Begin with the nudge behind your left ear. The whisper of the grass. The swelling and shrinking of the moon. Feel a yearning in your soul, your belly, your limbs, an ache calling you home.

Next question how you find the path (not realising you’re already on it) …start with purchasing…Books. Crystals. Altar tools. Essential oils. Sign up for online classes. Join Facebook groups. Follow the #witchesofinstagram. Google everything.

Next craft rituals, keep a book of shadows, lay out elaborate and mystifying tarot spreads, have a palm reading and study your natal chart. Read up on gods and goddesses.

Wake up one day and be captivated by the beauty of a bee on the lavender. Feel the earth pulse beneath your bare feet on dew soaked grass. Feel the breath beneath your ribs, thrill as a bat flies overhead on the hunt, feel your soul sing as you dip yourself whole in the clear, cold river.

Get simple. Find magic in shells and stones. In found objects or a twisted twig. Choose an acorn and a feather for your altar. Weave spells from string and pine cones, salt and kitchen herbs. 

Find the cauldron you seek tucked safely beneath your rib cage, behind your navel. Find your wand in your index finger. Feel magic beating in your blood and echoing in your bones, feel it rising up from the earth, warm and nourishing.

Know that you were born not made. That if they cut you in half it would say witch through to your marrow like a stick of peppermint rock. Be the magic you were made to be. Only you can.

When you come to the same place.  Revisiting. Wondering if you are repeating a pattern and finding instead you are standing on the spiral path, there are echoes, familiarity. But a different perspective. Viewpoints shifted.

Here we are then.

History repeating in a rebooted version.  My counsellor asked me what I have sent myself back to learn.  I am still wondering.

Today, heading down the A20 after an afternoon ramble, I dropped down into my life with the sensation of dream falling. I’ve spent weeks since our move trying to fit the previous strands of work and plans into a new mould.  Of course they don’t fit.  Nothing fits. But, waste not want not, I’ve been chopping and shifting and remodelling, those old wineskins again…My biggest worry has been about altering commitments. One of my work roles is regular, but uncontracted. I’ve been anxious about it, wondering how it will play out in the new term, what shape it will take this next year. I’ve been waiting for emails, full of tension, waiting for the reprimand, the call into the boss’s office…

Until.

Hold on one moment.

I’m the boss.

I’m self-employed.  I work for people on a casual basis, I go where the work is.  I weave together a range of different roles in a range of different places and this is how I earn a living. It’s a way of working which is in transition now my own children are grown and the need for a work pattern which fits with school holidays has gone.  It has been helpful though as I have recovered from burn out and had the flexibility to deal with family needs.

I have been working in this way as if it is for someone else.  I want to have happy clients, I seek to offer my best whatever I’m doing.  But I struggle to remember that there is no performance management coming up, no achievements to reach for promotion…So this anxiety is misplaced because the choices are ultimately mine to make…

Which spirals me back to another quest.  To claim my power.

Not the power of a dictator, all high boots and grandiose schemes, but the furnace-fire of my soul, bright jewel and essence, warmth, home.

I give it away. Locate it elsewhere. In others. In concerns and thoughts. I allow it’s energy to seep away and leave me cold. I fritter it in worries or fuss it away in perfectionism.

Perhaps I’m here again to reclaim that power. To uncover my maiden self and restore her, to recover the energy which fired me when I was younger, to reclaim my edges and the wild expanse of my soul.  Perhaps there is a chance to walk the shadow path to the edge of knowing and dip into the wild unknown.  Perhaps this turn of the spiral takes me away from one pattern and opens up a new way of walking through life.

The rules, it turns out, are just ideas, once questioned they disintegrate, rice paper on the tongue, dissolving. I am full of wonder that I can have taken so long to wake up to this.  Again.  But patterns have a power of their own, they are well established and easy. What if I run into this spiral, though, if I charge headlong beyond the next bend, beyond what I know and feel safe with, if I go fast enough, will that energy throw m outwards, into a new orbit?

A sense of expansiveness and promise now at the edge of perception. Freedom and hope.

