Samhain 2009

It’s all change for TGW! New home, and a new happiness. I have all but moved out of The Little House and have taken up residence at Three Chimneys, the home of my wonderful partner M. Perhaps most wonderfully of all, he sussed my paganism from the start – in fact from our first date – acknowledges its importance but crucially isn’t the least bit interested in hearing about it. There’s none of the prurience, pretend understanding, cliche-ridded heavy-handed ‘humour’ or other badinage or railery that I’ve become so weary of over the years. Stepping out of the broom closet to important others in your life is a trial sometimes; thankfully this time it wasn’t.

This Samhain I have so much to give thanks for, so much to feel blessed about, so much to cherish and so much to remember. It truly seems to be the most fruitful Autumn I can remember.

Where to begin? I could tell you about the wonderful walks we’ve been on, gathering conkers by the river with R as the leaves fall in shimmering files and drifts; I could tell you about watching the swan family on the river as they serenely brought up 7 chicks to near-adulthood. Or how about the baking of cakes and pies and bread that fill the kitchen at Three Chimneys with fragrance and comfort every weekend? Or the aromatic, piney fires we build and bask in front of on windy, rainy nights? So much to tell.

Casseroles, wine, fellow-hail, comfort, safety and warmth. Mellow light on old stone. Burnished copper reflecting candles, reflecting golden flames seen through the clear glasses in the front of the log-burner. Deep rugs, soft chairs and warm throws to cuddle your feet into. Hot tea on tap. Whiskey and ice, to round out the evenings together. Books, everywhere books. Combined possessions of two people with similar interests, tastes and pursuits. Love, care, understanding. A welcome without and a welcome within. At last, a safe mooring and a home for me and for R.

The house is a work in progress, and it is progressing apace; only this week we’ve finished restoring the panelling in the drawing room, commissioned three more radiators, replastered the landing and the master bedroom, cleared out a skip-load of junk preparatory to my furniture arriving and mended the floorboards in the hall. I’ve planted the urns outside the front door; we’re planning a large Yuletide party to warm the threshold and everyone’s really excited, not least us!

There are carved pumpkins in all the windows, made by R and myself; one happy, one sad and one ‘grumpy’  which came out slightly wrong and actually looks like the poor fruit has indigestion. We’re due at the local Fire Festival on Saturday night – procession of giants, wicker man, fireworks, huge bonfire and all the hot-dogs R can stuff down his maw during the evening. Mulled wine, boeuf carbonnade and mashed potatoes before we go out, to ensure centrally heated bodies as we process through the darkness to the festival site, to the transformative magic of fire, lights and brilliance in the sky, cheer, wassail and the beginning of the New Year for me and for mine.

The moon will be waxing full tomorrow night, the best of all times for me to wish ahead and work for the future.

Blessed Samhain, to all my dearest friends.

Back from the Isle of Winds

Ibiza again; and the magic and majesty of the island refreshed and amazed me anew. I have posted pictures which might tell you all you need to know about this amazing place.

Ten days in the sun and breezes, walking in the campo, looking at the flora and fauna, smelling the juniper scrub and the pines, listening to the sea and the trees, eating the generous, hearty food so customary on the island. Feeling the weight of the history, the invaders who came, were seduced by the softness and the welcome of the red land and stayed. Imagining the unbelievable relief of making land on the Isle of Pines; salt-struck and half-blind from the sun, to find a place where water runs, fruit trees bloom and the ground bears crops unstintingly.

And over all, Tanit, goddess of the Moon and of the flesh. Beating Her path over Tagomago to the inland waters and the shore.

Beltane – New Dreams

As I sit here, listening to the rain pattering on the roof of the unit where I work, I cast my mind back across the last twelve months. Rocky roads, rocky times; not time to think or to feel. Things left undone. But here in the burgeoning Spring of 2009, there’s suddenly light and room to move and to breathe.

