Turning A Leaf

 

We can do better.

Sadly, I think I've kind of kept the vibe a little low, the attitude a little negative, around here in the past. I stand by those things, of course, and I'm not saying I'll never turn to the dark side again in the future--Gods know there's plenty of things to be negative about, both in the craft and out of it--but I'm feeling like I need to balance that out a bit. Truth is, I love the craft, otherwise I wouldn't still be doing this after all these years and all this heartache--because there's been a lot of joy involved too, big moments and small. So in the future, I resolve to do better, and to bring some of that light forth as well. In the midst of (gestures vaguely around) , we all need a little light.

Something Happened on the Way to 2025

Nothing like severe, life-altering (and potentially life-ending) illness striking your family to shake up your way of being in the world.

I'm reasonably certain that very few people who suffer two types of stroke simultaneously walk unaided out of the hospital in a week's time, but my partner did. The tale of his recovery, which is ongoing, is not mine to tell; but I will say that from my very close vantage point, it looks a little miraculous, maybe even a bit magickal. I'm reminded of Paul Kantner's recovery from a potentially life-ending cerebral hemorrhage in the early 80s; the odds here were about that grim. How it has and will change my partner's life is also not my story to tell, but I can tell you how I'm faring.

I enter a state of functional shock when bad things happen, and I existed in that state for some time after the event. Miraculously, I managed to keep the bills paid and the household running, which was revelatory. Everything except me, anyway, as I mostly didn't eat for the first month--which had the salutary side-effect of making me drop a good ten pounds with no real effort on my part. Once I realized that, and started to come back to myself a bit in the upswing phase of his recovery, I decided I wanted to keep that momentum, so I kept my altered eating habits (OK, by this time I was starting to actually eat again) and added daily exercise to the mix, and have made it a habit instead of a happenstance. I look and feel better, at any rate.

I learned who I can trust in a crisis, and who cares enough to help us out, and those things were revelatory too. Shockingly, I learned at my great age that I can trust myself, even when I'm stressed beyond my own capacity to even recognize it. I also learned that I can no longer wholly condemn those who leave their partners in the midst of medical crisis, because I can now see how difficult to impossible understanding and supporting and caregiving could be for some. I'm certainly not the ideal person to have around in a medical crisis situation (my fannish identification with Scully doesn't extend to that part of her characterization), but there are surely those even less able to cope than I, so maybe I have a bit more sympathy for people facing that situation than I once would have.

Were the Gods or spirits or something looking out for him? Are there lessons for him to learn from this? Will his (and my?) life change in a rebirth/reawakening, initiatory/revelatory kind of way? Perhaps. Both Imbolc and the equinox have already passed with no significant recognition on either of our parts. I've offered up plenty of thanks to whomever might be listening. Things have calmed, stabilized, though I suspect I'll be metaphorically sleeping with one eye open for a very long time. What is to come I do not know, but I do know that I now have a bit more faith in my ability to meet it and handle it; and that, in itself, seems magick enough for the moment.

Times Like These

A week ago today I got up, sat down at the computer, and learned that the drummer from one of my favorite bands had died unexpectedly. I was stunned, initial numbness blooming slowly, inexorably into a sadness that surprised me in its depth. While I was never a Foo Fighters superfan, they'd been a constant of my life for nearly half of it, a beloved part of my personal soundscape, bringing their own unique blend of catharsis, comfort, and joy. As the week went on, and I saw the outpouring of love and remembrance from scores of friends, fans, and colleagues, my sorrow revealed its own nuances: nostalgia for the years of great music driven by that mesmerizing backbeat, grief for a future in which that heartbeat was stilled and the joy it brought to the world was gone along with it. An aching empathy for Dave Grohl, who'd lost his bandmate/brother (and having recently read his autobiography, that feeling was magnified horribly) and quite likely his band as well. The whole situation was, and is, heartbreaking, devastating. It's clinically fascinating to see how this sort of parasocial relationship can impact fans, but it's equally fascinating to discover how bereft you can feel over the loss of someone you'd never met but who had nonetheless made an impact on your life. The grief felt by the man's real-life friends and family must be fathomless.

