I was born in Kankakee IL on November 15 1953 at 1:55 AM. My parents were Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of Scottish/Jewish immigrants, and Leon, the youngest son of Breton/French farmers in Beaverville IL. I spent the first six years of my life on my fathers farm about a mile from Beaverville, a Breton/French community of about 500. Beaverville (originally, Ste. Marie) was founded in the 1850’s by the descendants of Acadians who migrated from Quebec on the instigation of Fr. Charles Chinique, who was also responsible for the development of nearby Ste. Anne and another satellite community, Le’Rable.
The Acadians where Bretons who, fleeing persecution and eradication of their Celtic culture by the French, landed on the shores of Nova Scotia in 1604 and founded Acadia, a colony which flourished for a about 100 years. The British came into the region at that time and drove the Acadians out. About two-thirds of them fled to Louisiana and are the ancestors of the “Cajun” people (Cajun being a corruption of the word Acadian). The other third fled to Quebec. Many of these became fur trappers, “Couer de Bois” and “Voyageurs” and helped carve out the unique history of New France.
In 1960 I entered First Grade at Donavan (IL) Grade School. Why didn’t I start in 1959? I was born in November and it was determined that I wasn’t mature enough to start First Grade.
The summer before my 8th birthday was chaotic for me. My dad lost the farm, the victim of economics and alcoholism, and took a series of jobs with some of the large dairy farms in Northern Illinois. My family moved four times in the next year, finally landing in a flat in Kankakee, where dad took a job at the nearby Joliet Arsenal. This move was good for my mom, as this was the city her parents lived in, so the Stewarts were close by.
Now. for all intents and purposes, my parents were agnostics. My Dad was a “Christmas and Easter Catholic” and mom was a “Passover and Hannukah Jew.” Once I came along it was decided that “if the kid is going to grow up to be a responsible citizen, then he needs religion.” But, which one? Dad favored Catholicism, but Mom was Jewish (and I’m a defacto Jew because my Mother was Jewish).
In 1962 we moved to Kankakee IL. I was sent to school at St. Patricks Grade School, which was just across the alley. I was a quiet kid, whose favorite hang out was the nearby public library. Shy and non-athletic, I found a world inside books. Books about spaceships and journeys to distant worlds. Probably the single most powerful influence on my young impressionable self was Robert A. Heinlein . My favorite books growing up were Glory Road, Stranger In A Strange Land, The Door Into Summer and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Other favorite authors included J.R.R. Tolkein, Issac Asimov, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradberry, and E.E. “Doc” Smith. Television fiction also played apart in my unique spiritual education, with the early Star Trek series being my favorite diversion.
I was involved in an automobile accident in March of 1965, and was in a coma for about a month. I lost enough school time that I ended up having to repeat fifth grade.
My Catholic education ended then, which was timely, as I had decided I had had enough of Catholicism. On the Shabbat closest to my 13th birthday (19 November 1966) I was Bar Mitzvah at Congregation Agudas Achim, which was the Stewarts Temple (Why? The trip to Agudas Achim took :45 to an hour. A few blocks from their home in Kankakee, Temple B’Nai Israel was holding services, but the Stewarts didn’t want to associate with their local Jewish community. Another peculiar behavior was that they rarely attended any services, and really only observed the High Holy Days and some years, Hannukah. Why? I know that the family was chased out of some country in the Balkans, and landed in Scotland. I know they changed their sur name from something that was very obviously Jewish to “Stewart.” I think fear of antisemitism was so engrained in them that they kept their Jewish identity on the downlow. Grandpa didn’t want his co-workers at the Bear Brand Hosiery plant to know he was Jewish, so they made their spiritual home in South Chicago. And that’s why, even to this day, my brother never talks about his own Jewish background).
In the summer of 1967 my family moved across town. I attended East Junior High School. and went to high school at Eastridge High School. My friends were the nerdy, intellectual kids. They were in the band, on the school newspaper and excelled in science and math. I excelled in english and the humanities, and was especially fascinated by religion and philosophy.
