Riptide

One of the things I read early into By Land Sky and Sea was Parma's mention of dance as a means to raise energy and celebrate the body.

I will confess, I love dancing, but my dancing skills are on par with Mass Effect's Commander Shepard - laughably bad. So I generally don't dance in public any more. (I had a brief spell in my early twenties, of acting "my age", going downtown to bars and getting mildly drunk on a semiregular basis. Amazing what a few shots of tequila will do with "I can't dance.")

This week has been a particularly hard one.  I had some depression issues weaning off the steroid, and a reaction to my migraine pills which had me at the ER unsure of what was happening to me. I spent most of today being gloriously lazy, doing a bit of homesteading, cooking, and playing videogames, trying to recover from the week. 

A song popped into my head.

A silly pop song.  With a fun rhythm.

I put it on youtube and tapped my toes.

I bought it from iTunes and put it on my phone, and put my phone in this cardboard tube that makes a great makeshift speaker.

And I started to dance.

I think I played it a good 20 times, resetting each time it came near the end. I danced like a little crazy person, arms flailing, feet kicking, no real rhythm or method or choreography and not a single sweet blessed fuck given. This was not my living room, I was not in pajamas on carpet, I was under a bright full moon in a summer sky, in a swirly dress and bare feet, stamping out splashes in the shallows of a pool. Partway through, I felt the weird exhaustion in my limbs, the realization that this is some sweet exercise, damnit, this strange buzzing feeling that was part breathlessness, and part...something else. And I thought back to Gede Parma and the mention that dancing can be used to raise energy for ritual and spellwork.

I'm usually a pretty methodical person when it comes to a lot of things, especially witchcraft, so it's significant to say I threw down a circle right there in the middle of the most random bit of floor, just enough room to dance, to get at my phone to keep the music going. I just went with it, grabbing the energy flowing through my body, through the air, through that half-imagined moonlit summer sky.

What I chose to cast, to release, is for me to know alone. But the experience is something new I had never thought I'd embrace. If nothing comes of my impromptu spellwork, I got a good workout and blew off some much needed steam doing it.

Interesting how these things come to you.