Sway with me...

Love is about saving... yourself, your lover, your heart, your patience, your endless imagination. What is it about dancing with someone that you love that seems to defy all other forms of expression? Even if you're just swaying to a song that you love, there is something so intimate and powerful about being wrapped around each other and wrapped up in each other's arms moving to a beat simultaneously that makes life's troubles seem like they're a million miles away.
I read, digest, journal, and review all the pieces of life that I've taken in thus far on my path of being a woman and a Priestess and there are aspects of love that still just facinate me.

I think that is why Love is such an endless facinating subject for me. Loving ourselves, loving someone else, loving children-parents-siblings-friends.. it truly IS the most powerful force in the universe.

What else can take something that looks a little silly and mushy without music, and turn it into a powerful experience with a little music and some deep felt emotion?

What is romance when we boil it down? It is the feeling of warmth that rises in your chest when you think about how you feel around a certain person, and how that person feels when they're around you! It is about taking the simple and the mundane and turning it into an artistic expression of emotion.

Whether I am dancing, singing, or just listening to the music that reminds me of Kevin I still smile. Even if I'm angry at him, wish he lived miles away from me, or am dreading going home to deal with him -- I can listen to certain music and remember dancing with him and smiling so much that my face hurt. I can remember the look in his eyes when he was coaxing me out onto a dance floor as an expression of how much he loves me, a little mischevious, a little loving, and always fun.

So I save... I save my best energy for our times together.
I save my best words and my most creative self for the projects that we do together.
I save the precious, tenderest parts of my secret joys for him to see and experience.
Love is about saving, it's about sharing what you want with others.. but saving the best for that one person who makes you feel like whatever you are, however you are, you are the most valuable person in the world to them.

Magick flows like water following our emotions, feeling our way through the winding paths of darkened woods that are the days and nights of our lives.. love gives us courage to keep going and to face the untold dangers that we imagine to be right around every corner. Magick is love, and love is magick.. magick for yourself is echoed your love for yourself, magick for others is echoed in the love that you feel for them or for those who are sacred to them, and magick for the world is service to the Gods via serving humanity.

But remember, that you are the sacred vessel of magick and thus are always deserving of pleasure and love yourself so save the best for yourself to ensure that you are always in the best possible state.

The path, being challenged, and Wicca

What is it that defines the path?

“The Path” as it is often referred to, is the way in which each person learns of their own spirituality and beliefs. It is said that faith is not faith if it remains unchallenged.

The interesting thing about walking the path, is that it is by definition, a challenge. It is a path that is not recognized or accepted by the common person. It is a path that occluded by mystery and shadows. It teaches it’s lessons through pain and fear, and overcoming both.

So why would anyone want to walk “the path” as we define it in Wicca?

Maybe it is that their curiosity exceeds what is fed to them through the “easy way” of monotheistic religions?

Maybe they just want to be different from all the rest?

Maybe they feel that living a life without some kind of personal challenge just is too shallow and empty for them?

Really the reasons are too numerous to list off and probably don’t need to be listed. In the end, each person comes to the path for their own reasons. But there is a paradox to this choice…..

They don’t really want to be challenged. Before you raise your voice and challenge that statement, allow me to offer up a few reasons for that statement.

Though Wicca is an alternative religion, few people who follow it actually see it as religion. They see it as belief. They believe, and therefore that’s really all they care about. But a religion is a belief system unto itself, whether you believe in it or not. Just as each person comes to Wicca seeking answers, they are also seeking refuge from judgement. They don’t yet realize that the judgement that they are running from is within themselves. They want to believe in something that empowers them to make everything right, but in the end that requires being challenged in their belief that some “other” is wrong.

There is no right and wrong in Wicca. That is the fascinating thing about this religion. We believe that you create your own reality, and if your reality contains judgement for being different then you’ve created that reality by validating their point of view.

The challenge of Wicca comes in facing the demons that have tricked you into believing that anyone other than yourself is right. And yet we each seek, endlessly, external validation through books, articles, movies, and music that our point of view is right and that the “other” is really wrong!

