Growing Community!

Hello, all!

This past weekend was Cleveland Pagan Pride Days, the big Cleveland area gathering that usually happens in late August every year. It started in 2009, and has happened every year except, of course, 2020 (due to the pandemic). I was actually a bit surprised that it continued this year, since the organization's other event, the Cleveland Witches Ball which usually takes place in October, was already cancelled due to the continued rise in cases of the Delta variant. Cleveland Pagan Pride Days (CLE PPD for short) is an outdoor event, but takes place in a small city park, and it is usually very crowded in all the small booths, with hundreds of people attending. There were certainly very crowded times, but there were also some more spacious moments, thankfully. I also noticed that most vendors arranged their booths with tables on the outside edges to keep browsing to the walkways, and not have people enter the small, tented areas. Many people did wear masks, or have them handy for more crowded instances. (I was working at a booth, so I didn't wear my mask while sitting at the booth with no one around, but I put it on any time I walked out into the event itself, into the crowds, to the bathrooms, and so on.)

I have a couple blog posts in the works, saved as drafts here, but I wanted to publish this as a quick note just to say hello, we're here, and to celebrate a little milestone!

It seems like a lot of people who were at CLE PPD on Sunday when I was working were people who had never been to the event before, and some who had never been to ANY Pagan Pride event before. Similarly, several people from our own growing Ohio Reclaiming Witchcraft community also decided to come out to meet up! Because of this, over the course of the weekend I was able to meet four more people from our little online community space, in person! I will leave names out of this public-facing blog post for privacy reasons, since this is visible to anyone on the internet. But two people came to visit me at work on Saturday, and two others met up with me on Sunday! We got to chat about future plans for this community, and possible ways to proceed with slowly getting people together, considering the continuing health and safety of everyone. Online rituals and meet-ups are certainly possible, and hopefully more simple to get started with for people's varying schedules.

Introductory Reclaiming Books

Some people may hear about Reclaiming first from their friends or local Pagan/Witchy community, if they're in touch with such a community, and that community has an awareness of the tradition. In our area here in northeast Ohio, I have found that very few people have ever heard of Reclaiming.

A good amount of people have, however, heard of Starhawk and The Spiral Dance.

If you didn't hear about Reclaiming through a friend, online group, or other similar means, you probably first found out about it by reading one of these books (or perhaps another by Starhawk, or other authors who were, or still are, involved with the tradition). This may be repeat information in that case. But for those who find this page through other means and want to know how to learn more, these books are a great starting point. Some of them are even used as prerequisites for participating in Reclaiming classes or workshops, to make sure people have a passing familiarity with the basics before jumping into work together, or so you can come in with questions for discussion ready.

The Spiral Dance, The Twelve Wild Swans, and Elements of Magic --
Three books that give an introduction to different aspects of Reclaiming

The Spiral Dance

In the upper left of the above picture is a copy of the 20th anniversary edition of The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess by Starhawk. It was originally published in 1979 by Harper & Row (HarperCollins, or Harper San Franciso), with a second edition being released in '89 for the 10th anniversary, and a third edition in '99 for the 20th anniversary. If you can find it, I do recommend reading the 20th anniversary edition, because it includes the author's notes and further thoughts about the original text at both the 10th anniversary, and the 20th. You can read through the book and wherever asterisks have been added, either one* or two**, there are notes about it in the 10th* or 20th** anniversary sections, respectively. I personally think this is really great, because you can immediately get a feel for how much things changed in the first twenty years since the book was originally published, and how Reclaiming tradition was already evolving. Of course if you can only find the original edition, or even the 10th anniversary edition, that's okay, just bear in mind that what you're reading was originally written over 40 years ago now, and some things have changed, new information may have come about, and the author's viewpoints have also grown and changed. Many of the practices and basic information, however, are still used to this day.