Destined (38 page)

One quiet afternoon Laurie came over
for an espresso and a chat. Siri and Bella joined us and we gathered at the
coffee bar. Laurie seemed excited and her eyes sparkled, her cheeks glowing
with color. She pulled a computer printout out of her bag and waved it at us.

“Guess who’s going to be here next
week!” she demanded with a big smile.

We all shook our heads and shrugged.

“Why don’t you just tell us, honey?”
said Bella, patting Laurie on the back.

“Starhawk!” Laurie announced what she
obviously found to be an astounding and wonderful fact, looking thrilled. We
greeted her announcement with attentive silence.

“OK…um, who?” Bella asked. Siri and I
didn’t know either.

“You have never heard of Starhawk?”
Laurie asked us in amazement.

“Nope,” said Bella succinctly. She
walked behind Laurie and made a crazy face, indicating with her finger that
Laurie was loco.

“Who is Starhawk, Laurie?” I asked. “And
where is he or she coming to, exactly?”

“She’s a very famous feminist author
and activist. She’s written, like, a dozen books. She’s also a witch!”

“Riiiiiiight!” said Bella, rolling her
eyes.

Everyone laughed, Laurie too.

“No, really, her books are wonderful
and she’s incredibly smart. Now she’s into this thing called ‘permaculture’
which is very interesting to John and me. It’s a kind of totally organic
farming that sustains the planet. Starhawk is an eco-activist.”

“Wow,” said Bella, “She sounds pretty
cool.”

“I would very much like to hear her
speak,” said Siri.

“Me too,” I said. “When is it happening?
Let’s all go!”

Laurie showed us the email printout.
She had heard about it from one of her organic produce suppliers, whose name
appeared in the “from” header. We all agreed it would be fun to go out at night
together, and made plans to attend.

When the night arrived we piled into
Laurie’s Green Thumb van and drove over to the college chapel, where the event
was taking place. It was interesting to me that a Pagan priestess was going to
speak at the same podium where a Christian minister would normally stand.
Laurie told us that the chapel was nondenominational, and was used by many
different groups and faiths for meetings and services.

We found a parking place and walked up
to the door. Several women stood outside handing out pamphlets about closing down
Yankee Rowe, our local nuke, and other hot political topics. Inside the doors
there were long tables on both sides of the foyer, with tickets being sold on
the left. A young woman with very long blonde hair, wearing an old fashioned
gown made of calico print, sold us our tickets. She had dazzling cornflower
blue eyes and was gorgeous without a speck of makeup. Next to her was a
dark-haired boy about twenty, pierced and tattooed with chains hanging from
various parts of his body. He looked intense, too, in a different way. The
lobby was crammed full of people, mostly women of young to middle age, milling
around and talking excitedly. Books were being sold at the table on the other
side of the doors. We moved past and entered the church itself, making our way
down the center aisle to find seats. The chapel was nearly full.

I looked around at the other people,
fascinated. The crowd was mainly female. Some of the women had short-cropped
hair and mannish clothes, obviously Lesbians. Other women were blatantly girly,
dressed in ruffled silks or flowered prints and wearing their hair long and
flowing. Some of them had put sparkling glitter on their faces and in their
hair, and many displayed colorful tattoos. A group of considerably older women
with white hair and conservative clothing were sitting in the front couple of
rows. A few apparently gay men and college professors were sprinkled throughout
the crowd. And then there were the three theatrically dressed long-haired
wizards who stood brooding on the periphery like Rasputin, sending their dark
electric gazes around to scan the room for…what? An innocent young victim? A
bed partner for the night? A talented new magical apprentice? My imagination
went wild.

“What’s with that, anyhow?” whispered
Bella, who was sitting next to me. She nodded her head toward the nearest
wizard, who wore a dark purple velvet beret over his shoulder-length curling
locks, and sported a neat little Zorro-style mustache and goatee. A large
silver pentacle medallion hung on his chest. We couldn’t see what it said from
where we were sitting, but it looked ancient and mysterious. He caught us
looking at him and scowled. Bella nearly exploded from withheld laughter,
making a helpless little snorting noise. I started to catch it from her, but
then a woman got up from the front row and approached the podium to speak. The
crowd settled down and was quiet. The woman said she was a representative from
the group who was sponsoring the event, the Men’s Education Center. I found
that ironic, but wonderfully so. Then she introduced Starhawk, who stood up and
took the stage.

She was a nondescript heavyset
middle-aged woman with chin-length dark frizzy hair shot with quite a lot of
gray. She looked either Jewish or Mediterranean in origin, with an olive
complexion. She was dressed simply in a purple top and black pants, with no
jewelry or makeup. I felt a little disappointed. This was the famous witch? And
then she started to talk, and smile, and look around making eye contact with us
all, and I realized in a flash that she was one of the most beautiful women I
had ever seen. She drew herself up and suddenly looked much taller, majestic.
She transformed herself and radiated power. A little charge went through me,
and I shivered with excitement.

All eyes were riveted on her as she
told us about her experiences in New Orleans, where she had gone with a group
of fellow activists to help with the recovery effort immediately after
Hurricane Katrina. She was funny and clever, and her voice throbbed with a slow,
sweet energy. As I watched her, something blurry wavered in front of my eyes
for a moment, then disappeared, then shimmered in the air again. I rubbed my
right eye, blinking to clear it. But the fuzzy glow was still there, when I
looked at Starhawk. The rest of the room looked normal. The glow was coming
from her, I realized. She was radiating some kind of aura. It shone around her
in a thick band about a foot wide.

