Category Archives: Spirituality

Tired Professional Editor Girl

Day Two: many words have fallen to my pink highlighting bar of doom. If only I was permitted to edit to the extent to which I wish to edit! Then I would be in heaven. But there are rights issues.

We did a beautiful full moon ritual tonight. I have missed group ritual.

In other news, I have a new (secondhand) cell phone. Of course, since the provider website won’t recognise my credit card because it claims I’m not typing in the correct address registered to the card, I can’t do more than activate it until I go out and buy a top-up card. Sigh. At least now I’ll know what time it is when I’m on public transport. (I lost my Eeyore watch! I cannot find it anywhere! I am very sad indeed.)

Very tired. Going to bed now.

Spring!

Today is the first full day of spring. We saw it in last night with one of the best spring equinox rituals in which I’ve ever had the pleasure to participate. (Yes, it even beat the Slinky rit four springs ago.) We had a great cross-section of people present, and the insightful focal exercise was fabulously designed and executed.

It is also JS Bach’s birthday. Happy birthday, JS!

And what better way to celebrate both the birth of JS and the first day of spring than by buying a replica sword based on the weapons of A Song of Ice and Fire?

Morning — The “Good” Is Debatable

I have been awake since 3:55 AM, when the volume of the radio belonging to the crazy lady downstairs suddenly leapt to the level of Intrusively Loud (Even Had It Been Daytime). I am Not Pleased.

Since then, I have read/examined a new tarot set and drafted a point-form review of it for the next issue of WynterGreene, handled some correspondence, surfed the internet, and thought up many scenarios in which I confront the crazy lady and tell her exactly what living in an apartment means (i.e., regular living noise during the day is not “a lot of noise”, and loud noises between ten-ish and seven-ish are Not Allowed and Very Inconsiderate). In all of these scenarios she sees the error of her ways, apologises in tears for her behaviour, and moves immediately.

Sigh. I am going to be one very cranky girl later today, what with the truncated sleep and annoyance with the cause. This is bad, as Liam is home today and there is a ritual here tonight (yay, Spring!). (The aforementioned ritual is thankfully not led by me, which is a good thing because I will be in no state to do something like that by tonight.)

Better Than I Think I Am

I just watched an hour-long interview on Wicca and living as a Wiccan that I did with two students from Dawson college, about four years ago. I’d never seen it before; simply never got around to it. I think there was a move around that time, then the career thing really took off, and then another move, and a baby, and a few books happened in there too. HRH finally (!) connected the VCR this afternoon so that we could tape a TV show on Wicca tonight, and I found this videotape and wondered if it had room to record the show after the interview. We popped it in to cue it up, and we ended up watching most of it. Apart from wanting to create a drinking game in which the audience takes a shot every time I say “Precisely”, I am remarkably impressed. I look good, I sound good, and it’s a terrific piece in general. They did it for a film editing class, if I remember correctly.

I wish I could remember their names; one was called Carolyn, I do know that, and one was of Irish origin and the other of Greek background. There are no credits at the end of the interview, nor are there names on the thank you Post-It note they affixed to the case. If I had their names and contact info I could get in touch with them to congratulate them on planning and conducting an enjoyable interview, and doing a great editing job.

Imbolc Blessings

A full moon last night, or more accurately this morning, at 12:45.

I love the images of Imbolc: White pillar candle in a silver bowl of snow. Berries in the offering bowl. Brid’s crosses, half-woven by candlelight.

Imbolc for me is about ten days of honoring. A few years ago I realised that the actual second of February doesn’t resonate with me as much as the days following it. Like other sabbats, the changing energy that the festival honours doesn’t happen all at once on a single day; energy is in constant motion, of course, and the sabbat is a day set aside to observe that ongoing change and to examine how one is responding to it. There are very few sabbats for which I can do this in a single day, however, and so the day of the sabbat often represents the beginning of ten or so days of introspection and reconnection.