In the wake of such a tragedy, the loss of someone who was apparently almost universally loved and respected, someone who was apparently kind, funny, generous, and humble, the mind invariably slides into the old just world fallacy and starts to balk. How, we ask, could this lovely soul be gone, while the vilest of human monsters continue to roam the earth, flourishing while befouling everything they touch? How the fuck is that possible? Can't we trade some hamberder-muching monomaniac for the sweet drummer who used to hang out at Guitar Center and buy gear for strangers? Maybe the forces would be appeased by taking, say, some shitgibbon who invades a peaceful sovereign nation instead of a cheery musician dude who liked hanging with his BFF and making goofy videos with the band? How, we ask, is this fair? How, we ask, do we proceed with living when the balance is so obviously askew? We feel askew, off balance, in the contemplation of the magnitude of the injustice of it all. Our footing slips, we feel unmoored, vertiginous. 

People turn to their religion when they feel like this, turn to their clergypeople to seek answers to impossible questions; but what about those clergypersons themselves? We have the same questions, the same anger, the same frustration; and just like everyone else, we lack concrete answers (well, we do if we're honest). We anguish, we rage, we sorrow, we cry, and we carry on. I've done all of those things this past week, and I've done all of those things this morning as I wrote this post. The only damned thing I can think of to do in the wake of evidence to the monstrous indifference and unfairness of the universe is to keep going, to try to shine just that little bit brighter to compensate for the light that just went out, all the while knowing that that extinguished light will still radiate for years to come, just as the starlight we see comes from celestial bodies extinguished eons ago. The light remains. It always does. 

Rest easy, Taylor. If the sky is a neighborhood, you're among good company. 

Passages

Back in January, drummer Neil Peart of the band Rush died, and in the wake of that, I started binge-listening; I'd always liked the band, but in the aftermath of Mr. Peart's death, I came to love them. And out of all those songs, one in particular grabbed and held me, to the point that I found myself listening to it multiple times a day, even hearing it in my mind upon waking and sleeping. The song is called "Time Stand Still."

Turns out it was a prophetic song, as the world I knew was about to be changed, in ways both temporary and permanent. The pandemic, of course, has brought some of those changes; another change is in progress now, as one of my beloved cats transitions from this life into whatever comes next. At the moment, I'm feeling the helpless dumb disbelief that is rather preferable to the other state, which is a panoply of wretched emotions held together by bitter weeping. Being a witch and understanding the cycles of life and death doesn't make the pain any lighter, or the loss less acute. In days to come, my spiritual life will (I hope) be a source of renewed strength and comfort as I grapple with the space his absence leaves in my life; but for this moment, I can't summon the strength to so much as light a candle. I will, in time. Right now, I wait, and I grieve.

"Freeze this moment a little bit longer," says the song; "make each impression a little bit stronger. Experience slips away." Please do, if you can. Because of the song, I remembered to do so, a little.

New Year, New Title

As my focus has shifted over the past couple of years, and my admittedly sporadic posts took on a different tone, I came to the conclusion that it was time to change the name of the blog. When I started it lo these many years ago, my intention was to write about capital-W Witchcraft, the sort of bats-cats-and-hats stuff I came to call Classic Witchcraft. And while that is still entirely appealing to me, the fact remains that I'm more focused these days on my practice as a traditional Wiccan--a practice which encompasses Witchcraft in all its lovely permutations.

The title is Scots Gaelic, which honors a part of my ancestry, while the subject matter--the harp and the sword--honors two of my interests, along with the deeper symbolism inherent therein, which I invite the reader to ponder as they will.

Full Circle or Downward Spiral

It’s always around this time of year that I feel the most nostalgic. It was just after Lammas that things began ramping up for me, leading up to my initiation in the fall: doing rituals, attending my first trad gathering, the excitement and anticipation of the Samhain season itself. And so I remember all of this, and both nostalgia and melancholy come in equal measure as I remember the young woman I was, and all that came after. Those ended up being very challenging times as I floundered about navigating the intersection of multiple new roles that I was entirely unprepared to take on—times when I came to understand that the bit about “suffering to learn” was nothing less than the literal truth.