This is the long, slow pause between terms.  Once full of harvest, now the days between the end of one school year and another stretch and bend, unshaped.  I am still working full-time but without the edges of school commitments that work is different daily and the lack of pattern unsettles me.

This time of year reminds me of my own schooling, the milestones of examinations ended, of the impending next step of the autumn term.  I went to a grammar school.  It’s  a system in this part of England of state “selective”  education.  I’m still in the process of healing that time in my life, seven years of vital psychological and emotional development locked into a pressure-cooker of academic achievement left a mark and some unhelpful patterns.  While I often think about those years and the way in which they shaped me, I am less inclined to reflect on what I have learned since or what I learned which was helpful.  This is what I’ve got so far…

1. The most useful thing you will learn in school is that touch-typing course you took in the lower sixth.

2. You can work for twenty-six years on a factory packing line and be happy.

3. In five years no-one will be interested in your A Level results. In ten years no-one will be interested in your degree class.

4. You know most of the things you need already, in your bones and blood, listen for them, they will steer you true.

5. Knowledge is not the same as power.

6. Your life is a growing and a gift not a program or schedule, feel into that.

7. You are absolutely and unequivocally unique.  This is a given, encoded in your DNA. Stop trying to be someone else.

8. After years of fault-finding in feedback and in self-evaluation you will need to say something kind to yourself everyday.  And mean it.

9. There is more than one way to live a life, question everything you thought you knew.

10. Nothing you do will prepare you for your actual life.  It will happen around you in ways you couldn’t imagine.  Learn to ride it, to flow with it, to breathe through it, thirty years of planning won’t stop the unexpected…

 Right now the purple-pink thistle flowers by the river are setting seed. Each flower transforming into a shell of white fluff and preparing to scatter. In the death of one phase the possibility of the next.

 

Like the seeds in a dandelion clock. These images have shadowed me this year. The sense of a thousand possibilities. The feeling of chance encounters and their ripples. The unseen consequences of our words and actions.

 

I’ve spent the past fourteen years sand-bagging my life. In the event of sudden and unwelcome change shore up your defences. Baton hatches. Pull up drawbridge. Prepare. Plan. Train. Review, begin again.

Its been a journey, I suppose. But I am coming to wonder at this version of myself. She’s good at what she does. Determined. Focused. She perseveres. But in her attempts to safeguard herself she is missing life.

Driving out to see a client today I reminded myself that this is my real life. I am not play-acting. It’s not an imagined scenario; a training day role play, a childhood imaginary game. The buzzard thermaling there above the wheat, almost brown it’s so dry, is real. The newly resurfaced road, minus its dividing  lines, is real, the woman with her carrier bag and flip flops walking in the heat haze is real, the trickle of sweat through my hairline is real.

In unusual weather everything becomes surreal. The heat and lack of rain is revealing hidden secrets in the landscape, lost monuments, archaeological remains. It’s the same in my life. The bones of life are coming to the surface, harder to bury in the flinty soil…Here are the bleached remains. Here the signs of something deeper, more primitive, a primal, present, instinctive life.

I am learning, slowly, that the mind doesn’t have the answers, I have to feel into them. The me I used to live in is unimpressed. It isn’t very tidy or coherent. I often do things on a whim. I am like a child exploring her environment, because it is here and it wants me to. My plans and programs, my lists and goals are abandoned, a boot fair of clutter and unneeded processes.

I want my life to be like thistledown. I want to grow, flower, and release. I want to let it all go. Not radio track the outcomes, simply set them to dance, fairy free without the need to know or monitor. They have their own life, they will live beyond what I can see or imagine. This is the magic. That each day I am sending thistledown out into the world, in my words and deeds, and that I only have to do this, as light as air, as easy as breathing, the rest is up to grace.

It is time.

For you too.

Take off the mask.

Reach into your heart and lead your soul-self out into the sunlight.

We’ve been hiding for too long.

Playing the roles given to us by parents and teachers.

Staying small so that we don’t upset, don’t challenge, don’t upstage.

Listening to the whispers of doubt, the naysayers; feeling the disapproving glances cast to put us in our place.  This far and no further, the smallest piece of the cake, chosen to be polite.

What does it look like if you take the biggest piece? And first?

