Bespoke Herbals @ Backyard Botanics

The year’s longest day.  Birds singing, strawberries ripening, Rhubarb ready – lettuce starting to bolt.  It’s the first wave of summer goodness and the trip the sun takes from here is down.  We have entered the realm of the holly king.  Seems impossible – we just got to summer.  But there you are – the only constant is change.

The magic if midsummer is about realization in the moment and enjoying what’s good, what’s present and available.  This is the time to count blessings and thank whatever divine source you connect to for the talents and skills you’ve acquired, the comforts you’ve garnered, the relationships you enjoy, your job or means of support.

And for change, for transformation, it could be anything from making a delicious crisp that nurtures your heart and taste buds to sitting out to watch the sun rise with a cup of coffee and listening to the birds sing to making a resolution filled with self love and trust.

This year I worked on healing wounds – neglect-wounds.  I grew from a child to a young woman without the support and love of a mother present to care for me.  Not when I was 2, not when I was 20, not when I had my kids, and not now.   She just had more important things to do.  Friends to see.  Whatever else she prioritized.  She might have been too young to be an attentive mother.  She might have been too damaged or fragile or maybe just too selfish.  It doesn’t matter why.  The magic is in seeing it, accepting it, and making lemonade with your lemons.   I also made a crisp and sat out at sunrise.  🙂

This midsummer I thanked myself for being a better mom for my kids than I had.  I thanked myself for the self-reliance I developed taking care of myself.   And I promise to be a better parent to myself than my mother was.  Lemonade.

The magic of midsummer is ease.  Enough ease to pause and take stock.  Enough light to see a little farther, a little longer.  And rhubarb, strawberries, lettuce, grass, trees, birds, sweet, warm air.

Every single act is sacred.  Every single thought is sacred.  Every single feeling is sacred. Each, created, sends ripples out into the world, in turn moving energy, perception, action, thoughts, feelings.

May our actions, thoughts, and feelings heal, comfort, support, and create awareness this summer solstice.  May we all have what we need.  May we all be happy.  May we all be well.

The Northeast is experiencing Beltane more or less on time this year.  Sex in the fields, yeah.  May 2nd is expected to be crazy warm this year – the sun will rise on warm soil and heat the Earth like it means it.  Radishes and lettuce will wonder what happened and humans will feel the dirt on their backs and round buttocks like a song…

And it’s time to think on what we are cultivating.  What’s your inspiration?  To be immersed in a drown-you-passion?  To have a free-yourself romance?  Or something cooler – tranquility?  Deeper awareness or connection.  Money.  A new job doing what you love?  A new home, a lover that sets you on fire? Care-free care for the people who need care so that you can rest?  What do you want?  See it.

Now is the time to plant the seed.

My coven mates:  For my new home and housemates to be felicitous, grateful, creative, alive.  For sex to be wet, warm, deep, fast, hot.  For my lover to be as fabulous as ever. For my growing season to be happy, full of dance.  For my garden to be a creative space full of wild growing flowers and vegetables.  Dinner together,  For us to be healthy, energetic, loving, creative, self-aware.

We all boil it down to what matters and feels good.  Whatever you plant, when you push your index finger, your will, into the soil – make it real.  Feel the moist richness receive and surround your fingertip, smell the soil’s rich fecundity.  Know that germination is magic.  Magic and love.

It’s a new moon.  A good time to make room for what we want, let go of what we don’t, declutter.  And Ostara – the spring festival – is nearly here, so spring cleaning is a thing right now.  So is deciding what we want to plant this year.

Being a complicated, messy business, life demands resourcefulness and intention.  We all have to find our way, emphasis wherever it feels right.

For me, it’s always been the craft.  With a graduate degree in comparative religious studies that, not surprisingly omitted the craft, I have proven to myself over and over that this is the road I travel, the practice that calls and supports me.  Studying the history of religion was a valuable way to rationalize it – my reasoning mind demanded it.  As a young woman whose family are strict christians of the Lutheran variety, I had to give myself permission.

And so here I am, about 25 years in.  It’s Ostara – happens to be my mother’s birthday.  She’s a perfect Ostara baby – fresh, open, whimsical.  She has the unique capacity to start fresh whenever she needs to and find joy in a new direction with no remorse or misgivings.   Think eggs, seeds, crocus, and all that is beautiful and promising in spring – endlessly.

She drives me crazy, as mothers do, but I respect her nature and her gifts.

While she recognizes the challenges of a given situation she frequently chooses to look past them to what she wants – and to frame things accordingly.   For a practical, earthy Scorpio type it’s hard to deal with sometimes, but I see the beauty and value of it.

