I’m not sure when it started, my belief in magick. I simply remember buying my first book about it, “Wiccan Ways”, by Raven Grimassi. Perhaps it was because a few years earlier I had begun practicing Tarot cards, and it led in this direction. Perhaps it was because I was intensly studying religions as my major at university and it was just another religion I felt I needed to know.

It led me to other books and then internet sights and then learning the pagan religions with my cousin. We would sit in Boston Pizza where I worked for hours on end reading books and writing in our requisite book of shadows. We would drive around the city in the early hours of morning listening to Ivan’s “Open your eyes” which seemed to contain some sort of magickal essence within it. Our game was called “Find interesting places to smoke.” My favorite place was in Makenzie town, a little faux old fashion community, so far south it seemed like a different world. We’d sit in the gazebo in the town.

We’d talk for hours about energies, and elements, and stones, and gems, with the zealousness of a white trash house wife who just became a born again Christian. The nights simply seemed to come alive with our powers.

My cousin and I eventually moved in with each other. For awhile it was amazing. We initiated each other after long philisophical discussions over whether this was possible, and how it could be done. We would circle together and make magick. We would burn incense and create amulets. We were fundamentalists, travelling back and forth to the book store frequently to replenish our learning material.

How I found it is a mystery. As mysterious as the name, SAPS. It was a mailing list and actually stood for Southern Alberta Pagan Society. I chatted with these people for a couple weeks. It was a fledgling group, and everything seemed so perfect about them, as though magick was flying at me through my computer screen.

I don’t remember why, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell my cousin about SAPS. These were my friends, my discovery, my adventure into the outside world of the pagan religion. I couldn’t do it though, I couldn’t bring myself to meet these people because of my shyness. So, I had to do it, I literally said to my cousing “I want to go meet this group and I’m afraid to go alone. I need you to hold my hand”.

So, a few days later we were showering and primping and preening. My cousin did her make up while I did my hair. Then we jumped on the bus my heart pounding, my stomach lying somewhere on the floor of the bus rolling around.

Greetings didn’t matter, because I realized I already knew these people, they were instantly my best friend. I still remember every person that was there. Jill, and YellowFeather, Tamatha, Dot, Mark, Feith, my cousin and myself. I felt more magick in that room than at any other time in my life. It was as though our energies clicked. Something special circulated that room. I still remember Feith’s first words to me, “Great, we’re all here…let’s get naked and circle”. Good thing she saw the panick in my eyes and immediately let me know she was just kidding.

Life went on like that for months. I was in absolute new age fundamentalist bliss. My energies and magickal powers blossomed over the months until I felt fairly conifdent in them. My intuition and tarot reading skills ever reached for their first youthful climax.

Something began happening though. People began to leave. First Jill disapeared into thin air. Then Tamatha moved to Texas to be with a man. I moved home, away from my cousin to deal with my ever increasing need to come out of the closet, and even more quickly increasing debt.

Then I fell in love. Full blown, painful, unrequited, first love pain. And on the climax of this pain I become closer to Feith than I’d been to even my own mother or cousin. She became my closest friend. All this happened basically on the eve of her moving to Halifax.

After my cousin moved to Edmonton, things were never the same. Most of the people in SAPS I loved were gone. I had bigger things I was working on. I was discovering my place and resocializing into the Calgary gay community. With my magickal, and psychic powers at a high, it was like a play ground. It seemed I was getting any man I wanted. I was bringing massive men to tears, and pain, simply with an evil look of my eyes into his back.

Like any child in a playground, I forgot about the outside world. I rarely attended SAPS get togethers and barely spoke on the mailing list. I watched as the remaining SAPS grew closer and closer while I became increasingly alienated. I was traumatized that Feith left. I don’t think she ever knew this. Completely devistated, I couldn’t watch her leave for the last time. I sat around the corner in tears wishing she’d just leave and get it over with.

My magickal practice and skills slowly diminished overtime, sometimes waxing again when my interests became peaked. However, without the support and love of fellow pagans, its impossible almost to maintain that much power and energy within yourself. SAPS slowly diminished too without the core family. The “new” family was so tightly wound that it alienated new comers and old timers. Internal fighting was the order of the day, and I couldn’t bare it. I wanted to go back to that time when Thursdays were like a warm, incense filled, Tori amos sounding hug.

SAPS disapeared without warning. I hadn’t received mail in ages, so I checked. I was no longer on their list. I looked up the list and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I believe it was disbanded, but honestly I didn’t look too closely. It felt as though a loved one had died from an invluntary, disasterous cancer. A part of who I was was gone, and what replaced it was promiscuity and lustful school girl crushes. I felt pretty empty about it.

I know however that my family is still out there. I will most likely not see any of them ever again. I know Feith is in Texas, and Dot is probably still in Calgary. As for the rest, I simply just listen for their voices in the wind and imagine us in black robes converging after our lifetimes are like stone, joining hands and calling the quarters.