It occurred to me this morning that blogging (and, by extension, writing in general) is something I use as a magickal tool.

In most magickal systems, we talk about words having power - and writing weaves those words together. Writing creates a sigil of sorts - while the typical sigil condenses an idea into a single symbol, writing works in something of an opposite way, constructing lots of little symbols into a coherent whole (where the post or article or poem or story is, as a whole, the sigil).

The beauty of blogging is the submit button. It’s the ultimate symbol of sending that energy out into the universe - you know that while you might go back and edit your post, you must assume that people will have already read that initial burst of words as soon as you hit submit, and thus it’s hard to change what you’ve written once it’s sent. It’s somewhat akin to the commonly used technique of writing on a piece of paper and then burning it in ritual.

My preferred usage for this technique is for transforming negative energy into something more positive, or for drawing specific things into my life. I frequently post something because I’ve spent too much time thinking about it - and at the moment, battling depression and under a lot of stress, it’s easy for that energy to build up in a destructive way - and by posting, I can let it go, and forget about it (which is what is typically done with sigils - charge, release, and ignore).

So, when stress builds up, I use that energy to write down all the things that are bothering me, in hopes of excising them from my life, and I post that on my blog. I always feel better after I do, because I’ve cleared out the energy blockage and have provided a way for the energy to be more productive.

I had a rather odd encounter in a meditation last night. But I think you need the background to really understand it.

Not quite a year ago, I took Kali up on a promise she’d offered me: she would wield her axe on my behalf if I chose the target wisely. I had sat on that promise more than a year before being ready to choose, not sure that I was wise enough to make that leap, or strong enough to accept the consequences. In that time I spent waiting, I got to know her better, left libations for her, and came to something of a working arrangement. And when the time was right and the need was great, I asked for something I couldn’t have gotten to easily without divine intervention: a lack of fear.

Not that I’m not still afraid from time to time, but what I got out of this request was a profound diminishing of unjustified unreasonable fears, and a better grip on the difference between things that are worth being afraid of and those that are not.

Was it a wise choice? I’m still not sure, but I think it’s better that I’ve made the choice than not.

Over the last few months, with the growing baby in my womb foremost in my thoughts,  I had felt somewhat of a distancing from Kali, and from the Gods in general. Not that they weren’t there, but that they were taking a step back to let me ponder things in my own time. And for a while there, I wondered if Kali was going to let me go completely.

When things got a bit rocky with the pregnancy, I remembered a story I’d read about her - unborn children were often offered to her for safekeeping; she’d either see them survive and flourish or take them as her own in death. A fitting request for me to make then, since she had played a hand in me getting pregnant to begin with. But still I felt a distance.

When we did the reiki workshop, one of the other girls came out of a practice session with a message for me: Hera had once been the Goddess  people prayed to for children, and some of her priestesses had been given the gift of bestowing the blessing of a child on women. If I wanted this gift, I should work with Hera and ask her for it.

Hera has never been much on my radar screen. I thought the timing was interesting, given the seeming distance growing between Kali and I, and that maybe it was time to move on and grow in a new direction. I even started running across articles on Hera here and there as I worked my way through the backlog of magazines at our house.

This weekend I ended up back in the hospital, and it appears that, barely 6 months pregnant, we’ll be staying here until the baby is born due to the continuing complications. Lots of rest, and lots of meditation have been the order of the week, trying to keep blood pressures down (or at least stable and treatable, since I’m now on two separate meds, and the key factor on my side is that as long as the BP is manageable, the baby stays in unless she shows signs of distress).

At any rate,  it’s been a rough few days, and the clarity of what to be afraid of and what to let go has been a blessing - although the things that don’t involve fear are harder to erase, like, “what did we do wrong?” and “why do so many good things in life get ruined?”

Meditating on those last night, I found myself in my hospital room. Arianrhod, who has always been beside me on my journey sat on my bed, holding my hand and comforting me. Kali stood between me and the door, sword and axe drawn, looking rather vicious, in a very obvious “guard” stance. She stepped aside to reveal that the door now had a window, and knocking on the door looking in was Hera, looking regal and composed, waiting to be let into the room.

I was a bit taken aback by this, and Kali looked at me and said, very plainly, “Maybe you should ask her what you get out of this deal. What has she done for you that makes her worthy of your honor?” I looked at Hera intently, and there was no answer. I looked at Kali, trying to understand her motives.

And then life interrupted as the real-world door opened,  snapping me back to reality.

I don’t quite know what to think of this all at this point. It will take some thinking to figure out where to go with it, and what to do about Hera.

Maybe my Gods seem far away because I’ve been in such an odd spot, sort of backed into my own little corner,  not paying much attention to anything else while I dealt with life here in my immediate sphere. And it’s hard to say, but maybe this suggests that I should learn more about Hera before I jump in with both feet, more the way I did with Kali - Kali is still here as guard and guide; certainly that strength is something I need right now. But over the next few weeks, there is plenty of time to ponder the situation, since I’m officially on medical leave for the duration.