What does it feel like if you shout and stamp your feet and sing and drum and scream and dance? Shameful? Ecstatic? What if you are the one on their feet first when they ask for volunteers at the panto? What if you’re the kid up on the stage getting all the limelight, bathed in glory?

What if you take the gift of yourself, the things you’re best at, and do those first, before the ironing or the grocery shopping or the pile of marking? What if you use the whole bottle of ointment, poured out and running over, over your whole head?

What if that is the work? To un-hide, un-mask, un-wrap in unimaginable, crazy, delighted wonder.  What if we break open and show the things we learned to hide. Let our hair blow wild and free, our hands muddy, our feet black from dancing on the bare earth? What if we shine?

 

It’s 9.55 am. Two and a half hours ago I had a phone call. J was in the hospital after a night out. The paramedics think he had his drink spiked.

Of course I blame myself. I have powerful thoughts. Last night I sat in bed at a reasonable hour with a fresh cup of peppermint tea and a good book and I felt like life was calming down. I shouldn’t have thought that because it tempted fate…This is magical thinking. I know it’s nonsense. That by thinking I precipitated the next drama. Of course I know that’s nonsense… Mostly.

So I’m sat in J’s flat in Margate having retrieved him from A and E and got him cleaned up. He’s shaken and feels like crap but will live.

I am constantly reminded that life is what you get. Each day just now I feel the disjoint between IG feeds and Facebook posts and what actually happens. I post a snapshot in a rare 5 minutes of leisure. Because it’s rare. Not because this is my life. If I posted about real life it would mostly be; a computer keyboard, cat litter trays, Morrisons (our local supermarket), a bowl full of washing up, laundry.

I’m beginning to think that I may have to shed the social. I don’t want to throw it away altogether, I have made some amazing friends and soul connections this way. But more and more it bruises my soul to be so constantly visible.

In magical terms it reminds me of a glamour. A glamour is spell which represents something which isn’t real, which shows you an illusion or something as other than it is. Glamours are deceptions, misrepresentations. It is a powerful magic which requires willpower and a strong sense of self to overcome. Tiffany Aching faces it when she deals with the faery queen in Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men. It needs a bone deep connection to your own truth and confidence in your own wisdom to escape…

I’m not as strong as Tiffany. I want to be seen. This magic makes me feel real. If I am visible I exist. If you can’t see me I vanish, like a baby hiding it’s eyes, I’ve  disappeared…

I am working with breath and body. I am working to explore what is actually present, rather than what I think is here.

For years now I’ve been working hard to create a work life which encompasses my passions but while I know this is valued by those who work with me and I enjoy it, in real terms it’s not supporting us.

Life is I find a constant process of revaluation. Shifting clouds of circumstance. It is not helpful to persist with particular ways of thinking or believing when these are no longer working . If I were tending a garden it would be time to see what is actually growing. From many seeds planted what has sprouted? What is thriving? What needs watering, or pulling up and composting? What tiny fruits can I feed with the energy of intention and purpose as they swell and flourish, ripening for harvest?

I am giving myself permission to do this work. To make mistakes. To try and fail. To change my mind. This is the essence of life lived rather than observed. Reaching down to the roots of the soul to find the elemental self and bringing her into daylight, blinking in the light of an awakening life.

Today is the last, last day.  After nearly two months of sorting, sifting, clearing, moving I will return the keys for the old house. A new chapter then.

As the dust begins to settle something is clawing at the corner of my mind (like the cat at the door as I write, desperate to walk over the keyboard and watch birds on the telegraph wires).  This sensation has been with me almost constantly for the past decade or so, but in the past I have been better at evading it.  It is a disquiet, an unease, a restlessness.  Something uncomfortable, like a stone in the shoe, or a splinter, just below the skin but avoiding extraction.

In the past I have identified this with divine promptings, a feeling that I need to be looking elsewhere, moving on.  Over time though I am coming to wonder if it isn’t within me. I feel now that this feeling, which has had me seeking new life paths and employments repeatedly over many years, is a desire for escape. I don’t know what yet.  What it is I am running from. Or wish to avoid.  But now I feel the answer is with sitting.  Just being.  Already the intensity is threatening to overwhelm. A rising sense of panic from my stomach to my head.

