Winter Returning

It's been uncommonly beautiful all week - warm, sunny, near 60 the last few days. Spring fever has set in and I am already anxious to see budding trees and the return of my tulips. I should probably plant some crocus - they start to bloom very early, late February I think.


Of course, it's still winter, and Mother Holle is getting ready to shake out her bed in a serious way. The storm that's tracking is predicted to give us in the metro area anywhere from a few inches to over a foot; much to the disgust of the general populace, the meteorologists have had to concede they won't be able to predict how much we'll get until it gets closer.

In truth, I like winter. I don't mind the cold or the snow; it provides an excellent excuse to light candles (or a fire), and I've got little white lights set up here and there for a nice glow. And I enjoy having a built-in excuse to stay indoors and putter around in the kitchen. The days are already noticeably longer.

The whims of nature are impressive and, to be honest, fun. The possibility that we might get a lot of snow is always exciting - how lovely it would be to get a two-foot blizzard that shuts the city down! Of course, that seldom happens; far more often, it snows enough to make driving unpleasant and slow, but nothing closes down.

It's okay. It's part of the cycle of the Earth, and in truth, weather brings people together. It's more than just something we all have in common for idle chit-chat; I'm always impressed by the way folks will rally to help neighbors and strangers who get stuck in the snow. I'm one of those people who will watch the local news report on the weather all day during a big storm.

Here's hoping for Snowmageddon!

Sunrise/Moonset

The full moon is setting just as the sun is about to rise. There's something magnificent about this timing, something that inspires me to go outside and try to stare at the whole sky at once. Venus and Jupiter still glimmer in the pre-dawn light, though the other planets are now too faint to make out.

It would take a better photographer than I to capture it, and I won't try. With digital cameras making it so easy to take tons of pictures, I've discovered something...taking pictures is wonderful, but it's also a distraction. I can't say how many times I had to stop myself trying to snap the perfect scene on a road trip because it wasn't coming out or we couldn't stop the car and I'd get more and more frustrated and forget to just enjoy the moment. Photographs help to remember the moment - but the zeal in getting the perfect shot can take you out of the moment you're trying to capture.

Well, it does that to me, anyway.

The January full moon is called Cold Moon, Snow Moon, Wolf Moon, depending on who you ask (and, presumably, what part of the world you're in; my perspective is always going to reflect North America and the climate of Colorado). Cold and Snow are pretty self-explanatory; Wolf Moon comes from the howling of hungry wolves outside, while the people huddled in their lodges during the long dark nights.

Photodisc/Getty Images; Licensed to About.com

However, the sunsets are later and the days are a wee bit longer, even now. Somebody posted '57 days to spring' on Facebook a couple of days ago, and I have to admit, the older I get, the less I enjoy winter and the more I look forward to the return of the green.

In the meantime, though, winter has a beauty all its own. The cold crisp air and the sparkle of the stars in the night sky. Silver moonlight across the snow. And while it was in the 50s yesterday, it's going to snow again soon - tonight, I think - and there's something about the changeability of the weather that will always make me love my home.

Because it is home.

Denver plays New England for the AFC Championship today. Go Broncos!

Hail Aurora

Her rosy-fingered dawn was particularly spectacular this morning. I pulled this from the Internet because I don't have much luck capturing these shots, so imagine a scene very much like this only with a couple of houses in the foreground instead of the mountains. The colors are much the same.

I find it interesting that I live in Aurora, a city named after the old Greek goddess of the dawn (and, of course, of spectacular light shows at the poles). A few years ago, they erected a statue of the goddess on a pillar at the top of a specially created hill, just off of I-225 at the entrance to the Aurora Mall (and the Aurora Town Center, which is on the other side of the street). Sadly, this is the only image I can find of it, but there she is, greeting all who enter Aurora. From I-225 and Alameda. Heading eastbound.

There was, predictably, some controversy when this mound and statue were erected. A few folks grumbling about putting up the symbol of a pagan goddess. Not much came of it, though, and apparently the majority decided that the city being named after her and all, it wasn't wholly inappropriate to honor her in this way.

