The name “Jesus” scares people off, since our sound bite- and meme-driven culture automatically ties that name with what I call the “Christianists,” those abusive people who misuse the sacred tradition of Jesus’ friends as a political ideology, the way Islamists do the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (“Peace be upon him”).

I’ll say more about this in a future post, but meanwhile….

Wander over to Wahydra’s Porch: Curmudgeonly musings from an old Virgo for “something completely different.”

In one of my playful personas I am a solitaire, a witch who works alone without a coven. This aspect began to see the light of day in the mid-1970s after I came out as a faggot in Ithaca, NY.

Walhydra became a storytelling alter-ego for me in the mid-1990s on the Crone Thread, a listserv of mostly pagan, mostly women elders, folk who understand, revere and emulate the Crone.

Crone is a feminine aspect of the Divine, in the form of a woman past childbearing age, who strives to learn about and teach the terrors and blessings of mortality. She does this by facing those experiences honestly, walking through them with eyes open, breathing deeply, and returning to tell the tale.

The crux of the Walhydra stories is that I’m still coming out as an adult…usually grouching and flailing about or, in my more Walhydra-ish phases, clinging to the underside of the bed frame as Goddess pulls on my legs.

BTW, don’t be confused by the gender-fluidity in these stories. As the About page on the Porch says, Walhydra is a female witch stuck for this incarnation in a sixty-something, gay male would-be writer.

NOTE: I have not  returned to Walhydra’s blog in almost a year, but this isn’t the end.

Blessèd Be.

Image: “Post Street II,” by Mike Shell on RedBubble. Porch on Post Street, Jacksonville, FL (2/11/2012).