I have a lot of “air” in my character.  In elemental workings air is to do with the head, with thoughts and ideas.  For me my inner world is often more real than the concrete one, and frequently feels much safer.  My ideas and imaginings are often so real that they hang around, created ghosts, long after a particular project or plan has passed or been discarded.  It gets pretty hectic in my head at times, noisy with the buzz of ideas, old and new, an overcrowded waiting room.  They lounge around, arguing, these thoughts, contradicting and disputing, waving their agendas at each other.  It’s no wonder I get dizzy some days.

It takes conscious effort to bring myself back into the real, and to really “be” here. With so much changing my levels of restlessness are almost off the scale.  If I can have a new plan then my mind will be busy with that, I will feel a greater sense of control, at least over this thing I am creating and putting in place, and the discomfort will be dissipated, for the time being.  This helps me to understand, at least in part, my love of studying.  Keeping the restless child of the mind occupied so I can have some peace.

But as we know these are only temporary measures.  There will always be the unoccupied moment, the enforced wait of a delayed train, cancelled plans which free up time, and the mind begins its persistent itch once more.

I am good at thinking.  I’m good at planning and executing those plans.  I am good at reasoning.  I am sensible and seek to live by my principles.  That’s all good.

But right now I feel that’s not the answer. In spite of all that something else is needed.  The situation can’t be fixed that way, it is an old paradigm.  In the new I have to learn to sit.  To feel the discomfort, and then feel it some more.  I have to learn to be in the day, not tomorrow, or next week, or “one day”.  I have to deal with boredom.  Mundane.

Perhaps once I have done this, squirming like a three year old left to sit too long, I will notice something. A woodlouse. A mote of dust in sunlight.  And remember that life is centred elsewhere. That wherever the centre of the universe lies, it is not in me. That I can let go and be here with the same freedom and flow as a sparrow bathing in dust. Perhaps then I will remember what it is to live in grace.

Last year New Age Hipster (a.k.a Vix) wrote this post about being a Christian Witch.  This was powerful for me. Newly out of the church and exploring a nature-based spiritual path I didn’t want to throw my whole faith heritage and spiritual journey to date out of the window.  Yet my own experiences in evangelical/ charismatic churches in my teens had taught me that some people in the church aren’t at all keen on those who follow the old ways.  This kept me hiding my new path and firmly in the broom closet.

More recently I’ve “come out” about reading tarot and have posted occasionally on social media about the Celtic Wheel of the Year and festivals. But I’ve still been reluctant to claim my path.  Because I am afraid.  I’m afraid people won’t understand and I like to be understood…  I’m not a different person.  I haven’t rejected the values which have steered me through life.  I still believe fundamentally we are here to live abundant lives, to have “life to the full“,  to love God/dess and our neighbour.  But there are some aspects of “belief”, being tied to a creed, that I struggled with for decades and can no longer pretend to adhere to. This is, to me, a more honest way to live, than struggling to bend my mind to claim dogmas which I can’t accept.

But it’s challenging. Stepping outside of the certainty of church life is daunting, letting go of a way of life; it was comfortable and, in many ways, safe.  Easier to stay with the known sometimes, even though it’s become unhealthy, than to break free into uncharted territory.  Seeking to hold true to a spiritual path outside of orthodoxy means walking into the  “cloud of unknowing“, continuing to seek God/dess, to reach out all my love, but into a void space beyond.

I still pray sometimes.  Sometimes I talk to Mary.  Sometimes to Jesus.  And today I remembered a retreat I took in 2001-2002.

In Ignatian Spirituality one practice is to imagine yourself in the Bible story.  You visualise the scene.  You see the characters.  You notice what they are wearing. What you can see and smell around you.  Then you see where you are in the story.  Are you a bystander?  One of the leading characters?  If Jesus is there what does he say? Does he speak to you? How do you respond?  You then reflect on what this can teach you about the story, and about your own faith journey.

