Stop apologising.

You don’t make bad choices.  You think carefully. You review. You plan.  You seek guidance. You wait. You balance the options.

Stop doubting.

You are more capable than you dare to believe.  You can do this.  All of it. With bells on. You have the power. The wisdom. The grace. The humour.  You have the sheer nerve, grit, balls. The fire.  You have what it takes.  You always did.

But there was that voice.  The one that questioned.  That undermined.  That compared.

That voice talks bullshit.  It wants to keep you small.  Because small is safe.  Small fits behind the parapet, in the corner, under the stone.  Small is where you won’t be noticed.  Draw attention.

It began as a way to keep you safe.  But after.  After it was a way to contain. Manage. Silence. Chain.  Reduce.

You don’t need it now.  Now you are grown. Strong.  You survived.

Stop questioning.

Remember all those choices.  The ones people commented on, in an off-hand, semi-humourous tone.   They were yours.  You made them because you wanted to live in the most lively way you could.  Without compromises and half measures. In truth.  In honesty.  In vulnerability.  Authenticity.  Vibrantly. With joy.

Stop pretending.

That you can’t. Or won’t. Or don’t want to.  You do.  You can.  Oh my goodness if you could only see what I see. If you could only know the passion, the raw, molten energy I see pulsing below your skin, behind your smile, beneath your eye lids.

Stop denying.

The pain, the loss, the anger, the fear.  All of it is what makes you who you are. How you are.  All of this makes you strong.  Decades of life.  Of experience.  It moulds you. Shapes you.  Not to be regretted.  Hidden. Explained away.  To be celebrated.  To be worn.  To clothe you in your scars. Scar-clanned.  A badge of courage. Of honour.  The brave etched onto your skin.  Your soul.

Stop it.  Right now.

There is no time.  There is no time for more regret.  For more sitting in the corner wondering what happened.  This is the sharp slap, stinging across your cheek.  This is the ice-cold, breath-stealing, limb-numbing jump into the pool.  This is the jolt of the missed step.

Wake up.

You are ready.  It’s time to start.

Half way up the lane it drops into consciousness from a much watched movie, a fog breaking open, sun-split, revealing the hidden and obscured.  Turning onto the downs road, pressing the accelerator and shifting gear, I chant the words, over and over.  Each time they sound different and the meaning resonates like a gong, vibrations felt between muscle, in the cell’s core.

The unexpected twists and turns of life, the musings over paths taken, or lost.  The endless grey of depression, clinging like oily mist.  And then a sudden jolt, the brake stepped too firmly, a wet tile slick underfoot, the missed final step descending.  Wake up.

Having spent hours the past month buried in earth, haunting snails and woodlice with determined weeding, sinking into an awareness of nature and her patterns – the kaleidoscope of sunshine and showers, the cool of an overcast day, the pattern on a spider’s body, the silken length of her legs – having discovered a body which loves to work, the burn of limbs which have been used, the tingle of muscles overworked, I feel the wild waking.

And this truth. To live rather than reflect. To be rather than plan. To act and act again. To take the moment, a midnight-black berry, plump, ripe, and allow it to nourish, bitter sweet on the tongue.

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.