I graduated from Eastridge in January of 1973 (early graduation, as I was attempting to make up the time in Fifth Grade when I was in a coma), and started attending Kankakee Junior College.
In February 1974 I traveled to Israel (with my mothers encouragement and blessing) I spent the first two weeks touring the country, and then settled at Kibbutz Nahsholim, on the Mediterranean Sea, about 33 km south of Haifa. That was a much more pleasant venue. We grew dates, figs, avocados, oranges and grapefruit. The Kibbutz featured a nude beach, which is where I acquired my taste for naturism..
Then I met Lynne, the daughter of a Belgium/French farmer from L’erable. We were married in August 1975 and that following Summer Solstice Joshua was born. But my relationship with Lynne floundered. She had never learned to drive, (though, in her defense, when she was young a sister, a brother and a brother-law- were killed in a head on collision on a highway between LErable and Kankakee. Two other sisters were thrown from the car, with one loosing all of her teeth and other being in a coma for six weeks. So I’m thinking that the accident traumatised her so much that she just didn’t want to drive) I still pleaded with her to learn (over 14 years), but she refused and became increasingly agoraphobic and falling deeper into the radical fringes of fundamentalism.
In May 1981 the twins, Jordan and Jesse were born. I took great pride in all three of my sons and attempted to be the best father I could be.
I helped establish Boy Scout Troop 313 and became it’s first Scout Master. Scouting became my retreat from a hellish home life, and a place to connect with my sons. Lynne got worse, and started seeing the Devil under every rock. This eventually led me to buy a larger, more opulent home (in hopes of achieving “space”) but that proved to be of no use. Lynne managed to fill the space with clutter, and I finally left the house in January of 1990 and filed for divorce. I was also having an affair with a female scouter, but worse, I was engaged in the beginnings of what would become a life long affair with the Goddess.
BSA Troop 313 was disbanded by it’s sponsoring body, the People’s Church, when my wife let the elders there know of my affair. Most of the members of Troop 313 moved to Troop 300, sponsored by my dad’s former parish and I became an Assistant Scoutmaster there. This troop was made up mostly of working class union people, so my repertoire of Union songs were an instant hit (with the parents anyway) around those moonlit campfires.
It was around this time while living alone, that I became very involved with the internet, and various newsgroups. It was on one of these that I met Qadisha.
In March of 1991 I flew to San Francisco to meet Qadisha It wasn’t hard to convince me that “California is the place you ought to be” either. I flew back home, got my affairs in order and on May 1st, flew Qadisha and daughter to Chicago, where my niece Angela and I picked them up. We drove my ’88 Chevy Celeb back to Santa Cruz . The next November (13 months after their first meeting online), Qadisha and I were handfasted at Valley of Fire State Park, north of LasVegas NV, with about 100 members of the internet community (who flew in from all over the country) in attendance.
Together, Qadisha and I founded Circle of Fire and Friends, a group which organized public circles marking the Pagan sabbats. The group fell apart over time, when it was shown that all people were interested in was the Qadisha and El show, and not in forming community or working together. It was through CFF however that I met Adam Walks Between Worlds , and entered into a friendship that would change me forever. Adam, Qadisha and I corroborated on the founding of something completely different. That was Order of the Mithril Star , which blended ceremonial magick, druidism, thelema, and shamanistic elements, and the core philosophy from Robert Heinleins landmark novel, Stranger In A Strange Land.
In Meeting Adam, my dormant Jewishness reasserted itself (probably due to the very excellent lox and bagels he brought to our CFF campout). Of course, I knew there were a lot of members of my tribe involved in Western Paganism. The more famous ones are Starhawk (nee. Miriam Simos; An author, she founded the Reclaiming Collective), Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (AKA: Otter Zell, Tim Zell; an author, artist and magician, he co-founded the Church of All Worlds (CAW)), Adam Walks Between Worlds (nee. Duane Adam Rostoker; 2nd “Official Bard of CAW, cofounder (with me) of the Order of the Mithril Star). Issac Bonawits (an author, he founded Ár nDraíocht Féin (ADF) and the Aquarian Anti-Defamation League).
