Beach Bliss

So this last weekend found me up north again, visiting my family this time, at my mom's beach house. For the record, I feel so blessed that she lets us come up there and soak in all that wonderful energy floating around. What a gift!

Also, I was able to link up with my little brother, Blackwood, and his boyfriend, The Tinkerer. They made the long haul up north for a stay just short of 48 hours, and it was a fun-filled couple of days together. We snuck away for a stretch on Saturday afternoon, leaving my little people and our other siblings at the house while we found a new metaphysical book store. The going, the doing, the browsing and the subsequent shopping in the quaint little seaside town were some of my favorite parts of the weekend. I always get a great hit of Spirit when I'm with those two. They live so strongly in their beliefs that I always come away feeling more attuned to my own beliefs as a result.

On the way to the bookstore, I mentioned to Blackwood that I was feeling ready to set up my altar and get things moving along, but that I'm heeding the advice of my cards and taking things slowly within this learning process. He and The Tinkerer took it upon themselves to find some altar items for me while we were walking through the shops, and in his sweet way, he presented me with the perfect pieces that honors what I honor. I was completely touched.

We also spent some time talking about relationships, and how the ones with which we struggle are really about us. Every time I see my friend make a decision that is fueled by her addiction instead of by truth, it actually stirs up in me the feelings I had for almost two decades when I watched my youngest brother lose himself and his life to heroin. I get addled, but that's my issue, not hers. I am still struggling to find my place within the friendship, but the lucky thing is this: there's no emergency. I have enough distance to watch things unfold for a while without needing to do something obnoxious or damaging. I can take my judgment over here in this little corner and sit still for a while until I work that out and get over things, or decide to change something.

Perhaps I should do a little magick to work some this out a bit. Perhaps I'll hurry along and set up my altar after all, especially now that I have some pieces of the beach with me. I'm curious how this will fly with my very traditional mother-in-law who is planning to visit at the end of the weekend. Could be funny.

Fairy Magick

Well, the fairies seemed to want that last post all to themselves. They've come up a lot for me lately, as I'm currently reading a chapter book with my little witch called Ruby the Red from the Rainbow Fairy collection. Also, the fairy trees we made this winter are colorful little pops of energy when you stare out the back door into the yard. They always make me smile. Here's a picture:

 It's not the best visual, but there are three containters: a lady bug, dragonfly, and blue glass vase that each holds one wish from each of my little people here at the house. They're a little water logged from the recent rains, but the ink has washed away and the bottoms of the vase are filled with colorful pink water, which makes the girls think there's magick at work.

I've mentioned before that my fairy cards are in hiding, and it's been part of my goal to unearth them, along with countless other items that have yet to be unpacked from our last move. I could use a little help from them, as what I'm doing doesn't seem to be working.

This past weekend I met up with Gypsy Girl at a borrowed beach house up north. We spent some time playing with our cards and catching up on the details of our lives, and it was restorative as all get out. We also linked up with Elfin One, a bit, on the phone, and it was great to be all together in the same place, albeit briefly. I am so lucky to have enduring friendships that evolve right along with me, and I know that tending to them with texts, email and calls is another way to connect to Spirit, as these relationships feed me in a way that no others do.

I have begun to struggle a little with one of my relationships, however, because I can't understand why a dear friend is unwilling to live her best life. Listen to me, all powerful one over here who thinks she knows it all. But really, it's hard sometimes to sit back and watch someone you love not take that next step that will make her happy, that will fill her up with purpose and power, and that will let her be her very best self. It's actually more than hard--it's agonizing. I want so much to help, to push just a little harder, to help her to see that it's okay to be scared, but that sometimes the best change comes from the scariest starting point. But how can I do this? What's my place in this friendship? What are my rights? The part of me that knows how not to ruin the friendship sits and quietly supports. But the part of me that wants to be fed by truth, by absolute and essential truth, can't stand it anymore. There's sometimes a great amount of pretending that goes on, and frankly, my bullshit-o-meter is at zero. I'm tired of pretending, and tired of trying to dance around the very large elephant sitting in the center of every single conversation we have.

On Thursday, I have my next Covenant Circle meeting, and our topic is "Suffering," which comes at a good time for me, clearly. I think I'll introduce this idea of suffering in the friendship I'm struggling with, as I'm not sure that my sweet friend realizes that she's got to be getting fed somehow by this suffering on some level. We all do this, I think, unknowingly. I am having such difficulty watching it unfold any longer. It doesn't help that there's a level of addiction being fed, as there's fundamentally something that's broken at the heart of it all. I just wish I could stop being so angry about it and move back to where I've been for years now, sending love and light, praying, being supportive. But this makes me suffer.  What to do?

