Glad Yule!

Hello everyone. I hope your various holidays have been treating you well!

I've been busy but also less busy than normal for this time of year - it's pretty awesome, actually.

We've had an abnormal month weather wise - with several small snowstorms back to back, with a lot of freezing and thawing. The past week has been our more typical mild rainy December - but it was weird to see snow and ice on the ground, and have minus double digit windchills, before mid-January.

Garm and I did our runic initiation - I pondered for awhile on "sacrifice", and what I could possibly offer to the Alfather in exchange for the knowledge of the runes -  what I could give up to Him, that I had not already given. And then I had a small epiphany - as Odin sacrificed himself to himself, so should we - not a sacrifice to him, but to ourselves.

I gave it some thought-- and decided to shave my head.

 

It may seem silly, but as a woman, a shaved head is an unusual thing, usually relegated to butch lesbians (and I am a lesbian but definitely not butch) and cancer patients. Women with shaved heads purely for the fuck of it are rare.  I also have a very strong attachment to my giant floofy mane of curly hair. But this is something I've always wanted to try, just to shatter expectations of me and embrace my femininity in a different way. Nootls did the honours.

It's already growing back a little (I may shave it again because the low-maintenance nature of it is lovely for the winter.)

Back at the middle of the month, I started mixing together some ingredients to make a kyphi-style incense. I say kyphi style, because the general proportions and amounts of things were more or less following this recipe, but used a pretty varied list of resins and herbs, trying to make a sort of "Northern Forest" scent - evergreen resin, birch and pine bark, and juniper berries. I just combined the wet and dry ingredients tonight, and since benzoin powder wasn't available, I rolled the little balls in ground gum arabic to help it set. I had way too much "wet" ingredients left, so I mixed up some other stuff on the fly to combine with it, just for the hell of it - waste not want not! We'll see how it turns out!

Tracking my recipes in a messy, scribbly fashion.

My winter altar, updated just a little with some red berries (dried multiflora rose hips)

My incense, all balled up and ready to cure for a bit before use! Fingers crossed! 

Yule was lovely - we had a small ritual with our friends, had a candle processional through the house, put up our tree, and drank warm mulled cider. Christmas, which I celebrate in secular fashion with my friends and family, was lovely also. 

Together my little pack and I will feast on roast goose for Old Christmas (otherwise known as Little Christmas) since our schedules didn't align well over the holidays and Yule fell in the middle of the week.

I got out for a good long forest hike today - it's been long overdue, and was delighted to confirm that wintergreen carpets the ground in my local woodsy park. It's harvest-able far enough off the main path that I feel safe using it.

Such a pretty little plant!

 I've taken to trying to understand my hamr - here in the concept of the shape one's soul takes if it wanders away from the body. I've taken the shape of a Grey Goose for over a year now - but another animal has also arisen as prevalent. I've mentioned her vaguely before - a creature with a rather snarly reputation perhaps being debunked by modern science. I'm not quite ready to talk about her yet - we're still learning to understand one another and her role as a fragment of my soul.

But winter brings with it many journeys inward.

I hope some brightness shines for you--in my part of the world, the worst of winter lays before us, with the heaviest snows and most treacherous ice and the cruelest of the cold winds-- but knowing that now each day will be a little longer and brighter than the last gives me hope.

May it for you as well.

Winter

I've been so quiet!

I got an indigo giftcard from work - I'm going to be ordering some books, getting back on track with my reading.

I had plans for a post delving yet again into the powerful death-vibes of 2016. The darkness swirling in the world, the realizations and understandings I've come to over the past several months. I was going to write about emotional abuse and gaslighting, about my stepping away from a toxic environment and how long it took me to wake up from that.

But y'know what? Fuck that. The world is in a hellhole right now and I can't bring myself to feed the yucky feels any longer.

So I'm going to quickly sum up some of the awesome fucking shit that's been going on.

I've been celebrating every sabbat/esbat/etc in style. My group of four (myself included) have made a point to get together. Our rituals are loose, informal affairs, but our energy is wonderfully in sync, so even if we allow ourselves to be casual and silly, we still have great synergy and I can feel that we are connected. The love in our little group is unbelievable. My wife, is of course, my wife, my best friend, the love of my life. Garm has come to help in the yard many times, we feed him supper, he took my wife to the emergency room the other night to get some stitches looked at, while I was stuck at work. (She's absolutely fine by the way.) Nootls has helped us around the house, we've hosted her on the couch as she has quite a drive to get home, we've babysat her dog. She just hooked us up with Reindeer hides, mine I'm using as a throw on the couch.

