Who am I now?

In September of 2006, I entered the blogosphere using the tragicomic voice of a character I call my “curmudgeonly alter-ego,” Walhydra.

As is the case for all egos, Walhydra is convinced that she is the real me, the important me, in this case inconveniently incarnated as a “fifty-something, gay, would-be writer,” who never manages to be as brilliant, as successful—or as invulnerable to pain, loss or mortality—as any ego wishes its human vehicle to be.

Walhydra came into being as a storytelling device in the mid-1990s, when I was invited to join a private listserv of mostly pagan, mostly women elders, folk who understand, revere and emulate the crone aspect of the Goddess.

The Crone is that feminine aspect of the Divine which, in the form of a human being past childbearing age, strives on behalf of the race to learn about and teach the terrors and blessings of mortality.

She does this by facing them honestly, walking through them with eyes open, breathing deeply, and returning to tell the tale.

Mary at the cross and Easter tomb of her son was my example when I joined the Crone Thread.

I can see in Walhydra the influence of two writers who helped me to survive my first adult decade in the 1970s.

One is Kurt Vonnegut, who took profound love of humankind, mixed with unblinking awareness of our capacity to be wicked and foolish, and created an alchemical blend of teaching humor.

The other is Carlos Castaneda, who led us would-be powerful and enlightened Flower Children a merry chase by writing book after book about a mythical student anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda, and his naive, ego-bound efforts to emulate his wiser self, the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, Don Juan.

In The Empty Path, my intention is drop as many veils as I can—as I manage to discover them.

I want to speak to my readers and correspondents out of my ever-changing present, as a student of language and religion, former clinical counselor and current online reference librarian.

I was born in 1950 to a Lutheran pastor and the daughter and sister of Lutheran pastors.

In the 70s and 80s, I walked the spiritual questing path of many of my peers, becoming informed by the practical mystics of Christianity, Paganism and Buddhism.

When I became a convinced Quaker in the late 1980s, I wrote, only half-jokingly, that I labeled myself a Christocentric-Universalist, for whom Christ is the center of a circle with infinite circumference.

Given my profound wariness of diminishing any aspect of the Real by using labels, I can nonetheless still wear that comical title on my nameplate—so long as my readers understand it to be the sort of joke Vonnegut would tell, the sort of self-important honorific Castaneda’s Don Juan would undermine.

May all people, of every religion and none, know and welcome the healing judgment and mentoring of the Divine One, who speaks to each in the language and metaphor of her own truer self.

Christ himself has come to teach us.

And so it is.

Blesséd Be
Michael Austin Shell