Kitchen Witchin' and Stich 'n Bitchin'

I have the blues. When I come down off a period of intense stress (parenting has been a trial lately), I tend to crash hard into a sort of melancholy that won't shake loose without some serious intervention. So, today I'm cleaning the kitchen and organizing things, and tomorrow, I'm going to spend some time with a girlfriend, stitchin' and bitchin'.

Dedicating this flurry of activity to the healing aspect of Brighid. Putting my heart in her hands. Letting myself be open to her tenderness. Drinking from her well.

Bright Arrow,
shoot straight
into the heart
of the matter,

set it aflame
with your healing power,
warm what’s cold
and burn away what
keeps me tangled
in this blue, blue haze.

Less smoke, Lady,
and more heat.

Growing Edge

My world is on a growing edge. What I mean by that is there are many changes coming - some within my control, and some not within my control - and this has a very double edged feeling. Like, I'm poised to return to school for yet another try. And I'm waiting for an adult child to move out of my house so I can have some peace. And I'm messing about in my unconscious material and feeling vulernable and raw as a result. And I'm learning a lot about myself through my Blue Star homework.  And I'm feeling some shifts in my expectations when it comes to the various spiritual paths that are calling me.  Druidry is private and a very solitary and personal practice for me, whereas my studies with Wicca are entirely dependent upon my connection with my coven. No coven, no real interest in carrying on with those studies, whereas druidry has captured me heart and soul and I depend on nothing external whatsoever to carry on with that course of study.

Some things are dying. I used to believe that I would, eventually, earn and MFA in Poetry or Creative Writing. I used to see myself teaching or doing workshops for writers.  I saw myself living a writer's life.  My spiritual work is leading me to see something different for myself. A BA Psych. An MSW. A career in helping and service to others.  A degree from Cherry Hill Seminary at some point - most likely in pastoral care.  Where does this leave my writing? My desire to write?

No where different, really, because the mistake I was making was believing that to write, I needed to go to school. This is simply not true. I can write *right now*. I can write.  Writing well is not something I need to learn.  So, while the dream of an MFA is dying, the knowledge that I can write has moved from a dream or a wish to a reality. I can write.  That has been born.  

When I experience too many changes at once (and I define the list above as 'too many'), I get very ungrounded very fast. It becomes ever more important that I sink as deeply into my body as I possibly can, or I will begin to neglect it. Not out of any kind of loathing for my physical self, but because the more shaken up I am spiritually or emotionally, the more likely I am to forget that I have a body that needs my attention. It needs food. It needs fresh air and walks. It needs sex and physical affection. It needs good sleep and lots of water. Focusing my attention on the body is like focusing my attention on garden soil. Though I can't see some of what's growing within me yet, I know it's there, beneath the surface, unfurling little tendrils of root below and reaching for the light. 

When my spiritual and emotional life is fraught with anxiety and change and I am on a growing edge, I have to become a very mindful gardener. Feed the soil. Condition it.  Mulch and tilling and much attention. 

I really needed to remind myself of that today.

Why Brighid?

There's an interesting conversation happening on one of the ADF lists at the moment. A lot of those of us who are involved with Druidry find ourselves in a relationship with the deity/archetype "Brighid", and one member, who isn't at all attracted to things Celtic wanted to know why.

Each had their own way of saying it, but the answers all came down to the same general theme: "As if I had any choice!"

I find this fascinating, because even though I profess to be a pantheist who doesn't really believe in 'gods', I have had the same experience with this particular archetype. As soon as I started working in a druidic context, she reappeared after a long absence - and when I say 'reappeared', I mean she popped in to a visualization I was doing as part of my home study course - unbidden, and completely unexpectedly. Not only did she pop in, but she had a heck of a lot to say.

Some would suggest that my refusal to believe in gods when I am obviously blessed with experiences of them is hard-headed. Maybe I'm just stubborn, but my experience with active imagination and visualization tells me that I'm dealing with aspects of self, no matter who shows up. Why Brighid? Because for some reason, my subconscious mind thinks that she is the best representative of many virtues that I want to manifest in myself, AND druidry is very IndoEuropean focused. My mind takes this information - druidry = indoeuropean and then searches itself for appropriate symbols. Being a Celticophile, Brighid is an obvious choice. 