I have thought I was fighting my way clear of the ties in previous months, but had the wit to realise it’s like climbing a mountain – numerous false horizons and that the key is never to give up hope. Conserve your energy. Keep plugging away. Take breathers. Don’t forget to breathe!

I’ve been out meeting new people, exploring new interests, and simply enjoying my home and my garden. Balancing solitude and the comfort of relaxation and downtime with going out and enjoying myself in company. I’ve been travelling more, seeing new places. Taking small risks, small excitements and relishing them. Working on my physical fitness, and my mental fitness. In essence, echoing the process of fettling and greening that I see going on around me every day.

So here we are at Beltane, beginning of our Summer; the Goddess and the God meet in the birthtime of the buds; so it couldn’t be a more auspicious time for me to reconnect with my path once more. Beltane this year  is also at the time of the First Quarter of the moon, which is perfect for the work I wish to do; building, strengthening, affirming work, consolidating the distance I’ve come so far.

I find the witchcraft path is like this – we allow ourselves to  become distracted by quotidian vicissitudes, separated from our source and the spring of our power; perhaps one day I’ll learn the trick of keeping my hand on the unicorn’s rein! Till then, I come home again, happy in the knowledge that I can rededicate, resubmit, revitalise my work, look at it once more with a new eye, keep the good and prune the no-so-good and shake the dust from the raiment.

I am taking Beltane Day off work, for an extended meditation, reorganisation and prayer session. I am taking time, precious time, to do what is necessary, what is right for me here and now. I like this. It feels like being able to spread my wings for the first time in an age; I will spread them wide.

New Spring, New Hope

Yesterday, I caught myself actually thinking seriously about getting my fingers into the earth again. With everything that’s happened I’ve felt heartsick, totally unconnected to the ground, not even willing to go and look at the garden that was once my be-all. I managed to leave it behind me, ruined and uncared-for, at my old house. It is totally wrecked, a grande-dame once beautiful and now run wild and straggled, effort wasted. But I’ve relinquished it. It was dormant and unworked when I inherited it; we worked together awhile and now it’s gone back to the earth again… asleep and not dead, waiting for someone to love it and rebirth it anew.

My new garden actually has grass, an amazing thing. It’s also only the size of a modest room and has high fences and walls. I have a plan for it. I find myself leaning against the corner of the window of my room, staring down on it like a plan of itself, and whiling away time dreaming of it full of light and colour. In fact, the majority of the flowers will be white, in honour of the Goddess; they will glow in the dusk and fill the air with scent, and I will sit amongst them, and bathe under the Moon, and feel renewed.

A dear friend has given me a hanging basket full of the most beautiful begonias – one of my favourite flowers. They’re not up yet, but I know they’re on their way. Ready to hang outside my door as a constant reminder of the Summer to come and good times…

I know my heart is healing and becoming quieter now that I’m allowing the calm and the green sappy balm of plants to infiltrate and soothe me. Thank the goddess, it’s about time!

Frost Moon

 As I was walking home from Seshat’s last evening, the Frost Moon came sailing through into a clear sky. I followed Her and Her scudding cloud hounds, shivering and wrapping my scarf around my head, pushing my hands deep into my pockets. When it’s that cold, the air smells dry and ancient and full of electricity. You can hear the wind building up static in the trees overhead, the constant sussurus like gossip half heard.

Seshat and I had a wonderful evening, eating chips and fish and bringing each other up to date with days and doings. We talked most especially about the blocking of will; when we have the will and the energy and the desire to move forward, but when the circumstances and situations just won’t support the moves we want to make, and in some cases need to make. It’s extremely frustrating, and has the power to bring one very low. I suppose the trick is to keep battling away, not looking for the solution, just resting with the idea that there is one out there, which we can’t see yet. Or, perhaps, that there’s no final solution as such; simply a route through. The equations might not balance in the end, but by then the game might have changed in any case.

All that Full Moon light and not enough to see by! Praise the Goddess, we both need maps!!

Humph. Well.

