response 1 of 13:

Nov 20 06:35 UTC 1998

The "this sounds like fun" people are on my pet peeve list...

response 3 of 13:

Nov 20 20:26 UTC 1998

Isn't it possible that some or most of the "this sounds cool" folks are, in
fact, people who have always felt Wiccan/Pagan, and didn't know a word for
it? After all, one is generally not attractd to spiritual paths that bear no
resemblance to one's own beliefs.

I was one of those people who saw a few things on Wicca, decided it was what
I already believed, and accepted the label. 
*shrug*

response 5 of 13:

Nov 21 16:37 UTC 1998

There have always been hoards of them around.  It's unfortunate that they are
so visible, but they wander off pretty quickly.

My experience was of the epiphany sort, too.

I was brought up in a Roman catholic family and wanted very badly to be
devout, though I remember watching my brother as he and I kneeled at my mOm's
knee and "learned out prayers".  We must have been about three years old. 
My brother, to my astonishment, clearly *really believed*.  I had been hoping
that I was too little to "get it" and that it would all become clearer as I
got older.  At that point it all struck me as kind of strange.

Through my childhood and early teens, I worked very hard at learning to
believe and behaved as thoug I was very devout in the hopes that belief would
follow appearance.  It didn't work.  It still struck me as a load of horse
hockey.

I felt empty.  I wanted to believe but I couldn't.  It wouldn't come.  After
17, 18, 19 years of endeavor, I still felt like I was going throug empty
motions.

When I went off to college, I began a search for the religion I *could*
believe.  I knew myself to be a spiritual person and figured I wouldn't be
happy until I found the right outlet for it.  I tried Judaism, I tried Bahai,
I tried Baptist, I tried Hinduism, I tried Buddhism, and while I found
something there in each case, the fit never was quite right.

When I became pregnant, I tried Catholicism again.  I endeavored for three
years to make myself believe.  Pregnancy made me feel so much *more* spiritual
that I was sure if it would ever take, it was during this period of my life.

Nothing.

Then, when my younger son was almost two, I mentioned my search, and my
frustration, to an acquaintance.  She knew that I had picked up tarot and
astrology as interests back in college, and asked my if I'd ever looked into
witchcraft.  She was surprised that I wasn't really aware of it as a religion.
A few days later she dropped off a couple of books for me: Starhawk's Spiral
Dance and something by Marion Weistein.  As I read, I was drawn deeper and
deeper into a sense of epiphany: here were the words to describe what I'd been
seeking!  Here were the words that describe exactly what I'd been feeling!

For many, many years I practiced as a solitary and read everything I could
get my hands on.  I was home!

response 7 of 13:

Nov 22 00:31 UTC 1998

In some ways, I never had a "threshold" moment- when I was wee little, 3 and
under, my mom would make up story/songs for me, with stars and fairies.  She
never told me *not* to believe in fairies.  We lived right by the Atlantic,
on the top floor of our building ,and I used to imagine flying out, on the
path the moon makes over the water, to the moon.  Always a sense of magic and
wonder from the moon and ocean, esp. at sunset and evening.  Mom would take
me out on the terrace at bedtime, after I'd said goodnight- in French and
English and any other language which might be handy- to various inanimate
objects- and ask me "how big is your world".  I was to answer something like;"
all that I can see, as much as I can touch, and everything I can love". 
Animism?...She also encouraged in me empathy- without realizing just how real
and literal it was, so that she was not able to teach me shields to go with
it. <sigh>  That hurt.  Oh well.  When I was 5, mom invited a young man and
his wife to teach yoga at our building.  I loved it, esp. the guided journeys.
I started using body relaxations to help me go to sleep at night.  Not many
years later, a camp counselor used them with us, and I learned more
techniques.  Also loved the occasional times when I got to walk in the Florida
piney-woods.  Real sense of aliveness and company.  I've never been afraid
of the "things you can't see".  When I was 10, I did my first conscious act
of magic; at a sunday school retreat (reform synagogue), a bunch of girls
decided to hold a seance; "Who should we call?  Let's call Hitler." Eep!  I
figured, picking the most evil name that they could think of, whatever they'd
get wouldn't be pretty, so I just (for once) kept quiet and drew a sort of
lead curtain around them to keep anything from noticing their efforts- damped
what energy they raised, and waited for them to give up and go to sleep...