In those days, my partner and I sometimes joked about being the Mulder and Scully of the Wicca, but there was more than a little rueful truth about that as well. Despite having grown up as a consistently bullied kid, I was still terribly innocent of the types of intrigues that people in groups could get up to, and even my devoted X-Files viewing didn’t quite prepare me, though it did at least give me some small comfort—after all, bearing the brunt of an admittedly ugly witch war still wasn’t quite as bad as being infected with alien viruses and forced into hiding from the entire corrupt US government. Just like Mulder and Scully, we exiled ourselves in the aftermath of a negative situation, and went on to live our lives and do our things with varying degrees of success. (When I sit here now and think about it, the parallels are so close as to be disturbing. We never broke up, though, in spite of some peoples’ efforts, perhaps because we didn’t have Chris Carter scripting us. Thank the gods.) Still, the nostalgia never quite left me, though at times it lay dormant as other things took the fore.

Our mutual practice evolved, but never strayed so very far from the root stock, even though at times our focus shifted elsewhere and led us down different paths of inquiry and exploration. I’ll admit now that even skeptical as I tend to be, I have come to believe in the power of initiatory experiences, and of the bonds we form by our rituals and our oaths. I can find no other rational explanation for the persistence and the tenacity of my attachment to a system of working that ought, given the scope of these past negatives, to fill me with revulsion. (The thought of certain people absolutely does; the system, no longer. Despite my early antipathy to dualistic thinking, I’ve also come to the realization that there really are positive and negative aspects to nearly everything, and that walking the line between them is my natural state. I’ve also realized that people can do bad things for seemingly good reasons—and that some people are simply utter shitlords.)

This may be another function of getting older, but despite years of raging at sundry machines, I’ve had time to rethink some of my earlier positions and arrive at a more nuanced view of them. Seeing recent outpourings in the blogosphere that remind me of where I was so long ago have certainly been at least a partial catalyst. Some of it I can see now as the end result of where I started, and while some of the shifts that I see are absolutely to the good, others seem to me to go too far. (I’m being deliberately vague because this essay is already in danger of turning into a dissertation.) Some of these seismic changes are going to be a threat to some of the older ways of doing things—a good and a bad thing, to my mind. Good, because in this era of #metoo and consent culture, the more egregious abuses will become harder to pull off; bad, because some ways of doing things will be unfairly and unnecessarily given negative labels when they are merely one way of working among many, suitable to some but not to others. A part of my nostalgia is now for some of those older ways of being and doing, things that still hold value, things perhaps in danger of being tossed out for lack of understanding, or for being seen only for their potential negatives and not their potential positives. (I’ve been there, after all, so I recognize it when I see it.)

I have come to believe that it is entirely possible to adhere to the letter and the spirit of the law while still remaining ethical and respectful. I’m starting to believe there may be others who agree. The public writings of newer-generation BTWs are awakening new hope in me, that this form of Craft may ever survive, and thrive, in a modern culture that expects things like respect and tolerance and consent. I’ve come to believe that it’s possible to honor the past while living in the present, and without fighting the future. But I’m older now, and I’ve had a lot of time to think.

I’m pretty sure I could have handled things better in the past, had I possessed deeper levels of understanding and wisdom and maturity. All of those things come only with time and experience, and back then I had neither. Perspective may be the greatest gift of age, and it’s a damned shame that it takes so long to acquire it. I still don’t know that I’ll ever again want to train and initiate people, into any of the systems I have that right and ability in—I’ve lost quite a lot thereby in the past, and I’m gun-shy now—but I won’t rule out the extreme possibilities. The fact that I’m here writing all of this would have been a near-impossibility at one time, maybe not even that long ago. Change truly is the only constant in life.

Mulder and Scully ended up back in the FBI after a long period of exile, a return that brought its challenges and rewards. I can easily imagine both of them, during those years away from their work, thinking and reviewing, considering their paths. I can so easily see Mulder turning his badge over in his hands, wondering if it was all worth it; can see Scully taking an afternoon at the gun range, keeping up her skills just in case (she always was the better shot). I can imagine the fear and hope and hurt and anticipation they would have felt over those years. I’m feeling some of those things now. I have no idea how any of this is going to play out, but I am feeling like making a tentative foray out beyond my comfortable place might not even be the worst thing I could do.

