Wordless by a Well

I've been away for  a walking holiday in the Wye Valley, exploring the river and the woodlands along it.  One place I went was a village with a old well next to the church. I thought as it was in a guide book it might be crowded but there were only  few people when I arrived and they soon went. So I was alone for a bit at the well, a really atmospheric place which I tried writing about afterwards but it seemed to be beyond words.

So, back home, I've tried to recapture the experience by meditation and automatic writing which has worked for me before.

Here's the (edited) result:

The well wet all around with iron or something from the water staining all the stone work around it. Mosses and liverworts growing up the well walls. A scent of the deep earth from the well shaft and a sudden upwelling feeling of water rising from the depths of the deep earth and from depths within me. I am well water. I am a stream.  I flow. Visions come of flowing streams a figure standing on a bridge: a priestess? a water nymph? a goddess? she stands on the bridge with the water flowing beneath her. I am her, and yet I'm watching her. We flow together washing the land, seeping into the land, one with earth, feeling the warm rays of the sun drawing us up into the air. Falling now as a shower of rain. Back to earth. A sprinkled blessing for all things.

The well coming back into focus. The stonework and the seeping water. The trees all around and the old church which i did not enter, too instilled with earth and water spirit visions to be diverted After a step out of time into the water world voices call me back. A family with young children are coming. I retreat through the churchyard into the trees beyond and linger along a hedgerow back to the village ....

The whole area around this well is a magical place. Part of me wants to write about it. Part of me says words are not the way to represent it. Sometimes I think that about this blog. That I shouldn't need to write it. That it is all just experience and nothing else is real, particularly not words. Though that's all I've got to communicate with. I don't know a lot of poetry (I should know more) but I often look into my by now old and battered  text book copy of the poems of Emily Dickinson which I had to read for A Level at school. It's one of the few schoolbooks I've kept. We looked at one with the words "internal difference ... where the meaning are" and she speaks of "saying it slant" which I remember we had to write about as "elliptical expression". I've gone off the subject I know, but those poems are the only ones I've read that hint at what can't be said in language. I know what she means.

The Gods of Midsummer

I went out to these pools looking for dragonflies and damselflies. There were lots of them, large reddish-brown ones gliding over the water with smaller electric-blue one on the edges. I couldn't get close enough from the path to get a decent pic of any of them, but I thought this dead tree, alive with lichens, made a good subject.  And there was so much else around these pools. Lots of unusual things like Marsh Cinquefoil and dwarf downy birches. But more than any of the individual things, the feeling of so much life all dancing to the tune of some magical impulse - the Green Man and the Green Lady dancing together through the longs days of the season of Midsummer. 
What should I call them? I've been discussing in some other forums whether we should know the names of the gods or whether they are beyond names and so we can choose whether or not to give them names as part of our communal religious life, or whether we should just experience them as what they are in themselves. I can never decide when I'm discussing what the right answer is. But when I'm out on a day like this all the questions dissolve and I just feel this being all around me.

Visions

 *

Thinking about Zero: the Fool, the Wanderer. Starting from nowhere on a voyage of discovery. Putting aside cards, books, images, and putting my mind into dream time, sliding across the edges of this world, this time, turning the deck of cards in the mind's eye, the eye that sees across the borders of the conscious world, the conscious time. Already the cards are peeling themselves off the envisioned deck, I walk the path of the Sorceror, the Shaman, the path where light is a soft glow at a narrow point before me and all around is dusky. The glow widens, another realm of misty colours opens up before me. Now I am the Visionary, the Seer, the Prophet. What do I see? The view clears to pastel green and pales further to clear light.

My dreams are laid out before me: each one from the notebook where I write them each morning, coming alive, resolved, what was puzzling and hazy coming into a different focus. I see things people, places as locations I can visit, anytime, for refuge, or for advice or just to be somewhere else for a while. That recurring place that came time and again into my dreams. Now I can find it. Now I know what and where it is. The ways are open for me. The strangeness still strange but not scary.

Unfinished business, but I can come again, knowing the way, but only when the gates are open. Until I am trusted with the key, which may be soon .....

Tarot

I've been taking some time to absorb the images of the Tarot pack. At the moment I'm using them for meditation. My spirit journeys have been getting more powerful and I'm getting better at spending time and finding my way.

But sometimes it seems necessary to have a fixed image or a point of focus to explore. This is a different sort of experience, and the results  seem to take me deeper into myself rather than out into other worlds.

Looking at different tarot packs is instructive. I'm coming to the conclusion that ony by designing my own (though I'm not a good artist) or collecting images that have the right resonances and making up cards from them, will I get a really useful pack for meditation purposes.

The images other people have put together are interesting and helpful, and I think it pays to refer to more than one pack when studying the Tarot. But for personal use, this would be confusing. So getting a pack together that is just right and works for me is going to be a long-term project.

A witch's work is a never-ending quest. So be it.

Plant Allies

I have been experimenting with using  plants as allies for meditation and visionary journeys. I’ve had some interesting  results  which I’m keeping for my  personal record. I’ll say something now about techniques and approaches, partly to get them clear for myself and partly in case anyone else wants to pick up from them and ask questions or make helpful suggestions.

 My basic approach is to identify suitable plants and find ways of relating with them. Books on plant lore and advice on gaining plant allies are available, but they only tell what worked for others. It’s useful to read as much as you can but not to take everything you read on trust. You need to find out what responses you can get yourself from different plants.  Approach plants in your garden, in the woods, in a local park, even in a weedy patch in a street corner, to find out which ones you can tune in to.

I have had best results from native plants growing wild and I have put some of the best ones in my garden in a special place with a seat nearby so I can meditate near them.  There are also places in the woods where certain plants and trees grow where I like to go and be quiet with them.

Sometimes you need to get closer using bits of crushed leaf for the feel or the scent or the moisture. This can be done indoors. You can also burn dried leaves in a thurible. I won’t go into eating plants now .  If you are using dried plants out of season it can also be useful  to have a picture to look at, preferably of the actual plant you are using when it was growing.

Last there is the question of buying essential oils and commercially available forms of plant essences. These are good for extra atmospheric background but not instead of actual plants. Essential oil in water in a burner or flower water put on the skin can be good, though you have to be careful what you are buying as sometimes what is sold is ‘chemically identitical’ fragrance rather than real extracts.

Beltane

For Beltane

The Green Man

&

The Faerie Lady

*

may you all keep good company

Blessed Be

L x

Searching for Traditional Craft

Should I only call myself  Witch if I have had a tradition passed on to me, or if I have been initiated by someone in the traditional craft?

I can't claim this. But 'Witch' is a state of being for me. It's a name that seems to have attached itself to me rather than one I have chosen. Following the path is something I know I have to do, as if I have no choice.

That's how I feel about it. It has nothing directly to do with specific rituals (though I'm not averse to learning them) or knowing any particular formulas. But although no-one has passed on any hidden secrets to me, I do have an experience of absorbing what feels like secret lore from my meditations and visionary journeys, and I have learnt something in getting advice about ways of doing this. But most of all I feel a personal and instinctive connection with things that are DEEP, something within me rather than something learnt or passed on.

For a long time 'Witch' was a title I aspired to but did not feel I could claim.  But experience and practise in communion with spirits and also learning things about herbs and  other lore has made me feel I can own the title.

But I'd love to know what any traditional practitioners out there think.