It occurred to me this weekend why there’s such a clamoring for “more advanced” books. Yes, it’s partly because there are so many books for beginners, or near-beginners, and not a lot beyond that. But I think a bigger problem is that after a few years, we get stuck in this sort of mid-life crisis mode. 

Merriam-Webster (via dictionary.com) [1] says a mid-life crisis is “a period of emotional turmoil in middle age caused by the realization that one is no longer young and characterized especially by a strong desire for change.” And that captures a big part of it. We’re not newbies, we want to move forward, and we don’t know what to change or how to change, but something should change, because we’re more experienced now.

I realized that this is the root of the problem while taking a Reiki II class this weekend. While the instructors are competent and knowledgeable, I felt that I got very little new information out of the weekend. Energy work is energy work, guided meditations are guided meditations, and “energy exercises” are just modified (and somewhat non-sensical)  t’ai chi/qigong type exercises, and from my experience, the real thing has a lot more energy, especially when movements are done one after the other as a flow (and that flow teaches more about energy flow than any single exercise could) than the modified versions.

Maybe I would have felt different about this 8 or 10 years ago, before I had the understanding of energy work that I do now; before I’d had experiences that take things well beyond what we were learning in this class.

But the question remains: where do I go from here? I’m not a rank beginner, and haven’t been in a long while. I’m relatively comfortable in my practice, but looking for something deeper.  It’s like you start out on a path of stepping stones across a lake, and in the beginning, they’re close together, and as you learn more, each successive stone is a little farther away, until you get to a point where you’ll have to jump if you want to reach that next one without getting wet.

In modern American society, when you want to learn something, you find a book or a class or a seminar of some sort, and come out of it with some new insight. So, we go looking for those familiar forms.

However, we’re also talking about a mystery religion - a religion of experience. Books on these sorts of experiences are hard to write, since so much is just not explainable. There aren’t even all that many books that say, “this is what I did, I got something out of it, maybe you will too,” books out there, so it’s hard to know where to go first.

Most classes and seminars held at local shops (and even those at the few festivals I’ve been to) tend to either be introductory in nature (e.g., Wicca 101, Intro to Crystals, Basics of Runes) , or skill-based (e.g., make your own ritual clothing, how to make jewelry). So much so, that most of the time, there are few workshops that even sound interesting to me.

Maybe there are other festivals with more experiential workshops - if there are, they’re mostly too far for me to manage attending any time soon.

Reiki at least was a specific skillset that I didn’t have…and yet, much of what we did, I already knew, having figured it out on my own and then moved on a while back.

So, where does that leave us? I suspect it leaves us still trying to figure out how to reach that next stepping stone on the path without falling and hurting ourselves in the process. And maybe the real trick here is to jump off the stepping stones all together, and swim around a bit until we reach a dry spot.

[1] mid-life crisis. (n.d.). Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary. Retrieved May 28, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: компютриhttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mid-life crisis

For the last couple of years, I’ve been leaving my libations and offerings in the back corner of our yard - particularly full moon and dark moon offerings, but others as the mood strikes me. It’s piled with large landscaping rocks, and we’ve always left it to grow somewhat wild - though the fire pit is only there because the lawn care crew moved it out of their way:

When we first moved here, the yard was mostly just dirt and rock. Up near the fence line at the front of the house, there are violets - and they’ve stayed there, until this year, when suddenly we had a whole bunch of them here in my offering corner - and while it’s possible they’ve spread the last few years all the way along the side fence, there were virtually no blooms along there this past month - just the cluster at the front of the house, and the cluster back here.

I’m taking this as a good sign, among several others, that the offerings have been accepted and are much appreciated. This is one of two spots in the yard that I think really need some sort of statue or other symbol of the gods, I just haven’t quite figured out what yet.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear. ”

–Mark Twain

I’ve been rather quiet this month. Life has been busy, there’ve been hard choices to make, and I really just needed time to do some internal processing about all the changes going on.

The benefit of a daily practice is that once it becomes ingrained, you tend to do it anyway, even when life falls apart around you. And so my daily reiki and prayers continue to be my way to wind down in the evenings, as I try to bring a  little more peace and order into what’s become chaos.

The last year has been a year of changes - of learning to overcome fear to make the changes that need to be made, and to have the strength to stand behind those decisions. This month’s decision: The business largely needs to go, because it takes up all our time, and we’re going to need that time for the baby. This was a really hard choice, since I’ve long seen this business as something spiritually important to me. But it’s time to move on to other things.

A friend recently complained that he feels like he’s from no where - all the places important to his childhood are, one by one, disappearing, and it seems to be leaving him feeling adrift and alone.

I’ve been in his shoes; but I’ve found it much better to build on my own internal strength. I have found my place, and made it my own, and no matter what happens to the things surrounding my life, I have a place to go home to, because it’s here in my head and my heart.

There is peace to be found in our daily rituals, and strength in our faith. Fear may still find us from time to time, but by planting our own roots, and letting them grow deep and strong in our faith and our rituals, we have the strength to master the fear, do what we need to do, and improve our lives.