“Can you see that too?” I whispered to
Laurie, who sat on my other side.

“What? See what?”

“That light around her!”

Laurie gave me a huge smile and
squeezed my hand, nodding. I noticed that tonight her earrings were little
silver pentacles hanging from silver chains. I remembered my intuitive vision
of her at a Wiccan ritual, and wondered what she would think of my encounters
with the spirit who seemed to inhabit Henry’s house, or the information I
sometimes got when I touched certain people. I had never mentioned it to her,
being so used to keeping my odd experiences private. Most people weren’t very
comfortable hearing about this kind of thing, and the teasing I received as a
child had taught me to stay silent. Maybe Laurie would feel differently about
it, perhaps she had even had some similar experiences. Mr. Paradis had
certainly accepted it calmly, as a matter-of-fact thing. And Tony thought he
could change the future with his mind. Maybe I was not so odd after all!

Starhawk told us that she had learned
in New Orleans that the best person to know when all services and systems break
down is not the Harvard PhD, but the person who knows how to make a composting
toilet. We all laughed. Then she went on to talk about how in our society we
over-value intellectual skills, rather than practical ones. What it really
takes for the world to work right is both, in collaboration, she said, and they
are equally valuable to society.

Then she spoke about permaculture,
telling us about the California community she was a part of, where they were
experimenting with the idea. She explained it as the art of designing
beneficial relationships between elements like people, plants, animals, air,
water and the soil to create a balanced, coherent natural system that can
sustain itself permanently. She said, “the world is a web of dynamic
relationships, and everything exists in communities.” I certainly agreed with
that. She said that we needed to turn our minds to managing the planet in a new
way. We needed to think of it as a closed system, where every action that
benefits one part will impact many others, some in good ways and some
negatively.

When the lecture was over she took
questions from the audience for over an hour. On the way home in the van I sat
up front next to Laurie as she drove. Bella and Siri were giggling about
something in the back seat.

“Laurie, how did you first hear of
Starhawk?” I asked.

“I read her book
The Spiral Dance
when I was in college,” Laurie
answered. The little pentacles hanging from her earlobe swung back and forth as
she shifted, glinting in the light. “It’s one of the most famous books on
modern witchcraft and the feminist spirituality movement. She was one of those
wild, San Francisco activist hippies of the ‘60s. They used to put on huge
public rituals, where hundreds of people would gather for fire circles on the
beach. Her coven is called Reclaiming. They have thousands of members now, all
over the world.”

“Well, you’re right, she did seem very
smart. What is the witch thing about?” I asked.

Laurie laughed at me. “The witch
thing?”

“Yeah, what’s up with that? I don’t
know much about it.”

“Modern witchcraft is a form of
religion, Emily. It’s usually a kind of nature worship. That’s why she is so
into taking care of the Earth.”

“But, what about spells and all that?”

“Witches believe that it is possible
to manipulate the world with their willpower, to make things happen with magic,”
she said, very seriously. “The word ‘wicca’ means ‘to bend,’ as in, to bend or
shape reality. And the main rule is that you can do whatever you want to, as
long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.”

That surprised me. I had always
thought of witches as the ones handing out poison apples to unwary princesses.
And it sounded a lot like what Tony had been teaching me, the power of positive
visualization.

“Do you think those women inside there
tonight were witches?” I asked her, readjusting my mental image of the term.

“Some of them, definitely. You’d be
surprised how normal most witches look. Like Starhawk, for example. But then
there are also the flaming charismatics like that guy you and Bella were
flirting with,” she teased me, grinning.

“I did not!” Bella’s protest came
ringing out from the back seat.

“I saw you looking at him!” Laurie
said.

“Yeah, well, he was like…trying to
hypnotize everybody!”

“He didn’t like it when you laughed at
him, you better watch out!” I teased.

“Oh-oh, the evil eye! It’s gonna get
me!” Bella pretended to hide behind her hands, giggling.

“He was just trolling for some new
disciples,” Laurie said.

“Well he must have a raging ego if he
thinks he can get much action with that hair do,” Bella sniffed disdainfully. “My
beautiful Latino husband is much better looking!”

I was thinking about permaculture
again, and the idea that the earth was literally a holy thing to someone like
Starhawk, according to what Laurie said.

“It’s cool to know that people are out
there working so hard on the health of the planet,” I said.

“Yes,” Laurie answered. “It makes me
want to help, too.”

“But you do, Laurie, you help a lot!
Much more than most people.”

“I know, but I can do more. We all
can. It’s really our only hope, you know.”

The mood had turned serious, and we
were all quiet as we rode through the dark streets toward home. I looked up and
saw a very bright star, all alone in the sky. It was huge. I thought it might
be the planet Venus. I thought about that star being part of the same community
of which I was a member, way down here on the Earth. That seemed pretty remote
and hard to grasp. The star was so far away that I couldn’t picture how any
action of mine could possibly impact it. So I reeled in my mind and confined my
imaginary frame of reference to the Earth itself, spinning along inside its
filmy little balloon of atmosphere. That was different. I could easily imagine
how gases emitted by my car could float up into that frail envelope and change
it, damage it. I could picture how the waste products of all the
technology-addicted people in our world could poison the soil and the water.