One of the Best Versions I've Heard

You can buy S.J. Tucker's music here.

Hmmmm

Is it just me, or are the Fae, in fact, out in greater force than normal this cold December? Has the Wild Hunt, in fact, been out riding more frequently and with more force than is usual?

Driving home along Spout Run (admittedly, one of the most Fae-inhabited spots in DC) late Tuesday night, I had to roll up my car windows (which I usually keep down even in the coldest temps) and call loudly to Bride the Bright and Vesta the Virtuous in order to make it home to my own snug cottage. And, somehow, a part of me is, even still, wandering those chilly banks, trailing my cape and soaking my boots in those icy waters, finding myself irrevocably lost, twigs in my hair and dirt under my nails, as I look for the entrance to the hill from whence those dancing tunes still beckon. It's a killing cold, and, yet, and yet . . . .

And, tonight, standing for a moment in the bones of my winter garden, talking with the lovely crescent Moon, something suddenly chilled my blood. "My" fox walked out into the middle of the yard, stared at me and said, "Go. Inside. Now."

And so, I did.

Picture found here.

Saturday Poetry Blogging

I KNOW A BANK

I KNOW a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious wood-bine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine :
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight ;
And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.

~Wm. Shakespeare

Picture found here.

Lie Down In That Grass

Via e-mail, a couple of readers have responded with dismay to my post on calendar magic. "That's not magic; that's basic How to Function 101 with some allusions to the elements thrown in!" And, "Liminal spaces are magical spaces, not dead time at the end of the mundane year!"

Which reminds me of one of Hecate's famous Wiccan distinctions: Some people practice witchcraft. And some people are witches. Neither is any better than the other, but there is a difference.

IMHO, Wicca always was, and hopefully always will be, a religion of the people. And as Medusa recently noted to Thorn Coyle, many, if not most, people have a limited need in their lives for connection with the divine. So for many people, Wicca will always be about a tumble in the Spring clover on Beltane, the enjoyment of mead at Mabon, a moment to remember ancestors at Samhein, a spell for a new job or a new love, and the odd connection with "something else" felt almost by random at a full moon or on a beach at sunrise. A good time at a festival. An 8-times-a-year experience. And that's good. That's practicing witchcraft.

Other people have a much stronger need to spend as much of their time as possible living in connection with the Divine, inhabiting their Goddess-selves, walking around aware that it's all just god pouring god into god. My own shorthand for this is "living as a witch." And what I want to do, what I try to write about on this blog, is not so much practicing witchcraft (there are lots of good blogs about that), but living as a witch. I want to explore how to live as a witch every possible moment in this modern world. I don't, no matter how much some part of me may long for it, live in a Ren Faire forest or a Goddess temple or in a cave on an island. I live in a modern urban center, with congested traffic and Starbucks and homeless people on the streets next to the v rich and the v powerful. I work at a large law firm. I get mammograms and colonoscopies in major modern medical centers. I buy my groceries at Whole Foods. My circle does magic to influence political events in the modern world and I spend most of my day -- almost every single day -- on a computer. And I need to know how to live THAT life as a witch, how to dance THAT dance as fully aware as possible of my connection to everything that is, of the fact that I am a manifestation of the Goddess, of the fact that it's all real, it's all metaphor, there's always more.

And, sure, sometimes, I find liminal spaces by fasting, taking a ritual bath in a tub filled with rose petals picked on the dark moon from my own rose bushes, lighting incense in my ritual room, casting a circle deosil with a silver athame whose handle is sealed with a celtic knot made of gold, and traveling along the astral plane to a spot prepared for me both by my own ritual workings and by my Patroness, a serious-eyed Lady with three heads and a large black dog. I go there for a purpose, to change consciousness/reality/myself/the world at will, to work pre-planned magic in a place where all things are in flux and where change is not only possible, but likely. It's hard work, it's exhilarating, it's serious business.

