Category Archives: Do Magic Locally

What Would It Take for You to Smile Before Your Ancesors?


As a part of my daily practice, I ground and make contact with the cold, red, Virginia clay upon which my little cottage is built. I twine my own roots around the deep roots of the ancient oaks, tall maple, triune river birch, crape myrtle trees, new magnolias, Japanese temple pines, gardenias, lilacs, lavender, rosemary, and sage. This part of my practice can actually take a reasonable amount of time. It's like checking in with a bunch of different family members; you wouldn't begrudge that time or try to rush it, would you? And I will go to my grave believing that it matters, that the Earth is healed when we spend time with her, touch her, send our love directly to her.

Lately, I am more and more aware of the way that a horizontal (about three-foot-tall (or deep))-layer of cold has spread not only over my bit of Earth, but of how it has, as well, spread for several feet underground.

I admit that, when I walk outside every morning to feed the birds (barefoot, if at all possible and reasonably safe, just to remind me that I am a priestess of the Earth and need to physically connect with Her), I examine the sunny protected Southern exposure near my deck for some sign that the crocus and daffodils (of which the tips are only now just barely visible) have grown a bit. I walk outside every morning to the car and scan the hellebores for a bud or two, scan the mulched, North-facing, cottage gardens for any sign that the Gallanthus, aka, snowdrops, are beginning to sprout, even though I know that they're a good 4 weeks away, at least.

And, yet, what my bit of Earth is telling me is that, until that layer of cold rises out of the red clay, there won't be any flowers. I'll know to really look for the flowers when I ground and find that the cold has stopped penetrating deep into my red Virginia clay. That's not what I expected to learn when, a novice, solitary Witch, I began, years ago, to daily practice grounding, but it's what grounding is teaching me, just now, all these years later. "Here, my dear, here's a deep revelation: Winter's cold seeps below ground and that influences when things bloom." Well, um, yeah, but I was thinking more, you know, dramatic revelations, lightning, dawn cracking thorough clouds, and, well, yeah, of course, cold/Earth/plants, yeah, ok, but, um deep insights? "Here, my dear, here's a deep revelation: "Winter's cold seeps below ground and that influences, when things bloom." OK, I learn, pace, Mr. Roethke, by going where I have to go.

And, then, I drive beside my beloved Spout Run and alongside my beautiful Potomac River and see the ice that has been there for weeks and weeks - unheard of here just South of the line that Mr. Mason and Mr. Dixon decided to draw. Last weekend, I was driving G/Son home, and we went over the bridge from Virginia into Maryland, across the Potomac River. Almost always, I tell him, "Now we're driving over the beautiful Potomac River," and then I call out, "Good morning, beautiful Potomac River!" This time, I said, "Now we're driving over the beautiful Potomac," and, before I could say anything else, G/Son said, "Good morning, Potomac!"

You know, I have been a good deal more lucky than I had any right to be. I raised an amazing, kind, gorgeous, good-humored, feminist Son, who married a beautiful, down-to-Earth, kick-ass-yogini of a hera, and who is an Earth-shatteringly-amazingly good Father. I've loved me some poets and priests of nothing. I've taught a lot of poor kids a lot of stuff and I've organized some educational programs to ensure that a lot more got taught. I've kicked a whole lot of law school ass, and I've written motions and briefs that have, if I do say so myself, been improbably successful. I've advised a number of wind and solar companies, thereby, in Lovelock's words, cushioning The Fall. I've taught one or two amazingly bright young lawyers how to think about legal issues and how to write good legal prose. I've been friends with a whole lot of amazing women. I've made a warm, welcoming home that frequently houses Witches and their rituals and provides an afternoon's succor for activists who need to sit on a porch. I've done magic for Code Pink, talked truth to power, and poured wine for wounded revolutionaries. I've worked with an inspired greenman to make a garden and ritual space. I've marched in every important march of the last half-century, handed out campaign literature, helped to get a woman on the ballot in VA and voted for her in the primary, done pro bono work to ensure voting rights, and fed people who were hungry. And if I were to die with nothing to proclaim to my ancestors beside the fact that my G/Son has a first-name, "say good morning when you pass" relationship with the Potomac River and that I know when my bit of Earth is still cold, well, I'll die happy and answer gladly, that's all I can say.

