Category Archives: Ostara

Ivo! Evoe! Hail, Kore! Ivo! Evoe!


One of the morning prayers that I say is, "Mother, Wash away from my eyes the enchantment of forgetfulness. Allow me, as much as I can know, as much as I can see, to realize that we are all connected. Remind me Mother, that it's all just You pouring You into You." A bit of this prayer is based upon a quote from J. D. Salinger and I forget the source from which I borrowed the rest of it, but I'm grateful to that person for helping me to articulate how I feel about those times when we allow ourselves to be ensorcelled by the Overculture into thinking that the world can be divided into the Sacred and the Mundane, that there are "muggles," that magic and mystery and connection to the Ineffable is what happens only inside a sacred circle, censed with sage and inscribed with occult symbols. And I work hard most days, I do, to keep my eyes open, to see with True Sight, to remember that it's all one immense and breathtakingly beautiful and dangerous and perfect and safe and glittering Web and that I'm a node on that Web, but also that I am the Web and the Web is me. I work at it and some days I do better than others.

And then some days, Grace comes flooding through some phloem in the Universe and I'm synchronistically, randomly, at the right corner, on the right street, at the right moment and there's no work involved at all. The Web is so real and visible and crystal clear that I can't imagine, literally can't imagine, how it can ever seem otherwise. And then I'm the Web wondering how that node ever imagined itself anything but a part of the whole. And then even that is part, a perfect part, of the Web.

I had to go to my office this morning, Sabbat or no, but I left at 2:00 to head home, do some errands, and make ready for Ostara. Sitting at the light, I caught a glimpse of her: a girl at that exact age after her childhood and before her teens. She was reedy and thin, not self-conscious, but unconsciously conscious of herself in the way that no child can ever be. She carried some kind of a book or folder, up flat against her chest, and was skip-running a bit to catch up to her father. I looked away, waiting for the light to turn green, thinking of what needed to be done when I got home. I glanced back; she and her father were now at the corner, waiting for the same light to change. She said something to her father, I could see her braces.

And, then, it happened. All in a moment, all of the enchantment washed away from my eyes, and my body and all my senses were simply, perfectly, by Grace, a mechanism for perceiving the Web from inside the Web, the Web's own unconscious self-consciousness of itself. The sun got inside the girl's hair, which was that heart-wrenchingly beautiful color of carroty-red that is not replicated anywhere else in nature. Her hair was simply, perfectly, by Grace, a mechanism for the Sun to make itself manifest and to show its beauty; without that hair, that color, at that moment, on that girl, at that corner, the Sun could never have been all that it was born to be, and the Sun knew it and I knew it and we were both awed by it.

And there, sitting at the red light, surrounded by the city, headed for the Teddy Roosevelt bridge, there, I was -- and best of all, knew myself to be -- in the presence of The Kore, in the sunlight, on the day of Osara. Not, symbolically, not metaphorically, not in any of the ways that it would make sense to say that I was, just a few feet North of that girl, in the presence of The Kore, but, simply, in the presence of The Kore. Not that The Kore "rode" her or that she somehow pulled The Kore down into her. Not that she stopped being a flesh-and-blood girl with a history and a future and braces. Not that she had ever not been The Kore and not that . . . . Well, that is why the Goddess says, "And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire." Words stop working.

And the light changed and I turned my eyes, full of tears and light, back to the road and, shaking, drove on, deeper into the Web.

May your Ostara be blessed, may all that is good and healthy and fresh bloom into your life, and may you have reason to exclaim, "Hail, Kore! Ivo Evoe!"

Picture found here.

A Poem for Ostara


The Enkindled Spring
~D.H. Lawrence

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up, and the flickering, watery rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, these sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

Picture found here.

Ivo! Evoe!


We're here in this bursting period between Imbolc and Ostara, one of the most dynamic sections of the Wheel of the Year. The "Sun Band" on my Ecological Calendar has been growing wider and wider.

If you've learned to look with love and to pay attention, the trees, at least here in the miraculous MidAtlantic, are no longer the dead brown and grey of Winter. Every branch seems to be suffused with green and, when you cast your eyes over a grove of trees, there's the tiniest, almost-here-almost-not haze of pink, a pink that long-term lovers of the Potomac know is the first color to precede that yellowish-green!-alive haze that happens just a week before ACTUAL LEAVES burst forth. It will be a few weeks, yet, but you can hear the gentle beginnings of the sound. And no branch is still "just" a branch. Every single branch now sports buds, buds that have somehow developed between December, when the snow drove me inside and, well, and today, when I was able to go sit on my rock and make love to my maples and my birch and my crape myrtles and my figs and my . . . . You know.

The app on my iPhone tells me that tomorrow's Full Moon is known as the Quickening Moon. Everything in my blood says: Yes, yes, and, ah! yes! Almost paralyzes you.

And, I have snowdrops in bloom!

/Curtsies

This morning, when I left for work, they were no where to be seen.

But when I came home this afternoon, a good dozen of the 75 that Landscape Guy and I planted last November were in bloom in the Northern (I know!!!) cottage garden. I walked past. Did a double take. Walked back. Literally fell on my knees. I can't think when anything has made my heart fly so high or my spirit soar so wildly. ("Too easily pleased," my mother used to say of me. It's true, but it's a blessing, not a curse.) I think that I need to make this an annual event, a hanami when I can text all of my friends and say, "Come over this afternoon for champagne, dates w/ goat cheese, radishes with bread and butter, and snowdrop viewing!" Next year, if you're on my email list, be ready!!!

What makes you foolishly happy in the early Spring?