Sunday Ballet Blogging

The Art of Magic

I don’t know about you, but if we break the human population down into Visualizers and Verbalizers, I fall pretty far over on the Verbalizer end of the spectrum. My primary approach to the universe, INTJ that I am, is a verbal, analytical, logical approach. With Gemini ascendent, my default setting is what some traditions refer to as Talking Self.

Yet, effective magic depends upon an ability to activate Younger Self, that part of the self that responds to symbols, complex meanings, feelings. I suppose that’s one of the reasons that poetry is so important to me. Poetry uses a medium that feels familiar and safe to me — words — in a way designed to activate Younger Self. What good poetry does (and I’ll include here good musical lyrics) is to slip unnoticed past the sentry that guards Talking Self so that Younger Self can recognize a truth beyond the literal meaning of the words.

All of which is a long-winded (see?) way of explaining why it can be so important for Witches and other magic workers to spend as much time as possible with any and all of the visual arts (dance, sculpture, painting, garden design, etc.) One of the classes that really changed my life for the better was an Intro to Art History class that I took near the end of my high school career. It gave me a schemata that allowed me to do more than just look at the surface of a painting and say, “I like it,” or “I don’t like it,” which was fairly unsatisfying for an INTJ. And ever since that class, I’ve been pretty serious about bringing as much visual art into my life as I can. (I credit Andy Goldsworthy, Patrick Dougherty, and, most recently, Sally J. Smith for teaching me the precise extent to which landscape can also be real art.)

Luckily, I live in a city of free museums and incredible civic sculpture. And I live close enough to New York, Philadelphia, and, nowadays, I’d add, Baltimore to get to enjoy the art in those cities, as well. And, while I’d always prefer a live viewing, the internet has made it possible for all of us to experience art that we may never get to see in person. Having an internal library (or an emotional museum) of images can make it easier to do effective magic.

To that end, I was struck this week with an image posted by one of my favorite modern artists, Rima Staines. If you scroll almost 3/4 of the way down on the above link, you’ll see an illustration that Rima’s done for a new journal called Earthlines. I’m hard pressed to imagine a better visualization for home protection magic, although I will say that when I sat down to work with this image, another creature, not a bear, came to me. And that’s where being in touch with your landbase and having a visual library can alchemize into something truly magic.

Literata recently posted some images that can be helpful when visualizing magic for the planet. I use this web site to help me visualize political magic, as well as images such as this. This image, this one, and this one figure in each of my daily meditations.

Are you more visual or more verbal? How do you incorporate the alternative approach into your magic? What art do you incorporate into your magic?

Picture (by Christopher Vacher) found here.

Grounding with Fungi

The other day, Beth Owl’s Daughter, posted this amazing video:

I was struck by the role that fungi play in connecting trees and other plants. Fungi hunt for nutrients next to the roots of forest trees and the exchange that they enable, meters away from the trunk of the tree, provides for communication and a sharing of resources, even between species. I love the description of the process as similar to brain networks comprised of neurons where the neurons are related not only physically, but also metaphysically due to the manner in which they send messages back and forth and build upon each other.

I come back almost daily to a question that Sia Vogel gave as a gift: What Are Witches For? There’s, to paraphrase the Cowboy Junkies, more than one answer to that question, pointing me in a crooked line, but, for this Witch, the primary answer is that I am here to be in right relationship with and to my landbase and then to act upon that relationship. That’s a big assignment, but I work at it in little chunks.

A significant portion of my work involves really, seriously grounding here, into this ground, this specific Bit of Earth that surrounds my little cottage near the Potomac. I don’t mean the sort of generic grounding that we all do at a public ritual, at the home of a sister-Witch whom we’re visiting to perform a group spell, at an office, or courtroom, or car dealer when we need to work some instant magic. I mean running my roots into the soil that I’ve worked, and fed, and weeded, and handled for years and years. The soil fed with compost from the meals that I’ve cooked to share with friends. The soil that I worship with my bare feet in the Summer and that I rake free of leaves each Autumn. The soil upon which I stretch out to perform the Iron Pentacle.

I mean letting my roots re-establish connection with the roots of the ancient oaks that have grown here since America was young, with the giant magnolias that Landscape Guy and I planted and nursed along the Southern border of my woodland garden, with the lavender and sage blooming just now in the herb bed. I mean letting my roots play with the worms, and chipmunks, ants, and armadillidium vulgare that live in the ground.

Lately, I’m seeing if I can get fungii from the oaks, maples, magnolias, cryptomeria, lilacs, and calycanthus floridus to play with my roots, as well. After all, I want, in Joanna Colbert’s words, to be in on the gossip of my landbase.

What is your grounding practice like? What are you a Witch for?

(And of course, it is both synchronicity and lagniappe that the forester in the video concludes her discussion by invoking the metaphor of an ancient tree performing a “a passing of the wand.”)

Watching the Future

Literata linked to this great video the other day, explaining that:

Kellianna performed on Friday night, and when she took requests, a young girl asked for “I Walk with the Goddess.” Kellianna said, “I’ll sing that if you, you, you, you, and you get up here and sing it with me!”

