Occasionally, I’m pulled back into the Pagan community by something, at least insofar as my attention. For those that don’t know, once we were an openly Pagan web hosting company, and I was once an openly Pagan.. um, Pagan. As a consequence of that, we wound up hosting an awful lot of really cool, fairly prominent Pagans. For those that remembered and knew that and wondered why it changed, there were reasons and there’s a good chance that someday, I will tell the story.
Today’s not that day, however. 
Isaac, who passed away this morning, asked me about it once when he Skyped me for something or another with regards to his site. He had noticed, and he was curious. I paused and stopped, but something in his voice had me pouring my heart out in an instant. As I explained the convoluted situation I was in, breaking down in tears at the end, he listened quietly. He told me after hearing my story that I had left nothing, was still the same, and that my spirit had simply shifted in its expression. That who I was, what I was, was unchanged and that my choices, hard though they might have been, honored what I had been for so long, and even more so because it pained me so much to do it.
I really needed to hear that, and was so grateful to him that he took the time to tell me so many years ago. I always remembered that about him, and how he went out of his way to comfort someone who could have seemed to be someone that “left the flock” or even worse, someone who could have seemed to the outside world to reject everything that he stood for.
I’ve traveled a lot of spiritual roads since then, through the Universalist Unitarian Church, and then to head back to Judaism through the Jewish Renewal movement, and my core values have never changed, most of those core values having been learned through trial and error and struggle from my years in the Pagan community and then the heartrending experience of having to cut myself off from it.
Isaac’s comfort, and judgment, during that phone call was one of the comforts I can point to that brought me through that incredibly trying time. It pains me deeply that he’s moved on from this world and that I can never tell him thank you again, or how much that talk on the phone meant to me.
He wrote me a few months ago, sending in a ticket to the support desk. He assumed we had heard about his condition, though I hadn’t. He was so matter of fact about his preparations – just letting me know that he probably wouldn’t be around much longer and that he was making preparations to put others on his account so they could deal with his sites when he was gone. The email was so cheerful that I couldn’t respond for a day, it struck me so hard that he was so matter of fact about it.
I admired him a great deal. He hosted with me for years, and I had numerous opportunities to talk to him about techie things and site things and chatty things, and he was always such a genuinely kind person to me. Everyone knows I kinda cringe at support phone calls – his always left me with a smile on my face.
Thanks for everything, Isaac, and blessings on your journey.
