April 25th, 2015 was a big day, since we had Poke Runyon of the OTA fly out to our corner of the world and bring the Traveling Temple out to our yard. Myself, along with 6 other folks, took initiation into the OTA, and received encampment letters for our study group. What, in my mind, made it a real winner was that a bunch of other OTA folks were just like, “Well if Poke is out there, can we come out too?” Sure! The more the merrier, which is how we went through literally a barrel of beer. Good times all around.
I have spent almost the last month solid working on things like coordinating the building of the henge, fixing up an altar where the lines are terrible, praying to the Gods that the ground isn’t completely frozen (or, as usually happens up here, muddy). I think it really paid off since we caught the trees in bloom which made the yard really pretty and the kids were actually on their good behavior. Our looky-loo neighbors even managed to only discreetly open a window to keep an eye on us. I planted white cedars at the edge of the yard so that problem will go away. The high point of it for me was Poke went around and as part of the initiation he explains the individual symbols attached to (literally painted on in the OTA sense) of each object and gives a short speech on each one. If you attend OTA seasonal events it’s a short version of that without as much acting but it’s all the seasonals rolled into one. What is nice too, is once I got the initiation ritual it took a lot of pressure off the group for the seasonal rites, since now we know what the meat of the expression is.Anyway, mission accomplished, I’m now officially into the OTA and can run study groups/seasonals at the house. If you happen to be in the northeastern US, you can use the Contact page to reach out and we can grab a coffee or mail me.