May you have a deep relationship with your own bit of Earth and may you find a river or mountain or moor to which your family may become tied.

Picture found here.

New Beginnings


Come, Come whoever you are, wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times, Come, yet again. Come, come. ~Rumi


Here it is: 1/1/11. The first day of the first year of a brand new decade in the 21st Century. If there were ever a world in need of a new beginning, then surely, with apologies to Anne Bradstreet, we. If magic is, indeed, the ability to change consciousness at will, then anything that helps us to declare a new beginning is a magical tool. And calendars are, for me, one of the most amazing magical tools of all time. You can take away my silver athame with the gold Celtic knot hilt. You can take away my magical glass chalice with its base of overlapping silver leaves. You can have my black huntress gown with Hecate's hounds bordering the hem and the deep sleeves that untie for hunting and horseback riding. You can take away my pinion incense, the kind that always lights and transports me to Coyote's realm -- you can take away all of those and I can do magic with my finger, the palm of my hand, a deep grounding. But please don't take away my calendars.

Calendars were one of the deepest and most profound magical tools that our ancestors ever created. Knowing when the Winter Solstice would occur, knowing when the reindeer would run, knowing when it was safe to put the carefully-saved and painfully-uneaten-through-the-starving-times seed corn into the ground without fear of a rotting rain or a killing frost: that was the magic that calendars worked for our ancestors, for those magic-workers whose RNA lives on in us, those whose magic was strong enough to allow them to survive long enough to produce us, we who are here at this time of planetary crisis. They must have had a reason. (And, at a time of new beginnings, it can be important, as well, to focus on continuity. Each of us is here today because we come from an unbroken line of survivors. And they survived, in part, because they knew when it was time for a new beginning. I'm here, prospering in the MidAtlantic region of North America, because some teen-agers in Sweden and England looked around themselves a century or two ago and decided, "Time to start over somewhere else." I'm here because my thirty-something parents looked around themselves in Boulder and said, "Time to start over on the East Coast." I'm here, and my wonderful Son, DiL, and G/Son are here, because I looked around myself in the rural South a few decades ago and decided, "Time to start over in the big city.")

And calendars are every bit the magical tools here in the digital age (where we carry them around inside our iPhones, weighing less than 5 ounces) that they were when our ancestors painstakingly constructed them on a grand scale in Newgrange, Maeshowe, Chaco Canyon, Great Zimbabwe, Tiwanaku in Bolivia, and at other places.

Now's a great time to buy calendars; they generally go on sale beginning today. Book stores are a good place to find calendars; this year my wonderful DiL helped me to find Sally Smith's Fairy House wall calendar at a bookstore (she also found G/Son his first calendar, with pictures from The Clone Wars -- an epic that I think is going to influence G/Son the way that the Arthurian/Morganian epic always has and still does influence me.) You can also buy wonderful calendars on line. I wouldn't be without a copy of We'Moon's calendar on my altar and I bought The Ecological Calendar for my desk at work. iPhoto, which came loaded on my laptop, lets you create calendars and I make wall calendars every year, with pictures taken of G/Son over the previous year, for family members. Making this calendar is almost always the deepest, most intense magical working that I do during the year, taking several weeks, and full of carefully-worded magical intent for the people closest to me. Few of them know of the magical meaning of the calendars; they just enjoy the yearly review of G/Son's growth. Next year, I am thinking of making calendars that show the growth of my garden, just for me and Landscape Guy, and just for the chance to do the same deep magical working for my bit of Earth that I do for my family.

There is almost no end to the magic you can work with a calendar. One of the simplest magics is to go through and plot important dates. When I write down on my desk calendar that it's G/Son's birthday, for example, I do a serious magical working for his health, growth, development, and safety over the coming year. I impress that magic onto that date and I release it when I get to that date on my calendar. When I write down meetings with my Circle and magical friends, I send a bit of magical energy forward in time to those dates. If my goal is to, for example, work in 8 weight trainings a month, I not only note those trainings when they occur, I also go forward to the end of the month and make a note to myself to check in and ensure that I lived up to my commitment to myself. When I note that a brief is due on a given date, hell yeah I do magic related to the success of that brief, impress the magic into the calendar, and release it when my paralegal presses the button to file the brief. I send my astral self deep into the workings of my iPhone and dance deep magic into the dates when I meet with Landscape Guy, when friends have birthdays, when I honor dead relatives. I even do a magic to coordinate the wall calendar in my breakfast nook, the We'Moon calendar on my altar, the G/Son calendar on my office wall, the Ecological Calendar on my desk, the electronic calendar on my laptop, office computer, and iPhone, well . . . you get the idea.

