Dreams of the Vine

There have been so many instances in which I've wanted to write this post, or some facsimile thereof, but each time I've shirked at the discomfort and erased everything I'd written. I've come to one of those confusing, disquieting points during which things are... up in the air.

It began around the time of my Saturn Return, which of course will surprise no one. Saturn can be a ruthless sonofabitch. I suddenly began to feel called to a billion and one (<--- slight exaggeration!) goddesses... and none at the same time. Frustrating doesn't begin to describe it. I was a bit like a crow, attracted to each shiny bauble that caught my black eye but equally as likely to just forget about it and move on when the other eye saw a glimmer. I made a list the other day in true Virgoan fashion and realized that there are ten--TEN!!-- goddesses that I'm feeling drawn to. Having been a one goddess (hell, one DEITY) witch for most of my life, this is, um, new. And uncomfortable. And making me batshit crazy.

I figured that maybe when Saturn was done with me things would fall into place. I was okay with change (on helluva remarkable statement from this Taurus Moon, for sure). I knew that I might not come out on the other side with the divinity to whom I had devoted so many years and so much life energy. I thought, maybe, I'd end up with someone darker or more Saturnine or just something different. After all, I'm not 11 anymore. I thought maybe I'd even come out with more than one deity demanding my attention, though that sounds far more arrogant than it felt at the time. I was just biding my time.

But it didn't work out that way. Saturn left Virgo, and I was still left with a mess that seemed impossible to slog through.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do. I began to make offerings and devote my extra time (ha!) to study and asked that there be a definite sign that someone--anyone--was going to claim me.

Cue crickets.

(Okay, okay. That's not completely true. My apprentice wanted to give me a reading with his new Goddess Tarot and the culminating card happened to be my matron goddess. Of course, the reading had nothing to do with my crisis of faith, so I've been talking myself out of that particular "sign".)

But, amazingly, this post has nothing to do with goddesses at all. tee-hee! During the same time that I was struggling to puzzle all of this out and sitting quite comfortably with my relationship to the Stag King, someone else entirely decided to step in.

I'd done a bit of a ritual, a simple thing really, and asked that I receive some message or answer to my dilemma in my dreams that night. Dreamwork has always figured prominently in my practice, going back to the days of listening to my beloved grandmother telling her dreams to the walls when I was a child. That night, there was no vision of a goddess. There was only Dionysos in all his typical ecstatic, wine guzzling, devil-may-care glory. What? The? Fuck? Now, in all fairness, I'd been reading a book that included a little blurb about Dionysos and had quoted said passage on my Tumblr. So I shrugged it off.

Fast forward a bit. (In fact, I need to go back to my Tumblr and see just how much time has elapsed because it's been quite awhile.) It is the night of the last full moon before Samhain. I am dreaming of a man who constantly changes form. He is dangerous and alluring at the same time. He literally unzips his facade from the top of the head down and steps out a completely different person. In the end he is wearing a jewel green-toned poet shirt and has thick, but short, black hair. I think he is flirting with me, but he may be trying to kill me. I wake as I'm saying the name "Dionysus" aloud. My husband had just gotten out of the shower and heard me say the name very distinctly. (He thought I was dreaming about another man. hahahaha! I suppose I was, in a way.)

He hadn't introduced himself to me in the dream. Somehow, in that borderland between dreaming and waking, I apparently just knew.

This may be nothing. This may be a passing thing or a way for my mind to think of something other than my lack of input from the female divine. I don't know. But I haven't been able to shake it, and that means something I suppose.

I'm a bit frightened, I'll admit. I'm kinda hoping that nothing comes of this. I am decidedly NOT a Dionysian kind of person-- at least, not if my version of what that means is correct. Sure, I love a good bout of ecstatic trance as much as the next witch. I'm prone to dancing wildly and singing at the top of my lungs whenever the hell I feel like it. But I was also dubbed The Ice Queen in high school and college (not because I didn't put out but because I can be a stone cold bitch and have chronically cold extremities). I don't drink, like, AT ALL, though I've made mead and beer for others to consume. I hate the taste of wine. Don't even get me started on sex.