The pain and the fear that you feel is self-created because you believe in it. You believe that you are hurt by someone rejecting you, you believe that you are rejectable. You believe that what you fear is scary because you feel powerless in the face of whatever that thing represents.

In the end, Wicca is all about challenge. It’s about challenging yourself to move outside your comfort zones, to listen to the most opposing view point you can find and see if you can see yourself through that viewpoint without losing one ounce of love for yourself. It’s about challenging your heart and your spirit to expand beyond where they are today and embracing what they can become.

But I find more and more that the people who seek Wicca as a religion don’t really WANT to be endlessly challenged. They want to master some sub-set of what is out there and then relax into their own pool of “see? I’m right.” Remember, there is no right and wrong in Wicca. There are only consequences of our choices. And if you believe that your choices are right, then you have faced your challenges and risen to love yourself enough to overcome them.

However, you are not done. You must continue to seek out and accept challenges in your life. This is how you feed the engine of the universal energies. Laying back and accepting the pool of “rightness” is akin to dying. Perfection is death.

So as you go off on your journey to discover and label these shadows, as you fall into bed every night and assume that you just can’t do one more thing, as you curl up and accept the hellish world that you may find yourself in remember something: you created it. So if you want to get out of it, then you need to get up and go face the challenge that is blocking your way You need to accept responsibility for putting it there, or not working hard enough to prevent it from being there… and you need to start working to remove it.

If that removal means facing fears, then so be it. If it means letting go of “rightness” in exchange for the discomfort of unknowing, then so be it.

But never, ever accept that being Wiccan is about being unchallenged and being “right”.

Waiting to exhale

When magick works, it tends to come gently through like sunlight filtering through the trees in a shadowed wood. When magick works, it tends to follow threads and expectations that feel as natural as the way water flows over rocks in a stream. Yet, when magick works I'm always gently comforted by the surprise that I have been blessed so completely with the insight into how magick works.

Emotional connections this week feel like a California mudslide. They creep, and creep along... and then suddenly everything gathers together and they engulf everything in their path.. burying me and every percpetion that I have at once. Wow.

Venus and Uranus are currently conjunct in my 10th house, that transit is also conjunct my natal Chiron. That is where the mudslide analogy comes from. Uranus lends a bit of divine insight to every experience, Venus rules emotional connections, and of course Chiron is the master of painful experiences that become powerful lessons that shape who we are. Saturn's endless lesson while cojoining my natal Stellium in Virgo reminds me that nurturing myself and others is NO TRIVIAL TASK! Ok, Master Saturn I get it... don't trivialize what it takes to keep people safe.. no really, I GET IT!! *sigh* At least I've got old father Jupiter opposing my natal Jupiter with a healthy shot of the Sun to keep my bouyant. Saturn transits are so heavy.

I am waiting to exhale because Mercury is retrograde in my 8th house, crossing back over into my 9th house after it turns direct in a little over a week. This Mercury Retrograde has taught me to go back over unfinished projects and work on them. This is a good thing, and I am taking this lesson with me into the next Mercury retrograde in May. Among these unfinished projects is one that I've been working on since I started as a Priestess: shielding and how it impacts a psychic's ability to predict the emotional flow of a situation.

As I review my emotional connections this week, and face deep truths about the people that I have emotional connections with, I realize that I keep a bubble of energy around me almost unconsciously in situations where I feel emotionally connected to the people I'm with.. but oddly I don't keep one around me in situations where I feel NO emotional connection to the people I'm with.. and that's the exact opposite of what I need to be doing to stay healthy.

In situations where I am emotionally connected the people I'm with, I've been afraid that I will be pulled into someone's emotionall whirlpool and have it ruin my experience. But what I neglected to realize was that as my Reiki abilities grew, so too did my ability to ground myself and keep my emotional energies seperate from someone else's. In situations where I am NOT emotionally connected to the people around me, I left my shields down because I expected that my psychic abilities would be hampered by the sheilds and that a lack of emotional connection would keep me from being harmed by their negativity. AGAIN, I was wrong. I neglected to realize that I am an energy being and thus will be affected by my surroundings regardless of the emotional depth of my connections (Moon in the 12th house, Neptune in Scorpio in the 6th house).

