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.

The cauldron of remaking

When a person asks me what I am doing, now that I have left paid work behind, I'll usually say something straightforward. Like, "I'm doing more gardening," or "I'm reading more books," or "I'm spending more time in nature." 

But underneath it all, I think I am really trying to change my relationship with time. To feel it is at last enough. To live in the present moment more often. To slowly reconfigure my inner constellations so that they once again make sense to me. 

I feel a sense of trying to emerge, as if from a long sleep or captivity. 

If my work life prompted a long hibernation of the soul — because my job never called for soul, just "deliverables" — then how do I reawaken this wellspring of vitality, passion and intuition? Is she still there? 

I see her, my spirit, in my mind's eye. In a clearing, deep in an oak wood, owl on her shoulder and crown of leaves upon her head. She stirs the cauldron. She feeds the fire, she keeps the moon in a drawer. She is wise beyond reckoning. 

I call to her: Be with me, be around me, be within me!

It is difficult to hold space for the unmaking necessary before the rebirth. Difficult to feel like enough without doing. I spent many hours in the garden when the sun was high, planting, tending, watering. 

But the winter, I tell myself, is the time to stop struggling toward the sunlight. Let my inauthentic life die. Stop doing to justify my being. Let go of. Listen for whispers. Descend into the darkness of that cauldron, and be stirred. 

Seedbed of dreams

Two nights ago I saw a moon like a half-filled chalice, cupping silver light poured by an invisible sun. 

I drank from that cup. As the moonlight slid down my throat, how I wished that radiance would water the ground of my being. Stir long-forgotten seeds to life. Show me whether I have fallen by the wayside, or if this path is true. 

Have you an inner wisdom, and what does she look like? Do you speak to her often, ask her questions nearest your secret heart? And does she answer in words you understand? 

Maybe she speaks in mind pictures, like animals glimpsed in the darkness on the side of the road you're traveling. Maybe in the sound of wind rushing past your face, or the jeweled dragonfly who lands on your hand, blessing you with its clawed feet?

Mine speaks like the young-old moon: a grandmother, a sister, a mother and a daughter. 

Her voice is like a silver-linked bracelet hanging with stars, and like a deep, damp seedbed of earth. 

She is within and without, which is a mystery. 

As moon without, she knits with long silver needles a waterfall of light between herself and the earth, her beloved; most beautiful of all the sky's children. She spills her light over me, which falls down my face like tears. 

As moon within, she whispers like rain. She stirs her cauldron of dreams, and waits for me to remember what I always forget: That I am she. 

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.

Thousand year forest

In the thousand year forest, Brigid's serpent ripples forth from earth's womb, and tastes the wild air with her tongue.

This wind, it tastes of mid-winter: the matings of eagles and owls, frost flowers blossoming over iced river edges.

Goddess of Fire and Creation, let me say that somewhere not here, yet living deep inside me, is a sacred grove; a wild and holy presence.

Somewhere inside that grove lives a wild woman, in wordless conversation with the eternal forest.

Her mystery is mine, have I forgotten?

The forest is inside always; its ways strange, though we think we know them. We think we know ourselves also, and that is the quickest way to lose the deepest mystery of our beings, which is unknowable.

Unknowable.

Are we not, somewhere, carrying inside still the mystery of the humans we once were—the mystery shared by every wild creature, embodied fully through fur, scales, feathers and skin?

Wordless; but speaking through the magic of grace, power, movement and gesture.

Eternal; yet beautiful in our earthiness and mortality.

Nationless; belonging only to the earth.

Entranced by and afraid of the flame.

Called by dreams, moved by unfathomable intuitions.

Conversing with creation through hand, eye, nose, ear and feet that caress the ground as we dance.

Sea changing, blood coursing to tides of joy, sadness and desire, and to the moon in the wide sky.

.

At times when I must hold in my thoughts, my objections, my anger, my grief and even my truth, even then I am still a wild dancer through this life.

Remember.

How this dance embodies that eternal mystery...which is what art is for.

A knitting circle

I was thinking of my mythical community.

"When I'm old, I want to be part of a knitting circle," I announced to my husband. (I don't really knit, but not the point.)

I imagined them, the wise and earthy women in this knitting circle.

Quirky, kind. Strong, sharp. Full of thoughts.

Playful and fond of the absurd, because laughing together is good medicine.

I said, "They'll like reading. And growing herbs...or wildlife habitat. But they're a little dangerous, somehow...like, they're witches."

I looked over at him. He nodded.

