Visioning, Old School By H. Byron Ballard

The mountains of western North Carolina are sometimes described as the buckle on the Bible belt. Our sense of place here runs deep and our sense of our spiritual place equally so. There are powerful strains of several Protestant denominations, in addition to well-established Roman Catholic congregations, enjoying the current influx of Spanish-speaking Catholics from the other South. There are Jewish congregations, an Islamic Center and the usual Quakers, Unitarian Universalists and Mormons. We hear murmurings from time to time that we are also the “Salem of the South” here in Asheville because of our active and highly-visible Pagan/Heathen communities. 

I was raised unchurched--as an elderly cousin recently reminded me--like my great-grandparents, who moved to this county from a neighboring one at the end of the 19th century. As a child, I attended a Lutheran private school and went to the occasional Methodist service with my grandmother--she sang in the choir--where I earned the dubious distinction of being asked to leave a Sunday School class at Hallowe’en time because I had dressed as a “Gypsy fortuneteller” and that was not an appropriate costume.

I spent most of childhood outside with animals, eating apples from our trees and wandering the mountainside above our house. I lived my childhood in a world peopled by spirits, one for each rock and tree and chicken, a natural-born Pagan, as many children are. I claimed that there was a man on top of the mountain who brought afternoon thunderstorms in the summer and that I could see him from the front yard. My upbringing then was largely untouched by the strictures or encumbrances of Christian lore except that gleaned from growing up in a predominantly Christian culture.    

How then do I explain what happened recently when I was visited by a full-blown, Our-Lady-at-Lourdes vision? A vision that happened, ironically enough, at a visioning evening in downtown Asheville, where we were to discuss intentional community and earthen building methods, eat appropriate snacks and make bids at the silent auction. The usual suspects had gathered at one of the usual haunts. There were PowerPoint presentations, several guest speakers (including Starhawk), festively-garbed barkers outside the building to draw in the crowds, all in an effort to manifest the community in which we want to live, raise our families and practice our spiritual paths. Door prizes were displayed, the parking of the Priuses was achieved and the gathering commenced. I had reserved some seats for my friends and co-religionists and was on my way to refill my water bottle when I was stopped in my tracks, stopped abruptly, as though a strong palm was flattened against my chest.   

Before me was a wall with a colorful banner on it and I watched as the banner changed and the colors blended. I had not been indulging in Guinness that night, honestly, I hadn’t! Clean mountain water had been my tipple all day long and I’d even had a decent night’s sleep the night before. The banner faded away and was replaced by what I can only call, in my limited experience, a vision. I saw a moving picture on the wall and it showed members of my community, showed them so clearly that I could pick them out and knew their names. I was there, too, and other people that I didn’t know. We were making bricks. We were working hard and working together. We were plastered with mud and our faces gleamed with sweat, were pink with exertion. The vision seemed to last a long time and my memories of it are still very clear, but I suspect I stood there facing the banner on the wall for only a moment. Certainly no one came forward to inquire about my health or my sanity. The picture faded back into the banner, I shook my head like a swimmer coming up for air and I refilled my water bottle.    

The event had such a profound effect on me that I am talking about it still and have lured my community with a vision that has both enraptured and terrified them. What we were making with our own hands--in the sweat of our labor and with local materials gleaned from our living Earth--was a temple. A Goddess temple that the community raises with our own grimy hands, set in the heart of the city limits of our town. Not in the countryside behind a tall fence, not even on acres of verdant land, either of which makes more practical sense where we are. The complete vision that was visited upon me and with which I constantly torment my community was a proudly centralized house of celebration, a place where we can mark the turning of the wheel of the year, bury our dead, marry our lovers, present our babies to our Ancestors and our Gods.    

The vision includes the certain knowledge that land will be donated for the structure, that there will be space for a community garden and an outdoor ritual site and there will be composting toilets. That speaks volumes about my personal world-view, don’t you think? Green roof and composting toilets indeed. After I returned my water bottle to my seat, I went around the gathering to speak to other friends and acquaintances about what had occurred, what had happened to me over there, against the wall. I asked them to hold that bit of information--a Goddess temple made of earth in Asheville--while we went through the long visioning process, and to give me any feedback they felt important. Each person I spoke with nodded solemnly and agreed to hold the vision. Some of them hugged me, a couple of them wept.   

Like my grandmother, I have the occasional precognitive dream and have had dreams that feel like past-life remembrances. My spiritual calling sometimes requires me to do a kind of Shamanic work that takes me from the time and space in which I usually dwell. This was different from all those things, something that I have never experienced in quite that way. I am merely the carrier of the dream, not its creator. As I’ve explained over and over again, it was different from the feeling of having a good idea, though I believe it is one. It came to me full-blown and I watched it unfold on that wall, like a movie.

Those people who carried the vision during the rest of the visioning event--when Starhawk took us on a guided tour of the possible future and Janell took us on a virtual tour of her work in many other places--have come back to me to say that they could see it, in their minds’ eyes. They and I hold a vision of what can be, of what will be, if the community so chooses. A woman came forward to offer her backyard as a place for a prototype temple. Kleiworks International has offered the opportunity to learn how to make bricks. I have been in touch with other new temples in various places, learning the how’s and the why’s of their birth stories. And I await the offer of land that I know will come.    

How grateful I am that I was not like visionary Cassandra, misunderstood, doubted. We are here on this buckle, in these most ancient of mountains, visioning an old world made new.    

H. Byron Ballard is a co-founder of the Coalition of Earth Religions/CERES in Asheville, NC and is in the exploratory circle of the Mother Grove Project. She is a Dianic high priestess in the service of Inanna and is a bookseller and village Witch.