Pagan Holly

My summer solstice started with tears. On the evening of June 20, just before the sun set, I went out to our garden and noticed that something—probably a deer—had chomped the newly-emerging blooms off many plants. This is my first garden and my first garden loss, so I was pretty sad. My partner and I planted the garden on Victoria Day weekend, the same weekend I celebrated Beltane. We don’t have a yard—only a back patio and front walkway with tiny patches of land adjacent to each—but when we moved in, our landlord said we were welcome to garden. We took her at her word and pulled out a big shrub that’s invasive in our area, some other shrubs, and a collection of hostas (which I stealthily relocated to common land, where they’re thriving). We spruced up the borders with cedar edging and planted perennials native to our local area. We also expanded last year’s container vegetable garden: we’re growing three varieties of tomatoes, two varieties of peppers, eggplant, and a bunch of he

I’m a grad student; I understand impostor syndrome. I worry that compared to my colleagues, I’m a fraud who lacks work ethic and original ideas. I even know about the debates over who is allowed to experience impostor syndrome, so in addition to worrying that I’ve tricked my university into taking me seriously, I worry that I’ve deluded myself into feeling like a fraud on purpose so I can claim sympathy I don’t deserve. It’s exhausting, useless, and inescapable. My rational brain believes my advisory committee when they say I’m doing fine. But I feel like an impostor grad student anyway, and it doesn’t surprise me that I feel like an impostor Pagan, too. This post was prompted by a Paganism-related achievement: I set out to do something I thought would improve my understanding and deepen my practice, and I accomplished that goal. (I didn’t even realize how classic impostor syndrome this is until I started typing that sentence.) The goal was to find Pagan writers on the internet an