But I don't do that kind of magic every day. Even if I didn't have to get up, put on a suit, and show up on time at work, I couldn't do that kind of working every day. But I still need to live every day as a witch. Sure, I know I'm a witch when I'm wearing ritual robes and burning incense on charged coals inside a circle of spring-green light. But I need to know how to live as a witch when I'm stuck in traffic on the Roosevelt Bridge, when I'm taking a client to lunch at the Palm, when I'd dropping off drycleaning, when I'm firing up my Apple computer to read blogs, when I'm mowing my lawn, when I'm on my iPhone with Son, when I'm calculating whether or not to refinance my home, when I'm trying to talk myself into just five more minutes on the treadmill.

And, thus, for me, the world, the world that we dare to call "mundane," is full of liminal spaces, many of them as yet undiscovered. It's full of serendipity. It's full of elementals and dryads and pixies and Goddesses and genii locii. It's full of metaphor. It's full of magic. Liminal spaces don't only exist upon the astral; adolescence is a liminal space, menopause is a liminal space, pregnancy is a liminal space, being out of a job is a liminal space, living in a country longing for an evil leader to go away and a new inspiring leader to assume his job is a liminal space, every corner that I turn all day, every intersection through which I drive my car is -- you guessed it -- a liminal space. Being aware of the liminality of each of those situations is a big part of what it means, for me, to live as a witch. And looking for ways to use such "mundane" liminality -- figuring out a magical way to use downtime at the end of the secular year -- is probably, IMHO, a more important part of living as a witch than the limited number of times each year when I dress up in ritual robes and do high magic. If I had, Goddess forfend, to give up one or the other, I'd trade my most ecstatic high ritual experiences for a lifetime of everyday magic. So I balance my checkbook with magical intent, I cook and freeze cabbage lentil soup with magical intent, and I organize my calendar with magical intent, and I call upon the elements for aid, and I ground before I pick up my pen.

Rumi said: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense. That's a liminal space and it doesn't matter where you find it: inside a circle inscribed with the names of seraphim and demons or beneath a full moon on a frosty field or at your desk with your new calendar before you. The important thing is to lie down in that grass.

~Art found here.

From A Wind In The Door By Madeline L'Engle

I fill you wIth Naming.
Be!
Be butterfly and behemoth,
be galaxy and grasshopper,
star and sparrow,
you matter,
you are,
be!
Be caterpillar and comet,
be porcupine and planet,
sea sand and solar system,
sing with us, dance with us,
rejoice with us,
for the glory of creation,
angle worms and angel host,
chrysanthemum and cherubim
(O cherubim)
Be!
Sing for the glory
of the living and the loving
the flaming of creation
sing with us
dance with us
be with us
Be!

They were not her words only.
They were the words of Senex,
of the Deepening Sporos,
of all the singing farae,
the laughter of the greening farandolae,
Yadah itself,
all the mitochondria,
all the human hosts,
the earth,
the sun,
the dance of the star whose birthing she had seen,
the galaxies,
the cherubim and seraphim,
wind and fire,
the words of the Glory.

Echtroi! You are Named! My arms surround you. You
are no longer nothing. You are. You are filled You are me.
You are
Me.

Lately, I've been re-reading some of my childhood favorites and, duh, realizing how almost everything that I read throughout my entire childhood was about witchcraft, and magic, and mysticism. And I never knew; like the person who spoke prose all his life, I never knew. Anne has a great post; you have to read the comments about how people came to Paganism. And, although, for me, the aha moment came in a dry, dusty, political tome (ha!), all my life, every book that I took off a library shelf was preparing me for that moment, it seems to me.

I drove today, as I do every work day, past Spout Run, just by where it empties into the beautiful Potomac River. And I saw what I saw and have known there before. I live in a world more full of wonder and Naming (which, we all know, is the secret to magic and is, of course, what witches do) than I could ever have imagined.

(And, how could I have know, when I read A Wind In The Door the first dozen times that L'Engle was such a fan of de Chardin? And why would I have expected anything else? you matter you are be!) It's all a glass bead game. (Have I told you the poem about goblins and glass beads?)


Art found here

Goblins

Froud toys!