(He's heard me dreaming aloud about other hypothetical communities that we could somehow be part of. Maybe a permaculture-green-sustainable community in the Pacific Northwest? A pagan-artist-village community in Devonshire? The oddball, charming fictional communities of Bluebell, Alabama, or Stars Hollow, Connecticut...surely they must be based on real places. Etcetera.)

The next day, musing on the ways of my mind, it struck me—I had been describing the person who I want to be when I grow old.

The ongoing sense of community with other women that I sometimes long for, especially now that my mother and grandmother are gone, my aunties dispersed.

Be a good parent to yourself, a wise woman told me. Be both the daughter and mother.

To that, I'll add...also be the grandmother-crone to yourself.

I'm reminded that as a girl, I had a habit of buying highly impractical clothing for imaginary scenarios.

Floaty, gauzy gown with a long sash and ruffles? Of course. Because I was hopeful that one day very soon, I would be walking in a sunny meadow and come across a princely young man who would promptly fall in love with me and my lovely dress.

"Wear it and he will come."

It didn't seem unlikely, then.

(The meadow never actually happened. Eventually there was indeed a princely young man, but he's never cared for meadows. Or walks.)

I'm poking fun at my younger self, but that imagining came from the same mind that today muses on knitting circles and community. Still trying on possibilities of the person I want to be and the life I want for myself.

When I was a young woman with a head stuffed full of romantic novels, my longings were different than they are now. The knitting circle suits me better these days.

So it appears I have a sketchy map, and a place to get to...but which paths will take me there?

I have to get on with it. I'm already oldish, with no community in sight. Or else I'm overlooking something right under my nose, which is a possibility.

But it all began with the girl that I once was, let's not forget her. I love her once-upon-a-time longing for the mythic that played out in dresses.

And I am glad she lives on as again I try to envision a life that fits who I'm longing to be now.

A blessing of bones

LAST NIGHT, I was blessed by the Old Bone Mother.

In her old hands, she carried reindeer bones. Click! Clack! They rattled as she prowled through the dark stone cavern-space where we sat.

Bones scratched over scalps, rested over hearts as the Dreamers dreamed their way along twisting inner paths, anchored by the pulse of the Drummers.

In the Celtic lands She is the Cailleach. The Unmaker, the Uncreator, the Unwinder, the Remover. Her breath blows cold on the back of the neck in the Dark Time, She throws boulders that make mountains, She brings the fierce cold, She is an elemental force as She moves through this world, collecting what needs to be Taken.

She Takes.

(This was how the story was told to me: She Takes.)

Deep beneath the sacred mound of Sí an Bhrú, Newgrange, in a dark womb of a chamber, She sings as She knits together the bones of those and that which have been Taken, reshapes them to live again on the earth in new form.

Because of Her, nothing is lost to the world, not ever lost, not truly.

And in this space, where the Old Bone Mother paid a visit to the Dreamers, a trickster-shapeshifter-shaman of a man told us: "We are given two great gifts in life. The gift of being created. And the gift of being uncreated. Throughout time, throughout culture, how we respond to these two gifts becomes our religion."

The Cailleach's blessing is to take from us something that needs to go. It is too soon to know what is gone from me. So many things I no longer needed, that I wanted to push out the door like a houseguest overstaying her welcome by months or years.

Tears overflowed, silently. My heart overflowed, silently. This went on for a while. And then I felt at peace.

Last night, I was blessed.



Last night, the drum was alive under my palm. Though stored away for long years, it still had not forgotten how to sing, how to vibrate and shiver its skin in answer to my hand, resonating for long moments in the humming silence. I played the drum, the drum played me, for a moment all one and the same.

I have walked the passages of Newgrange, Sí an Bhrú, in body. A dozen years ago, in the springtime, when the lambs frolicked and the Cailleach slept.

Did the echoes of that mystery plant their seeds in me then? The potent magic of the Irish-green grass, the druid sun tracing gray stone spirals, the paradox of timelessness amid great age, those stay with me.

But if I am a drum, one beat was struck on me that day at Newgrange, resonating over years until the same hand last night struck me once again.

Maybe it is as he, the shapeshifter-shaman, said: "We are all Drummers on the Skin of Mystery."

Mystery is rattling in your ears, striking Her fists on your bones. When She strips you bare to scour you and refashion you, when you are uncreated and lose your identity, your trappings, your anger or your way, say to yourself it is a gift.

She Takes, and it is a gift.

Last night, this is how the story was told to me. And then, how I told the story to myself.

And now, I tell it to you.