Quietness has been a deep friend of mine, like a silent companion that holds my friend, reassuring, loving and stable. My *need* to be loud, heard and understood (and that all Leo trait: right) has dissolved to such a point that it surprises me now when it surfaces... where it seemed that even just a few eras, heart beats and skips before, it was my constant companion.

Culturally this makes me a bit awkward in the western tribal culture that I adore. Most of those who have been my companions for the last 15 years are in that place, and reward and desire loud, pay attention to me type actions and attitudes. Finding myself just wanting to be present, engaged but not trying to be the raucous can be lonely.

In this way I don't miss traveling with Orion and House of Brigh. The constant flurry of "OMG!" everywhere was fun sometimes, tiring at best, and hurtful to my spirit in a very deep way. I missed having just quiet deep connections with people. No need to talk, but deep presence.

I like having creative fun, playing hard and engaging in true joy... but as an outpouring of depth of connection... the Source of that joy I desire it to be the connection to Spirit.

All Creation Honors Creator

One of the main components in holy wars has to do with concrete thinking in religious contexts. Our current climate has some of the most brilliant people with doctorates, of which most have a religious education and spiritual development age of about 5th Grade!! This means that functionally that your average person has a belief system that concretized at about 10 years of age. As we go forward in our inner development, often we begin to look for deeper and more functional images of God.

How we find these can be harder than it seems because often well meaning people scare of us off from looking at these with real intent in order to keep us "safe" from crossing some invisible line. One concrete idea of God is that there are many religions that have access to God and that there are other images or names for God. This idea scares people who cannot do abstract religious thinking because they are unable to hold the idea that more than one person might be right. This ideology moves hand in hand with the idea that if someone else is right, that automatically means that another is wrong.

With this fear in mind... I'll tell you an old story:

There are four blind men who discover an elephant. Since the men have never encountered an elephant, they grope about, seeking to understand and describe this new phenomenon. One grasps the trunk and concludes it is a snake. Another explores one of the elephant's legs and describes it as a tree. A third finds the elephant's tail and announces that it is a rope. And the fourth blind man, after discovering the elephant's side, concludes that it is, after all, a wall.

Each in his blindness is describing the same thing: an elephant. Yet each describes the same thing in a radically different way.

According to many, this is analogous to the different religions of the world -- they are describing the same thing in radically different ways. Thus one should conclude that no individual religion has a corner on truth, but that all should be viewed as essentially equally valid.

This is a powerful and provocative image, and it certainly seems to capture something of the truth.

If God is infinite and we are finite, it is reasonable to believe that none of us can fully capture that infinite nature.

... at the end of the day, we can never fully know the mind of God, but God knows us... and the point of ANY religion is to just help people get to know God better. Anyone who uses a religion to prove that they are right or wrong is using God to promote their own insecurity instead of moving into submission to the Holy Spirit.

In this same vein... I will leave you with an idea...it is not God that needs to be protected... it is our own fear around our beliefs.

Blessings on your journey to deepening your faith!

I myself took up the cloak of blame;
I smashed the bottle of honor and virtue on a stone.
What of it?

Sometimes I rise up and watch the universe from above.
Sometimes I go down to earth and lose myself in love.
What of it?

Sometimes I study life's meaning in the holy books.
Sometimes I go to the tavern and get drunk.
What of it?

Sometimes I enter my garden to pick roses for my darling;
I grew the roses and I gathered them.
What of it?

The wine of this love is a sin, the orthodox think-
The sin is mine. I fill my glass and drink,
What of it?

The pious bow to the niche in the mosque.
I bow at the Beloved's doorstep, pressing my face up close.
What of it?

My enemy says loving beauty is sinful.
I love my Beloved so I'll gladly pay that price.
What of it?

They ask Nesimi,
are you and your beloved getting along?
Whether we get along or not, my Beloved is mine.
What of it?

-Nesimi, 15th C.

Ever find yourself in deep anxiety or emotional pain? You find yourself feeling trapped, overwhelmed and looking for the escape hatch? Recently I found myself in this deep suffering over my relationship with some close friends of mine and I was wondering if the Goddess was going to change it for me, if she was going to offer any sort of relief or support.