At least, I want to believe.

Back In My Day, Part One

I came in at a pivotal time in the history of the Craft, in the liminal space between a publishing boom and the arrival of the mainstream internet. Being initiated in 1994, I found myself “between the worlds” in more ways than one. The book blitz of the early 90s was still very much in play and driving much interest and expansion, but there was also the sense of something coming over the horizon, with talk of “computer bulletin boards” and “newsgroups” of interest to pagans. Along with the fashion for witches and witchcraft in popular culture—from Charmed to The Craft to Buffy’s Willow and Hocus Pocus and more—it was a heady time to be pagan.

Still, I consider myself to be among the last generation of pre-internet pagans. My interest was sparked early on in my childhood thanks to the availability of lurid occult paperbacks left over from the late 60s and early 70s. My parents would haul me along to yard sales and flea markets, where I would rummage happily in bins of musty old books and come up with the bizarre treasures that helped fire my imagination and drive me down the paths I grew up so eager to explore. (Fortunately for me, my parents never censored my reading materials.) Once I was old enough to drive, libraries and bookstores were my natural destinations, and discovering that Actual Occult Bookstores existed within driving distance was utterly thrilling. Probably dangerous, too, since I was a sheltered small-town kid with zero people smarts and a certain amount of naievete-induced fearlessness, but for whatever reason I survived my early explorations unscathed. If I had been something other than a conventionally-unattractive Weird Girl, I might have been less fortunate.

I look back on those days now through the rosy tint of nostalgia and feel a bit sorry for today’s newcomers. I wonder if it can have as much of an impact for them as it did for me, and, I assume, others of my generation. There were always two or three shops in town that catered in some way to the pagan/new age/occult subcultures, and regular visits were a given. Seeing new books and statues and tools in person is a very different sensation from just seeing photos of them online. Finding and ordering from catalogs like the old Abyss Distribution/Azure Green was a furtive delight, as well. I can remember very early pamphlet catalogs from bladesmiths and jewelers and the like, passed from person to person and group to group. I remember the fun of going to festivals and gathers and seeing the vendors’ rows set up, seeing the wares handcrafted by magickal folk for magickal folk. Finding out about those groups and festivals was also a challenge and a risk: flyers put up at the shops, ads placed discreetly in magazines like Green Egg or Circle Network News. Phone calls made and public meetings arranged. Chances were that you came into a study group or Outer Court with only the most rudimentary knowledge of what you were in for; there were, for good or ill, a lot more secrets in those days.

Many of those secrets were passed along as multi-generational and barely legible photocopies. I still have reams of such materials, and I can’t even look at their binders on my shelves without recalling the excitement of receiving them, the clandestine thrill of reading through them, imagining how the authors of them felt as they wrote them and ritualized them and passed them on. I remember the fun of long nights at the copy shop, laboriously photocopying hundreds of pages and collating them to be given to a newly initiated or elevated witch. It was a magickal time.

I cherish these memories. For all the backstabbing and bullshit that inevitably came about (people being people, and people in marginalized and factionalized quasi-religious groups being the worst), I still have so many fond recollections of so many experiences. (I hope that you, Dear Reader, have a few of your own.)

If I were to start actively training and initiating people again, I imagine that it would feel profoundly different. I’d be contacting and screening people via email or social media. Meeting them at restaurants or coffee shops instead of witchy stores, as there are so few of them now that everything can be bought online. They would come already armed with extensive knowledge and fully-formed opinions, thanks to the nearly limitless information available for just a few keystrokes. I could send them links to providers of appropriate robes, cups, athames, jewelry, incense. Share suitable books for them to read from my Kindle library. And once they were initiated, I could pass them 50-plus years’ worth of materials as scanned pdfs on a thumb drive, no photocopiers necessary.