And, with calendars, every day is a new beginning. Every week is a new beginning. Every month is a new beginning. See how magic they are?

What's past is past. All that matters is: what will you do with this new hour, new day, new week, new year?

Calendars are, in my world, tools of Air, every bit as much as are Swords. Dawn. New light. Fresh breezes. Spring. New Moons. New beginnings.

Here are a number of magical workers blogging about the possibilities of a new year:

Seeing omens for the new year.

Basic tools, but also some amazing Tarot exercises.

A look to the skies.

Open your feet to the powers beneath you. Open your crown to the powers above. Feel the rising and descent. Feel where these things meet, within your belly and your heart. You are becoming, you are shaping, you are more. Bring the light.

Almost 2 journal entires a month, beginning with: 1. What is it I am committed to starting? 2. What is it I am committed to finishing?

A call for accountability.

Becoming who we are.

Organizing your year around the power of just one word.

How will you wield your calendars this year? What important magic will you have done when 12/31/11 turns into 1/1/12?

Picture found here.

Staying in Love When It Snows


As regular readers know, it's important to my spiritual practice to be in active relationship with a specific piece of land, rather than just having warm feelings for the intellectual construct of "the Land" or "Earth." A large part of my daily practice involves getting in touch with and listening to the specific, small (less than a quarter acre) bit of land on which I live and garden. When I lived in an apartment with no yard, I adopted some spots near me as "mine."

Even in Winter, if it's at all possible, I'm bundled up and outside, even if only for a short time. I've learned that, as long as I can keep my hands warm (I've been known to wear mittens over gloves and one of my goals for the coming year is to learn how to knit those fingerless gloves that I could wear over full gloves), I don't really mind the cold, at least down to around 25 degrees or so. Finding out how to dress comfortably for the outside (for some people, it means fleece-lined boots, while for others it's a hat or a big warm scarf around the neck) can make it easier to maintain a relationship with your bit of Earth even in Winter. And, really, not knowing what a place is like in Winter is sort of like "knowing" a person, but being ignorant about a huge chunk of their life.

That said, as an old woman with a previously-broken-and-still-held-together-with-screws-and-plates ankle, I'm more than careful about not going outside when it's snowy or icy. When you really can't be outside, one way to deepen your relationship is to learn about your land. What do you know about the First Peoples who lived there before you? Do you know where your water comes from and where your waste goes? Can you identify the birds and other animals who live in relationship with the same bit of Earth as you do? Can you identify the trees that live with you? A lot of that information is likely available on-line. Additionally, Field Guides, which you can often get quite cheap secondhand, are a great way to get to know more about your area. A coven might want to buy a set and circulate them. I keep, for example, Birds of Virginia, on my porch so that when I see a bird I don't recognize, I can try to identify her. But in the Winter, when I can't go outside, I'll read a page or two every day in order to try and learn about local birds. And now, thanks to Margaret Roach, I'm in lust for this: The Bird Songs Bible. If you have children, all of these make good family activities on snow days and are a great way to instill a love of nature in the next generation.

If you garden, keeping a garden journal can be another way to deepen your understanding of your bit of Earth. During the year, I'll note on Facebook when each new flower first blooms. Then, on a snowy day in Winter, I'll go through and make a chronological listing in my garden journal. It's interesting to see, from year to year, the patterns and the variations. More serious gardeners additionally keep track of last frost, rainfall, hours of sunlight, and temperatures. Margaret Roach also has up an interesting podcast about the process of preparing to order seeds for next Spring, another great way to spend a snow day.

Finally, even when you can't be outside physically, you can do meditations and trance work to communicate with your bit of Earth. Let it know that you want to listen and then be willing to open up and learn what is taught. You can do art inspired by your relationship. You can raise energy and send it to, for example, the shivering animals, the roots deep under the snow, the earthworms and bees that are so necessary to the Earth's survival.

How do you keep your relationship going when it has to be, for a short time, a "long-distance" relationship?

Picture found here.