(In all reality, I'm guessing someone just thought it would be a cool statue and didn't put much thought of goddesses into it at all. Most monotheistic believers seem to think the pagan gods are not real.)

In any case, it's interesting that I live in a city named for a pagan goddess, and one who evokes my favorite time of the day as well. In recent years I've realized that everything in my life has culminated in putting me exactly where I need to be. Maybe it's a symbolic stretch, but hear me out.

My house is on Flanders street and was previously owned by a couple named Bender. My favorite cartoons are The Simpsons and Futurama.

A block from this house is Sunrise Park. The park is connected to an elementary school and has a large open field behind it where a prairie dog colony makes its home. At the top of the hill, there's a platform marking the solstices and equinoxes. This is where I watch the sunrise on the solstices, and the sunsets at the equinoxes. (And it's not perfectly aligned, no, but the fact that it's there makes me think there was a reason we looked at 40-something houses before choosing this one.)

I am passionate about the environment and the well-being of the Earth, obviously. I landed a job with the department of health and environment. The environmental side of the department, where I work, consists of the Air Pollution, Water Quality, and Hazardous Materials divisions. I'm with Haz, protectors of Earth. I am a Fire sign - Sagittarius.

It's all coming together. Haha!

Maybe it's all coincidence, but somehow I don't think so. For the first time in my life I feel I am where I need to be. Perhaps it's just a fantastic side effect of entering my 40s and realizing that it's okay to like myself as I am, to actually enjoy my accomplishments and feel satisfied with today while striving for more, to own everything about who I am and what I believe and what I want. Perhaps this really is just something that comes with age, along with the realization that you don't need to care what others think of you too much. Because the truth is, most people aren't thinking of you. What's the joke? "Dance like nobody's watching... because they aren't... they're checking their phones."

I had a get-together yesterday for the Broncos game (victory! yay!) and would like to thank everyone who came over to hang out with an introvert who seldom wants company but feels it very keenly when she asks for it and people say "not now." So, a big thank you to my friends, who accept me as I am, and validate this crazy notion that maybe we are all okay just as we are.

Spring Cleaning... in January

I suppose I'm impatient for spring. There's still a fair layer of snow in the yard, but there's something satisfying about sweeping dirt and dead leaves out of the garage and away from the front walk, even in the middle of winter.

All in all, it's been a relatively mild winter so far. Some cold temperatures and snow, but fair more often than not and not that much precipitation. (Though the glacier in front of the north-facing mailboxes tells a story of recent frigidity.) The squirrels are fat and there are flocks of geese everywhere. I love watching them take their flight every night from the drainage canal along Yale to their resting grounds at Quincy reservoir.

When I was a little girl I used to read Grimm's Fairy Tales over and over. One of my favorites was the story of Frau Holle, who caused it to snow when she shook out her feather bed.

The tale of Frau Holle/Mother Hulda goes like this: a widow had a daughter and stepdaughter. Favoring her own daughter, she allowed her to laze about and made her stepdaughter do all the housework. One day the stepdaughter accidentally pricked her finger on a spindle. Leaning over a well to wash the blood away, the spindle fell from her hand into the well. Panicked at the thought of her stepmother finding out she'd lost the spindle, the girl leapt into the well after it.

There she fell into the world of Frau Holle, where she immediately encountered a few things that needed tending: bread about to burn, an apple tree that needed plucked, and house chores for Frau Holle herself. Impressed by the girl's kindness and industriousness, Frau Holle rewarded her by covering her with gold before sending her back up to her own world.

The girl's greedy stepmother had the notion to send her own daughter down as well. So the girl pricked her finger as her stepsister had done, and jumped down the well. Only she refused to save the bread from burning, or to pluck the heavy apples, or to lend Frau Holle a hand in her little home. Disgusted with the girl's mean behavior and laziness, Frau Holle sent the girl back covered in pitch, not gold.

It's turned colder tonight, and it looks as though Frau Holle is going to shake out her bed tomorrow.

