The Moon Is As High As The Fourth Of July

My Circle of Amazing Women counts each dark moon, each full moon, and each of the 8 major holidays as lasting three days. And, so, if the "real" moon is on a Wednesday, but it's easier for us to meet on Friday night, we do, and we consider the energy every bit as real, the feeling as strong, the magic as effective. (It's a convention born of the kind of schedules that women in Washington, D.C. keep, but it has never failed to "work" for us. Maybe it's "derivative" and modern; maybe it's "East Coast," maybe it's, here in the center of world politics, political. Whatever it is, it works for us.)

By my Circle's reckoning, today "is" the Full Moon. The "real" Full Moon this month, at around 7:00 am on Friday morning, was so strong that it kept me out of bed, full of dance, and crackling with electricity and life until about 4:00 am on Saturday morning. Staring at the cool orb behind the branches and leaves of the oak trees, jotting down insights into my Book of Shadows, silently communing with the night, I sang my "Hymn to Her" over and over and over again.

And I spent part of "today's" Full Moon time sitting in the hot July sun, surrounded and grounded by the low, droning sound made by crickets in the afternoon heat, breathing the hot, gardenia perfumed, afternoon air, and listening to the small plot of land upon which I live. And I spent part of it at my altar, going through my daily practice.

I believe in daily practice like I believe in breathing, and bathing, and laughing every day, and in the beauty of the Darkest Goddesses. Over time, my daily practice evolves, but what stays the same is the need for my daily practice to be, well, daily. I ground, and if there's not time to do anything else, I think that a witch who has grounded has performed her daily practice.

But almost always, I also invoke the powers of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and a constantly changing group of Goddesses. Today, appropriate, I think, for the time when we harvest corn, tomatoes, okra, cucumbers (beloved by the Egyptians), blackberries, and cherries, I invoked Ponoma, after reading Sia's lovely post, along with several Others, and always culminating with my beloved patroness, the Goddess of crossroads, liminal spaces, change and flow and transformation, and birth, death, the Moon, witches: Hecate.

I lit candles dedicated to two different specific spells. I pulled a tarot card to give me something to consider. I tranced, and, in trance, danced, naked, adorned with flowers, and sweating in the July afternoon heat, to my place of power. I prayed my two important prayers and I listened, again, to the land. I invoked what I need, using my wand -- an old crooked branch that G/Son always picks up and says, "Your wand don' work?" -- and I swam back home from that "place," back down my street, and up my steps, and inside to the middle room on the left, to my altar.

And, as so often happens, the gate opens, photosynthesis carries me away, I remember that I am part of everything and that everything, oddly enough, is happily part of me, and then, before I dissolve all the way, all the way, all the way into everything, slowly, I come "back."

May it be so for you.