Related to this, I have found that witchcraft demands a keen eye and the capacity to deeply understand a situation, its causes and effects.  Why?  Because spell work can backfire.  Banish something you don’t want and other things – things you cherish – can go with it.  Or it leaves a void that makes room for something you’d rather not have in your life. Call an experience to you and likewise you trade it for something else, or it travels with something you didn’t expect (yes, this is an experienced witch talking).  In other words: be careful what you wish for.  Be thoughtful, be in the flow, and know how you got to where you are.  Since none of us *really* knows what we’ll find when we get to wherever we are going, a little faith in ourselves, the universe, and its mysteries is important, too…

Even with the wind still blowing and the snow still protecting the ground, I am breathing a relieved welcome to spring, because that’s how winter lets go in the Northeast and makes room for the light.  Notice the birds singing more and the first buds on trees.  It’s subtle, but it’s here.

In that spirit, if you need to let go of something in your life be sure to fill that space with something lovely — balance your intentions and your spells — cover what you are calling in when working to move things out.   Thetravelingwitch.com has some fun suggestions and methods for the curious.

And to my sister and brother witches in the craft – cheers!  May you fill your Ostara eggs with love, joy, and a good dose of fun this coming season.

xoxoxo

Well, unless you are Stormy Daniels, I guess.  But that’s not what this is about.

Reading the many articles and statements that result from the #metoo movement is both a catharsis and a series of considerations.  While I can’t possibly express how offended and indignant I am at much of what I’ve read, not all of the stories seem worthy of my outrage.

Conversely, there was the time I went into my professional review – something I had anxiously awaited, as all hopeful hard-working young people do – only to come face to face with a monitor displaying pornography.  “You don’t mind, right?”  my supervisor said, smiling.

I did.  And I told him I did.

And I have other stories.  Some of them more shocking and less funny than that one.  But all of this is complicated.  Eros is complicated.  I also have had wonderful relationships with men I’ve met at work – relationships that would never have developed if one or both of us hadn’t been willing to risk rejection with some small overture that went beyond the most expected of professional communications.  The blueberry muffins home baked and proffered in the kitchen over the water cooler, the inquiries about how my work was going, the suggestion we go for lunch – offsite.  Things can become colorful with a bit of encouragement so it’s worth considering where the lines of convention ought to be; I’d argue we don’t want to become rules-robots.

For my own part, while I’m not known for throwing people I find attractive against a wall and stuffing my tongue into their mouth, I’d hate to think that I or any of the women I know aren’t at liberty to express our interest in someone – that would seem … well … awful.  And it cuts both ways.  I can’t emphasize enough that while my own experience of inappropriate sexual advances have overwhelmingly been of men carrying them out, and of them being power-based in their origins, it would not be true to say that I, as a woman am not in command of my sexuality.   And frankly, in the spirit of achieving the kind of equality I think is sensible, I’d rather bring us even rather than engage in castigating each other.  Unless you’re Matt Lauer, a rapist, Harvey Weinstein, or one of their ilk.  In which case you deserve to be castigated.  Or worse.

So I would like to offer the following as a kind of start at setting guidelines for our consideration:

If your first expression of interest (called thus in goodwill) would NOT appear in the pages of a Jane Austen novel (with language adjusted for modern tongues) it’s probably not appropriate as a first overture.

If, to correct you, anyone has to physically displace any part of your body, you can assume you are out of line.

Porn is out unless you’ve already had sex.  And talked about it.  Porn, I mean.

Please do not tell me what I want.  I can tell you what I want.

No definitely means no.  Even if one says “no, thank you.”  It’s still no.

I am not in any way questioning the import and timeliness of #metoo.  Believe me, my stories really could fit right in with some of the most shocking ones.  But I want us to be careful.  Nothing stands in for good old-fashioned personal responsibility and self possession.

Unless we’re talking about Matt Lauer.  That guy really pisses me off.

With all of that particulate matter banished to warmer skies, the northeast night sky shimmers with a giant white moon hanging in the east.  It’ll track toward the west in a south-facing sky, illuminating deer in the snow, new years revelers, and trees frosted with ice.

In this sleeping time there’s the comfort food and the snow boots carrying us through snow drifts.  Maybe on winter vacations, great aluminum wings lifting us high into the sky, pointing toward southern destinations.