But none of that will matter if it's where I'm meant to be.



My first small, pathetic bunch of homegrown Niagra grapes

Autumnal Equinox

While I'm still in the throes of a nine day modern interpretation (not my own) of the Eleusinian Mysteries, I was so uber excited for the opposition between the setting autumnal sun and the harvest moon last night to kick off the equinox celebrations. As I've mentioned before, I think it is incredibly important to keep my children in touch with the natural cycles of the planet they live on, so we try to celebrate the solstices and equinoxes outside. Alas! It rained here all day long!

A few cotton candy clouds are better than nothing, I suppose. We dashed all around town through a light sprinkling of rain for the last 10 minutes or so before the sun was supposed to set trying to find the ideal place for viewing, but the sun was never visible behind all the cloud cover. This picture was taken right at sunset, approximately 7:30pm for us.

There was no sign of the big, full harvest moon at all.

I have a get together with my (very young) apprentice on Saturday, and as he is currently very interested in crystal healing, I whipped up some small gem essences for him to try and charged them under the setting equinox sun.



Ghetto Pagan Mother of Four: Transports gem essences— crafted at sunset on the autumnal equinox and bottled in reused baby food jars— in her daughter’s Tinkerbell lunch box. And she can’t take a non-blurry picture to save her life these days. There’s a special ring of hell for this camera, I tell ya.

Today's Accidental Witchery

Today’s accidental witchery:

One of our family traditions is to make apple head dolls with the littles around the time of the autumnal equinox (it’s not an exact science, more like when the apples are ready and Mama has the energy). I use mine in ritual throughout the dark of the year, and the kids put on Samhain puppet shows with theirs. (‘Cause this mom doesn’t force her religion onto her children, but she does insist that they be aware of and take part in the seasonal changes of the planet they live on.) While making this year’s dolls today, the skewer from my oldest daughter’s went through the apple and into my hand. You cannot imagine the stupid amounts of clumsy that have been naturally bestowed upon me. Honest. A thick, glistening drop of ruby red welled up on my hand as I cursed, and when I yanked my hand away, said drop flew right into the mouth of my daughter’s doll. OH YES IT DID! See the picture? PROOF!

At which point she ran around the house screaming that she didn’t want a zombie apple head doll because it might try to eat her BRAAAAAAAAINS!

I think this mom may have to pull a switcheroo come Samhain.



The wound, clearly located on the Mound of Jupiter. That little bugger drank of the blood of my self-worth!

Birthday Tarot

Somehow I keep forgetting that I have this little blog, and now I'm very late in posting my birthday tarot spread. I'm lazy at best when it comes to tarot for myself. I prefer to keeps things as simple as possible, especially with something I am meant to track over a year. So, each year on the event of my solar return, I draw one card from the deck to represent my overall state of mind throughout the year and then draw one card for each month, laying them in a wheel around the first card. These were my results this year:

Center (self; mindset through the year)-- Ace of Swords reversed
September- VI of Pentacles reversed
October- IV of Cups
November- III of Cups
December- Knight of Cups reversed
January- Page of Wands
February- Empress
March- Emperor reversed
April- II of Wands reversed
May- VIII of Wands
June- Ace of Wands
July- Page of Pentacles reversed
August- Judgement

While I will reserve most of my personal interpretation for myself because it is, well, personal, I will say that it looks to be an interesting year. For one, this is the first time in many years that I have drawn any Major Arcana during my birthday spread. That in itself says a lot. It also seems that the spread is a bit Wand heavy, but that is not really unusual for me. Should be an interesting year...

I Stayed

There are days when it is so difficult to stay in this body. I don’t know what this “disorder” is that I have, or even if it is a disorder at all. (Ancestors say: What you lookin’ for a cure for? It’s a damn gift, girl. It’s a damn gift. Doctors shrug.) I know too that some would literally kill to be able to leave their physical being with the ease (ha!) with which I do so. Still, I have four children to care for and can’t just go AWOL whenever. I NEED to be present for them. You’d think, after all these years, that I’d be a little more adept at keeping myself from slip sliding into the Otherworlds at random moments, but if there’s been progress in that area, it’s slight. That frustrates the hell out of me.