We did our Imbolc ritual after Liam’s dinner. He watched me scoop freshly fallen snow up in the silver bowl and put it on the altar, then place the candle in the centre of it and put the bowl of berries next to it as an offering. We lit it and talked to him about how even though it was very very cold and snowy, the earth was already thinking about spring deep inside. “Candle,” he said, pointing to it, so we talked about the importance of light and warm hearths in the home too, and how Brid helps us make our home a loving one. Then he decided he wanted berries, so we went back into the kitchen and he ate most of what was left over. The last one he held in his hand and thought hard. “Do you want to give that to the Goddess?” I said. He nodded and ran into the living room to stand in front of the altar, reaching his hand up as high as it would go. I lifted him up, and he pointed to the goddess statue we have. “Lady!” he said, and put the berry in the curve of her arms. He’s a natural.

I have some very welcome meditation and honouring planned during this upcoming week. And I’ll be making my Brid’s crosses again, once I find appropriate material. I have to check to see if the corn husks I saved and dried will work properly. I think they will, once I soak them a bit to make them pliable.

And as my contribution to this year’s Imbolc poetry web, this poem about light returning:

A Winter Dawn

Above the marge of night a star still shines,
And on the frosty hills the sombre pines
Harbor an eerie wind that crooneth low
Over the glimmering wastes of virgin snow.

Through the pale arch of orient the morn
Comes in a milk-white splendor newly-born,
A sword of crimson cuts in twain the gray
Banners of shadow hosts, and lo, the day!

~ Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1899

(Editor’s note: For some reason this didn’t publish last Friday night, and as this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down since then I didn’t notice until now. Fixed.)

Monday Morning

Now that it’s a new work week, the professional issue that has gnawed at my sense of right and wrong all weekend has been handed to the appropriate person to deal with, and my job had just been made a whole lot easier. I can go back to doing what I’m supposed to do without stopping every few moments to do an hour of back-up research, which has been making my job take about three times longer as it ought to take.

I attended a lovely calm Imbolc ritual yesterday, which was a welcome oasis in the maelstrom of ethical indignation. I also took the evening off to watch Smallville, The Dresden Files, and Battlestar Galactica with HRH. (The Dresden Files, for those who also read Jim Butcher’s books and are curious, is not a bad adaptation. It doesn’t try to tell the story of the books themselves, and there are variations from the source material (Karrin is completely different, for example) but otherwise, it’s translated the feel and spirit of the books by doing something different with the source material.) It’s nice to have one night per week where we both settle down for appointment television, and talk intelligently about it during commerical breaks. Other than that, my weekend was pretty much devoted to work.

Speaking of, back to.

Spiritual Housecleaning

I dusted off my personal altar today and rearranged things a bit. I updated my spellbox with new petitions and burned old ones that had seen fruition or pertained to events now concluded. I lit candles, purified with incense, and settled down to meditate. This is part of what I’m doing to keep in touch with the foundations of my practice.

One of the changes I want to make in my life involves dealing with how overwhelmed by spiritual administration I’ve been feeling. For the past six years I’ve written and taught and led and guided and it’s time to pull back from that to focus on reacquainting myself with my own personal spiritual practices once again. The energy I’ve been putting into supporting other spiritual experiences has to be turned inward for a time to nourish my own spirituality.

And having said that, this afternoon I sat down to begin putting the basics down in a document for an article I proposed to WynterGreene for the Spring spiritual gardening issue. More spiritual-guidance type writing, yes; but I’m doing this from a different perspective. Also, it’s been over a year since I handed off the green witch book, so my brain has had time to recover from intense immersion in the subject and the ensuing evasion of even thinking about it (a perfectly natural form of self-defense when one has eaten/breathed/slept a single subject for over a year, in order to avoid burnout), and now I’m actually beginning to sense a revival of my interest in the topic again. It’s terribly nice to finish this article outline and already be a third of the way to my target word count. It means that when I expand the point-form outline into full sentences I’ll be over halfway there, and then when I add sentences to further explore/explain and link things I’ll be right where I’m supposed to be. As a requested submission for the same issue I’m also working on an annotated bibliography of sorts of selected titles I used as reference for WotGW, and it’s much harder to narrow the list down to my top ten ten picks from the list of books than I expected it to be. It feels good to have made this much progress on both articles when I was only expecting to work on one.

Countdown to Imbolc, my favourite festival: Nine days!