Tools of the pagan

Candles and oils, symbols and sigils, herbs and stones - these are some of the tools of the pagan. They all have their uses, and it's one of my favorite aspects of paganism - the connection of the natural world's objects into my practice.

My favorite tool, though, is probably tarot cards. I've been fascinated with them since I was, oh, fifteen or so and sneaking interpretation books home from the library, hiding them away from my mother's distrustful eyes. It was a revelation to learn that our modern playing cards are derived from tarot decks.

Divination is a relatively misunderstood art. The future is not set in stone, so there's no divination practice that is going to state definitively that such-and-such will happen. The cards merely indicate the way things are going. They offer insight into your present situation and potential future; they work, through symbols, to help you realize what path you are on: whether you should stay the course, or look to new ways of approaching a particular problem or concern.

The primary difference between tarot decks and regular playing decks are the inclusion in tarot decks of the Major Arcana, also known as trump cards. These 22 cards represent archetypes, where the Minor Arcana that comprise the suit cards correspond to the elements and deal with day-to-day matters. There are a million websites and books that offer an explanation of the meaning of the individual cards, and I have no intention of laying that out here. Generally speaking, major arcana cards, when they come into your reading, tend to indicate outside influences, where the suit cards indicate your own behavior and beliefs.

The one thing I'll say is this, only because it seems to come up every single time someone who doesn't know tarot asks about it: Death doesn't mean death. It means change. Which, I suppose, is as terrifying to some as death itself. Personally, I am pleased when Death makes an appearance in my readings.

My go-to deck is still what many would call the 'beginner' deck, that is, the Rider-Waite deck. I love them because they are beautiful, evocative, and very easy-to-read cards, with rich symbolism that serves as an excellent assistant to reading interpretations. It's sad to me that the artist of these lovely cards, Pamela Colman Smith, isn't given credit in the deck's name. She was a pretty remarkable woman, definitely someone ahead of and outside of her time.

I've had a variety of decks but I always come back to this one. These cards just speak to me.

Also, the Five of Wands lends itself to a really great joke.

The stars look very different today

David Bowie has died. It's dominated the news all day, and no wonder. He's one of those rare people who did exactly what he wanted, morphed into different personalities and was completely and utterly himself.

This is such a rare thing. We're all so constrained by expectations - of society, our parents, our spouses, our friends, ourselves. We grow under the weight of what others expect from us, and it shapes us all in ways that will conform to the standard.

'Coming out' as a pagan is still something I feel strangely about. There's the sense that I have betrayed the teachings of my youth - I grew up in a very devout, Catholic home, and I never did tell my mother (rest her soul) about the call I've felt from my earliest childhood to the pagan gods, the magic and mystery of the old ways. Even now, when it's (somewhat) more socially acceptable to not be Christian, I seldom talk about my beliefs in public or even with friends. There's the ones who think you're the deluded and the ones that fear for your soul and the ones who think you're very cute with your hipster New Age nonsense, and all of it serves to keep my mouth shut. Of course, if you follow me on Facebook you've seen my links and pictures shared from witchy and pagan websites, so I'm not hiding it - but this is the first I've talked about it openly.

The truth is, I love being a witch.

The power of plants, stones, symbols. The wisdom of the old gods, of the power of the earth and the elements, of the ancient cultures who have given us our modern civilization, have been speaking to me since I was a girl. Why fight it?

I've always been drawn to plants, flowers, gardening. I seem to get it from my grandmother, who tended dozens of plants. I don't remember her much - she passed away when I was seven - but I heard more than one tale of how she talked to her plants, and her mango trees gave fruit the size of softballs.

It must skip a generation, because my mother never had live plants. She'd always buy the silk ones (which are even nastier to dust and clean than the real thing, if you ask me), and wouldn't buy real plants even when I promised to be the one to look after them.

I myself have always had a green thumb. When I was in second grade, my father died, and my homeroom class gave me a plant in commemoration. It was a beautiful little philodendron and I had it for ten years, until it abruptly died one summer for no apparent reason.

