Whats on my mind today? and Sorry I have been gone so long...

There was something I wanted to say today. I keep thinking and thinking and coming back to the idea that of all religions I could be I simply must be a Universalist. So many fervent beliefs, so many personal truths, for so many people. How do we decide as a people who is right and who is crazy? Am I qualified to make this distinction? Are you?

I feel like the divine must be able to overcome all of that. The divine is capable of being what each person who needs it, needs. (I hope I did not make that statement too convoluted.) For the people who need Allah, the divine is Allah. For those who need the Greek gods, or the Celtic gods, or Yahweh, that which is divine is all of those. That which is divine is not limited to that which is within my own perception, it is beyond my own experience, it is divine. How can mortals put restrictions on that which is divine? How are we so perfect to know better? I think we are not, and I think we need to remember that as people we are more alike than we are different. We all need food and water to survive. We each have blood running through our veins, and we are all human, and we all deserve respect no matter what our beliefs.

I know, short post, but that’s how I am thinking today, and I know, it has been a long while since my last post. Sorry! I will try for weekly again!

Pray for Peace

I mentioned that I was going to start attending the local UU church and this poem/prayer was spoken there and I felt like I needed to share it.

Pray for Peace

Pray to whomever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah. Raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.


Then pray to the bus driver who takes you to work.
On the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus,
for everyone riding buses all over the world.
Drop some silver and pray.

Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.

To Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, pray.
Bow down to terriers and shepherds and Siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.

Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.

Making love, of course, is already prayer.
Skin, and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile cases we are poured into.

If you're hungry, pray. If you're tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.

When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else's legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheelchair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer as the earth revolves:
less harm, less harm, less harm.

And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, writing on a blackboard
with yellow chalk, twirling pizzas--

With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.

Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.

Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your VISA card. Scoop your holy water
from the gutter. Gnaw your crust.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.
   -Ellen Bass



Picture found Here.

My Garden

I will start off by saying that this is not a how-to. My “garden” currently consists of a few little potted seedlings starving for light and a few more seed-pots still waiting on the sill to sprout. I am not a garden expert, I just love using herbs and making my own things and growing has always been a wee bit on the difficult side for me, a tiny apartment will do that to a witch. I even started out with quite a few more seeldings, but did not realize that a kitten would eat sage and thyme if it was there… She did and now they have found their way to a slightly less sunny windowsill…

My mom always planted shady flowers, living in the woods meant that we had to. We never had the really bright and exotic fun flowers, but my mother had a thing for hostas of all different sorts and they always grew so well for her. We never had a lot of vegetables mostly the things that could sit on a window, or deep within the shade of a forest. I guess I did not pick up the same innate ability for making plants work like my mother did, so I have mostly avoided trying to have them after moving out of my mother’s home. I think that was a mistake on my part.

Trying to grow the little buggers now is hard but I just love having them, they are like sad misshapen little children (the poor light means they are a wee bit on the scraggly side.) I can’t wait till I get to use them, in incenses, and cooking, baking and other spells, it will be lovely to have herbals to use that I don’t have to order online. I do love my online herbal store, but some things are worth doing myself, to connect me further to what I am doing, to bring me nearer to the earth, and to all things divine.

My garden is my attempt to learn more about my earth, my garden is small but it is mine, and it has magick too!

Growing; Get up and do it already

So this post is going to be a bit of a mixed bag on too many things. It may not even feel connected to itself. It has been an exceedingly rough week, and I am quite done with it. I had a different post planned, one that was going to be thoughtful and maybe even stoic, good and properly Pagan in all of the right places, but today and this week just aren’t the times for them. It has been bad enough that I am having some trouble putting thoughts together, but I know I need to, for my own piece of mind.

I won’t get into the specifics of what happened this week, well not all of them, but I will say what I said on FB, (I don’t always like admitting that I use it.) If this week had been food, I would return it, without wanting a replacement or my money back, I just want it gone. Over. Done. There were a series of really quite unfortunate events, which, while completely unrelated to one another, ultimately culminated in the death of my paternal grandmother on Thursday. She had not even been very sick for long, she was only really ill the last few weeks, she was in and out of the hospital, and then all at once, she passed. Her husband passed on good Friday of the previous year, so I suppose that it makes sense that she would pass so very close to her beloved husband of 60 years in a similar fashion, on a similarly holy day of their faith. It is hard to see my father, a generally somewhat closed emotionally man, break down and cry so often. Losing your mother has got to be hard.

