Category Archives: Witch of This Place

Energy Follows Attention


An interesting conversation with a dear friend has had me thinking for a few weeks about mystical experience. And one of the things that I've realized is that while it's generally not possible (absent LSD or other psychotropics) to have a mystical experience on demand, it is possible to do work that will lay the groundwork and help pave the way. (That's not to say, given the nature of such experiences, that they don't sometimes come to those who have done nothing to prepare for them, or that all the preparation in the world will ensure them. In this way, they're a bit like athletic performance. Some people are natural athletes and can achieve amazing performances without as much practice as it would take, oh, say, me. Others can practice and work out for a lifetime and still not break the record or perfectly execute the grand jete. It nearly drove Salieri crazy.) And I'm reminded of Adrienne Rich's admonition that:
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

And yet, and yet, what I've observed is that daily spiritual practice and an openness to mystical experience, as well as a willingness to go with the experience when it happens (to not shut it down, discount it, run away to some distraction) are certainly helpful.

And I think that all of this is relevant to the notion of developing and being in deep relationship with your landbase, with your own Bit of Earth. Which is, for me, where mystical experiences come from. Few of us living in this technology-studded culture are able, without some work, to connect easily and deeply to our landbase. Like most important relationships, it can take work. And, yet, that "work" -- once we decide to make time for it -- is really quite easy.

1. Pick a place. Better if it's quite accessible and won't take time and effort to get to. It can be your yard, a nearby park, a strip of weeds between your apartment building and the dry cleaners. It can be a potted plant in your window-sealed office if that's your most likely option.

2. Spend time there. That's all. Don't expect to have a conversation or receive insights. Just go there and spend time. Fifteen minutes, if that's what you've got. An afternoon, or a sunrise, or a long lunch break if that works.

3. Repeat Step Two daily, if possible, or as close to daily as you can. Keep doing this.

4. Begin to notice how things change. What new animal did you see? Is the plant that you sit by blooming, losing its leaves, sending out runners? Keep doing this for months and months, years and years. Maybe you'll feel, at some point, like getting a field guide and trying to learn more about that bird who sings to you from an invisible place in the tree or about that weed that seems invasive. Maybe you'll want to look something up on the internet or ask a local gardener who's been working for years in your area.

5. One day, maybe early on or maybe after a long time, you may get a notion to do something: leave a crust of your sandwich for the ants, bring some water in a bottle to pour on the thirsty little plant you've been watching, pick up the trash, plant a vegetable garden or a tree. Maybe this is the land telling you what it needs, maybe it's just your wild whim. An' it harm none, do as ye will.

I pay a lot of attention (and we all know that magic, like energy, follows attention) to the strip of land alongside the Potomac River that I travel through every day on the way to my office. After years of this work, I can recognize subtle changes and I welcome so many manifestations of the landbase's energy as my old friends.

Today, I noticed that the chicory is now in bloom. Chicory's flowers always remind me of the color Alice-Blue, derived from a dress worn by Alice Roosevelt Longworth and they're happy and dancey, the way you'd feel if you wore that dress to a party. I didn't used to know chicory's name; to me it was just that pretty blue flower that grows by the roadside. But eventually, maybe it was chicory and the landbase talking to me, or maybe it was just a whim of my own (and the real lesson is that there's honestly not much distinction), I wanted to know its name and that's led to me learn more and more about it.

Like Miss Alice, (her father is reported to have said that he could "be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.") it's got a mind of it's own and spreads where it will. The chicory growing along the Potomac River in Virginia likely came from some that Thomas Jefferson imported and grew at Monticello. Like a dear old friend who shows up at the first sign of trouble or hardship, without waiting for an invitation, chicory grows in abandoned fields, along roadsides, in places where the land needs to begin to recover itself. Its leaves can be eaten and its roots provide the flavoring in chicory coffee. It is reputed to have medicinal uses and is sometimes encouraged as fodder for livestock.

And it's pretty and happy and sways in the early-morning sunshine as if it were skipping home late from a dance.

What's blooming just now in your landbase? What might you notice if you committed to spend some time paying attention for the next week, or Moon, or turn of The Wheel?

Beltane’s Promise


One of my favorite poems for high summer is Mary Oliver's Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith, where she says:
Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun's brass and even
into the moonlight, but I can't hear

anything, I can't see anything --
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green
stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,

nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,

the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker --
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.

And so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing --
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,

the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet --
all of it
happening
beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn's beautiful body
is sure to be there.

Oliver's "what should I fear . . . let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine" is all about the Eleusian Mysteries to me.

