A Large Part Of Me

Aquila makes what I think is a really important point in this post.

Rituals such as these are hardly ever earth-shattering at the moment I perform them. Each one seems rather to be the herald for some more gentle growing awareness in my life.

I think it's the amount of time I spend contemplating the ritual-days or weeks before I perform them, usually. Grinding and mixing an individual incense, picking out the juice and the cake, the body and the blood. Finding enough candles in the candle-drawer or making a foray to the flea market for soome more. It all occupies a large part of me.

So that when I finally get to do the ritual -or we do, when my partner joins me - there's a sense of completing something started some time ago, of wrapping it up and finishing it, before it can start to work.

And so it is with this Samhain.

My ancestors accompanied me back home, but I didn't start to notice them until a couple of nights later. Now. (Aquila lives in South Africa and so celebrates Samhein when American and European witches celebrate Beltane.)

My own circle has been working on this concept for the past year. We're an eclectic group and each woman takes a turn planning and priestessing our rituals. We've learned that the ritual, including, especially, the magical intent, needs to be posted at least a week, including one intervening weekend, ahead of time. That allows each of us to mediate, journal, prepare. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of friends showing up and chatting inside a circle where we've called the four directions. That's not magic. Group magic takes, IMHO, even more "prep time" than the sort of solitary (or doubles) magic that Aquila describes.

The key sentence in this post is: "It all occupies a large part of me."

Sure, there's another type of magic. The type that you do on the fly to help repair the web when you see a tear, the type that you do to find a parking space, or to slip invisibly by your nosy neighbor. If that's the only kind of magic that you ever do, it's fine, but, IMHO, you won't grow as a witch. For that, you need the kind of magic that Aquila writes about, the kind that all occupies a large part of you.

So mote it be.