For Qadisha and I, living together proved to be a strain on the relationship. In fact Qadisha didn’t believe that men and women should live together and had even taken a vow that no man would ever live with her. I took a room with a friend in Ben Lomond, nestled in the Redwoods between Big Basin and Henry Cowell Redwood State Parks. I have a particular fondness for the giant trees, and that actually is my favorite feature of California. But Qadisha wanted to move to southern Oregon, because of it’s proximity to Interstate 5 and lower cost of living. In the summer of 1998, Qadisha and I relocated to Ashland OR , hoping once again to fulfill my dream of establishing an intentional community. Ashland was thought to be a good choice based upon it’s reputation as a new age mecca in the Northwest. But it was my second choice. My first was the very liberal town of Arcata CA, on California’s Redwood Coast.
Philosophical/political differences gradually drove Qadisha and I apart. I was inclined to be more openly Pagan, and was actually attracted to Ashland because one could do just that there. But Qadisha feared that her daughter would be ostracised, so a “rule” was imposed on me: “Never wear your pentacle in public.” Later, after we broke up and I was seeing someone new, Qadisha tried to impose the rule on my new relationship as well. That did absolutely no good and further strained things.
I was also a person whom communards contacted to network with others in the Pacfic North West. In July 1998 I founded The Jefferson Index, which was organized to provide a network for Pagans and other Earth religionists living in “the mythical State of Jefferson.” Ceridwen was one of these contacts, but I did more than just help her relocate from Santa Cruz, I married her on November 18, 2000, after relocating :40 up I-5 to Grants Pass, the “gateway to the northwest.” It’s also :45 minutes closer to my beloved redwoods.
Why Grants Pass? Several reasons. I was not at all happy in Ashland, mainly due to his economic situation. Since moving to the West Coast, I had never made more than $24,000 per year. A major reason for moving to Oregon from Santa Cruz was the lower cost of living. This was a reason for moving from Ashland to Grants Pass as well. Ashland has become an enclave of the elite, and housing prices are skyrocketing. Wealthy Bay Area folks are moving to Ashland in droves, driving prices up to where working class people could no longer afford to live there. Gradually I discovered that Ashland represented everything I hate about America: Bourgeois liberals who spout politically correct euphemisms while pretending there are no homeless in Lithia Park (and their Police force makes sure it stays that way), and spawn children who spit at and harass the poor “scrubs” among them.
In September 2000 a “friend” in Grants Pass offered Ceridwen and I his cabin, set on 20 acres in a forest clearing, :10 minutes from town. Having just received notice of another rent increase for my boxy Ashland-ghetto apartment, Ceridwen and I jumped on it.
On 18 November 2000 Ceridwen and I were “hand fasted” in our home, with about fifty friends in attendance, some of whom traveled from as far away as Minneapolis MN. It was a very Druish affair with David Helfand (Celtic Harper and multi instrumentalist) and Murray Huggins on bagpipes.
In July 2003, I resigned from the office of Arch-Druid of the Mother Grove. I was tired of being the “lightening rod” for everyone with a beef about the RDG. So Ceridwen was voted new Arch-Druid,and I became the new Clerk of the Mother Grove, a more “behind the scenes” sort of office.
In March 2004, Ceridwen and I and the RDG Mother Grove relocated to Humboldt County California, where the sacred tree of the RDG grows abundantly. In preparation for that move, Ceridwen and I founded the Sequoia Pagan Alliance, to network and make friends with Pagans on the Redwood coast.
What about my boys? I used to travel back to Kankakee about once or twice a year (they wouldn’t come to California, because (as we all know) “all Californians are Satan worshipers who eat babies while lounging in their hot tubs”), but I haven’t been able to afford that trip since the move to Oregon. I call and email them as often as possible, and as they grow up their relationship is getting stronger. The twins both graduated from Illinois State University and have thriving careers as Videographers (Jordan has won his 8th Emmy). They are married and between them they have two boys and four girls, and Josh is married, has two boys of his own, and is a personal trainer and basketball coach. Josh’s oldest son is married and has a little girl, my great grandchild.