The magickal workings of this week were to learn how I relate to my emotional connections and how to improve my relationship with them so that I am healthier emotionally (and thus physically). What I have learned:

1) Loving someone adds a great deal of emotional energy to a connection, so bringing my sheilds down allows that love to flow more freely even in times of pain. Keep my shields down around people that I love.
2) Trusting someone adds a great deal of astral space to a connection, keep my energies focused and light around people that I trust to allow the connection to grow as it will instead of trying to control it. Controlling a trustworthy connection is a waste of energy. Trust is an emotion based guideline.
3) Allowing my shields to come down around people who are NOT magickally attuned is just about the stupidest thing I can do, they are like toddlers with guns and will inflict deep wounds on my energy body. I will work on jacking up my psychic energies so that my abilities will work around "muggles" without me needing to bring down my sheilds.
4) Everyone who loves you pays the price for doing so, but they do so willingly because they love you.. don't try to compensate for that bill, it only cheapens the love.
5) Let joy in, if sadness follows immediatly behind it, then trust in my abilities to handle sadness... but don't block joy whenever it comes, or worry that sadness is on it's heels.. more often than not sadness is nowhere to be seen, and joy will expand without bound if allowed to do so.
6) Magick follows the heart, if your heart isn't honestly and truely involved in your magick.. then it will fizzle. If your heart is in it, then there is nothing to fear for your heart is the purest connection to the cosmic-divine love and will only guide you to the right path, the right answer, and the most healing waters for YOU.
7) Make friends as often as you can, because you never know when one will leave unexpectedly and you'll need the others to help you heal.

The ties that anchor, bind, and support

In the cool of the morning I sit and reflect upon the connections that I have right now. I wonder why I have chosen to let some die off and nurture others? Did I mistake someone's callousness for intentional harm? Did I misunderstand someone's curiosity and believe it to be adoration?

In magick we believe that we create our own realities. This extends far beyond the marvelous blend of energies that become rituals and into the simplest of choices: who to keep as friends and who to let float away on the river of time. In pondering the ties that anchor, bind, and support I wonder if my natal moon being in my 12th house has made it so that I cannot trust my heart's voice when it comes to choosing people to love? Or maybe because the 12th house rules the dissolution of boundaries I can trust my heart more than anything else to lead me to the purest sources of love and support?

As I pause to reflect upon the people who are in my life now, I wonder if I've missed some major clue in how to define what is good for me. They are not toxic people, nor are they people that I regret knowing, but they do not tend to understand my emotional self. I'm sure that everyone has met people in their lives who "just get them", right? You know, those people that when someone asks why you're smiling, you say "They just understand me, that's all." I wonder if even THAT perception is merely a by product of a reality that we create to make ourselves feel more comforted, more secure and supported? How can we trust our perceptions of emotional connections when they can be clouded by so many different things? Different things like: your state of mind at the time, the other person's state of mind, your mood, the circumstances in which you met, the first impressions that you had of each other... all of these can be influenced by so many things that in the end it all feels like a by-product of the Wyrd.

My current magickal process is about being aware of the emotional connections that I have, what they give me, and how I can be more honest about relating to them in ways that feed my spirit and my heart. Thus I am walking through both the current astrological transits, and my natal astrological chart to gain insight into how I pick my relationships.

Neptune rules illusion, fantasy, dreams.. Mercury rules communication, connections, clans, and commonalities or patterns. I have a Neptune-Mercury conjunction in Scorpio in my chart .. in my 6th house of service and health. This means that I am very affected physically by the type of people I surround myself with, that's a fairly serious implication from picking unhealthy connections.

The Moon rules emotions, intuition, and psychic energies. Having a natal Moon in Gemini means that dealing with my own feelings is a battle, nurturing the feelings of others is even more of a challenge, and being restless and curious all the time leaves me exhausted, lost, and often craving a quiet place of solitude where I can hear my own heart.

