Singing Goddess

So you may or may not agree with this particular life event peeking into a Witchy blog. That's cool.

It's happening anyway!

Last weekend, I did a very uncharacteristic thing which was hung out with a coworker outside of work. By "hung out" I mean he and his girlfriend, my wife and I, his roommate and two of my close friends piled into two cars and drove 12+ hours to Connecticut for a concert.

Not just any concert.

I have been a Florence + the Machine fan since Lungs, since I heard two songs at a drag show, of all things, and Amy was like "yeah they're really good! I have the first album!"

This was my first time seeing Florence live.

I love a good show, there's just something about hearing your favourite songs live no matter what, but nothing on earth could have prepared me for this.

Without hyperbole, this was less a concert and more a religious experience in and of itself - there was magic in that arena, and I still haven't quite come all the way down from it yet. I don't know if I ever will. I very resolutely refused to ground myself for a full day afterward, because I had absolutely zero interest in coming down from the high I was riding. I feel as though some part of me was snatched away for the duration of the show, then giving back changed ever so slightly.  Along with some exciting things happening in other areas, I've been in a better mood since than I've been in awhile, despite succumbing to a head cold.

This woman is absolutely divine. 

So yeah, sort of a silly update, but also a reminder that there is magic in all sorts of things!

In the land of the Gods

It's been (as usual) longer than I intended.

In June, my family and I - my wife, my mother, and my two dearest friends and I, flew to Iceland for a week. Four of the five of us are pagan, and three are heathen or heathen-ish. 

We spent the Summer Solstice in the land of the midnight sun, and saw a legitimate 24 hours of daylight on the Solstice day. 

Being in a land which doesn't see real darkness is a really bizarre head game on your sense of time. At 11:30PM, it is easy to be outside casually walking around, not realizing it is 11:30PM. 

We spent the first two nights in a house literally beside the sea, at the beginnings of the Westfjords. We saw more sheep than people, and saw some of the most wondrous, bizarre, barren but beautiful landscapes I have ever seen. We spent a night nearer to the south of Iceland, with a beautiful endless field for a backyard. We spent our last three nights in the capital, driving around to various places of interest, and parking the car and exploring the downtown areas on foot. From a purely tourist perspective, Iceland is beautiful, the people are wonderful, and the horses are wonderful creatures (coming from someone not overly used to horses.) The air is clean and fresh, our accommodations were all absolutely lovely. 

On the spiritual side...that is a whole other level. 

The spirit of this country is alive like I've never felt before.

For the Solstice, we went to Þhingvellir--it's a national park, the historic seat of the Alþing, and a very powerful place, having been there now. It was wildly windy and rainy for most of our time there, but we - inclusive of my mother - found a flat rock to use as an altar, and placed on it what things we'd thought to bring with us, and did several rounds of a blöt with a bottle of Brennevin. 

A waterfall at Þhingvellir

A very dear and very sacred-seeming encounter with Goose

I of course loved birding in Iceland, and was especially excited by the possibility of seeing Greylag geese "in real life". Goose is my totem, the greylag specifically - while we sometimes get the odd stowaway here in winter with the flocks of Canada geese, the odds of seeing them are rare. We saw them in Iceland almost right away, but never up close and never within photography range.

After our ritual, we continued down the path for a ways, and there they were. A few geese settling in for the night ("night" being relative - it was after 10pm but the only dark was cloud cover.) We watched for a bit and I crept a little closer for photos - and the geese were kind enough to let me in on their little secret - goslings! 

I'd see them again later at a pond in Reykjavik, and closer up, but that night at Þhingvellir there was magic at play. 

It's a pretty surreal feeling now to wear my Mjolnir pendant, knowing it's been in the sea of the Westfjords, and has laid upon a rock as an altar at Þhingvellir. I've been wearing it practically nonstop since I got it as an iniation gift from my wife so many years ago - the silver is starting to show the sort of deep worn tarnish that can't be polished away. And now it's been on this amazing trip with me.

In other news, I lost my grandmother last week to a long battle with Alzheimer's. It was thankfully very quick when the time came - she did not have to linger or suffer too long. As I've been puttering in the garden this past week, I've been thinking of her a lot. 

It's good to be back - maybe sometime soon I'll get back into posting more than every 6 months, perhaps? 

Coming back around

I'm familiar with the expression "the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions". I've always taken it to mean, no matter how virtuous your intentions may be, ultimately it is your actions that matter most. Causing harm is still causing harm even if you don't mean to.

Sometimes I wonder if another twist on that expression is that great intentions themselves send us on spirals downward, if we overlook our limitations.

The last six months have felt a lot like, two steps forward, two steps back, though I know that's an unfair assessment.

My mental health took a blow at the end of last summer. My team at work has been consistently understaffed, and promises to bring on more people, alleviate some of the load, etc - have taken too long, and been too little on arrival. There was a brief respite in the fall, a few sweet weeks of having my feet under me, before it all spiralled out of control again.

I'm out of touch with myself. I thought I had a handle on things. I had a decent amount of time off over the holidays, and thought that I could keep it together, day by day, just getting over each hurdle as it came. Turns out I was further down the rabbit hole than I thought.

I've been off work since the new year, but going back at the beginning of February. I feel ready - I miss people, I miss a reason to get up in the morning and DO things. I've been pretty good at not completely succumbing to laziness, and moping around the house in my pyjamas, but it's hard to get up early in the dark when I don't NEED to. It's hard to get out of the house when it's freezing or too mild for January and raining, when I don't HAVE to go anywhere. Laziness is easy.  Especially in winter.

But I've been needle felting and colouring and keeping the house clean and seeing my therapist and my medication got upped, just a little - so I'm trying to focus on that, that I'm still growing gods damnit, I have not been stagnant simply letting my mind go empty. I've also been doing a lot of winter birding, which has been lovely on my head - out in the fresh air whenever it's a few degrees above "I can't feel my fucking face".

My favourite band (Florence + the Machine) has a book club which I mentioned briefly before -- it's nice to be reading again, and reading things that are outside my usual scope of interest.

At the same time, I'm plodding through Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (HR Ellis Davidson). It's actually a more enjoyable read than I was led to expect - not as scholarly or dry as I feared, it's just competing with a lot of other brainspace right now. It has given me an unexpected new attachment to Thor, who surprisingly has been a god I haven't worked much with, but plan to start.

My felted creations will be going up on my Etsy soon, and I have lots more planned once I can get my mitts on more wool.

I am not going to promise to be vastly more active, because I'm certainly not out of the woods yet, but my intention, hell-bound though it may leave me, is to be more active here, to pick up where I left off and really make something of this again.

Because no matter where I end up, one thing is certain: without intention I won't go anywhere.