It was only a matter of weeks for me to be able to trigger the OOBE’s on my own, but getting back? Staying here when the pull comes at an inopportune time? That’s been one hell of a different, far more complex story.

I stayed today though. I fought the pull tooth and fucking nail, and I stayed.

The Crystal Controversy

I'm a four planet Virgo, so one of the first things I was drawn to as a new pagan all those many years ago (is it really nearing 20 years!? Holy hell.) was crystals and gemstones. Herbs was first-- again, Virgo-- but crystals were not far behind. As taboo as this subject is in the more hardcore witch circles, I've never been ashamed to admit that I am drawn to pretty, shiny, chthonic things. I spent years carrying each stone with me, one at a time, and meticulously recording the results. I wore them, put them on my body, placed them under my pillow at night, meditated in circles of them, placed them in complicated grids, met them in dreams and trances... everything. Eventually, I did some not for profit crystal healing for others. I was still a teen and seriously considered doing this work for the rest of my life, but frustrations and concerns set in and I left crystal healing behind for good. I thought.

The subject has recently come back onto my radar, and I find my reasons for ignoring crystal healing falling on deaf ears. But I have this space, so I thought I'd type out my feelings on the subject as a sort of cathartic exercise for myself, even if no one is reading it. ;)

The first thing that made me reconsider my position as a crystal healer was the ethics of where and how the various crystals are collected, and we're not even talking about the obvious ivory, pearl, and coral here, which are probably harvested illegally. The subject of blood diamonds has gotten some attention recently, but these are by no means the only crystals which are harvested at the expense of other humans, animals, or ecosystems. Anytime there is a phenomenon that grows as rapidly as crystal healing has, there will be people who want so deperately to profit from it that they push the ethics envelope, and I want NO part of that. Sure, I can do my best to ensure that I only buy crystals from ethihcal, fair trade suppliers, but the overall problem left a bad taste in my mouth.

Then there is the misconception that crystal healing can do no harm. Go ahead and google it. See if you can't come up with at least a dozen sites proclaiming how "safe" crystal healing is. Oh look, I found one in about 2 seconds: "There aren't any bad side effects...". This illustrates perfectly a complete lack of understanding about healing in general. Let me give you an example.

At the point at which I was considering leaving crystal healing behind, I was approached by a woman in her 50's who had been treating herself with crystals. She'd been using hematite to relieve back pain from an old injury because she'd read or heard somewhere that hematite was useful for realigning the verterbrae, but the back pain was still getting progressively worse. What was she doing wrong? Well, she'd misunderstood the problem first and foremost. Back pain from an old wound is probably not caused by vertebral misalignment. It's more likely inflammation at the site and/or nerve pain. So this woman was treating the wrong thing. Second, she was using the wrong stone. In my experience, hematite aggravates inflammation, so the stone she was using was actually making her worse rather than making her better.

With herbalism, people are usually distinctly aware that some plants are poisonous, so they have a healthy dose of trepidation about treating themselves without doing at least a little bit of research. But with crystal healing, people will pick up any old stone and expect it to be all happy goodness and rainbows, no side effects at all (except for the good ones, of course). There are some safe crystals, just as there are safe, nourishing herbs, but you gotta do the damn research. Healing is healing. This means that you have to a.) understand a fair amount of human (or animal, if they're who you're treating) anatomy and physiology, b.) understand the characteristics of the healing medium you are working with and c.) be aware of the constitution and particular peculiarities of the specific patient you are working with.

Are you going to die from making a mistake with crystal healing? No, probably not, but that doesn't mean it's harmless. I don't mean for this to discourage anyone from seeking crystal therapy with an experienced, qualified healer, nor do I mean to disparage those who practice crystal therapy. I just wish that more people were willing to recognize that there are risks that come with ANY form of healing.

Weekending

Evening primrose (Oenothera biennis)


Native sunflowers


Goldenrod is just beginning to bloom


Still a few blackberries hanging around




Spiral cornmeal offering