The ties that bind are those that bog me down with endless emotional drama. Relating to the world through the eyes of emotion for me is a curious thing at best, and a draining thing at worst. Yet, with balance the ties that bind can become the ties that anchor, and for someone with a Moon in Gemini that is a vital thing.

The ties that anchor are those that patiently wait while I dance the anxiety, irritability, and frustrations out of my system and simmer down to a point where I can easily exchange both ideas and emotional support. These blessed individuals don't take my mood swings personally, they don't over-react to my wild ideas, and they lovingly encourage me to flesh out the things that seem to reccur in my mental meanderings.

The ties that support are the ones that express value in what I have created and shared. These exciting people ask questions, explore ideas, and add information and insight to my endless mental adventures into the metaphysical.

Where, then, shall I plot a course for the people who will help me keep my inner worlds balanced and my outer worlds healthy and interesting?

Full Moon on it's way...

As I sit here and feel my way through the astrological energies of the Full Moon I wonder how much of our magickal power is restricted by our own fears of being seen as being limited?

Saturn in Virgo opposed Uranus in Pisces. Thus we have two astrological powerhouses sitting opposite each other in signs that are mutable in nature... and oddly difficult to label and isolate in terms of magickal energies. One could argue that Saturn in virgo is a traditional viewpoint on health and human services.. but that's not really a digestible format for magickal working.... it needs a simpler definition for spellwork.

Uranus in Pisces heralds a time when humanity reshapes their relationship with Spirituality and divine love. However, this is a long process.. not something that represents a tightly defined scope of work.

Add Pluto in Capricorn, the influence of the God of change sitting in the realm of established norms and traditional structures and you've got quite a revolutionary environment for magickal working.

Bring in the T-Square relationship of the Sun-Mercury-Mars stellium in Sagittarius to the Saturn-Uranus opposition and you've got a hell-raising bundle of raging energies looking for a plan to change the world, or at least make dramatic changes to the existing establishments. Given that the stellium is 90 degrees from the opposition, there is some measure of a "tough coaching" feeling to this energy pattern rather than a "that's enough and I'm through with this now." pattern.

I look back upon the historical figures of the occult and magick and wonder how they used these energies.. what lessons did they learn about these types of situations that allowed them to make the most of these powerful energies? These types of energies NEED an outlet, and if one is not voluntarily given to them, they will undoubtedly force their way out of one's self.

Gently is not a way that we proceed with this cauldron of simmering change. It is very much like any story, myth, or legend around the great Goddess Hekate... or around Eris or Oya... these are Goddesses who offer us the lessons of change and how powerful an impact it has on the mentality of a human being. We fear change, thus we tend to fear the Goddesses of change.. is that really the true path? I don't think so.

Feeling my way through these energies what I see is something like a roller coaster to a kid. It's a challenging thing, representing a partially frightening experience of going very fast and losing one's center around the dips and turns. But in the end there is this great feeling of exhilaration when we land in the starting house and realize that it was all OK because we allowed ourselves to make the journey. Of course, anyone who has ridden a roller coaster has experienced the first time feeling of being trapped on this monsterous machine without any way to get off before the scary stuff starts. Standing on this side of the Full Moon feels a little bit like that, though having ridden many roller coasters in my time I will be employing the age-old strategy of coping by letting go and feeling the exhilaration of surviving each unexpected dip and turn!

Of course, if one were to examine my natal chart, they'd see that this T-Square\Opposition pattern sits on top of an identical pattern in my chart. *wry smile* So I'm well aware that I have no choice in the matter, and I will take this journey whether I like it or not...

I am, as it were, strapped into the first car on the roller coaster. And thus, I am facing the fear of being seen as limited or unable to handle the drastic and unpredictable changes that these energies can bring. However, I have magick, and through that vehicle I can express my fears and move beyond them to give these energies an outlet that will create a world of fun and exhilaration. So.. in the end the roller coaster is magickal work.. and the planetary energies are the engine that pushes it along the track at high speeds.

