simple stuff like eating corn flakes.  I am a hippy from the early 70's and lived in a commune at one time.  I have also been a corporate head hunter that fired a record 176 people in one month.  I am not necessarily proud of that but it did teach me to trust no one over 30 and not believe anyone younger than that.  But as our beloved Amethyst and the sweet little shop keeper told me, magick exists, it works, they have seen it.  Yeah yeah and I can by all the land I want on the beach for a bunch of dollars sent to a nigerian web site.  But you know what, I can show you.  It does, it changed my life, and is going to change my life even more.  In three days I am going to begin the strongest spell I have ever put together.  And the proof is that I am going to loose 110 pounds or 50 kilograms in somewhere close to a year.  Now the spell is not designed to melt fat off me like candle drippings.  The spell is designed to simply strengthen resolve.  It is a binding spell. Why because I have lost nearly a ton of weight over 35 years sometimes as long as six months but it always comes back.  And it brings friends.  But I am done, my faith is strong now for the first time ever, my abilities have grown crazy strong.  Over the next year I will prove it right here in this blog.  Stay tuned.


Harry McAlister