My airy prediction that I would wrestle the power flat and tame it went slightly awry, and I ended up not getting past the first base. Blocked, well and truly, by all the *other* stuff flying around. Sitting there in  circle, trying to centre…. and thinking about work. Gah!

I know this sort of thing happens to all of us. There are just days when things will not go right, no matter what you do. For me, the Full Moon is utterly exhausting, and by 8pm last night all I wanted to do was curl up in bed with my music on in the dark and drift off to sleep. Pathetic!

It wasn’t totally wasted as an enterprise, though. I cast a Celtic Cross with my lovely Intuitive Tarot deck and studied it as well as I could in circle – I’ve left the spread out on a table in my room so I can go back over it tonight. There’s a great deal to listen to in this particular spread, with the situation in question, and I need to understand the results fully.

Sia’s excellent suggestion to work with the power of the balanced moon – half light and half dark – seems to me to be an elegant way out of the problem. I’m just not a Full Moon type of girl. We’ll call the Full Moon my ‘bad time of the month’ and look for good times instead!

I love working in the rising full, and the dark of the moon has great attraction for me also, perhaps because it feels like the potential contained within is similar to that of the seed, before it is watered and has sprouted. The waning moon, particularly the week after Full and the week before New, is an intensely draining time for me, rather like the tide going out. I think it is extraordinary that, since taking this path and beginning to pay attention to the aspect of the moon and my corresponding feelings and moods, I can see a clear connection. It would be like the tide, come to think of it. All that water inside us!

Approaching the Full

Full Moon will be tomorrow, Tuesday 14th at 20:04 precisely. Working with the Full Moon has oftentimes been a bad move for me; I seem to do well with the rising power, and surprisingly well with the dark, badly with the waning, particularly the last quarter. The Full Moon usually sends me (no other word for this) loopy. All my work goes awry; the power slips the leash and heads off down its own path.

So this Full Moon I’m going to wrestle it down and contain it. There’s power for the using here, if only I can direct it. This wildness in the magic can surely be used for directed purpose. I’m feeling mad enough to try it; let’s see!

Coincidentally, it will be my first working in my new room. This room was once my husband’s as well, but I have reclaimed it and smudged it; Seshat saw it over the weekend and says she feels it is truly mine. I agree, and hoped it was true, so I’m glad of the endorsement. There’s so much more room in there, spiritually and psychically. I can lay out a pretty respectable size of circle and work completely within it. The room itself is actually the extent of the circle – the corners are fairly well the compass points and there will be candles at each – so an ellipse, 20′ x 16′ to all intents and purposes. Fantastic.

I shall be working for clarity of vision, strength to stand alone, strength to spare so that my friends in need can be supplied unstintingly. By the looks of it, these themes will sit well with this particular Full Moon; always knowledgeable and informative, Starweaver’s comments add light here.  I shall be working to come closer to my Goddess. I shall be echoing the sentiments Seshat sent me in her worked item last week; and I shall be looking forward to Samhain, not long away. My dear friends Boleskine93, Naufragio and Seshat will be working as a team on that night; I will be working alone but not lonely. More on this to follow.

The Sum of the Parts

When we work together as pairs or groups, what are our expectations? It might be fair to expect a larger group to generate more energy, or better focused energy, but we know from our least experience that this doesn’t happen; quite often, the reverse is true. The politics and compromise of group work can dissipate the power potential, leaving us less than the sum of the parts assembled.

When you work alone, you deal only with your own limitations; your own fears and doubts and your own imagination. How big is the room? As big as you can envisage. Or as small.

When you work in pairs, especially if you find a good formula, the world is literally made small and you rise above it and can see the facts, see the truth; this happened again with Seshat last evening.

I find it consistently amazing that I can gather for a working and be stressed, insufficiently grounded and prepared, anxious, not calm, and Seshat can bring me gently down and park me in the circle. About halfway through our devotions last night, I came back to my body with a little bump and suddenly felt my calm running through me again like a cool dark river.

