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This is the story of how our founding High Priestess, Lady Marina Mercaent, came to the Wiccan path.
A teen-age involvement with born-again Christianity faded away, and up until age 36, her spiritual path was loose and free-flowing. She loved nature and the seasons, but hated the dogma of established religions.
In 1996, she joined an internet community, and met her first Wiccans. As they talked about their spiritual path, Marina realized how similar it was to the innate spirituality she had followed all of her life. As a child, growing up on a non-working farm in upstate New York, Marina had spent as much time as she could in nature. Some of her happiest times were walking in the deep woods, along the old logging roads that sliced up through the hills. There was something compelling about the crunch of leaves underfoot, the sunlight filtering down through the trees, moss-covered rocks, and the sense that no other humans were nearby. Yet Marina always felt that there was something with her in those woods, something magical, something divine. She felt that if she could only turn quickly enough, she could catch a glimpse of that energy, that being.
She played along the banks of a small creek, spending time gazing into small pools of water, discovering the frogs and crayfish that inhabited those small worlds. there was a deeper, wider creek as well, its banks fern-lined. If you knew where to look in the spring, you could come home with bags full of fiddle-head ferns to cook.
Moving into town as a teenager did not keep her from the woods. A marriage at the age of 19 brought her to live in a log cabin in the woods she built with her husband. Once more she roamed the logging roads, feeling again that sense of union with the land, and that sense that something besides the birds and animals shared it with her.
At 27, the marriage broke up and she moved to a small city. She found herself living where it never got truly dark at night. She sought out the parks, as a refuge from the noise and concrete. She was 34 before she was able to buy a small home on a few acres on top of a hill. Once again, she was surrounded by woods, hills, and silence. At 40, she discovered Wicca.
Her hilltop home became her temple.She created an outdoor altar, a fire pit, and began to explore Wicca as the philosophy that explained her lifelong relationship with nature. After a few years of solitary practice, on a plane coming home from vacation, she was reading Phyllis Curott's "Book of Shadows". Curott's descriptions of her work with her first circle encouraged Marina to seek out area pagans. She found a High Priestess, newly trained, who was forming a coven, and became one of the founding members of the Coven of the Moonlight Labyrinth. She was chosen as Maiden, to be trained as a High Priestess. The next three years were a time of incredible growth and experimentation. The solitary learned how to work with others, then how to lead a ritual for her group, then to lead public rituals.
The final part of her formal training was to run the coven for a year and a day. That task ended in March 2003. During that hectic and wonderful year, ideas kept knocking at the door of her mind. Visions of connections came to her in meditations and journeys. A word - LunaSolis - followed her through her days. She got answers to the questions and inconsistencies she had uncovered during her studies. She knew the time would come when she would put everything she was being given together with her experiences and traning, and found a coven.That time came at Beltaine 2003.
LunaSolis Coven was founded at Beltaine of 2003.