Yet I was thinking of her poem today, mere hours before Beltane, when I went outside to pick oregano from the still-not-all-planted herb bed (covering my ears not to hear the whining of the eager-to-be-transplanted rosemary) and to water the new gardenia bushes that Landscape Guy just put in. I was thinking of the line "every summer/ I fail as a witness" as I contemplated how much I'm going to have to work at my job to complete a project by Monday (and thus not be in the garden) and how I plan every February that, by Beltane, I'll have every seedling planted, every weed pulled, every bit of the garden absolutely perfect. And how, every Spring, I fail as a priestess and fall short of that worthy goal.

I was also thinking of Oliver's assurance that her failure as a witness (and, I hope, mine as a priestess!) doesn't matter because, one morning, the corn's beautiful body is sure to be there. That's Beltane's promise to us, isn't it? That if we do the best we can, and work as hard as we can, and prioritize well, one morning, come high summer, the herb bed will be full of herbs, and the cottage gardens will have been weeded, and the corn's beautiful body is sure to be there. And so, on Beltane morning, we stop working, and weeding, and worrying. We wake up, wash our faces in the dew, and spend a day with our loves, dancing, feasting, and showing the seedlings just what we want them to do.

The promise can fail, of course. One thing agriculture did for our race, one thing that gardening does for me, is to embed and embody our success or failure into the (seemingly, to us,) random whims of this complicated personality we are pleased to call Gaia or "the Earth." We are co-creating, not acting as prime movers. Hail can destroy fruit. Drought can kill gentle plants. Clouds of voracious grasshoppers can show up and consume everything in a night. And so there is a huge part of gardening that is wrapped up in a willingness to take things on faith, to be willing to fail, to, in Teasdale's words, "buy it and never count the cost," or in Kipling's, to:
make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss.

That doesn't mean that Beltane's promise is false. It means that it's more complicated than we often imagine. Beltane is, of course, directly across the Wheel of the Year from Samhein, when everything is all about death, and loss, and descent. And so the promise of Beltane contains all of Samhein, just as Samhein contains all of the lust and joy and growth of Beltane.

I was thinking especially last night about Beltane's promise that, if we prioritize well, things will work out when I left my urgent project, ignored my needy garden, didn't launder the tablecloth or polish the silver, and spent the evening with G/Son. I read him a story about the powers of Earth, Air, Fire, & Water and then we went outside to spend a bit of time before the sun set. I was showing him how the maple seeds come down spinning away from their parent trees and how that's different from the way that the dandelion seeds (that we blew and made wishes on; Sorry, Son) spread by floating on the wind. And then he said, "Watch, Nonna. I'm a maple seed," and he spun around his twilit yard. And then he said, "Watch, Nonna. I'm a dandelion seed," and then he danced the float of a dandelion seed.

I am a woman who actually loves to weed, but, you know, the weeds will still be there in a few days when things settle down. And I am planting many sorts of seeds, and some of them will be growing long after my rosemary, basil, and parsley are lost to the Halls of Memory. And I will count on Beltane's promise.

Will you?

Picture found here.

Arbor Day: A Uniquely Pagan Holiday


This Friday is Arbor Day, a day set aside in the U.S. and many other places to plant, care for, and honor trees. It comes just after Earth Day and just before Beltane. Must be something in the "air."

If you're Pagan, this is the holiday for you! My little county is asking people to discuss their "favorite" trees. What's yours? Have you ever planted a tree? Hugged one? Worked with one to help you ground?

There was a pine tree deep in the forests of the Rocky Mountains. I sat at its base when I was, I think, four years old and realized that my life was going to be mostly about connecting to nature. My memory's hazy. I was "alone" (mom was inside the nearby rented cabin, dad was off fishing, and, well, there were the trees and, I've always believed, a brownish bear nearby) for maybe one of the first times in my life, and I adored it, I was alone and I expanded out into the Earth and ran what I did not know then to call my roots down into the rocky soil to twine around the pine tree's roots.

In A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book, Ceisiwr Serith writes:
You share the joy of your marriage bed unashamed,
Eternal Lovers, with the whole world.
Each opening flower, each leaf unfolding, is your cry of ecstasy.
Each bird or animal mating, each man and woman making love,
Is not a reflection, pale or otherwise, of your lovemaking,
but your lovemaking itself.
Each hug, each handshake, each smile,
between lovers, or family, or friends, or strangers:
children conceived today on this Beltane,
on this happy Beltane.

This time of year, almost all of my sex magic goes to the herb bed and the seven magical trees that I've planted since I moved here. Shortly before they moved, the people who sold this cottage to me planted two fig trees. Every summer when I harvest their fruit, I see sex magic manifest in trees. Where does your magic go this time of year? Is there even a single tree that manifests it?

