For Your Full Moon Pleasure

hat tip: Wired Science, listed to the right in my BlogRoll

Full Moon

There's a gorgeous full Moon in the sky.

Breathe.

Come back into your body.

Remember.

Breathe.

Picture found here.

Sturgeon Moon

My old body lets me know, these days, in no uncertain terms, when I didn't get enough sleep the night before. (Of course, Dear Body, if you didn't insist on waking up at the same time, regardless of when we got to sleep, and refusing, as you never did in my younger days, to go back to sleep, it would help. Just saying.) But there was no way, with last night's almost-full Moon simply pouring and gushing magical energy all over my garden, my cottage, my body, that I could get to sleep last night.

It was as if there were gentle electricity running through and charging everything. It was too much to ground and, besides, even the deep soil here was so full of Moon magic that it could only accept a tiny bit more. There was so much magic-of-this-place going on, that it was all I could do to watch in wonder and not get carried away into the Hill of Fairy, from which one returns, thinking one's been away a day or two, only to find that years have passed.

You can't, at least I can't, spend decades communing with that mysterious, glowing orb and not be affected when She's near the peak of her power. And my body may protest in the morning, but I wouldn't give up these nights of being bathed in energy, magic, and love for anything.

African Alchemy has more.

Picture found here.

Smudge

There's a full moon today and at the beginning of the full moon (in Aquarius, while the sun is in Leo -- talk about powerful) we had a lunar eclipse. I came home early today to harvest sage and thyme from the herb bed to make bundles for smudging. This weekend, I'll buy cotton embroidery thread in 4 colors: Green (Earth), Yellow (Air), Red (Fire), and Blue (Water) and will make about three sage smudge sticks and three thyme smudge sticks (yes, sage is more traditional, but thyme is more special to me). I like to make the bundles a bit loose, so that they can catch fire more easily. I'll hang the bundles in my ritual room to dry.

Many people who write about making smudge sticks recommend making a sacrifice to the land in return for the herbs. I harvested these without the assistance of my normal summer anointment of the sacred oil of the Goddess DEET. So I made a serious blood offering to the land (in the form of the tiger mosquitoes who live here) and I have the welts on my leg to prove it.

There's a Wiccan "rule" that one should never use one's athame for "mundane" things such as cutting herbs. I completely disagree, especially with the notion that there are some things that are magical and some that are mundane. For me, it's all real, it's all metaphor, there's always more. (That's from Adler, somewhere). So I use my athame for the first cut, although, afterwards, I use my more effective garden shears.

Later tonight, I'll do some ecstatic dance with a few other witches and eat a magical meal. Then I have a few witch bottles to bury on my Southern boundary. I don't often blog about these "basics" of witchcraft, but they are what make up the day-to-day turning of the wheel.