My mind lead me down this winding garden path and I wondered how long this pain was going to last. My inner shrink weighed in and I began wondering if I was causing this pain myself, wrapping myself up in something that wasn't necessary. I was antsy enough and felt displaced to such a point that I wondered if I was going to have trouble sleeping.

Then, I started feeling this nagging concern if I was going to be resentful if I prayed and the Goddess didn't answer or cause any change. How would this lack of change after prayer affect my belief in prayer and my belief around whether the goddess answers prayers. This softer concern voiced a true concern which made my skin crawl: whether prayer worked and if I believed in it. It was at that stunning moment that I realized that not only had I not prayed and asked, but that I was afraid to for fear it wouldn't be answered and I would be left holding the bag alone. After some deliberation, I stepped up to my inner prayer mat in a decision to choose to the best of my ability to allow the prayer to be answered any way that she saw fit and not try to control the outcome.

I moved into my soul, and very quietly, deeply and with intention started praying over myself and the situation. Through that offering to God, I began to see that I was asking for relief from pain. The spirits showed me that I needed grace as I went through something very difficult. I started perceiving grace as not a rescuing of myself from my pain, but instead more like a state of spiritual being that relieved me from having things attach to me, like lubing a pole before it went into a slot.

My prayers followed this flow, asking for grace to surround me and uphold me. And after my spirit had a good lube job, my inner eyes glanced to this energetic idea that was hovering over my spirit: that when I did prayers over something, that I was really hoping that God was going to be appeased enough that she or he would grant what I wanted. I was trying to BUY God with my prayers. I looked at that for a moment, felt a wave of remorse, relief and embarrassment. Good Lord, really?!!!! From there I began our traditions chant to offer remorse and then ask for it to be changed from that place of understanding or deep soul knowledge.

It's strange how invasive it is that you want to buy or earn your way somewhere, as if your soul were for sale so we can obtain respect, care for or honor. We cannot earn the love or grace of God. The Universe's love, relief or joy cannot bought and sold. Often we are seeking to "cure" something by prayers, chants or rituals instead of moving into presence with the holy and allowing it to impact or change our spirit. In reality, to cure is a misplaced goal because it is based on the assumption that something is broken or in error. In reality, we have no idea if this is true. Spiritual tools are like mechanic's tools to work with our "soul bits" functioning to clear, clean, feed or uphold the soul. We have to be careful not to try use them to obtain love, grace or the respect of Divinity, because the tools do not function like that and then we will find our spirits feeling resentful, betrayed or abandoned!

The real medicine for our soul's wound is to move close into the Goddess and allow her presence which is love to imprint our spirit. No child (young or grown) petitions or conjoles our Mother to *make* her make our owy better. Instead we love the Goddess, come closer to her and open ourselves to her as deeply as we can and like a mother who gets to see our owy, ask her to kiss it and make it better. She wants nothing more but to do this kindness for you, but our Goddess is a Lady and she won't force you to open the place where the owy is to let her kiss it.

I had dreams about Cerriadwen's cauldron all night. She was kind to me even as I struggled with this deep soul wound that I have to earn grace or love or compassion from the Universe. People often say that this work is unforgiving and brutal, and soul deep it is, but the Goddess loved me deeply that night. She spent the whole night standing in the deep place with me and as I changed, the inner sight that she is always standing there came open to me.

Great Mother Great Father, let me be open and guided by the highest and most noble inspirations and aspirations: You. Let my feet not stray from this path.

But by the Grace of Divinity go I.

I am expanding. My personal boundaries around love, acceptance of others and the willingness to change has also been expanding. About a year ago I started realizing that in order to be a true walker of this spiritual path that was congruent with what I believed was being asked of me by my creator, that I was going to have to change.

This included doing things that were uncomfortable for me. Seriously uncomfortable. There were some days that I must have chanted, "the Gods don't give us more than we can handle, we just may not agree on where the line is" 70 times a day! And in the same day, find myself thinking sometimes the ugliest things and realizing that I could not give myself permission to think that anymore.