Mabon

I managed to source a suckling pig - Yule is in the middle of the week and I have no time off, so we'll likely do our great Yule feast a little later - but I am so beyond excited.

We got our yard cleaned up, and a few things planted - it snowed today, and I still have raked leaves to bag, but come spring we can start fresh on much better footing than this time last year. We got to harvest some garden sage and lavender from our herb garden.

I finished reading the first half of Taking Up the Runes - I have the elder Futhark memorized, and their meanings, and finally made myself a set of runes. 

I have other rune books to read and more study to do - the runes are a lifetime journey, I feel - but I'm beyond happy to understand them even at a baseline now.

We bought a sewing machine - my wife and I - and we each made a cloak. I'm madly in love with mine. I then made a viking style apron dress and tunic to go with it. So I finally have real, handmade ritual garb!

Stylin'

I did some major altar work as well. My current altar I inherited second-third-?? hand, and it was battered and covered in sticky tape residue. I did love it despite (or because of?) it's well-loved look, but I wanted to refresh it. I attacked it with sandpaper, sanded parts of it down to bare wood, others simply deep enough into the finish to smooth over the gouges, the old adhesive gunk. I then refinished the whole thing with a more matte-paint-like stain and replaced all the hardware. It has a fresh new look now and I adore it. <3

 

 

Looks good as new!! There are "before" pics back in my blog somewhere I'm sure...

I also worked at making a small Odin and Sleipnir statues for the Alfather's altar. Sleipnir I felt was particularly genius. I bought two paper mache unicorns at a local arts n' crafts store...and murdered them to make a hybrid 8-legged steed.   

I mentioned snow.

Well that was a shock! I can't remember the last time that the first snow I saw in the year was an actual "snow storm". It's not quite cold enough to stick here as we're near the coast, so we got mostly wet slushy snow and rain - but still more than flurries. The wind was intense and COLD this morning.
I need to get those damn leaves bagged up before they get buried. It's supposed to be another rough winter.

Secretly I'm excited? I love snowstorms and snow days and being curled up with a warm drink listening to the wind howl outside. It's a bit scarier when you own a house vs. an apartment, but damn, it's still so comforting.

I've been busy-busy the last few weeks, but feeling very driven. I have a new gorgeous leatherbound book to make into a proper BOS - I have plans to use pressed plants, colour, polaroids - and make it a mishmashed work of art. I'm ready to bring back the activity into other parts of my spiritual life - not just rituals, but meditations, real practice, get reading and blogging again.

Here's to the rapidly approaching end of this majestic shit-show of a year!  

Of wolves among men

Some very exciting spiritual things have been afoot. I've been working steadily at getting through Taking Up The Runes. I had tried once and found myself overwhelmed, but I think I was ready to learn them this time, since I feel more comfortable with my learning. Paxson has earned herself though the dubious distinction of writing the only book I've ever willfully defaced with both pen and highlighter. Long after the book was bought I found out she has some yucky "subtle racism" stuff going on - nothing neo-nazi but just... naive and facepalm worthy, so I've had to make some, um, corrections. I'd have turned to a better book, except there don't appear to be any - every rune book I've uncovered has some nasty "folkish" heathen baggage attached, so it's come to "learn what I can, take the rest with a grain of salt". Sigh.

But the past week or so, I've been thinking a lot about certain animals, their place in myth, spirituality, and science.

A new-ish totem creature has been emerging for me, one whose symbolically ascribed meanings tend towards gluttony, savagery, attitude for days, wild animal abandon, and general orneriness. It's a little known critter, and upon good old fashioned learning about the animal and it's behavior, is not nearly so ornery as is thought. I've decided to learn what this little creature has to teach me, not just in what others think of her, but in what she feels like to me. And this got me thinking.

