Into the cauldron

Down, into the cavern, the psyche, the Underworld; so Samhain, and the dark half of the year, spins us down to our essential selves. 

Asks of us, how will you serve what sleeps now, and will rise again in spring?

Like our plant relatives, like the landscape, like everything that ages, we wither. A part of us sinks down and in, revealing the bones that have lain beneath the long seasons of growing, flowering, fruiting. 

If we have nurtured our gardens, the seeds of another harvest lie scattered over the ground, shaken by the North winds. Waiting in the last, fading light before darkness falls; to be held by the sheltering earth through the long months of ice, snow, killing cold.

Remember this night: There are witches, and there are witches. 

Beware, sisters, which paths you choose to walk. 

Will it be muttered curses, crabbed thoughts, and casting a metaphorical evil eye? 

Humanity can be so very disappointing, after all, and we may be so frustrated with unfolding realities, that this seductive, thorny path may seem to be the one where we hold more power. I speak from experience.

Rather, instead of casting maledictions, will we ask ourselves some version of the questions: How can I serve the Earth? How can I serve life? Using the gifts I have been given, what can I do to heal and help, and imagine the world the way it could be? 

How can I make more of what I love, and less of what I do not?

We all have the other kind within. (A proper cackler, I mean.) Yes, a Crone is meant to be fierce. But, fierce in service of something important, something life-giving, something that matters.

Wisdom whispers, perhaps we want to call up our most fierce powers to serve that which we love most, and to change that which ruins, harms and destroys. ???

Here, let me remind you about the Cailleach — the divine Crone who reigns over winter, beginning as I write, at Samhain. Who shapes mountains with her hammer. A creator and a destroyer, like every crone goddess. A fierce carlin who bestows sovereignty, and, with a fine sense of justice, punishes those who take too many lives of the wild creatures sacred to her.

Know you that a Crone's eye pierces any disguise or intent. 

She sees clearly, judges sternly but fairly, and — like most old women, and winter itself — does not suffer fools gladly. 

The Crone guides the young. Protects the defenseless. Rights the balance. 

Ever, the Crone serves life (as death also serves life) — which is as it must be, as all of us must do, in order for all of life to flourish once again on this Earth. 

Isn't that what we all long for? For life to flourish once again? Inside ourselves, in our spirits, and flowing outward to heal every inch of this planet?

Perhaps this is why witching myself feels like beginning to rewild myself. A profound gift as we head into winter, a seed I can hold in my heart, in the darkness. 

We are nurtured by seeking out wild ways of knowing. Feeling into Earth ways, with their vast power to mend our wounded selves and our wounded planet. 

The way I somehow eased into a softness toward my gardens this year, trusting the plants to find their own way, reseed where they will. Giving the plants time and space to do what they know far more than I how to do: express their intelligence, their ways of being. 

This is an Earth way. 

Because our beloved Earth is the opposite of a minimalist. You must scatter millions of seeds, not only one. You must plant endless forests of trees, continents of prairies, a world of oceans. She is brilliantly, magnificently, endlessly, fecund and creative. 

Let us recognize her always in ourselves...and ourselves, always in her. 

So, on Samhain, there are witches...and there are witches. As we sink down into the mysteries of the Crone's dark womb, here is my spell and blessing...

May we rest deeply in this cauldron of darkness. 

May we dream of possibilities, as seeds do. 

May we trust in what is rich and strange in ourselves and others. 

May we let the wild reclaim even the smallest inch of our fallow ground ... and slowly, slowly, awaken it to flower again. 

 

All things crooked and powerful

How gray and blustery it is, so suddenly and absolutely. As if a tempest is blowing in from some ghoul-haunted forest. The sun hides his face from us as we slip into the dark time: November.

Waiting Month, Month of Clouds, a time of stillness that in the north is foreboding, holding storms in its belly.

A time to remember the dead. Ancestors whose names I did not even know before this year, and those loved from childhood. My mother. My grandmothers. My sister. My aunties. My beloved cats.

A spirit for every golden leaf fallen from the silver maple.