We worked for strength for the people in our lives, and sent out our love, and asked for strength for ourselves too; today I feel like a new person. After we’d given our river offerings and said our prayers, I leapt into the air and yawped, loudly, into the dark cold air, nose to the stars, and capered with glee.

I worked towards Hecate; goddess of the crossroads, anger, underworld, air and darkness, to lend me her fury and dispatch and knowledge of the Way.

So what do I make of this? I see that together we’ve a strength that is largely untapped as yet; I see that the parts of ourselves that we offer to the circle click together into a vast, shadowy three-dimensional object, the function of which we don’t understand, and which we’re not likely to.

Our gods and goddesses are different, our approaches are different, even our ideas about the Way are different. This difference brings diversity, strength, infinitude of opportunity for opinion and new horizons to open before us. It makes us think. We are not hermetically sealed within a system, trying to reach out; we’re already out, flying in the limitless cold clarity of the air around.

 So our un-understood machine – will it hurt us? Do we need to understand to have it work for us? I don’t think it matters – it might be frightening to imagine the wheels grinding into life, but we’ve accomplished great things so far, on tickover. Overdrive might be an interesting experience.

Sure

What a week. You confidently expect this sort of thing to be quite stressful, but in between keeping myself cheerful for my boy and organising my mental and physical division from my husband, I’m not sure I’ve got much time for myself in. That will come. I have been neglecting my devotions, and I’ll be glad to resume the programme with Seshat over the coming weeks. We got such a fantastic result from our last ritual that there’s only more ground to be covered, more depth to be explored there.

The moon rises towards the full over the weeks to come – totally auspicious timing. The power is there for the using.

I shall be away all of next week, from Sunday onward. This is for work, and should by all rights be a total pain, but actually I’m looking forward to some peace and quiet, my meals cooked by someone else, time to myself and some new faces. Hard work will keep me occupied, and I have a colleague and friend with me, so we can have a few quiet drinks and relax.

I have said this before, but I have been staggered, completely bowled over, by the strength of support and fellow-feeling shown me, especially here. It’s a wonderfully strengthening and life-affirming feeling. I feel entirely as though I am on the right path, at last, at last. I haven’t felt like this for at least 10 years.

Having not had this level of support in the physical world (long story!) except from a few very special and caring people, I can say you have honestly made the difference between failure and success for me. Without the strength, sanity, purpose and power you people have given, I’d have failed and gone back to my marriage with my tail between my legs. I had strength enough to make the move, but not quite enough to stick to the programme when the various ‘interest groups’ started applying the pressure. However, I was not alone. And my Goddess supported me too. Bless you.

The weeks to come may be interesting, but my life begins here, and I can’t believe the heady power of that thought. I feel like a lioness, once of a zoo, standing at the open door of a cage as the sun rises over the Serengeti. Time now to run for the horizon.

Midsummer Blessings

To all my dear friends, blessings, for the Midsummer times are here.

We light the fires of the Summer sun upon the Earth; we sing of the green and the darkness under the trees.

We give thanks, for the cool waters, for the waters from the sky and the waters under the Earth. Thanks for the fires of the Sun and the fires we kindle on the ground. Thanks for the cool air, that lofts the birds and the scents of Summer. Thanks for the warm and fertile Earth, that bears our weight and the life we depend upon.

Goddess, I hail you; triumphant queen of the Midsummer night. You are the subtle moon past full, the silver grasses before the wind, the whispering oak. Lead me out to know the dark and the life you hold so gently by. Cradle me in the stillness at your centre; help me know.

God, I hail you; glorious king. Stand upon the Earth, crowned by the Sun. Now one with your Goddess, spring forward and lead me, Lord of inspiration, fire and feeling. Show me new paths. 

As the year burns and the wheel turns, guide us all in love and care; help us fight and be valorous for what is good. Give us the power and the heart to choose the right path, no matter how hard it is to follow.

So Mote It Be!

Bright blessings to all this Midsummer’s Eve.