The result? My heart started expanding. My capacity to love that which was before unlovable to my own eyes has started becoming valuable in and of itself. I remember the moment when I read a section out of my Dalai Lama book where he frankly stated that we were addicted to beauty and only wanted to love beautiful things or beautiful people and specifically that he stated that we devalued things that weren't beautiful. It felt like he was talking to me. Lately in that vein, I have noticed that our super models are really iconic on this. They are unhealthy and ragged bones in skin, being run by our consumer culture addiction to beauty and our connecting beauty to a value statement.

I saw a guy in Home Depot that had a ruddy face and knotty hair who was selling air conditioners and for the first time as I walked by I thought, what a beautiful man and I smiled at him unconditionally from a deep part in my heart. I shocked the hell outta myself!

All of this is an example of how I am working to remove my own prejudices that come forward, especially against myself. This transition been hard, and this is just one area! Let's not get onto how I feel about people who are arrogant, unkind or otherwise lacking. (especially in my own opinion)

Treating and feeling equanimity towards people, religions, ideologies and whatnot is something that I strive to uphold. Each time I see someone, I go back into my spirit and find the place that sees them the way that I think God sees them: As Divinity expressing Itself. My hope is that someday, my own spirit won't even remember what it was like to feel the other way.

I don't post here very often. It's not so much that I abandoned LJ, as much as I am so wrapped up in living life that sometimes I forget to write about it too.

Much has been happening on many fronts.

On the spiritual front, my heart has been listening to the piper of the unity mysteries and trying to figure out how to realize this deeper into my spirit. I understand these often with my brain (why, yes, it is all just God, duh!) to actually finding a way to ACT like this in my relationships, my interactions with the causal plane and my hopes and aspirations for the future. This is much harder to do than I thought because there are some sacred cows that are up for slaughter, and I have to admit I am more than nervous.

The thing that keeps my feet on the ground however, is the the Goddess has shown herself to be reliable to me. She didn't promise to do it for me, save me from heart ache or any of those type of markers that I felt like should indicate love. Instead, we walk together. She midwifes me. She leaves me options and choices and we collectively make decisions. I finally came to the realization that the pain that was happening in my life wasn't me being punished or less loved by by creator.

Also, having relationships with individual (very real!) deities I also realized didn't mean that there wasn't an overarching presence that ran through all things. So my "am I monotheistic am I polytheistic" conversation that has been turning in my head no less than 15 years suddenly became a non-issue. It's like the light turned on and I dropped the ax in surprise.

Beyond that, I am working on being a good member of a poly family. This is also difficult as in order to really live this sort of life, you really do have to work out your inner demons. I have had to learn not to punish people for my own insecurities and pain. I also have had to allow others to be not perfect and not punish them for that too. My own heart has been chiding me on not being a two faced hypocrite, meaning: If I believe that all people are worthwhile, and people are allowed to make mistakes, and all people deserve to be treated like full human beings: then, I cannot treat them like cattle to be mistreated as I feel angry, hurt abused or wronged. Removing the tantrum feature from a relationship system has been the most constructive thing I have done for myself in a LONG time. (Sorry for the over share here) But, the bottom line is that I think that many of us use our tantrums to hold people hostage whenever we start to get scared rather than go into any sort of true interior examination.

So... off to make my first African Hot sauce. (sounds really hot doesn't it?!) It's got like 5 kinds of peppers in it, and a whole lotta love!

Ciao!

In response to a few people who have asked what works to help with stress, I went ahead and wrote this up! Have fun!



Meditation key to potency in magical work. It is brings us to an awareness of the reality around us, it opens pathways in our spirit to facilitate the change that we are trying to create, deepening our spirit allowing us to access the deeper mind from which all creation flows and we we discover all things are connected. This crossroads point is very handy in magic!

To meditate is to show up into your life, to uphold your spirit and allow yourself to bloom! This will allow your mind and spirit to relax, integrate in what is happening to you in your life and frees up resources in your spirit to work with what is stressing you.

Some ways in which meditation for our earth based path can be done very easily.