In any case, it doesn't matter why. It just - is. The path I have trod has led me to this door, and having opened it, I am free.

Faeries: the wee folk

There is a tradition in Scotland which says that after Satan was defeated and cast out of Heaven, he turned to God and said to him - "Not all of your angels are as loyal as you think. And although they did not fight with me against you in the war for Heaven, they did not fight for you either. They are what they call on Earth, 'Neutrals.' "

When God heard this he was very angry with the angels and tried to come up with a proper punishment for each of them according to their mixed loyalties. He eventually chose to banish them from Heaven to the Earth, where they became the Faeries. And according to their disposition they remained Neutral on Earth, indifferent to men's squabbles and arguments and the never-ending debate between good and evil, light and darkness: God and the Devil.

It is said that their fate will remain unknown until the Last Judgement and the end of the world.

I'm not sure what the source is for this story, but it's certainly interesting. 

Simple Spells

I prefer simple spells, mostly because ritual space and alone time are hard to come by. A candle, maybe some incense, and a few minutes of focused intention.


To Banish Painful Memories:
Best done during a waning or new moon. Light a black candle and recite:

After this cruel memory is seen and said,
erase these thoughts from my heart and head.


Prosperity Sigil
Carve into a candle, trace in oil on your skin, draw on a fogged mirror - lots of possibilities.

Knot Spell
Take a cord in a color corresponding to your need, and tie a series of knots in it, chanting and visualizing your desire:

By knot of one, the spell's begun.
By knot of two, it's coming true.
By knot of three, so mote it be.
By knot of four, this power I store.
By knot of five, the spell's alive.
By knot of six, this will I fix.
By knot of seven, events I'll leaven.
By knot of eight, it will be fate.
By knot of nine, the spell is mine.

Symbols

A key aspect of pagan thought is the correspondence of plants, stones, animals, and colors with different qualities and aspects. Magic incorporates these symbols, using them as physical reminders and touchstones to assist in focusing the energy of intention. Some of the best magic is simply lighting a colored candle and gazing into the flame while visualizing your need.

Color Correspondences:

White: purity, balance, healing, innocence, divination, the Moon
Black: banishing, safety, protection
Brown: home, animals, pets, earth, stability, locating lost items
Orange: creativity, legal matters, ambition, opportunity
Red: sexuality, passion, strength, fire, survival, action
Yellow: intelligence, memory, positivity; the Sun
Purple: spirituality, break a habit, drive away evil, power
Blue: water, good fortune, truth, calm, protection
Green: growth, money, earth, trees, success, jealousy
Pink: love, romance, friendship, affection, nurturing

Elemental Correspondences:

Air: East; yellow
Fire: South; red
Water: West; blue
Earth: North; green

 

Crystals and Stones:

People have been carrying stone amulets for thousands of years. Here's a fairly comprehensive list of stones and their associations. I can't vouch for the parts of the body associations; I believe that's Reiki, or chakra work, and I don't know much about that. Ooh, something new to learn.

There's so many more. The planets, the trees, herbs, flowers, all have their own associations. I'll come back to this subject.

Days of the Week

Here we see Sunna and Mani, the Norse goddess of the sun and god of the moon. Pagan traditions typically view the moon as female, presumably because the moon's waxing and waning coincides with the female menstrual cycle. Why the Norse viewed it the other way around is not known (to me; please enlighten me if you have any insight), but I'll speculate that it has something to do with the life-giving power of the sun in a land so often cold and dark.

So the Sun and the Moon are the first two days of the calendar, and rightly so. These two celestial objects are the most visible and important to us; the sun that gives us life, and the ever-changing moon that helps us mark the seasons.

I think it's common knowledge that nearly all the English days of the week are named after Norse deities.


Tyr's day (Tuesday)
Woden's day (Wednesday)
Thor's day (Thursday)
Freyja/Frigg's day (Friday - it's debatable which goddess this day is named for)

Saturday is the outlier, named after the Roman god Saturn.