Earlier in the day the dimness was lit by the inner lamps of yellow-green grapevine, coral pink creeper across my window, deep-gold coins of pear tree, fiery gold of crabapple with its bright red fruits.

Though even then, skeleton branches like fingers clutched their few remaining leaves, some grasping only sullen sky.

But the day has grown darker, more leaves blown to the ground and now I look to the candle's flame for remembrance. Fire for remembrance of all those bright, beloved lives hovering over my shoulder.

I keep this day. It deserves that I do so. I haven't always done, but I regret when I do not. I, at least, cannot both hold this day of between-worlds in my thoughts and go about my normal work day.

So this day, I choose to be here.

Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do. Thunder on my right hand. Lightning in my left hand. Fire above me. Frost in front of me.

—Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

I dug up a last unwanted elm seedling hiding amid the stems of my little Saskatoon serviceberry. Filled the bird bath and stored the garden hose in the garage. Put out suet for the woodpeckers, nuts for the jays and seeds for the dark-eyed juncos migrating through. I mulched leaves and left them to shelter whoever lives beneath them. 

It is a practical kind of ritual. 

Then the wind chased me inside. 

So many bright days have I gathered sunlight, landscapes flooded with beauty, breathing in the wind and pursuing quietness and solitude. Many lovely places have I visited, many a thought thunk, shared with no one but myself.

Now I am here with you and my musings, my broomsticks made of twigs marking me as a lover of all things crooked and powerful...messy, earth-wild and every shade of brown: leaf, pinecone, grasses, bark, branch, mushroom, acorn, seedpod, feather, muddy river, dark soil to which we all return. 

A female house sparrow had tucked a few strands of tawny grasses into the window well beneath the air conditioner, planning a snug spot out of the weather. (My only clue such activities were taking place was that the cats had been sitting side by side, staring intently at the window for two days.) 

We saw her flutter to the window with more grasses, only to find the air conditioner gone and the storm window closed. She clung to the window frame with her tiny claws and stared, quite understandably bewildered to find that her alcove was no longer accessible. No longer the safe spot she imagined.  

My regrets, little sparrow. I wish you well snuggled in to another cozy spot by now. 

All this is to say: Winter is coming. We draw inward, we hurry through the landscape, we huddle by the fire. We turn to all the tasks and occupations we've neglected for months in our great push to fill ourselves up with sunlight, petals, planting, traveling, outwardness. 

Shakespeare wrote, "The bright day is done, and we are for the dark." 

Terry Tempest Williams wrote, "Do not fear darkness, it's where one comes alive." 

I write, blessings to you who feel darkness weighing on you like a mourning cloak. 

Embrace this season as a time for rest, a time of slowing down and the healing of slow-mending wounds; the feeding of hungers unrecognized and unacknowledged amid the bright hum of doing. 

Let us have the perceptiveness to see all the ways in which we have grown since the last turning of the sun, and to take encouragement from that—especially in dark November. 

For myself, I call to the owl, whom I have never found, though I have searched. 

Be my guide, owl, you who sees in darkness what others cannot. 

Teach me, you who consumes what is needed and purges what is not. 

Call to me, you who flies on silent wings, bridging the gap between this world and the Other, a being of mystery and magic. 

I ask the earth that it may be so. 

Season of the Crone

HERE, ON THE doorstep of Samhain, veils of mist blur the edges between the end of one thing and the start of another. It has been that way all day; light rain dripping onto yellow maple leaves, then hanging suspended in the soft, damp air, hovering between heaven and earth.

Twilight falls. The mist grows deeper, spread over the land like the finest silver cloak, sifting down through the atmosphere. It beckons me.

Come. Let us speak to you, it whispers. This is a language you know in your bones. This is a borderland you know in your dreams and have known from the womb..

I feel close to the Crone these days. Not only in the turning of the year, but in the seasons of my own self, the power gathering for some purpose I cannot see. The Divine Feminine wants me to notice her. She speaks through the spider's web, the autumn mist, the living lines in my face. She speaks through the cycle of seasons, myth, symbol and story.