First and the most important:

Working with the breath - breath work is life work. it is the substance that is in everything, enlivens all things and takes our deepest prayers and heart intentions out into the world. The more time you spend with the breath, the more you come to understand its nature. There is a deep and potent mystery here that for the average person is relegated as background function. This is understandable given our present culture's focus on valuing doing versus being.



But the witch knows that we have to pay attention to the big deal things and put them into their proper place. The breath is the way through to the other realms and we cannot get there without it. Breath, wind and air are the substance we use when we chant the sacred words and the barbarous names and more importantly it is the method to which are prayers are sent into heaven to our ancestors, gods and spirits. In old craft it is said that words are the beginning of creation, but silence is the beginning of power. We begin to see forming the two bookends of the inner life: breath and presence.


Because craft is supposed to be practical, (otherwise it isn't craft!) here are some ways in which you can begin to work with this.

• Pick a phrase that you are working on or a word of which you would like to understand the deeper meaning. Do not change the phrase part way through your meditation. Similarly, pick an amount of time that you are doing this for and stick with it. Don't go shorter or longer even if you want to because your spirit and the spirits who uphold you want to be able to trust that you will do what you say.


• Banish your space anyway you would like, this can include with sage or cedar (don't use both together), salt and water, abramelin oil, lavender oil in water, florida water or the Kabbalistic Cross/Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.


• Find a comfy place to sit where you can sit up with your head level to the floor. Try not to slouch. I use a pillow to help with lumbar support.


• Begin to rhythmically breathe, breathe in for a count to four, hold it for two counts and then breathe out for 4 counts, hold for 2.


• Do this until you feel your body begin to relax. Then begin to count from one to ten with each breath being one count. Allow your spirit to move deeper into your body and into your center.


• After the 10th breath take the word you picked and her this word in your head on each out breath. If your word was "peace" you would breath in still using the four fold breath method and then breathe out and on the out breath hear your mind say "peace." Then breath in and then out again and say "peace" in your mind.


• When the allotted time is up, recite a prayer from your tradition, or offer a spontaneous prayer to your ancestors, guides and spirits.


• Banish the space again like you did before!


The Ancient Call or The Use of Barbarous Words
by L. Sophia Kyraphia with deep gratitude to L. Fattah Kyraphia

Working with the Book of Shadows within a tradition's structure has been one of the mainstays of British Traditional Wicca since its inception.  Similar to several of the Abrahamic faiths, we are not without our own controversies as to who wrote the BOS, how it was assembled, how authentic the writings are and methods to measure this.  Our tradition has always been a blend of ceremonial magic, traditional hedgewitchery and cunning craft.   Our specific blend was created by our spiritual ancestor, Gerald Gardner and his work has left a benevolent legacy of magic and myth that has served as a trusted and knowledgeable device to explore the mysteries of our purpose of embodiment in this life. 

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I have been working in my garden this year, and a strange phenomenon has been happening. The pumpkins did not ripen, the fruit on the trees never got big enough to pick, eat, or can. The sun, which normally brightens Oregon with its sunny and mild disposition hid for almost twice the amount of time that it normally does. Something is going on. The controversy about the climate changes that have been occurring rage on between two poles: whether or not it is humanities fault that the changes are happening versus a natural climate shift. These are colorful at best and downright scary in its bottom line.

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Last week, Orion and I were in Portland, Oregon in Rookhaven's Walnut Grove. This grove has had faery work happening in it consistently for about 6 years now, and the land responded strongly and in kind. Opening the faery well, I felt a slight sadness come through, the feeling could be described as ambient and my inner core watched intently, not wanting to blink for fear of missing something. I bathed in the faery waters, it's blue light infusing my body, breathing life to my soul and moving my spirit into alignment with the genus loci. I felt a deep feeling akin to joy at the same time.

Then, we moved into opening the second well, which was to our dreamer. I cleared away the debris that came forward and blew prayers into it with the sacred breath. While I was there, a deep sacred melancholy came over me. I felt the longing of creation for its creator, the deep pangs of desire for union and the joy of being alive permeating my being.

My heart is still chewing on it. My body is in love with life. And my spirit is quieting down in order to listen more.

Blessings Great Mother, for your holy presence.