In the way of true cowards, I can speak freely about it on this post because my friend doesn't read this blog. And I'm sure she wouldn't appreciate hearing about my trouble with the friendship in such an open forum. But it helps me to recognize that once you open the door on truth, you can just shut it again and pretend it never was opened.

A Little Help From Our Friends

Just when I think I've reached my limit with this house and its mind of its own, I read this lovely excerpt from Blackwood (powerful leader of a NC coven and adorable younger brother) who suggests welcoming the fairies into the mix to help get your home in order. He writes: "As a hedge witch who is interested in hearth and home, contacting the fairies is an excellent idea.  While home is a place to relax, it takes a lot of energy to maintain a healthy, happy home.  The fairies can help lighten your load."  

Retreat

Recently, I've been hunkering down and working on my essay, and have to confess that I have no idea how I'm going to go back to school and balance my normal "work" at home if I can't even get the application together without the house falling apart. It's slow going and sort of exasperating, the level of organization it takes to run a house. To be honest, I rather loathe it. I was not cut out to be a homemaker, I think, and we will be happiest someday if we could outsource all the parts of homemaking that don't feed us.

Ha! Wouldn't that be lovely?! Not going to happen for this chic. I am trying to create a sense of purpose and joy in undertaking the things around the house I most detest. I don't enjoy searching for lost socks. I rather don't appreciate scrubbing pink Dora toothpaste from the light switch in the upstairs bathroom. I could do without rehanging the front shingle that fell off the house during the last hurricane. I wouldn't mind someone else doing these things. Somedays I actually wonder if I could conjure up the money and person to come in and take over. Again, this just isn't going to happen. I usually whine about it for a while, then go make something delicious in the kitchen and feel that all's right with the world again.

Am looking forward to having a mini retreat this weekend at a borrowed beach house. No children or Cute Husband, no real responsibilities, and a world of quiet. I am looking forward to reconnecting with Spirit, watching some dvds of Downton Abbey, and catching up with my favorite soul sisters. Most likely I'll be touching base from there with you all, too.

One, Two, Three...Click

At the end of The Wizard of Oz Dorothy wants nothing more than to go home. Glenda, the Good Witch, tells Dorothy that she just has to click her heels three times to find herself right back where she started, in her own backyard. I love this idea that we already have everything we need, and that when we go searching, usually we end up right back where we started, too. This resonates pretty fiercely for someone who has moved every two years in the past 20. It used to be that I had start-over-itis, and looked forward to exploring the next place we lived. After about two years, I'd start to get restless. I took great pride that in my last teaching position, I stayed for three years. It seemed like an enormous accomplishment for me.

This wanderlust has served me well. I've met wonderful people, stepped in plenty of different oceans, climbed some mountains, lived in a country that spoke languages different than mine, learned some cultural sensitivity, and mostly, learned how fantastic it feels to go home. Home has always symbolized where my mom is, and if you met her, you'd understand why. In a life of constant motion and travel, she has always been the anchor for me. I could always just go home, settle in, and get back my bearings.

While we were living overseas, my mom got breast cancer and it was perhaps the biggest wake up call of my life to date. She is healthy and fine now, but it slowly dawned on me that if you don't create in yourself your own anchor, you might someday become unmoored. This is hard to do, for me at least, in a life of constant motion. For myself and the family I'm raising, I realized that I needed to do a better job of creating that sense of home for ourselves, regardless of where we lived. This is what I'm up to right now. I'm digging in, despite hitting the two year mark, when typically the brown cardboard moving boxes magically appear. I'm so grateful for the reprieve, and look forward to at least one more year here in this home we love.

When I was in high school, I took a French class and was the only student in it. My teacher was sort of lazy, but she was more creative than I gave her credit for at the time. During that year, she assigned Candide for me to read, an endlessly long (for me) and meandering story that tested my limited knowledge of French and caused me some anguish. Back then, I sort of nodded a lot when she explained the nuances of Voltaire's philosophical musings, the basic jist of which was, "Il faut cultiver notre jardin" which loosely translated means, "One must cultivate our garden." At the time, I thought it was a sort of lame ending for a book, but when I lived in North Africa, worrying about my mother during her sickness, and craving being closer to home, Candide's revelation kept circling through my brain.

