Spring

After the eclipse things have changed. We're also past the Spring Equinox and today it feels like spring already. Birds are singing in the garden and the seedlings I've set are stirring in their pots. I know I'll have to keep them covered at night from frosts, but I feel so optimistic today, so full of hope. It's not that I have wished the winter away as I believe in living every season as it comes. But today I feel so full of spring that I can let go of a tightness inside and open up.

I'll look tonight for the sickle moon in what should be a clear sky. As she grows I will grow with her and come to fullness. So I hope.

Stirrings

My small garden looks so ragged, so in need of love. But I tell myself it is as it is supposed to be at this time of year. So I keep to putting things on the compost heap for later, pay my respects to the garden spirits at my altar under the thorn tree and bide my time, as the garden spirits tell me to. Spring is stirring slowly but, again, I tell myself to take each day as it comes, as a blessing in rain or sunshine, in wind or calm stillness : these are the elements of our being and we must live them as they come to us just as we must live with both happiness and sadness, as I do.

Imbolc

So Imbolc has come and gone. The candle I lit burnt down. These cold days with blue skies seem so pure and fresh. So like my feeling for Brigit. So like the pure whiteness of snow and of snowdrops. So clear like a teardrop on my cheek in the cold wind.

Another year grows. My eyes open to another Spring awaiting its time. 

I wait too, but must remember that the moment is Now. That is all there ever is.

Dark Moon Solstice

Usually I acknowledge the Winter Solstice by lighting a red candle at sunset that will burn through the night. Last night I needed to do something different because I also regularly acknowledge the Dark Moon and the two came together this year.

So instead of lighting a candle at sunset I waited until after midnight when the Solstice time had passed then turned off all lights and sat in the darkness for a long meditation on this dark time. Only after the time of the New Moon had also passed did I light a white candle and I waited until morning before lighting the red candle for the returning Sun.

I feel this is time for a new beginning and await guidance on where my path will take me and what the returning light will bring.

Invisibility

I want to be invisible. I want to go to the woods and be like a tree. So no-one can see me. Then I would be safe from people. There are other dangers I know. But I don't mind risking those. So I've been working on a spell of invisibility. So I can go out to the woods and dissolve into them and not be seen by other people.

I don't want to share the spell here, for that might make it not work. But I know I have to share some things and I don't think all other people are bad. So I come on here from time to time to be 'public', or visit other people's pages to see what they are doing. Here I'm not invisible but I'm in control of what I reveal and I feel that I can expose things safely. When I meet people face-to-face I am like that, always keeping  my secrets and staying safe. But also always looking for others  I might feel safe sharing secrets with. ......

So I went to the woods and I did the spell and sat near the path as still as a tree trying to be like an invisible dryad. Some people passed and ignored me. They receded and the wood spirits came closer. What I could see changed. I thought what other people saw of me also changed. I thought the spell worked. Then some more people came, a family with young children. A boy with a stick ran off the path towards me. I looked at him and he looked at me. Then he ran off. I think he saw me, but I wonder what he thought he had seen.

Coming Home

After writing what I did last time I have to say something different now. I walked out to a place that I used to go to a lot, but I haven't been there for a while. It's difficult to get to as it means quite a long walk along the forest track and then to scramble up a slope. But then there's a mossy hollow and a spring bubbling out of the ground. I never used to meet anyone coming up here but I think I felt discouraged from coming when some men in an off-road vehicle further down the track gave me a scare. They didn't do anything but the way they looked and laughed at something one of them said scared me. I wouldn't have stood a chance if they'd come after me. They shouldn't have been there anyway and I felt that the place had been violated, so I stayed away.

Today I felt called back there. I met no-one except a couple walking a dog at the beginning of the track. I got a bit scratched climbing up through the fern and bramble but once there I felt a deep peace almost like I could have curled up in the moss and dissolved into the place. I sat there for a long time watching the patches of sunlight filtering down through the trees. Then I went to the spring and spoke a spell of blessing. Afterwards there were tears in my eyes and I let one fall into the water.  It was overwhelming, like I was a lost daughter come back home. And I am.

Shadows

'All my bright uplooking
Is cast down'

I seem to have written that in my notebook about a year ago. But I don't know where it came from. Did I write it or copy it from somewhere? I don't know.

It's how I am though. After a couple of years of visions and openings I seem to have lost the sight. What was for a while a path to initiation taking me through the veil now seems just flat and ordinary. I still go out and look and see things that fill me with wonder and a feeling that I belong. But I can't see through them any more to what is beyond.

How could such a gift be granted me and then taken away?

The Game of Life

I'm back with this blog after many months. I'm not sure what I have to say to any possible reader? It was always more of a personal journal than a way of communicating with anyone. I'm deeply personal and inward looking and I'm my own best conversation partner. I know that sounds egotistic but I'm really not that full of my own importance. My feeling about myself, and my care for others, is that I should be humble. I hope I am. But my best society is the company of spirits in the forest and I find other humans difficult. Why? I get on OK when I 'play the game' which I can do well enough when I have to. But I'm so aware that is is a game. I'm really seeking something deeper than a game.