I read a piece I stumbled upon from March, (Link) about wolves in heathenry, how many people call themselves "wolves among men" or "wolves of Odin" as a sort of fancy title for themselves. The article pondered that wolves are enemies, preying on the weak, gluttonous and greedy and dangerous - that they are not things to emulate, they are things to defend our communities against. The wolves who accompany the Alfather do so because one of his aspects is death, so the wolves are not the most positive side of him. Wolves are the dangerous outsiders stealing our sheep, and threatening our very lives when we enter the woods.

 If those qualities truly belonged to the wolf, I'd be inclined to agree that "wolf people" are perhaps to be avoided. But I happen to know a wolf person, and I also know a decent amount about wolves. So the question I asked myself was - when we work with animal spirits, symbols, archetypes, totems - should we rely only on the mythology of these creatures - or, should we look too, to what we know about them in the modern day?

Wolves are not dangerous antisocial predators among their own - far from it. Wolves are born and bred to be social, it is part of their DNA. The pack hunts together, lives together, shares in caring for the young, and protects each other from their rivals. Wolves are loyal in that way,  and their familial bonds are crucial to their survival. While wolves are territorial, packs do interact, and "lone wolves" may find packs to join and become a part of a community in this way.
As for gluttony, it is true that wolves gorge massive amounts of meat at a kill - sometimes more than 20 pounds in a sitting. But wolves also succeed in the hunt less than 10% of the time - this is not gluttony, but opportunity. An animal who may spend a week or more between meals must make the most of what he can. If moments of joy are few and far between in a world rather at odds with how a lot of us would like to be living, drinking every drop that comes your way is making the most and best of life while you can. (To be fair though, calling yourself a "wolf among sheep" is perhaps something of a predatory statement - or perhaps you're such a rather inept wolf that penned sheep are all you can catch. )

The wolves that appear in Norse myth are certainly not benevolent by and large, but they have their place, too. Fenrir will slay Odin at Ragnarok, and play his part in the end of the world, but when the dust settles, a new world has begun. Death is part of life - you can't have one without the other. In our modern world, the fear of the wolf can subside - though their place in mythology is important, they are an intrinsic part of the world we live in, the cycle of life and death that is woven in all of nature. If you would see the wolf as only a force of destruction and chaos, remember that our planet was born a ball of fire and gas, and that everything eventually breaks to become something new.

So many of these animals were once our ancient foes, and we were right to fear them, for they are mighty and formidable - but now, as the natural world vanishes before we are even done understanding it, remember that between wolves and men, only one kills for sport, consumes more than he ever needs, and doesn't look after his brothers. I've learned the hard way this past year, that sometimes the enemy is already living inside the gates.

I think I'll stick with the wolves.

Dirt. Worship.

It feels weird to be stuck at a desk again.

I took a week vacation, the first since December (which has been waaayyy too fucking long), and spent nearly all of the week toiling in our yard.

With my mother's help, we got most of the leaf litter cleared away, and my wife and I were able to get beds rebuild, cleaned, dug, and are slowly refilling them with soil.

We were left with a decrepit old metal and wood bench - I acquired fresh wood, metal primer and rust paint, new bolts, and outdoor urethane, and am slowly getting everything ready to rebuild it good as new in a lovely deep red colour.

During one of our hardware store trips, we got some herbs (3 types of lavender and one of garden sage) to plant, as well as a foxglove. We have dahlias, fairy lilies, and marigolds to put out.  I have 5 happy plum tomato plants in pots on the deck.

So many nights over the past week, I've stumbled in the house and straight to the shower, exhausted and aching and filthy. Head to toe dirt. Smeared on my arms and legs, inside my gloves, smudged on my face, under my fingernails, on my glasses. Soil and old muck and rust and dust.  From digging out rocks from garden beds, from pulling weeds, from carrying bucket after bucket of fresh garden soil, from slipping and falling trying to disconnect the hose from the tap again. Grass stains on my knees. My neck hurts, my legs are covered in bruises, I have hedge thorn scratches on my arms. I have the start of a swell farmer tan. Sweaty. Hair at the back of my neck is wet, between my breasts is dripping, my glasses keep sliding down my nose.

And I fucking love it.

This is building a relationship with our land - this is paying in blood and sweat and labour, in hopes of love in return. Beautiful flowers, the shade of massive trees, some day soon, sweet fresh veg; hopefully cherries one day from our cherry tree. There are some random blackberry canes here and there that I refuse to remove - others sprouting up that may be wild raspberry. And so much wonderful green.