She speaks of the boundless fertility of the earth and her seasons of rest. The cycles of the watching moon. The Three Fates who spin the thread of life, measure out its length, and choose when to sever the thread. The Three Weird Sisters, in and out of time, straddling reality and the supernatural. Between the worlds.

To me, names like "witch" and "crone" seethe with power. Wisdom. Mystery. They invite me into a sisterhood as old as time.

I live in a bungalow, in a city, far from the countries of my ancestors. Far in time from the Old Ways. Yet, somehow...I feel akin to the witch-crone in her cottage. She lives somewhere inside me, of that I'm sure. There are the cats, after all.

Maybe our society's version of the crone in the cottage is the old woman who lives with her many cats...or the old woman who feeds the pigeons, or the old woman who scolds children and talks to squirrels, or the old woman who picks up litter in the park? Not necessarily evil, just...odd.

That is why this passage jumped out at me from a lovely book I just read:

"There was a movie I loved with all my childish heart: Thomasina. The title character was a cat that died and, with the help of a woman thought to be a witch by the townspeople, returned to tell stories of its nine lives. I never tired of the movie, for I identified completely with the unusual woman who lived deep in the woods, taking in hurt animals and healing them with patience and love. In my heart, I knew I would be a strange woman just like her someday."

Love that strangeness in yourself. Listen for the voice of a shape-shifting enchantress, who sounds like falling mist and looks like the fierce clutch of an owl's claw on its prey. I have a feeling this is a good time to hear her--witch, goddess, crone, hag, sorceress. Like a force of nature, like the turning of the year, she is more than we can put one name to.

Catechism for a Witch’s Child

When they ask to see your gods

your book of prayers

show them lines

drawn delicately with veins

on the underside of a bird’s wing

tell them you believe

in giant sycamores mottled

and stark against a winter sky

and in nights so frozen

stars crack open spilling

streams of molten ice to earth

and tell them how you drink

a holy wine of honeysuckle

on a warm spring day

and of the softness

of your mother who never taught you

death was life’s reward

but who believed in the earth

and the sun

and a million, million light years

of being

© 1986 J.L.Stanley

Found magic

"Human creativity and craft, when practiced in attentive, participatory attunement with the earthly locale, can also be deeply wild." --The Alliance for Wild Ethics

After the rains of last week, the last of the leaves were down. The silver flash of aluminum beer cans against November-brown leaves caught my eye as I jogged at street level a few days ago. Picking up trash thrown in natural areas is an avocation (some might say obsession) with me so today, Samhain, I headed down to our local creek with a trash bag. What better way to honor the old gods of earth, fire, tree and sky?

Diligently I hunted down and wheedled cans and bottles from their resting spots and tucked them away in my white trash bag. There was one small blood offering, courtesy of a sharp stick to the palm; and a bit of an unexpected slide down a steep hill on my backside. But finally I hauled a full bag up the hill to my car, feeling virtuous about a job well done. Except for those last dozen cans that hadn't fit into my trash bag. So back into the little wood I ventured.

As I wove through tangles of branches that caught at my jacket, the crows vigorously objected from the bare treetops. The mallards, gathered in the open water near shore, also voiced their thoughts on my presence. So I was a little distracted, and suddenly, there it was: A magic bower fashioned of deadfall.

Delight took me by surprise. Pure, childlike enchantment. A fairy house open to the sky! Made to bewitch lovers of the whimsical, the creative and unexpected--and clearly, lovers of the wild.  

It had a threshold, and a kind of hearth in the center, and fallen-log furniture...

...even ornaments, of the found variety...

And walls and a roof that will keep out no air or rain, but that shape stretched, crisscrossing shadows on the woodland floor, in echo of the trees from which each branch was grown over the long years. Or in echo of our own human silhouettes, with our branching arms and fluid gestures.

I felt magic in the care with which these branches were woven, propped and tied together. It spoke of love for this small wilderness in the midst of the city. The creation and presence of this structure, shaped by anonymous hands, stood in bright counterbalance to another aspect of humanity, symbolized by the trash I had picked up for the past hour. 

In gratitude, I wove an offering of dried flowers over the entryway before I left; I am only one among a greater community who practices honoring wild things.