And I wondered how it would be if I had a conversation with Jesus today about my witchy path.  And what he would say to me now. It began kind of awkwardly, more on my part, the prodigal daughter seeking an audience…

But I realised pretty quickly that it wasn’t an issue.  Jesus isn’t interested in any label I or others ascribe to me.  He is interested in how I live.  I had a strong sense that he calls some people to serve him in the church, and some to serve him in every other place on earth.  He calls people to live radically loving lives, to bring healing, to challenge the dark places in human hearts and seek to bring wholeness.  I do not believe that this is dependent on any creed or specific religious path, because God/dess is way too big to be contained in one faith…

I saw him kneeling on the ground with the woman caught in adultery, drawing shapes in the dust, I saw him challenging the status quo, asking the difficult questions, living differently to the way people expected.  And I knew that while other people might judge me, he didn’t.  That he would ask me to live as honestly as possible. To trust in grace.  To stay open.  To return accusation with patience.  And to be ready to turn over the tables when there is injustice.

I still don’t understand how my faith shifted in the way it did.  I still don’t know what spiritual twister took me from that place and dropped me in this.  But I will keep  walking the path, seeking grace, seeking to serve and seeking to bring love and healing.

Amen, sister. So mote it be.

 

 

The body speaks.

Today it is asking me to slow the heck down, for goodness sake.

It has been telling me this for a while now.

I’m not good at listening.

Since I was eighteen I’ve had patches of poor health.  These tend to grow out of patches of overwork, though it’s taken a long time to see the pattern.

One of the contributing factors is that I don’t like to let people down. So when something new begins, I tend to try and carry on with what was there before as well.  This leads to being overloaded. Which leads to a need to shed things. Which leads, ironically, to letting people down…

For instance.

When I started teaching I continued with my church ministry.  I looked around and saw other people doing lots at church.  I figured I should be able to as well.  I didn’t factor in parenting a young person with an autistic spectrum condition, managing a fragile marriage, or, what’s that? Self care…A week after the end of term we flew to visit my friend in Canada, in all the photos I am red-eyed with a heavy cold, I came back exhausted…

At the end of that year I experienced strange symptoms, right sided weakness, dizzyness, excessive tiredness.  The diagnosis was a small stroke.

Forward a few years. The fragile marriage is over. I’m a lone parent looking to support my children and improve my career prospects.  I need a way to work which will earn enough without requiring too many hours work (because I need to stay healthy dammit). So I’m teaching and studying. I’m back in church ministry too. Oh yes and on the side I’m running a healing business, because that’s what I wanted to do when the marriage ended and I don’t want to let it go. I end up shaky every day, with constant palpitations and not sleeping.  I resign my teaching post and try self-employment.

A while later I’m back working in a school.  It’s what in the UK is called a specialist provision, this one for young people with ASC. I’m the Senco and the government systems for monitoring SEN have just changed. There’s plenty to do… When I stopped working for myself I held on to a couple of pieces of private work.  Maybe it was an insurance policy. Maybe, again, it was so as not to let folk down.  After a full working week working in school I spend Saturday morning teaching and then go into a local school in the afternoon to do assessments.  These result in  8000 word reports, which get written in the weekday evenings….looking back it was a truly insane way to live.

At the same time my faith is unravelling.  The certainty and hope that has kept me going is finally disintegrating, there have been signs over the past seven years or so, but now it’s in full out free fall.  I am looking for anchors but drifting uncontrollably.  I begin to get symptoms.  Mostly dizzyness.  Weakness. I find I can’t drive.  I can’t get to work.  There is no sick pay policy so in the end I have to resign.  I cannot walk properly, occasionally I need to use a stick.

Things fall apart.

But I am cussid if nothing else.  Or wilful. Or maybe, occasionally, resilient.  I begin tutoring again, manage to find some assessment work.  I pick up threads and start to try and weave them into something coherent.  It’s a hotch potch macrame mix but I figure it will have to do.

Throughout my adult life I have worked with a spiritual director.  A mentor or guide.  Ever since my early twenties I have believed I have choices, that we always have a choice.  I have sought to act, not to sit back and bemoan circumstances, to take what is at hand and get on with it.  I wonder sometimes about the idea of the “life of dreams” because it feels more like a “life of consequences”.

And now.

