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.