I don’t want to give the impression that the internet had no role in my early years in the Craft. I was initiated in late 1994, and got online in 1997, and it was meeting, online, people of other lines and other trads and exchanging ideas and information with them that got me through some of the most difficult and exasperating experiences of my life to that point. The witch friends I made online in my formative years helped make me into the person and priestess I eventually became. I have to think that coming in when I did, at the confluence of these two approaches, absolutely shaped my development for the better, and I’ll always be grateful that I was lucky enough to have it both ways.

Witch Problems

So back in the spring I took advantage of the little postage-stamp sized section of earth just beyond my patio and planted a few things that I thought would be colorful and appealing. Now it's late August and my rose vervain and wormwood are absolutely taking over the world. Had I but known they'd like it here as well as they do, I'd have spaced things out differently. My gorgeous purple and white petunias have been all but drowned in the silvery-green fluff of the wormwood and the insistent green onslaught of the vervain.

Not that I am particularly complaining, mind.  :)

Witching Up

Mugwort and mead hangover, and that certain je ne sais quoi sensation that comes of having gotten one's witch on, so to speak. Good times.

Introducing The Witch

(Note: The original posting date for this was March of 2010, on another blog I maintained.)

from the Halloween Tarot, by Kipling West

If Hogwarts existed, and I'd been plucked from my muggle-born world and sent there to study, I think I would have enjoyed Potions most of all. (As a child I'd have gone in mortal terror of Professor Snape, though by my teen years I would have been regularly costing my House points for snarking back at him.) I love experimenting with things, making messes, making potions, making magick--the magick of scent, that most evocative of sensations. I love settling in to my witch's cottage (yes, I have one) and setting out my ingredients, setting up the atmosphere for crafting something wonderful. I work by candlelight, of course, and utilize things like cauldrons and stone mortars and pestles, wooden bowls, wooden and pewter and silver spoons, glass jars and stoneware jars. I like music for background and inspiration, but since it's impossible to play the harp and do handwork at the same time, I use recorded music instead; Blackmore's Night, typically, though it might as easily be something else in a similar vein.

When I was blogging on the Temperance card the other day, I completely forgot the version to be found in one of my all-time favorite decks, Kipling West's Halloween Tarot. I got that deck out this morning and when I turned her up, I couldn't believe I'd forgotten. That's me, the me I have in mind when I'm doing my thing with my herbs and oils; the witchiest me, not a High Priestess of the Wica or anything ceremonial or outwardly imposed. That's the me that I held in my heart and my imagination from the time I was just a child, and to me that's what Witchcraft will always look like: cauldrons and cats and owls and hats, something bubbling away over a fire, shelves of obscure tomes and jars filled with you-don't-even-want-to-know-what. Steady hands, good instincts, curiosity, a willingness to experiment, those are the characteristics of Witchcraft to me. The religious aspects, and all the other trappings, they have their place but are wholly secondary to me in my practice. The craft, the Craft, the work of the hands and the imagination and the senses, that is Witchcraft, and that is magick. It's my own weird science, and it fulfills me.

(Yes, I was one of those kids who had a chemistry set, and a backyard meteorology set, and I made messes and set things on fire and drove my parents nuts. I used to stake out plots in the yard and conduct archaeological digs. I even had a job working in a laboratory once; I loved it, wearing a lab coat and gloves and messing around with beakers and centrifuges and such. If you were wondering.)

I remember being quite young and finding paperback books on Witchcraft, all of them the kinds of little books by folks like Hans Holzer that were so popular in the early 1970s, and I read those books and sort of glossed over the descriptions of "skyclad" ceremonies and ritual sex and such. I was culturally aware enough to dismiss those as being hippie free-love stuff, not actual, you know, witchcraft, which certainly involved the necessary ingredients of cauldrons and cats and owls and hats and potions and candlelight and...you get the idea. I'm considerably older now, and I'd like to think better educated and more experienced, but that early image of Witchcraft has never left me, and I guess it never will. No matter what my age or experience level, I'll always be that little witch in her cottage, mixing up something arcane by candlelight, overseen by cats and owls and the quiet stars above.

(Bonus: I also own boots like that. Stockings, too.)