Being who I am though, and what I am, I know that dying is a part of being alive, and it is such a necessary part of being alive too. Because what is life, if we did not die? What would it mean? What COULD it mean? Being philosophical, or understanding about it, doesn’t make it happier, nicer, or frankly, easier to deal with. But it does give me a different way to deal with it. The thing I am keenest on doing right now is taking a bit of soil from both gravesites, (I first need to check on the legality, or local rules of such a thing, can’t be caught doing something can get me arrested…) and putting it into a pot and starting a small tree. The only current problem with this is the lack of a place to put the poor little tree once I have started it. Unless I plan on keeping it as a bonsai, which I have had less than poor luck with in the past.

This is not meant to be the entirety of my post. I have no intention of lingering on the past, or on the negative, every life should be a celebration, (again, death being a part of said life.) and I mean to have a few drinks in the honor of my ancestors, especially the newest within the ranks of ancestors in spirit. Another thing I have been meaning to do is find a proper spiritual community in the area I am currently living. I have had an affinity for the Unitarian Universalist church recently and have been meaning to attend a service or two and see what it is all about. The doctrines sit well with me, and the specific mission statement of the local congregation (dunno if I am using the correct word,) are of particular interest to me.

As members of a welcoming, religiously liberal community, we care deeply about each other, our children, our neighbors and our Earth.

Together, we provide a haven for nourishing the spirit and mind, while we strive to build a just and sustainable world.

We covenant to respect our differences, and to commit our time, our treasures and ourselves to this mission.

I just cannot argue with a belief system like this. Any organization that is built upon these beliefs seems well suited to me and what I do. I suppose my biggest hurdle is that I have not been “church going” in a number of years. I seem to not want to break out of the “spend the day in pajamas” cycle. I basically need to get my butt out of my lovely-loungy bed, and get to this lovely place and be a part of a community in a more personal sense, and in a larger sense. It is time to care for the world around me in a way that makes a visible difference. Not for myself, as I don’t much care what the world at large thinks of me, but I do care about what the world at large thinks of pagans, and I really do want to make a positive impact in that way.
So here is to taking what the powers that be throws at you and growing from it. Here’s also to getting the heck up and just doing it!

Late-Winter, or Early Spring?

So since spring has started we have had more snow around here than we had all winter. Go figure!

Since it is snowing after the official first day of spring, is it a late- winter snow, or an early spring one? Well, it was certainly pretty. The hubby did not like it much, but he has shoddy brakes, and balding tires, and I suppose it is a fair enough sentiment, except that there was no snow on the roads. It was nt even cold enough for the snow to stick to more than the freezing little plantlings starting to come up. It has been getting toasty since then, which is probably for the best, I do like it toasty.

I hope spring is finding everyone fairly well, I do love me some spring, well I love em all, better when its warm though!

Follow-Through

I know, again, this topic feels all not-pagan-y, but it is, at least to me it is. Maybe it is more witchy than pagany, but, eh semantics.

This really does have a bit to do with spell-work. We do all the planning for our spells and we find all of the right things, and we do everything in the right order. Then we raise our energy and cast our spell. And it is all done, we quit worrying about it, but why don’t we care anymore?

This is not true for everyone some people ARE really good about their follow-through. Asking for raises after money spells, putting job applications in after job spells, going out and talking to people after love spells. More people seem not to. It seems as though some people want to go through the motions and say the words and let someone, or something else do everything else for them.

Spells are great, I can do things with magic that I never could without it. But the universe, or divine, or spirits aren’t all perfect, they will not bend they laws of reality for you, they make things move in your favor, but if you can’t be bothered to start the ball rolling, there is no point in there being a place to get it. If you don’t back your magic with a few actions often the spell itself is even incomplete, and nothing can happen, because you may be actively holding it back. Magic can help you achieve your goal of being a bit skinnier this year, but not if all the food you are living off of comes from the donut shop… There is only so much your spell can do, if you don’t really care whether or not it works…

Maybe that is the crux of the issue, why most spells require follow-through, because without the follow-through, you aren’t really putting your energy behind the spell. You are holding it in, and really fully committed to making the spell work, or having what the spell may result in. If the results of the spell are not going to be something you are prepared for, then maybe it is a good way of judging whether or not the spell should work. Just my thought on this though, and I am certainly not perfect.

Happy Equinox!

Another sun rises, without fanfare

On another new day

Another morning dawns anew

And another moon lies down

Another night fades away

As they always do

Another day begins as the world continues to spin

And the year moves on once more

Just as it always has