Lady Luna in Aries... and the cauldron gets stirred again.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008, 06:50 AM EST

With two planets in Libra and two in Scorpio we are full into the season of letting go. So how come all I can think about is finding new friends? The full moon in Aries falls in the 11th house of my natal chart, the house of friendship and social groups. So with Mercury retrograde, the celestial energies urge me to look back on my social patterns and adjust. So I did, and I found out that I've got lousy taste in friends... and what's worse, I really am not that good at being friends with people who have an active social life.

To be fair, with a full time career, two kids, two dogs, a house and a husband I've got a pretty full plate most of the time. Add to that a coven, and random students here and there who I am trying to get going.. and I'm pretty much tapped out.

So I need a friend like my old friend Laura. Laura was a Libra. She was an unhappy Libra but she was alot of fun. Unfortunately, Laura decided that living wasn't all that great so she committed suicide 12 yrs ago. Since then I've been a little disconnected from what it means to have a good friend in my life for any longer than about a year.

Libras and Scorpios tend to be my best friends.. Libras because their energy blends really well with my Moon in Gemini, and Scorpios because my Mercury and Neptune are both in Scorpio so I tend to communicate better with then.

Funny. The only Libra in my life now is my husband. And the only Scorpio is my friend Jon. Jon is a workaholic, so I never see him.

*sigh* Friends. Those people who remind you that you're OK just as you are... without losing weight, changing your communication style, or being some amazingly famous person who makes their life easier.

I want more of those.

What is it that drives our curiosity about others? Do we imagine those people that we find sexy to be gifted with something that we lack? Do they know the answers to mysteries that we haven't figured out yet?

All Jungian archetypes aside, I'm eternally curious about how to properly describe sexy. Because it is so elusive, what makes people in the media believe that they have the right to define it?

Why are Americans so enamoured of an English accent?

Why do Latin men love blondes so much?

Why are Black men so entranced by white women?

Maybe all of these (generalized) attractions represent the unknown? What elusive characteristics to each of these groups have that the others do not?

I find myself completely smitten with English men. Yes, I recognize that many of them don't have great teeth, and alot of them are short. Yes, I see that there are "red necks" throughout Europe, and my own American bias filters out their rude, ignorant behavior everytime they open up their mouths to speak.

The electric response that my senses alight me with on the moment I hear an English accent is challenging to describe. I feel that I'm instantly transported to another life, where I was safe and the world was a known place. Things changed, but reason and civility were maintained as a high ideal. It's not the tea drinking, nor foppish mannerisms that return to lure me back into another world... it's the smells of damp tweed and wet soil, it is the feel of hot breath upon my wet and cold skin in the morning, and the rush of excitement of cold leather gloves on the small of my back helping me up onto a horse. There are echoes of a deep love that rise up within me, that I have no logical explanation for. I am passionately aroused by the smell of Earl Grey tea, and the sound of someone clearing their throat before they speak. The sound of boot heels on old stone floors makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and the gentle lilt of an English accent in someone saying my name makes my logical mind melt into my neck as emotion floods my senses with rich memories of a life I've never lived.

Is my heritage coming back to haunt me? Because I am a decendant of the English and the Scottish does that mean that my cells retained some memory of a life on the Isles where I was part of a different world? If so, why is this coming to bear now in such full color and life?

I wasn't raised with small dogs barking, yet their barks are comforting to me where they are irritating to others. I was raised in warm, dry climates.. yet the feel of wool on my skin, and thick socks across me feet seems more familiar than sandals and silks.

Somewhere in my memory there is a passion that sits dormant. It tickles my senses to the point of distraction, taunting me to come out and experience it in full force during this lifetime. My breath catches in my throat as my chest warms without my consent. My knees and hips soften, and my face relaxes as the memory of passion and perfection flood my conscious mind. Rich smells of cooking meat, and the sound of a man's voice calling across a field opens my heart and it sings. I am open.. like the lotus flower in the sun I relax my defenses and lay without restraint across the soft embrace of a fearless life filled with simple pleasures and the delight of an English world.