I've been making an effort in my daily practice to wear some symbol of that day's deity, and have a mind to what qualities they exemplify as I go through my day. Woden (Odin), for example, calls to mind wisdom and discipline. Thor suggests strength and courage. Frigg's domain is the home, wisdom, prophecy; Freyja's is sexuality and magic. I have seen a theory that Saturday could come from Saeter, a Germanic term for the god Loki, and while this is dubious at best I have a special fondness for Loki, and what better day to celebrate mischief and fun than Saturday?

It's probably not accurate, though. The old Norse name for Saturday translates to "washing day." Most weeks, that's what I'm doing.

As to the gods...

"As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life." - Diogenes Laertius

Rationally speaking, the only belief that makes sense is agnosticism. That is, admitting that we really cannot know, definitively, if there are such things as gods, or if the world around us was created by some deliberate hand. There's no real proof of it. It seems as likely as anything that it's our awareness of our mortality that drives us to seek some deeper meaning to our brief lives, some broader purpose. If god did not exist, the saying goes, man would have to create him.

On the other hand, we don't have any proof that the gods do not exist. Science tells us the universe began with a great explosion; but where the matter came from, or what set it to motion, remains an elusive theory.  I believe in science, and the scientific method - hypothesis, observation/experiment, conclusion. I also believe that there is knowledge we can scarcely fathom, much less measure. In that realm lie the gods, magic, and mystery. For that reason, I choose to believe in the gods.

Growing up, I was taught there was only one god, Yahweh, god of the Jews. (Even so, many sects have him split into three aspects.)  This belief is presented as an axiom, accepted by (or forced upon) most cultures in the Western world as simple truth for hundreds of years.

Yet from very early childhood, I was called by the gods of ancient Egypt and Greece. I became fascinated with their stories, the forces they represent, the activities on Earth that they set into motion, and their integration with the Earth itself - river nymphs, tree nymphs, the gods and goddesses of the ocean, of the forest, of the underworld. The gods are everywhere, manifest in everything we see. 

Pantheism? Perhaps. Yet I also believe that the gods are distinct entities, beings we can approach. Beings that hear us when we call to them, and reply at their whim, as unpredictable as nature itself.

The role of the gods is not to serve as our parents, indulging our every request. They watch over us, but their purposes are their own, and they take the long view. Some paths suggest that the gods are not to be bothered often, particularly not regarding trivial things, and that every approach to them should bear a gift - an offering or a sacrifice in exchange for what is requested.

They do not give without expecting us to work, in return.

The philosophy is succinctly summed up in one of Aesop's fables, that of "Hercules and the Waggoner." It goes like this:

A Waggoner was once driving a heavy load along a very muddy way. At last he came to a part of the road where the wheels sank half-way into the mire, and the more the horses pulled, the deeper sank the wheels. So the Waggoner threw down his whip, and knelt down and prayed to Hercules the Strong. “O Hercules, help me in this my hour of distress,” quoth he. But Hercules appeared to him, and said:

“Tut, man, don’t sprawl there. Get up and put your shoulder to the wheel.”

The gods help them that help themselves.

Pre-Dawn and the Wheel of the Year

I'm an early bird, so much so that I intersect with the night owls occasionally when I get up at 4:30 a.m. Even on the weekends, I'm up with the dawn, no matter when I went to bed.

The best thing about the very early morning - the wee hours - is the predawn sky and the stillness of nature. Every morning, before I get into my car and fill up my head with thoughts of my workday and what I need to do, I like to take a few minutes to look up at the night sky and listen to the wind walking through the empty branches. It's the kind of quiet that only occurs for a few hours each day, when most of the humans and animals have gone to ground and only a few creatures are stirring.

(Then I get in my car and head out, and am always surprised at how many people are out and about, going to or returning from work. Humanity is never truly at rest, it seems.)

The moon today is a waning third quarter, still boldly lighting the sky even only half-illuminated. Venus, Mars, and Jupiter shine in a jeweled arc from the east to southwest. The big dipper hangs upright over the eastern horizon. I missed Orion today - he may have set already, or was perhaps just further over the western horizon than my vantage point afforded.