Here in Massachusetts the days have been arctic cold– 7 degrees farenheit as I write this — my queue to stay warm inside, resting.  The heating system in our old farmhouse barely keeps up with the cold, drafts that make me think a door has been left open sometimes blow through.   I remind myself this house has weathered winters since 1750, family after family living here – the first owner a major in the revolutionary war.  The horse hair walls and old plank floors look strong, solid, reassuring, with 9 over 9 windows framing the beautiful, clear night sky and luminous moon, the fireplaces and roof standing where they’ve stood for 267 years.

Another year under the winter sky for this old house and its people for now, 2017/18.  Winters come and winter go.

Happy (another) new year.

We all wax and wane, like celestial bodies, in clarity.

Brilliant in our humanity, an infinity of gods and goddesses stumbling toward the light.

Writing stories, living in the shadows of stories, becoming our own stories.

Imbolg is the season of welcoming Spring, banishing Winter.  the green of the pines, heavy with the weight of snow.  the sun setting after I leave the office – not before.  the final retreat of the holiday lights.  Gardening catalogs begin to arrive.  Imbolg is as the darkest part of the night – the bit just before dawn, and somewhat fearsome.

Still time to bank the fire, stay warm inside, waiting for the return of Lucifer.

He always seems to turn up, eventually.

Here on Oahu there is something called the Valley of the Temples.  To get there from the west side of the island you have to drive the H-3, which is incredible.  Flanked by towering fortress-like mountains that ascend at a breathtaking angle, lush and vertically channelled, the highway winds through a valley, through a tunnel though the mountains, and eventually reaches the east coast.  Many are said to have died in strange ways during the construction of the highway, which took many times more time and money than the military planned to spend on its construction … due in part to concerns over altering the landscape and worries for the local environment.  The people of Hawaii are tied to their land, to their ocean, to their mountains and sky.

The mountains we crossed that day are said to be peopled with the Night Marchers – ancient hawaiian warriors that march old battle sites and haunts during the night, spiriting away visitors who dare to look at them, rather than to drop to their bellies and hide their faces.  Friends of friends have seen them, reporting beating drums and dancing figures outside their doors during the night.  Those who have relatives already co-opted into their ranks are immune, but no one else is …

There are also stories of Pele, who travels the east coast, visiting residents unannounced.  She appears as a woman with long, flowing hair, or as an old woman.  She’s reported to have knocked on front doors, asking for sugar.  Turn her away and face her curse.

The East coast is also home to the Valley of the Temples,  a place that intends sanctuary for many religions.  It so happens, though, that the place to visit in this valley is the Byodo-in temple.

A blanket of peacefulness and light seems to lay upon the place;  after parking and (gladly) paying 3.00 for admittance, visitors turn to the scenic facade of the temple, nestled amid mountains, conifers, and bamboo stands.  It waits across a short walking bridge, seeming to calmly invite folks closer.   There are black swans, walking paths, coi, and a lovely, rather-grand-though-not-enormous temple that is home to a great bronze statue of the buddha.   There’s a ringing bell that clears the mind, a monk wandering about, and a place to buy food for the birds and fish– which delights many visitors, both young and not-so-young.

Hawaii has so much energy, so much movement, that it’s difficult to say which places feel the best and are hardest to leave.

In the end, after exciting days of surfing, hiking beautiful shorelines and forests, snorkeling, and enjoying gorgeous waterfront settings, the temple was the highlight for me and for Inga, my eleven year old daughter.  It would be hard to imagine the Night Marchers haunting the temple grounds … but then, who knows?

At Waikiki beach there were so many faces, so much going on.  People surfing, throwing themselves off of jettis, riding waves into shore on their bellies, trying to catch the tropical fish along the shoreline rocks, swimming, tanning, reading, building sand castles, showcasing themselves.  There was even a young woman standing knee deep in the water taking selfie after selfie after selfie … ad nauseum.

The sun is hot, the water is cool, the beach is crowded.  My 14 year old son took his first surfing lesson on Waikiki beach this week with a guy who has to be the coolest man around – James of Make a Wish.  James works with my sister granting wishes on Oahu via Make a Wish – a nonprofit that grants wishes to chronically ill kids.  He’s a master surfer himself, and his job now-a-days is to grant surfing wishes … which he does –  all the time.  Apparently even for kids who aren’t sick.

He had my son up on the first wave after a short primer, and Tristan surfed for at least 40 minutes.  Surfing with James.  A total dream.

And then he took my nephew out for the same.  Then my daughter and niece.  He calibrates each lesson for each student, talking easily with all of the kids around him – the ones riding belly boards, the ones chasing fish.  After hours of swimming, teaching, dragging kids into the waves, and surfing – on his day off- he shakes hands with folks on the beach, lifts his surfboards (2 – one for him, one for his student) and walks off with them, toward downtown Honolulu.

Awesome.