Last Mabon, my wonderful job took me out to San Francisco and I spent (not enough!) time with some of Mamma Gaia's oldest trees, the Redwoods in Muir Woods. Those trees make my lovely oaks, which have only been around since, oh, say, 1711 when Handel was composing, seem juvenile by comparison. In Muir Woods Meditations, Dag Hammerskjold is quoted as saying that:
Here man [sic] is no longer the center of the world, only a witness but a witness who is also a partner in the silent life of nature, bound by secret affinities to the trees.

I think that's about right. Almost not a week goes by that I don't dream of taking G/Son out there some day so that his little Pisces soul can experience those ancient land wights as I did. One of my most mundane goals this year is to bring my physical health to a level where that will be possible. I'll sit down at the end of this month -- one third of the way through this calendar year -- and evaluate my progress on that goal.

In Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, Michael Pollan quotes Russel Page as saying that, "To plant trees is to give body and life to one's dreams of a better world." As Pollan notes:
It's a sobering responsibility, picking the site for a big tree; get it wrong, plant it too close to the house or an electrical line, and you will someday force a terrible decision on someone. [People who lived here before I did, please take heed!] To plant a big tree is to throw a long shadow across the future of a place, and we're obliged to consider its impact carefully.

This shouldn't make you reluctant to plant trees, it should just make you look up and also consider the Element of Air. Where will this tree be in 20, 30, 40 years? Where will it be when you are gone? Surely, it will be making oxygen, giving wildlife a place to thrive, and, maybe, making fruit. But will it also have room to grow?
Pollan goes on to note that:
[T]he etymology of the word true takes us back to the old English word for "tree": a truth, to the Anglo-Saxons, was nothing more than a deeply rooted idea. Just so, my version of a planted tree -- envoy to the future, repository of history, index of our respect for the land, spring of aesthetic pleasures, etc. -- is "true"; it has deep roots in the culture and serves us well.

Pollan notes how important trees have been within the American, and other, landscapes:
The American Indians were not the first or the only people ever to consider trees divine; many, if not most, pre-Christian peoples practices some form of tree worship. Frazer's Golden Bough catalogs dozens of instances, from every corner of Northern Europe as well as from Ancient Greece, Rome, and the East. For most of history, in fact, the woods have been thickly populated by spirits and sprites, demons, elves and fairies, and the trees themselves have been regarded as the habitations of the gods.

Well, yes. I go to work every day through the Spout Run Woods and, I can assure you, the woods still are.

There are, to my mind, two trees famous and important to American history. First, there is a story, and Goddess, does it ever capture American history, of George Washington admitting that he chopped down a cherry tree. I imagine that Pappa Jung would have had a lot to say about this. And, then, there are all those apple trees that John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) planted all over America, providing cider for generations of Americans,. Are there others that I'm forgetting?

One of my most favorite groups is the American Chestnut Foundation, a group working to re-establish chestnut trees, which once covered most of the MidAtlantic, to their landbase. If you ever want to donate to a great cause, I think that theirs is one.

I'm not suggesting that you add an extra holiday to your calendar between Ostara and Beltane. We're all too busy to ground and pay attention as it is. I am suggesting that you talk to your Circle, Coven, Grove, etc. about how you can, next year, incorporate Arbor Day into your rites.

May there be acorns, pine cones, large trees, weeping willows, dogwoods, redwoods, cherries, and figs in your future. May you and the trees spend this incarnation learning how to breathe each other into your cells and how to encode messages to your grandchildren, etc. into each other.

Blessed Arbor Day.

(Yes, that's John Denver. I'm old. It's gotten a whole lot better since then?)

Oaks and Beltane


My little cottage is surrounded by some (three-to-four-hundred-year) old oaks. They help me to ground; every day I run my roots down into the red Virginia clay where these lovely beings have been thriving since before America was America. They also center me; I know that I am home when I can feel myself surrounded by oaks. They support the squirrel clans who are my closest neighbors and they provide housing for over a half-a-dozen different kinds of birds. They shade my house in the summer, give me more than enough firewood, and provide me with provenance. I'm not embarrassed to announce myself to the Elements or to the Potomac River when I can state that I come from that bit of Earth bounded by all of those old oaks. There are callouses on my hands from raking up oak leaves and acorns; those are my bona fides to the doors between the worlds.

"My" oaks are slowly dying; although oaks can live 400 or 500 years, global climate change is drying out our summers and stressing our oaks, making them subject to oak borers, which kill them within a few years, at the most. Since I moved here almost a decade ago, my neighbor and I have had to take down three of them, and the final few are only going to last another couple of years.

When they go, we will probably replace them with pine trees. No leaves and acorns to rake every Fall. But I am not sure how I will know, without them, that it is Beltane.