In any case, it's a strangely magical, wondrous, marvelous thing to simply look up at the night sky. And yet, there's far more to it than simply appreciating the beauty of the moon and the stars. People have been observing these moving bodies since the beginning of our existence as a source of not only wonder and awe, but a means of discovering our own place in the universe, of calculating time, of establishing and connecting to its rhythms.

In ancient Egypt, the rise of the dog star, Sirius, coincided with the annual Nile flood that brought fresh, fertile soils in which they planted their crops. As the event that ruled the very rhythm of their lives, this was the date upon which they based their calendar. The flood was believed to have been the tears of Isis, weeping for her dead husband, Osiris.

  Annual flood, 1937. Click here for spectacular full-size image.


With the construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1970, the annual flood no longer occurs in Egypt. While the release of water is now regulated, and the previous fear of an excessive or insufficient flood is relieved, the lack of fresh silt means the land must now be artificially fertilized. For every advance, a price, I suppose.

It is a fascinating paradox of humanity that we are part of nature - not only that we are born of this Earth, but that all we have achieved has been based upon learning from nature, understanding how it functions, how its parts fit together, how one piece affects another - and at the same time, we have developed our entire civilization on the principle that we can manipulate our environment to suit our needs. We cut down trees to put up shelters, and grow fibers to weave into clothes, and plow up land to plant the seeds we want to grow. We're part of the Earth, and yet our history of adapting its materials to suit our needs have given us a sense of separateness from it. Some philosophies suggest we are above it, keepers of it...masters over it.

Nature laughs at such notions, and reminds us regularly how we exist here by her whim. At this moment, floodwaters in Missouri have closed roads and threaten hundreds of homes. Last week, at least 11 people were killed by tornadoes in Texas. Here in my home of Colorado, several people will lose their lives over the course of the winter in avalanches, and more will perish next summer when they get lost hiking in the woods, or are struck by lightning on a mountaintop.

It's no wonder to me that for millenia, humans have both revered and feared nature, developing stories to explain her activities and practices to placate her more destructive flights of fancy. The gods of nature are typically gods of Chaos, and a common mythological pattern is the overthrow of these Chaos gods by the gods of Order - the gods who give life and guidance to humans. Typically these were the gods around which the society centered its worship.

But it's worth noting that the gods of Order were born of the gods of Chaos themselves.

Personal Paganism

I don't practice a great deal of formal ritual. It seems I'm always meaning to do a little rite or some spellwork at the full moon, but most often it ends up being no more than a thoughtful gaze into its face, its position in the sky.

I found this on Pinterest a while ago (a phrase I use embarrassingly often). I've found it an excellent guide to both understanding the concept of magic and the steps required to manifest it. It's psychology - how to turn belief into reality.

It's in the everyday that ritual becomes a habit, and it's this that I want to work on this year. Magic, spellwork: these aren't particularly mystical things, in my view. It's simply an effort to focus the power of one's own will and the energy of natural objects to bring a desire to fruition.

I suppose that concept is mystical, actually. At the heart of my paganism is the belief that the world itself is a divine thing, alive in its own right. The creatures we share it with, the plants, the very stones that comprise the land we live on, are alight with their own energy.

Over thousands of years, people of all cultures have learned the physical properties of the natural world; but in addition, we have seen the symbolism of objects and plants as well. Spellwork is simply the manifestation of these beliefs, the attempt to bring them to the forefront.

Bringing this into daily life usually ends up being something I do outside. One little spell I like to do is when taking a walk: pick up a leaf, hold it in my palm as I think about something I want to happen, and toss it into a stream or into the air, sending that energy and intention for my need into the world.

I am a fairly avid cook, and I mean to incorporate more magical intention in my cooking. The selection and preparation of ingredients, the thoughtful consideration of herbs, the careful use of fire and water in the cooking process, are magic in themselves. It's all about intention.