But...I know there are some people who do not see the link between being tapped on the shoulder by one archetype over the other and what information is already stored in their subconscious mind. They will insist that they'd never 'heard of' or 'known about' the archetype that they now call 'patron' or 'matron'.  This may be true, in some sense, but here's what I think does happen -

They are presented with an archetype they do not recognize.  S/he will have certain features that allow them to categorize this archetype in some way (nurturing, warrior-like, crone, maiden). They will then do some research to discover the nature of this archetype and find one that 'fits'. 

I think it very rarely happens that a deity appears in a person's spiritual landscape fully formed unless that person already knows something about the deity, or at the very least, the archetype that deity represents.

But I could be wrong. What have your experiences with deity been? How did you come to have a relationship with your matron or patron?

Spiritual Crisis

We all experience this in one form or another. We feel spiritually dry, or unmoved by ritual. We fear that the gods and goddesses we've worked with for years have abandoned us, or perhaps, that they don't exist at all. After years of pagan practice, we come to the conclusion that there are no gods, no powers, nothing but the natural world in all its wonder.

Some, when confronted with this kind of spiritual crisis, go looking for the next spiritual high. They convert to charismatic Christianity, or go back to the Catholicism of their childhood. Others move on to Buddhism or atheism. They pack up their altar tools and tarot cards and vow to stop wasting their time and energy on something that just isn't working for them anymore.

I've had these periods of feeling stale in my spirituality, but I've come to learn, after over twenty years of spiritual practice, that those spiritually fallow times often come to me as a signal that I'm out of balance and need to lay off the magic for a while. Or, the opposite is true, and I need to ramp up my spiritual practice. Add something new.  Do something creative. 

Dark nights of the soul in which we despair of ever feeling a connection to the divine again can be tests or lessons that can be overcome by a simple continued daily practice - faking it until you make it. For many, the addition of daily practice does wonders in easing us into an ongoing conversation with life the universe and everything. The daily practice acts as a bridge between times when we seem to be full of spiritual flow and creativity, and times when we feel withered up and empty.

I challenge us all to make of our spiritual journey a thing we just do. Whether we feel like it or not, whether we're inspired or not, whether we want to or not, let us all choose two or three simple things a day that we just do, no matter what, as a way to keep the lines of communication open between the gods of our understanding and our recalcitrant rational minds. Let's find a way to honour our need for something more by including something playful in our spiritual practice, whether that be fingerpainting or gardening or private dance in the nude in our temple spaces. Let's challenge ourselves to be mature pagans - pagans who don't give up when the juice seems to run dry, but persevere in practice because practice works in keeping us in the flow of the seasons, the tides of the waters, the waxing and waning of the moon. Let us see our planet as a mirror, and let us gaze into it in wonder and awe. Let that be enough when nothing else seems to be going on. Develop patience. Sit in the silence. Open your senses. Trust that while your individual perspective on deity may change, something is out there, whether it be the Universe itself, with all it's wild and unknowable wonders, or a gentle Mother Goddess who wraps you in her arms when you most need her, whether you can feel her or believe in her at that particular moment or not.

But do not be complacent. If you're not feeling it, reach out. Make offerings. Do something in honour of a hero or heroine in your favourite mythic cycle. Draw something. Paint something. Dance. Sing. Honour yourself as god or goddess, if that's all that's left for you to believe in.

Magic will happen - does happen every morning when the sun rises, when monarchs fly across an entire continent, when a new born baby cries out for its mother, when breasts fill will milk to feed that babe, when life takes us into death, and our flesh feeds new life even as our spirit moves on to other experiences. 

In the fabulously wise words of your local AA chapter - it works, if you work it.

More on Effort as Offering

This is something I've talked about on my show.  Effort as offering, instead of the actual product of effort. This is important to me because many of my artistic endeavours are failures, and my knitting often gets frogged. My cookies fall apart. My gardens wither and die. Offering less than perfect 'products' to the Universe doesn't work for me, but offering the effort I put into them does.