We had a small barbecue for Canada Day, and for the first time I walked barefoot in the grass. My grass. Our grass. I was always a bit shy to, before, not knowing what rocks or sticks or broken glass were back there. But no more. I walked barefoot, sat in it, laid back and looked up at the sky.

I had to pull some roots out of a flower bed - I suspect they belonged to one of our big trees. I wove them into two little wreathes - one I hung, in offering, on the tree - one I brought in for my altar. It needs a re-do, some freshening up, and then I will show you.

<3

Dirt is wonderful.

Oops

So about that video... Kinda forgot. Oopsie.



Here it is!!

Death and Rebirth

My new tarot deck makes mention of how uncomfortable with are with death, how we just don't like to know about what happens to things after they die -- and speaks of Death as "the energy of endings", but always then the cycle of renewal that follows.

I took the Death card from all three of my tarot decks tonight and was amused to discover that all three are birds - a condor, a skeletal bird, and a phoenix.

From left to right - Animal Totem Tarot, Wild Unknown Tarot, and Shadowscapes Tarot

I've been thinking of death in the literal, physical sense a fair bit lately. My grandmother's illness has brought me to the stark realization that her passing quietly and unexpectedly in her sleep would be an incredible kindness versus the possible drawn-out spiral of losing herself to Alzheimer's disease. A coworker's mother also has terminal cancer, and was recently given 24 to 48 hours left, so we were comforting her as best we could while she was at work.

In the metaphorical sense, I'm learning that the death-renewal cycle need not always be painful. We come to expect that when there is an ending, there will be a rebirth, but it will be a bloody, painful, messy process, one that needs to be followed with gentle healing, picking up the pieces.

But what if Death is the healing? What if the tearing down, the cutting apart, the burning and walking away, is the recovery?

I spoke before of severing some facets of my life that were making me unhealthy, that were sickly and stagnant. So much anxiety, so much tension and stress and malaise bound up in so much, so many hours of my life spent on these things. Death brought me relief. The mighty end, that freed me of so much weight. We so often fear death, fear endings, and I think I was clinging, too, to things that no longer served - and that is what we say, isn't it? Those of us who perhaps got a Wiccan-ish flavour to our practice early on? "I release all that does not serve." We cling to our own ball and chain, afraid to drift away if we shed that weight.

I've been mentally healthier, calmer and happier, than I've been in years. My rebirth came as glorious renewal, cleared vision, new purpose and drive. Perhaps it was the timing, the needfulness of this cycle in my life, or perhaps it is all in how I chose to look at it?

Are there any facets of your life where Death and Renewal may restore your vigor and soul?

Stuck sideways between the metaphysical and the physical is our back yard. We saw it as full of potential when we bought this place. Why, put up a privacy fence, plant some flowers, and tada! Our own little paradise. The other thing Death is good at, is stripping us of our delusions.

Our back garden wall is home to a massive rat nest - so there went money, and effort, and no doubt more still - we will never likely be 100% free of them (we live next to a grocery store), but we're hoping to reduce their numbers to a point where the health risks of having so many so near are mitigated. And our beautiful gardens we had romantically planned to fill with flowers, are so soil-barren that I managed to put my foot through one to the near top of a rubber boot. I was afraid at first that I'd fallen into a rat warren, but after a lot of digging, shifting rock and stomping, we realized that the previous owner had tried to compensate for too little soil by piling up rocks in shoddy walls, and the soil has sunk and settled and eroded around these until chunks of the yard are actually hollow. He also left years worth of leaves to rot, so huge patches of the yard are so overgrown with dead grass and rotting leaves that the grass beneath choked and died. But several evenings of hard work, and we've bagged up piles of leaves and dead grass, dismantled shoddy rock walls and rebuilt some, and once the weather is consistent enough to set concrete, we'll be out with mortar taking all those stones (my gods this yard has so many damn rocks) and building proper walls and a fire pit, filling beds with top soil and bark mulch.