Yesterday, I came home from work and sat outside for a long time in the woodland garden. There was not an oak catkin to be seen. Not one. I wandered the whole yard; no oak catkins. Today, I came home from work and there were oak catkins all over my front steps, all over my back deck, all over everywhere. It's as if, at some point in the last 12 hours, the bell sounded and every oak tree in the neighborhood said, "Oh, OK, time for the Great Rite. Here you go!"

There's never been a Beltane here at my little cottage when I haven't gone out, an hour or two before the Witches showed up, and swept mounds of oak catkins off the steps and deck. There's never been a Beltane when I went out at dawn to wash my face in dew and didn't find the dew full of yellow-green oak pollen. How will I know that it's Beltane when all of my old companions are gone?

What tells you, sans doubte, that it's only days until Beltane?

Picture found here.

Violet and Jack

It's been a cold, wet Spring so far, here in the mercurial MidAtlantic. That weather pattern has its own gifts, but does make sunshine extra special. Which made today really wonderful: sunny, warm, cloudless. I had to take a break from my work and sit out in the woodland garden. It's amazing how fast things change from one day to the next, this time of year. Yesterday, the jack-in-the-pulpits were all still curled up like an odd oragami experiment.

This afternoon, many of them are open in all their secretive, spiral, cobra-headed glory. Landscape Guy and I put these in several years ago and it's wonderful to see them thriving and spreading on their shady, little hill.

And, just as suddenly, the violets are in bloom. When I was growing up, we had a truly huge, decades-old mass of them in our yard and I loved to pick great big violet nosegays. The thing about violets is, they're going to grow where they're going to grow (the ones here seem to especially love mulched spots, oh well) and you're not going to stop them. So you might as well say, "Look! Aren't my violets doing well?" and enjoy.

Is there a bit of Earth that's special to you, a space with which you cultivate a regular relationship? What's happening in it just now? What are you doing there just now?

Photos by the author. If you copy, please link back.

Staying in One Place


I have friends who are world travelers; there's so much that's wonderful about ranging all over this perfect planet and experiencing as much of it as possible. I used to wish that I were a better traveler, that I'd managed to travel to more places, that I enjoyed travel as much as I enjoy hearing about my friends' expeditions. And, then, finally, in my forties, I realized that, with the defenses that travel requires my boundary-challenged Sun in Pisces to maintain, and with my Moon in lazy-comfort-loving Taurus, I'm never going to be much of a traveler and that's just going to have to be ok this incarnation.

There are also many rewards of staying in one place, and I've been thinking about one of those this Spring. When you live in one place for a number of years, you develop a relationship with that place. I've lived in this tiny cottage for almost eight years, and nearly all of the plants here are ones that I put into the ground myself. When the snowdrops show up in February, I think that I have a glimmer of understanding of the statement that those who had experienced the Eleusinian Mysteries had no fear of death. It's as if the very ground beneath my feet conspired to send up tiny white messages to me saying, "We will keep our pact. Winter will not last forever. All that dies is reborn." And I breathe in, and I breathe out, and my very being expands a little into the sunlight and down into the warming soil, the soil full of the roots of plants that I have planted.

I had another reminder yesterday when I caught a glimpse of my beloved, old brown rabbit. I absolutely did not expect her to survive the Winter, but there she was, and I know that it's her by that big chunk missing from her ear. Miracle of miracles, the local hawk didn't get her, and my fox didn't sup on her, and the cold and hunger didn't do her in. She's long in the haunch, but still able to show up and enjoy the newly-mown grass and, unless I miss my guess, she's managed one last priestessing of Great Rite and is now gravid with the results.

And immediately I am in that place that we Witches call "Between the World," although, for me, it's often more a case of being "Deep Within This World, The One That's Crammed With Mystical Myst." All Winter while I huddled inside, not wanting to slip and re-break the old ankle -- while I bundled up in sweaters, socks, afghans, and gloves, while I lit fires and glanced out at early sunsets, and fed myself with soups and stews -- all that time my dear friend was cowering inside her form, slowly burning the carrot tops I'd given her and waiting, as I waited, for Spring. And then, one old woman setting an example for another, she emerged as soon as possible and gave herself to the Great Rite, as simply as I give myself to the task of starting seedlings, of clearing the herb bed for new seedlings, of cleaning my altar for Spring. Well, really, her surrender to Life is larger and more unstinting than mine -- and she and I both know that. And this morning, adding my coffee grounds to the soil around the Kleim's Hardy Gardenia jasminoides, I scan the yard for her, grateful to have lived here long enough to have received her lesson of participation and surrender. I am who I am because I am in relationship with her. She is who she is because she allows herself to be fed by me. We are both who we are because our roots are here, in this bit of Earth. She is the old rabbit of this place; I am the Witch of this place. We are both each other.

Picture found here.