Then again, maybe it was the new Third Degree energy that amplified these feelings.  It’s said that a newly elevated High Priestess “glows” for a solid month but combined with new love, who’s to say which it is?

But where Jan was full of encouragement one minute and warnings the next that I could blame on the difference in our ages, my announcement to my other best friend and former High Priestess, Donna, left me stunned.  I’d hung up the phone with Jan, bounced around the house for a few minutes, and then called Donna at her new job in Seattle or wherever she was that week.  I told her I’d found “The Treat” and that he’d been so close in proximity that I’d been driving past both his home and his office at least twice a day for the past four years without ever knowing.  I’d expected her to be happy for me, especially after the hell I’d been through with my ex.  I’d expected her to be glad and remind me how much I deserved a relationship where I was worshipped as Goddess Incarnate.

Donna had seemed amused at first.   By the next day, she was ridiculing my puppy love feelings to the point where I sat and sobbed when I hung up the phone. Yes, I truly was acting like a schoolgirl, but there was something sweet in Jesse that awakened an innocence I’d thought was lost forever and I was full of giggles when I talked to Donna about him.  By the end of the week—thankfully before Jesse knocked on my door that first night and asked if he could come in—Donna had spread the news of my love interest to the rest of the former Wiccan Elders of Dragon Hart and they’d all become overly interested in my personal life and how I should be living it.  They took turns calling and emailing me from the distant cities where they live, telling me how I needed to wait before dating and that I needed to pay my “dues”—as they had and were and still are—in the single life.  As of now, they’ve become so invasive that I’ve gone mum on them.  And that’s made their curiosity even worse.

I can’t tell them to knock it off.  Okay, yes, I did tell them that, but they didn’t listen.  Even though they wanted me to reach my Elevation to Third Degree and become their “equal,” my former spiritual teachers have not been able to stop treating me as their student.  They may not be teaching me lessons on magick or the Mysteries but their teacher role has transferred to my personal life, and I’ve been taught to respect their opinions so that I can’t fathom telling them to get out of my romantic life.  Most of the time, I walk a high-wire between anger at their lack of respect for how I’ve run my life and hurt at some of their more jagged comments, and yet I still want their approval because I love and respect them.  I was warned that former teachers will never truly see you as an equal and, in times of disagreement, will revert back to the old dynamic of trying to mold you into the image they want.  Since I graduated from the spiritual degree program of our Tradition three months ago, the relationship dynamic has focused almost exclusively on my feelings for Jesse and how silly I’m being for falling in love, especially after feeling unloved for so terribly long.

Once I started not saying much about Jesse, Donna and the Elders left it alone…until Beverly read Tarot cards on my situation and declared that there was something I wasn’t telling.  They’ve been very annoyed that I won’t confess whatever’s going on, and my claims of not wanting to discuss my romantic life have fallen on deaf ears.  It’s almost as if they’re frantic to be certain that Jesse and I are as far apart as possible, but why? 

“Sheesh,” I whisper. “There’s got to be more to it than sheer nosiness.”