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. 

 

Calling up our power

Still, the witch stirs her cauldron.

I hear her call, Come to me, daughter. Remember your power; the power of women.

 

She knows this long, old story. Century upon century of women, demonized for exercising their power and autonomy — another chapter in the story of sinful Eve eating the forbidden fruit.

 

After many hard-fought and all-too-recent gains for women in this falling-apart democracy — the so-called bastion of liberty, the so-called leader of the free world — the radical patriarchy is eager to criminalize a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and her own reproductive decisions.

 

Lives lost and options limited because of a radical minority's misogynist, hypocritical, pseudo-religious bullshit.

 

Whatever spin they try to put on it, it is clearly motivated by the same hatred of women that has never stopped rearing its ugly head; one of many systemic efforts to restrict and control women around the world.

Women with fewer rights than men. Women not allowed to drive. Women who must hide their faces in public. Women who can’t choose whom they marry or when. Female genital mutilation. Women raped and honor-killed. Women with no health care, no education, no vote.

 

The old, ongoing story of women, for millennia chattel, controlled, stalked. Harrassed, assaulted, disbelieved. Abused. Terrorized. Murdered.

 

Burned as witches.

 

Chances are, you have experienced one or more of these things. Maybe there have been times (years) when you felt like prey the moment you stepped out of your front door (or even inside of your own home). When vigilance became automatic, when assessing the threat level was engrained behavior from such a young age that you don’t even think about it most of the time.

 

And times when, whatever you did or didn’t do, it wasn’t enough to protect you.

 

They have always wanted us to believe we are lesser-than. Powerless.

 

Now, and in times past, we utterly reject what they want us to believe.

We live our lives, and resist, and persist. We make our voices heard. We join together. We use our power.

We rise: in the divine feminine, in the power of women.

 

Because no law or person or can make us less than we are. No law or person can change our belief in our equality, and our rights as women and human beings.

 

We cannot be constrained by the limits of others, only ourselves.

A pagan woman, I draw power from that quiet voice of the witch inside me. From the sacred earth, of which we are part. From belief in my soul, in all its shadowed beauty. 

I envision Eve walking forth from the garden of Eden; woman, and sinless, and whole unto herself.

A quiet voice like water

Thinking about my last post, I begin to notice how often I write about what is calling me (in this case, I am back in dance class after a long time away).

This is the word spell we wrap around ourselves, all unaware.

Do you do the same?



Outside, it is raining, a soft and secretive pattering of drops on the roof overhead.

The house is quiet, the cats asleep, the candle lit.

The wildflowers I planted in a seed starting tray begin their lives beneath the soil.

A day to turn inward...a watery, daydreaming sort of day.





I see how I evoke that which I want to be more present in my life...or I evoke a direction I feel pulled to follow, in order to call the path to me. Sometimes without even knowing that is what I am doing.

I perform that ritual here. Where else is there a space for dreams, magic and mystery, but in our creations?

A web post (or a person) may on the surface appear simple, but is many-layered with wish, meaning and emotion, like a deep network of roots beneath the prairie soil that anchor the sunlit growth unfolding above the surface.

Putting forth a thought...a wish...a state of being, is a kind of spell casting. This is one of the types of magic we practice, whether or not we consider ourselves witch, shaman, healer or artist.

We define and shape our reality, and ourselves, by how we think about and express them: An evocation.

We call something by naming it...then putting intention behind it then releasing it, within and without.

But the things we struggle to express — the most deep and powerful and shape-shifting things — they seem to resist being named and encapsulated.

This may be a vast longing that we can't translate into words...

Or it may be a suggestion of a thing entwined around something else, in such a tangle that we can't tease it apart and examine it properly...

It may be something of which we see only the barest outline, out of the corner of our eyes.

This unnamed something floats in on the pale silk of a milkweed, and plants itself in the tangle of thorns, thistles, whispering grasses, the under-the-surface beings of our inner landscapes.

Such callings are elusive and wild. What wants to be known sends out tendrils, or rivulets. It surfaces from some nameless place within.

We can listen for its whispers as it flows through our lives. With our attention, we nurture and give home to its voice. Trying to pin down and examine it may wither it to silence.

It is like water, this voice. Its source is sacred, a spring deep underground in darkness. Speaking through the language of image and dream, metaphor and archetype, it finds its way to us by secret channels, nurtures life unseen, ebbs, flows and shapeshifts.




It is Mélusine, a freshwater spirit.

It is a Mystery unleashed in spring.

Like spirit whispers, water rarely follows a direct path...it meanders. So the paths to these callings and destinations are intuitive and winding.

We do not know where we want to end up, or even exactly from where we are beginning...we hear only a whisper on the wind. This way.

We have only this signpost.

If we wish to stay connected with our sacred source, I believe we must follow the whisper, the signpost, over and over again throughout our lives.

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

Folk tale for a cold night

On a dark and blustery day--when the turning leaves have frozen on the vine and passersby hunch their shoulders against the wind as they scurry to warmth and home fires--it is time to sit down with a strange tale of enchantment and wonder....

I have just the tale; one that captures the mystery of the forest and the power of old crones. A twisty story set in a land that echoes medieval Russia...a place where the snow is deep and the fearsome figure of Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged house may still roam.

The tale is called The Witch of Duva: A Ravkan Folk Tale, by Leigh Bardugo, and it begins this way:

"There was a time when the woods near Duva ate girls.

It’s been many years since any child was taken. But still, on nights like these, when the wind comes cold from Tsibeya, mothers hold their daughters tight and warn them not to stray too far from home.

“Be back before dark,” they whisper. “The trees are hungry tonight.”

Grab a steaming cup of cocoa, wrap up in a cozy blanket and enjoy the full tale here.