The shawl I'm knitting is for me. The effort is for the Irish Goddess, Brighid, who has been appearing in meditations lately. I like to say 'hey, thanks' when these appearances come up, since they are usually beneficial in some way. While I'm a pantheist and have trouble believing in literal deities, there is no doubt in my mind that Brighid is an important character in my mindscape.  She is a returning character, having been a very important part of my early seeking until I moved on as asked by a teacher to another archetype.  Maybe I should have said no, because I never felt particularly close to the archetype I was being asked to work with, and in fact, felt quite strongly that 'she' didn't like me very much.

Bygones are bygones, however, and I am happy to see Brighid returning with her no nonsense habit of dunking me in frigid rivers and ordering me around. I love it. My goddess is a dominatrix with a giggle and a quick hip bump. ANYway...

The shawl is perfect as effort for her, because in knitting it, I'm constructing hundreds of little candle flames.  The symbolism couldn't be more perfect.  Today, as I was knitting and thinking about something I'd read in one of my OBOD lessons, I had a flash of inspiration - I'd like to try painting, drawing, or photographing tryptichs of the triads of wisdom.  Not all of them will be easily translated from verbal to visual, but some of them will be really fun to work with. For those who don't know, Triads are wisdom teachings that are packaged in easily memorized threes. Like this:

The three melodies of creation:
The wind in the trees, the stream at snowmelt, the cry of a new-born babe.

 

 

It could be a lot of fun to take triads like the one above, and come up with visual representations of them.  I would want to display the three images together, so I'd have to find ways to bring them together - maybe give them all the same border, or keep the colours similar.  

The whole point of the Bardic grade in OBOD is to seek inspiration, and that's been the major focus of my meditative work lately. For me, seeking information means clearing out the dross in my head (and there is a powerful lot of it).  Knitting is becoming as spiritual a practice as ritual is for me, which I find fascinating and inspiring in itself. How much of what I do on a daily basis can be spiritual just by virtue of my thinking it is? 

Most of what I do. Cooking, cleaning, self-care, studying, connecting with friends, nurturing my family, knitting, drawing, writing...it's all spiritual when I make it so by virtue of thinking as the effort as an offering. 

Serendipity

I'm making a habit of noticing when synchronicity makes an appearance in my life. I woke up this morning thinking "I should think about writing again." For those who don't know, I used to be a rather prolific writer. Poetry and erotica. I had some things published. I got paid for some things I wrote. I had publication credits. I was a writer.

I got happy in 2004, and there ended my writing career. My muse was misery and without her, I couldn't write. Oh, I scribbled a few things here and there, but nothing I considered 'real writing'. There've been a few abortive attempts at writing a novel, but I quit before I hit 20 000 words every single time.

In working with druidry, I'm learning to be open to inspiration in a way I wasn't before. I didn't consider writing a spiritual act before I began this course. I considered it a hobby. I thought of it as self-indulgent. I didn't take it seriously.  Taking the Bardic Grade from The Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids has opened my eyes (and spirit) up to how spiritual any form of creativity really is, and I'm coming back to life in many creative ways as a result.

The desire to write has been creeping slowly up on me, but this morning it felt important to honour the desire. I set about putting up a blog for the 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women blogging group, since that project had totally fallen off my radar and I wanted to make space for it. I realized, as I was putting it together, that this was about writing for me. I want to invest time, energy, space, in writing.

Just as I was blogging for the first time in that new space, I got an e-mail requesting that I submit a story to an anthology.  I haven't been asked to write or submit anything since 2004. I laughed when I read the e-mail. Out loud and from the belly.

All Hail Serendipity. 

Turkey Soup

In early January, I roasted a turkey and made a huge feast for my family.  We froze the carcass, which I pulled out last night. I'm making turkey soup - something we all need, considering the weather. 

I'm grateful for the life of the turkey, which has fed us four or five times now.  After the feast itself, we grazed on leftovers for days. Turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce sandwiches on toast (yum!) with mayo.  Warmed over turkey and gravy served on mashed potatoes.  Turkey salad sandwiches.

And tonight, turkey soup to nourish us all through a cold and miserable January night.

Thanks, turkey. :) Thanks, turkey farmer. :) Thanks, grain that fed the turkey. :) Thanks sun that ripened the grain, and earth that nourished it and rain that watered it.