Transition.  Change. Unplanned. Unexpected. Necessary.  And I see this pattern. The pattern of trying to hold on when things shift.  The band playing on while the Titanic lists and plunges.  Whistling while Rome burns.

I do not see it as wisdom anymore.

Because it doesn’t acknowledge the ending, or leave space for new beginnings.  If I carry on regardless the season won’t match.  I will be planting seedlings in the cooling temperatures of autumn, or trying to create an English country garden in a sub-tropical climate.  It won’t work. Old wine, new wineskins, as the Bible has it.

So I don’t allow the rest space where there can be recovery, I have begun with the new before the old is ended…

What happens if I just stop this time? This change above all feels so huge, it is like one path simply ended, in a cliff-fall plunge, a clear track and then the void.  What happens if I really do listen, if I take each day as it comes, if I stop trying to rebuild the path out into nothing? What happens if I accept the ending and stop to take in my surroundings?

I am surrounded both literally and metaphorically by the evidence of a life.  The desire to serve others, to serve God/dess, to bring healing, to make things better.  Evidence of mothering and teaching. Evidence of hobbies and interests. I am not sure what to make of any of it. If any of it fits or can come with me…the externals look like seeds, tufted, and floating  into the blue.  I can’t catch them, or put them back in place, reconnect the seedhead’s tidy globe with glue and tape…

Maybe, though, I can wish on them, set them free, to see where they land, what they grow…and meanwhile stand barefoot on the earth, learn how to breathe, drink tea, find the rhythm of my soul’s life in the body’s wisdom…

 

The secrets are here. I hadn’t realised how many. The abandoned dreams. Too many memories. Before this house I had moved four times in five years. I’d shed boxes full of University reading, notes, unworn clothes, outgrown toys. We could get the whole of our house and possessions in one small lorry, which seemed an achievement with two small children. When we moved to this house, the one we are leaving now, the attic was empty save for one lone suitcase abandoned by the previous tenant and an old water tank.

Now though. We put down boards , a ladder, for ease of access. When my husband left I was thankful that I could still get up there without step-ladder acrobatics and rafter balancing, not forgetting dire warnings from childhood about the risk of going through the ceiling. I could still find the Christmas decorations and the boys could set out race tracks or Playmobil cities with abandon.

The clutter crept. Things kept just in case. Old cases full of spare blankets and pillows.  When the toys became obsolete I kept my favourites, like my mum before me, in case we needed them in the future for grandchildren, and because it is hard to let go.

There are boxes of photos, folders full of old lesson plans, books and books and books. Theology books from my years in ministry, teaching books, children’s books, from my own children and my own childhood. There are demi -jons and brewing buckets from summers when there was time to make wine, there are boxes full of cables, old game cassettes and DVDs. There are crates of Lego and a life size cut-out of Boba Fett.

Within the boxes I find a place card from my first wedding, a newspaper announcing the engagement of Prince Charles to Lady Diana, a map of the Falkland Islands my dad brought back from his tour there. I find the Bible my nanna gifted my grandfather when he was away during World War 2 and the trolley full of blocks which I pushed as I learned to walk.

This odd collection makes up my life. Much of it can be set aside. The essays and course notes have stayed undisturbed for ten years, the education books will be obsolete by now, there is no space to store excess bedding or the confusion of cables.

But the unpeeling, the dismantling, the decisions are uncomfortable. I feel raw and exposed. Many things remind me of a life I no longer live, a person who no longer lives in me, remnants of a different marriage, another family, a woman who did the right thing, stuck to the rules, a good girl. These objects are signs, clues, I am like an archaeologist of my own existence, this means she was dedicated to her teaching career, this shows us that in those days the family might be found camping, we see here signs of persistent and determined Christian practice.

The space is almost empty now. I have swept it clean. One box, one bundle at a time we have lowered the treasures and trash into the daylight, exposed them to scrutiny. They seem absurd, they drag up old stories, open old wounds. We have a room of boxes piled and ready for storage. I don’t know how I feel about leaving these things in a distant warehouse. I imagine the whispering in the darkness when the padlock has been fastened, the shutters drawn, the ghosts of memory rustling like leaf-litter, scattering to dust.