Well, I went off to high school in Maryland, in a lovely, magical bowl of
land, became quite good friends with various trees and land spirits, and my
roommate introduced me to two influential books; Richard Bach's _Illusions,
the adventures of a reluctant messiah_, and Sybil Leek's _Diary of a Witch_.
For some reason, the library also had a copy of Aliester Crowley's _Magick
in theory and Practice_.  I liberated it.  What a start... So that's how I
found out what you call this thing that we are.  In college, I had some pretty
intense experiences of discovery in nature, which I expect I'll tell you some
time in answer to some question, and also joined the SCA (medieval recreation,
if anyone doesn't know).  Found out that one of the locals was Wiccan, and
took about 10 minutes to stammeringly ask him to teach me.  He agreed.  Now,
for amusement value, it turns out that his teacher was kicked out of the
tradition to which I now belong.  For a while, before I had my own place among
the folks in Toronto, I was really, really embarassed for anyone to know my
"lineage" <g>  Now, it's good for a laugh.  

Now, there're a lot of experiences left out of this story, which I expect I'll
pass on later, but that's the skeleton of it.

response 9 of 13:

Nov 24 02:30 UTC 1998

Well mine is sort of similar to some that other have already expressed.  I
think I "knew" the moment I was born I just didn't have the words for it until
recently.  I remember as a child sitting in the back yard talking to the sun
and the stars and the grass and the animals.  I especially loved to talk to
the wind because it talked back =).  I could see spirits as a child and
demonstrated outstanding ESP (both documented) and these were natural to me.
My father is 1/2 cherokee and he taught me early on that the earth possessed
many strengths that we could not "see".  I spent many of my childhood hours
on the river or the ocean and in nature in general and this is where I felt
"at home".  As I grew older and dove head first into my dance and gymnastics
I grew away from the spirits that were once my friends and I spoke less and
less with the wind, but they were still there saying hey to me in my dreams.
I know found my connection in my music and the ways in which I moved my body
to dance with it.  I honestly lost myself in the music more than a dozen
times.  After I was injured and could no longer physically lose myself in the
music, so I threw myself into sailing.  I spent hours and hours on the ocean.
Now I spoke to the dolphins, to the waves, to the gulls and found home once
again.  I remember as a teen when we visited our beach house.  As soon as
everyone went to sleep I would sneak out and sit on the bench and just stare
out at the ocean for hours.  More than once my mother had to wake me up from
my bench that had been my bed early the next morning.  
*time warp* Last May (I honestly don't remember what sparked my interest it
could have been a snipit of a conversation or a TV show who knows...) I began
to research Wicca.  I don't even think I knew it was a religion much less that
it pertained to witches.... I just remember hearing the word and going "yes
I need to know more about that."  So many hours later I had the barebones of
Wicca and I saw in it all of my life.  Next I reached for human contact
information.  Unfortunately I never found suitable people at the time.  In
the college area where I live there is not a pagan student groups (i'm working
on it) the solitaries around here tend to be "Craft Watchers"  *grr*.  So I
turned to books.  Millions of books.  Whatever snipits I could read in
Barnes&Noble (i'm a poor student) I would absorb like nourishment and return
another day to finish the book.  I hoestly don't remember the names or the
authors since I dont have them on my shelves, but I remember the feeling of
belonging among the pages written by people who felt like me.
Now I'm learning and continuing my journey, and I feel better than I can ever
remember =).
Who's next?

response 11 of 13:

Nov 26 12:13 UTC 1998

My dad led rituals with The Maccabees, which used to be a quasi-Masonic
fraternity. My mom read palms, tried ESP, read cards, recalled the really
wonderful things that her uncles did with Madame Blavatsky. Both of them ended
with a dead sort of skepticism. As a kid, I tried ESP, Ouija board, Egyptian
occultism, ad lib magick. Went into "humanism," but got tired of attacking
religions. Taught philosophy, but found it didn't deal with problems that real
people wanted answers to. Wrote LISP programs for "artificial intelligence,"
and many articles, but found that machines aren't people. Worked with Valerie
Worth, who was writing "The Crone's Book of Words," discovering magick and
Wicca. In AA did volunteer work in the Unitarian Church, but found it was
mostly how to be politically correct. Danced in a circle at County Farm,
singing "We all come from the Goddess," and I was hooked for life. Read the
Charge of the Goddess at ritual and knew that was where I wanted to be. Then
my mother had her stroke, and Isis came to heal her; I promised to love and
serve the Goddess forever and ever. She's been right there through the deaths
of my mother and father, and later, the death of my wife. And my wiccan/pagan
friends have been right here when I've needed them. My job is to do the same
for them.

response 13 of 13:

Dec 2 00:42 UTC 1998

That is a very wonderful story John =)