And I got it, really, that all he's saying is that we need to cultivate our own garden, tend to our own business and needs, and instead of traveling all over the globe, we can just look, ahem, in our own backyard. Wiser, more grounded folk might not need to travel to another continent to figure this out. What can you do? This is apparently my process.

On a literal level, there's something to be said for being in one spot long enough to plant roots--both in the everyday details of life, and in the flower beds out back. Growing something takes a long time: friendships, routines, a sense of home. And if you sit still long enough, you can let things compost a bit. I've been doing a lot of this lately, and it's sort of wonderful. When you aren't up and moving, you can focus on big picture things in a different way.

All this is to say that I am planting something pretty exciting in this garden of mine. Today I wrote the rough draft of an essay I'm preparing for an application to graduate school. I want to get a degree in counseling, so today I started. Of course, it's an online degree program that I can pack up and move to the next place. What's most exciting to me is that this degree is just training me to do what I already feel I do. I already am who I need to be to chase after this dream--it just fits me. So today after I finished my first draft, I smiled and thought of those ruby slippers, not because I was feeling nostalgic, but because it's refreshing to feel like I'm traveling a path that's of my own making, and that is my life's purpose. I mean that's not something that happens to me every day. It's worth some red glitter.

Thanks to Brigit

When I used to imagine what it would be like to have the time and courage to witch out a little, I always envisioned myself in some cottage in the forest, where I could say things like, "This morn I walked in the wood and wandered the path of green" or some such crap. It might look something like this:

It's taken me a while to realize that that cottage in the forest is an ideal and that the goal here in all of this lifey muck is to create that cottage where I am, to be where I live, and to give that ideal some legs in my real life. So instead of waiting to move to the Cotswalds to wander my gardens in a gauzy white gown with a wreath of roses in my hair, I will do what I can where I am. Take the kids to school, clip coupons, switch the laundry, and then, in the middle of all that, say a prayer beneath the full moon, or stir the cauldron in the kitchen while I'm making Sloppy Joe's for dinner.

I don't think I understood this fully until I visited Brigit's chapel this past summer in Kildare. While there, I wandered the grounds, prayed inside the fire pit behind the church, and felt on a very deep level that I had been there before a long time ago. The message I took home with me was this: I may have once been a devoted follower of Brigit, and may have served her in a life of spiritual austerity, but this is now, and being Pixie Girl in the here and now, I can still serve her in the time in which I am living. My service to the magickal might not seem as sacred in a house with aluminum siding than in a thatched roof hut, but that's all just a matter of perception.  It's all one.

"I'm Not a Witch--I'm Your Wife!"

I was watching The Wizard of Oz on Saturday morning with my two witches in training (6 and 3 years old), and was struck by the idea that the whole concept of a witch has been around forever, yet there's still an enormous stigma attached to saying out loud that you believe in them. We seem to inundate our children with fairies and witches and princesses, convince them that these things are the magical parts of life, and then when they're old enough to know better, we tell them all of that stuff was just make believe and to get on board with what real life is all about. It's a strange cycle. They have to unlearn to live with a sense of magic and wonder in life to cope as adults, yet it seems to me that a little magic is exactly what we could all stand to have a little more of.

(Note: My little brother/Witchy mentor who is an official Wiccan leader has told me that when we say magick, we need to misspell it. Good to know.)

I spent some of my teen years and early 20s re-watching The Princess Bride, a movie about true love, honor, and yes, a bit of magick. My favorite character is played by Carol Kane. She is married to Miracle Max, the dishonored medicine man who the king's son banished from the kingdom. The main characters end up at Max's house when they need a miracle. Billy Crystal plays this shlumpy character with perfection, and Carol Kane plays his crone wife with great hilarity. Here's a photo of her:

At one point, Mad Max tells the main characters that he can't create magick anymore, and Kane comes screeching onto the screen screaming, "Liar! Liar!" Mad Max says, "Go away, Witch!" and she retorts, "I'm not a witch! I'm your wife!"

This scene always knocks me out. I throw around this line from time to time when Cute Husband comments on my time with my two favorite witches, Gypsy Girl and Elfin One. It takes us back to when we were dating and would loaf around watching movies together on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

It's hard to incorporate a sense of magick into your life if you don't acknowledge that it's floating all around us anyway, despite what we're taught to believe. I'm working hard at staying plugged in. Some days it's easier than others.