We've found an endless number of salamanders under all those leaves. We've been careful to relocate them to dark damp corners near the rocks we're not going to be disturbing. I adore them. (they are eastern red backs, if anyone wants to google)

Even after the work we've done, we have so much ahead of us - but each time we finish, the yard looks a little cleaner, a little greener, and it's a wonderful feeling.

Death in the end, is change. We can be subject to it, but we can create it, too. Choices I have made, with circumstances brought to me, have brought a great cycle around in my life. And now we are agents of renewal in our space, our bit of land, that we are working with love and commitment - like the condor in my tarot deck, we are clearing up the dead so the land can breathe.

It's a wonderful feeling.

(I'll be posting a video tomorrow night, of a tour of our yard Amy did a week ago - and me tracing her steps tonight to show how much we've accomplished.)

Thought and Memory

A lot has happened.

I suspect 99% of the folks reading this will know a bit about why I've been gone so long. Long story short, we are now happy homeowners in a house that is finally feeling like home. I had a rough mental health spell - one of my worst ever - but I got the help I needed, and though it was a very hard time, I managed to keep going, get up every morning and go to work, eat, drink, sleep, so that is something.

And now I'm doing very well!

Our new home has a small third bedroom that has become our sacred/altar room - that is its only function, and it is so incredible to have such a space. No more altar crammed into a corner of the bedroom - I've allowed my altar to stretch out, giving me a good chunk of space to have my "seasonal" setup, and also a mostly clear space where I can "work" - and numerous shelves and nooks to give me gods and spirits space. Some things are still empty-ish, but it's always a work in progress, but it's been a lot of fun getting it set up the way I wanted it.

Our yard is incredible - again once we get it cleaned up, and get a privacy fence put in, it's going to be an amazing space for fires, drinks, parties, barbecues - and rituals.

I've gone through some pretty crazy spiritual changes and transformations - I'm working with a specific animal right now as a sort of "totem" and am feeling very strongly drawn to start looking into more shamanic practices. (I guess not a huge shock given my relationship with Odin.) More on that later!

My spiritual path and my personal life recently got shaken up a bit. Revelation comes sometimes for me in bursts - I realized a situation was no longer even remotely healthy for me, and in one of those deepthought flashes, I realized it had not, in fact, been healthy for a very long time-years in fact. It takes a lot for me to throw up my hands and walk away. But I will not be mistreated, held to unreasonable expectations, and taken for granted, either. The severing was not gentle or without blood, but it was necessary and beautiful in its finality.

I've felt better, been happier, less stressed, more social, more me ever since.

Our Ostara ritual was beautiful. There were four of us - myself and my wife, our friend the Wolf, and a fourth friend whom we haven't been able to practice with in awhile. She brought her dog, who found our ritual spot for us, then lay quietly within the circle and was on her absolute best behavior until we were done.

In case anyone was wondering, natural dyes do work *fantastically* on eggs. These are yellow onion skins (The dark red-orange) red cabbage (the blue) and beets (the soft brown).

My wife got me an amazing set of tarot cards for my birthday - The Animal Totem Tarot by Leeza Robertson. It's a new deck, just released in late March - unlike most of the animal themed decks I've seen, this one tries to still incorporate a good chunk of symbolism from more "traditional" decks. And the artwork is simply gorgeous, to boot.

The only downside to my days are that my grandmother is increasingly unwell. She's fallen prey to the only illness my family has a strong genetic predisposition to - Alzheimer's. Every week now she gets worse - she no longer knows my aunt, who's lived with her for more than 40 years. They are trying, finally, to get her into a care facility, but it could take years for approval and a bed to come up. It makes me heartbroken to know how much she's lost - this is a woman who was adamant she never wanted to be a burden to anyone,  and kept a journal every single day of her life so she'd never forget a thing. She'd write about my visits, what we did - did I help in the garden, did we play in the yard? She kept a separate logbook for her garden - what was planted, what worked, what didn't - what colour of this or that flower, what type of peas and beans and beet seeds she used. How many pints of raspberries she picked. To see her so far gone that she wouldn't even recognize those journals, now, as hers...it does hurt. But only time will tell now - in some ways I hope that she passes quickly from her illness, rather than linger for another countless number of years not remembering who she is.

I'll have more specific things to talk about soon - some of my spiritual growth, my changes, what I've learned. I just wanted to give everyone a big catch-up on where the hell I've been.