. . .

I didn’t know any of those girls, but I was so moved that it’s hard to express. I nearly cried with joy at the knowledge that they are being brought up with a vision of the divine that explicitly includes them, their bodies, their selves.

I came to Wicca and Goddess religion many years ago when I first read The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement, edited by Charlene Spretnak. In an essay entitled “Why Women Need the Goddess,” Carol P. Christ wrote:

Religious symbol systems focused around exclusively male image of divinity create the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate or wholly beneficent. This message need never be explicitly stated (as, for example, it is in the story of Eve) for its effects to be felt. A woman completely ignorant of the myths of female evil in biblical religion nonetheless acknowledges the anomaly of female power when she prays exclusively to a male God. She may see herself as like God and affirming God’s transcendence of sexual identity. But she can never have the experience that is freely available to every man and boy in her culture, of having her full sexual identity affirmed as being in the image and likeness of God. In Geertz’ terms, her “mood” is one of trust in male power as salvific and distrust of female power in herself and other women as inferior or dangerous. Such a powerful, pervasive, and longlasting “mood” cannot fail to become a “motivation” that translates into social and political reality.

In Beyond God the Father, feminist theologian Mary Daly detailed the psychological and political ramifications of father religion for women. “If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling his people,” she wrote, “then it is the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated. . . . The images and values of a given society have been projected into the realm of dogmas and ‘Articles of Faith,’ and these, in turn, justify the social structures which have given rise to them and which sustain their plausibility.”

Looking at the faces of those girls in the video, watching their body language, I can see, incarnate, the truth that rocked me so many years ago. What a gift to live to see this difference.

Stop. Ground. Breathe. Return to Center.

Would now be a good time for you to stop, ground, take a deep breath, and return to your center?

Of course, the answer is, “Yes.” The answer is almost always, “Yes.”

Modern life can be, at the same time, both frentic and routine. And both conditions make it easy to forget who we really are and to ignore our connection to The All.

Being a Witch isn’t just about the connection that you feel when you can get away to the mountains for a few days or when you attend a festival or ritual. Being a Witch is about also about (I’d even go so far as to say “mainly about”) how you live in all of the moments, hours, days, and months in between. When you’re trying to herd the kids out the door in the morning. When you’re behind the most irritating young person in the world at the deli. When the program crashes the night before the report is due. When there’s only time for one: tv, catching up on chores, or your altar. (The best answer may be chores. I suppose it could, on rare occasions, even be tv. But a Witch makes a conscious choice, not one based on habit, or exhaustion, or advertising.)

One of the simplest ways that I know to remember who I am and to remember my connection to The ALL is to stop, as often as possible throughout the day, and ground, breathe, return to center. And then proceed from there.

One thing I do is to establish triggers that remind me to perform this simple practice. When the radio announces the time as I drive to and from work. When my phone rings. Whenever I look at the small dish full of succulents on my desk. When I gather my papers to walk into a meeting. When I turn the water on in my kitchen or bathroom. In a short time, it becomes almost automatic to give myself this gift whenever I experience one of my triggers.

Try starting with just one. When that becomes a regular part of your practice consider adding another one. It’s easy and no one even has to know what you’re doing.

Do you have a practice that helps you to be a Witch all day, every day? Do you use triggers?

Picture found here.

Tuesday Night Poetry Blogging

P I L G R I M

~ David Whyte

I bow to the lark
and its tiny
lifted silhouette
fluttering
before infinity.
I promise myself
to the mountain
and to the foundation
from which
my future comes.
I make my vow
to the stream
flowing beneath,
and to the water
falling
toward all thirst,
and
I pledge myself
to the sea
to which it goes
and to the mercy
of my disappearance,
and though I may be
left alone
or abandoned by
the unyielding present
or orphaned in some far
unspoken place,
I will speak
with a voice
of loyalty
and faith
to the far shore
where everything
turns to arrival

…

- excerpt from “Pilgrim”
Title poem of the new poetry book, Pilgrim,
coming in May 2012

Picture found here

I Am The Rain that Falls

I am the rain that falls and
the grass that grows and
the ferns that drip and
the wisteria that droops and
the dirt that absorbs the rain.

I am the scent of wet mulch and
damp Earth and
overgrown mint and
young basil and something else,
unknowable, under the mulch.

I am the cardinal that demands and
the blue jay that steals and
the crows that warn and
the cat against whom the crows warn after the cardinal demands.

I am my garden in the rain and
my garden in the rain is me.
Everything is everything and — this –
I know more deeply than I know my own name
or the name of my garden in the rain.

Others have said the same thing, with more poetry:

I am the wind that breathes upon the sea
I am the wave of the ocean
I am the murmur of the billows
I am the ox of the seven combats
I am the vulture upon the rocks
I am a beam of the sun
I am the fairest of plants
I am a wild boar in valour
I am a salmon in the water
I am a lake in the plain
I am a word of science
I am the point of the lance of battle
I am the God who created in the head the fire
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?
Who announces the ages of the moon?
Who teaches the place where couches the sun? (If not I?)

~Ambergin