Maybe that's what I was doing on this blog - presenting myself as a witch. It's not that this wasn't genuine. I did need to express my personal sense of achieving initiation. I just started thinking too much about it. Words on a blog are not what counts but experience is what's important.

But still here I am writing words. So the game goes on ...

Circles of Initiation

I've been meditating on levels of initiation. And times when there are things to say and times when there is nothing to say. Things crowd in and all sorts of thoughts, feelings, images, natural objects ... seem significant, or are imbued with significance. Then things clarify. What was a rush of significance resolves into something deeper, clearer, transparent: into knowledge. You've arrived. After all the things that were to say, to experience, to embrace, there is nothing .....

For a while you mark time. Your initiation feels complete. Until another level, a deeper circle within the Abyss, a higher zone on the Astral Plane, forms and opens new avenues for exploration. The enticing path through the Forest that you thought had come out into the light turns back into the trees again and the Forest beckons once more, darker, deeper, more significant than ever.

No-one can foresee this and tell you when it will happen. There are guides to point the way if you can recognise them. Guardians to warn you if you can hear their voices. But you are alone on the path. Only you can walk it. Only you can learn the lessons deep in the Forest. You?  Me  

Saints and Goddesses

I've been thinking and meditating a lot on the links between pagan goddessess/gods, land spirits (wights) and christian saints. I know that some saints were actual people in history who have been declared to be saints. I don't really understand that except as a way of honouring people and then associating them with aspects of deity as time goes on.  But in some cases no-one seems able to say if or when  a saint was an historical person. I think here that a protective spirit of some place began to live more widely in a story and grew in the spirit world because of the prevalence of the story and so became a goddess or god in the pagan world or a saint in the christian world.

I've been thinking about such things since putting the icon painting of Saint Melangell on my last blog entry and trying to understand why I felt that I should do that. After all I'm a witch. I'm led by my meditations, my thoughts, my reading and my discussions with people to conclude that Melangell is a presence in her valley of Pennant in Wales, that she has a life as a hare goddess and as a saint associated with her church in her remote valley, and that none of these are incompatible with each other. Her story lives in me. So she is with me, whether as a saint or a goddess or a protective spirit. She is beyond such words.

MELANGELL

In the dark time between Samhain and Imbolc I have been quiet and withdrawn. For Imbolc I lit an array of candles for the awakening light. I have been - spiritually - in a hidden valley learning about Melangell. I've known something about her for a while, the story that she hid a hare under her frock to hide it from a hunter. Last summer I visited the valley of Pennant Melangell in Wales where this story is set. It's very remote and the little medieval church is as far as the narrow road goes. It's a place of retreat and I sat outside under the yew trees thinking about her story, and it hasn't left me, and neither has she.

So I've been meditating and researching all I can and all the time bringing her closer. She has been adopted as a christian saint, but some see her as a pagan hare goddess or a protective deity of the Pennant valley. But her protective veil goes wider than that, and I feel myself under her care in a way that i have never felt before. Like that hare under her frock. Safe in the darkness.. Now the light is returning, and the hare can run free.

There's some  info about her on the web from Wikipedia to the website of the centre in Pennant, and this site which has some interesting discussions: MELANGELL

It's now my quest to find out anything more that I can by reading and by personal meditation, which I think she encourages.

Thoughts in Withered Bracken

 

Sitting on a hillside between withered stalks of bracken and sodden leaves I feel something inside me responding to the season. As if the faintest stirring of something, unready to show itself, but waiting its time. I am becoming so focussed now on the natural rhythms of the land and I feel myself responding so sensitively to them from within me.

 Finding a way to face the Dark One in her deepest darkness seems to have brought me on to a clear path - not dark at all but like crystal in its quality, or deep clear water I can see through to another world. I'm finding it more and more difficult to find words for what I want to say, even though my mind is clearer now than it's ever been.

I hope to say something of my discovered path, though I'm becoming more convinced that what I need to say is beyond words. Once i would have felt that it is all too sacred to make public. Now I'm sure that whatever I try to say will be in code except  for those who already know and will recognise the meanings between the words.
 

Through the dark of the longest night,but still dwelling in darkness. I went to my woodland shrine and placed a black pebble there and then a grey pebble. When the light strengthens I'll go with a white pebble. This is a new venture for me and the shrine needs much work My new year resolution..

The Dark Moon Rite

What I said in the last post about doing a Dark Moon rite has now come to pass. At Samhain last year I had an unexpected encounter with the Dark One and so this year  I planned an extended meditation from the 1st November for thirteen days until the Dark Moon. As the Moon waned this became more intense and I've kept a daily journal which I'm going to publish extracts from here. For the first few days, up until the last quarter, this was mainly finding time for quiet meditation and planning. I also had to get on with my daily routines, but I felt myself moving inward as the last quarter passed and the Dark Moon approached.

