I’ve recently become a fan of Thorn Mooney, who writes Oathbound at Patheos and has a YouTube channel with years’ worth of videos that I am, apparently, slowly working my way through until I’ve seen them all. (And this from someone who forgets that YouTube exists sometimes.)
The video below is from 2014, but as a witch who is laying the groundwork for a coven in a rural area, it gives me a little hope.
I also have hope from something that happened between rituals at Artes & Craft sometime this spring. There were 10-15 of us sitting on chairs and couches in the reading area talking about how all of us, at one point, had thought there were no other Pagans around. I had driven 2 hours to get there, past Grand Rapids — for the record, I’ve met up with two GR Pagan groups that are still going strong so I’m sure there are more out there, and the area has enough of a Pagan community to support a Pagan Pride Day for 17 years and counting — and I think I had come the farthest that day. Literally, there were 10-15 of us physically in the same room, and most of us had been sure that there were no other Pagans this close by.
So, despite my rural, middle-of-nowhere (future) covenstead, I have hope that this “There aren’t any Pagans around me!” thing is an assumption that we make uncritically, sometimes without Googling the obvious (as Thorn mentions in the video). And I hope that once I’m ready to put up my own Witchvox listing and open the doors, it will be found by five or six folks who really are interested in learning Alexandrian Wicca, even if they have to drive an hour or so to do it — and even if they had been really sure that there were no other Pagans out here.