 I planned for a final period of three days when I could be alone at home and not have to consider anything else. At midnight before the first of the three days I prepared my altar and made a dedication of the coming time for the Dark One. As I meditated I felt the familiar shiver when things start happening and knew that I was  walking the Dark Land.  Heron had left a comment last time about initiation and he had posted a writing on his blog about The Washer at the Ford. I found myself thinking about this and had visions of coming to the Ford to meet her. Crossing the Ford was my way to her.

Although I had been up late, for some reason I woke early the next morning, before dawn. From the bathroom I noticed what looked like moonlight through the frosted glass. I went to another window at the back of the house which faces east. I saw the thin crescent of the Waning Moon low in the sky and a bright planet nearby, both had just risen. When I checked later I saw that the planet had to be Venus. I didn't expect to see the Moon again until she was waxing. But the sky had cleared overnight and there she was quite bright, with Venus too. I was overwhelmed. I'd thought of retreating into darkness but here was enchanting lights in the sky and the Goddess of Love looking down on me. And so what I thought would be a dark time of retreat turned out to be an intense but quiet time when I felt blessed by a light that is the other face of darkness.

Over the three days I walked in the woods, I read about the Crone, I meditated in the dark.  I have a wide circuit that I like to walk through the woods and over a hill. I usually do this clockwise, or sunwise, but I started the three days by walking it in the opposite direction. The plan was to walk it the usual way round as a 'return' from the dark retreat. On the last night I crossed the Ford. I have my record of the crossing but that will stay in my Book of Shadows. But the thing I want to say here is that I expected to pay a price for the crossing. And I did. But the physical things that could have gone wrong were few and all happened on the return journey. When I tried to open my bedroom curtains to let the light in on the morning of the last day I couldn't. A 'dream catcher' tied to the curtain rail was tangled up with the runners and they had jammed so I had to prise one off to open the curtains. Then I did my return walk. It was raining heavily but I had committed to do it so I did. The ground was wet and slippery and I had trouble on the hill and I was wet and muddy by the time I came back though the woods. I slipped and grabbed the first thing I  could for support. It was a bramble which cut my hand.

So I did pay a price. My final planned thing was a emergence bath. With candles and lavender oil. It was so welcome when I got back cold and wet and I came out of it  re-born. Or renewed. And there is just this to write up which I am now doing.

Blessed Be

The Dark One

This last year has been a very intense one for me. An experience I had last Samhain with the Dark One was powerful and unexpected. Since then I have lived with that experience and it has deepened as I have moved closer to her. Although that's not right. I don't think you get 'close' to her in the way 'close' is usually understood. This year I am undertaking an extended meditation over the ten days from the traditional date of 'Halloween' which occurred this year just after the Full Moon, through to the Dark Moon, which I think is her time. Although I have not posted here very often of late, I'm posting  now in the midst of that extended meditation as as part of my reflection and note-taking of the process.

The ritual act that I will perform at the Dark of the Moon is gradually emerging from my  meditations and my planning. Although the ritual has been going on since the Full Moon, paradoxically growing as the Moon wanes. And paradox seems to define what is emerging. She is so close yet so 'other'. She is the mirror image of everything I hold dear, and so also its antithesis. Everything I am, she is not; she is an absence counterbalancing my presence. But also, again paradoxically, very present (?!)

Of course this extended meditation is going on alongside my everyday life: coming into focus when I have quiet times set aside for it, but also infusing all the other things I do. It's like an invisible life alongside my visible life. A secret place I can visit wherever I am and whatever else I am doing. I've never felt more like a witch.

Dark Thoughts out of Season

Time has passed and many nights of contemplation and visions in the dark.

Have I seen things I should not see?

Those spirits that I walked with through the woods walked apart, but with me:

different like the trees are different.

Now the Abyss is before me, dark and indifferent .....

These are not thoughts for Harvest, but the rain is falling and the land is sodden, and already my thoughts turn to a darker season.

Should I look more deeply into the darkness?

Winds of Change

To this lake today. The waves rushing across it make it look like the sea, though they are caused by the wind rather than tides. There is a lot of wind here. The lake is up on a plateau in the hills of North Wales. All around it is peaty soil with heather and sphagnum moss, forming tumps which, in different stages of drying out after recent warm weather, take on a beautiful succession of colours from green to yellow-green, dusky pink and rusty orange. Subdued and subtle colours  - at a distance a myriad shades of tinted straw - but close up, and interspersed with the heather, like the hues of another world.

I love to be in these empty landscapes, though ruined cottages and the remains of old lead mines show that they were not always quite so empty. There are wind turbines barely visible on the horizon, also showing that the land is being utilised in this way again. Concrete and tarmac are being laid across the peat where before there were just tracks and rubble roads. Pylons are being built to carry away the power generated.

I have mixed feelings about this. Green energy is of course a good thing, though some question how green this technology really is. And the peat too is a carbon store and this carbon is released when the peat is excavated or dries out through draining. Should I regret the loss of this wild landscape and the special things that are here? Or should I welcome the alternative ways of producing energy? If only I could be sure that it would help to avoid climate change my regret would at least be tinged with hope. But the more I find out about the technology and the impact of putting it in such places, the less I am sure.

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 .....