Witch Skills

Since posting my guide to visualization, I’ve been thinking — having a series of posts on what I consider essential witch skills might be a good idea. I mean, I’ve been doing this sort of stuff long enough that I should have some basic idea of what I’m doing, right?

…right?

Eh. Maybe not so much. But I’m sure I know some things. I know my post on visualization was helpful to some folk, at least. I’m sure I could be helpful in other areas.

Of course, first I have to figure out just what I consider to be essential Witch Skills.

Take this post as a rambling exercise — I’m thinking out loud, using y’all as my sounding board. Nothing I list here is permanent; this entire list is just to give me a jumping off point. In fact this entire post is basically an excuse to get another W done for the Pagan Blog Project.

Also, I’m not talking about skills like herbalism, or mead-making, or carving, or salve-making, or anything like that. Those are good skills, yes, but they’re not for everybody, and I’m not about to suggest any of them are essential to being a witch. I’m talking about the kind of skills that give you the basis for good magic work. Skills that, once you have them, are passive — to use gamer parlance — at your fingertips without you needing to think too much about them. Things that should become automatic.

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Heilig Avondmaal 2012: Bringing the Dead Home (again)

Ms. Dirty of Graveyard Dirt has issued her Holy Supper challenge again this year, and I’ll be participating. (There is a lot of swearing at her blog, fair warning.)

Today I realized it’s Sinterklaas Day, or the Dutch Christmas. We celebrated it when I was a little kid, and continued to into my adolescence. It’s a holiday that has strong emotional connections with my relationship with Oma.

And, you know, she’s been gone two years and I just realized today that it’s Sinterklaas Day. I should have put my clogs by the fire last night, waiting for the casual racism of my forebears to bring me the wrong gifts. But I didn’t, and I forgot.

It sort of hit home when I went to check the mail. Everything was for her and Opa. (Most surreal: addressed to Opa, a donation drive letter from the hospice that saw Oma’s last days. I guess they didn’t get the memo that he died last Christmas.)

I’m picking up mail for dead people. What is that, if not a definition of witch?

Continue reading “Heilig Avondmaal 2012: Bringing the Dead Home (again)”

Going the Distance

Proper posture hurts.

When I align my spine correctly, I have to brace myself against a wall with my hands. My breathing comes short and I get dizzy. Sweat breaks out on my brow. Tears spring to my eyes. I can’t hold it for long.

I know I must hold proper posture. It is not relaxing for me, however. It is painful. It hurts to change my body from what it’s used to.

My spine curves to the right. If you look at how I stand in resting position, you’ll notice my right hip and my right shoulder bend towards each other, like lovers longing to touch. I’m twisted and gnarled like a wind-worn tree.

My hips are twisted the other way, too; not only up and down but front and back – they jut out on the right, pull back on the left. So standing correctly is not just a matter of separating my star-crossed shoulder and hip, making them learn the appropriate distance from each other, but it is also a matter of making my hips see my feet eye to eye — if they had eyes. Making them line up with the strong, straight legs that are among my best features.

I have had this incorrect posture since high school, I’m sure, though I’ve never really noticed it till this year, when my physiotherapist pointed it out to me. But for four years in high school I didn’t use a backpack. I used a shoulder bag that I carried on my left shoulder, and I hitched that shoulder up, to better carry the bag. I still carry bags on my left shoulder. I cannot carry them on my right. They slip off.

Now my spine has compressed; shrunk down in on itself, trying to make me smaller. To stretch it out again — to regain function in my crippled, gnarled body — I must maintain proper posture. I must re-learn, I must teach my flesh to change itself. I must breathe. I must regain muscle tone in my abdomen. I must focus, I must do this, or I will be a gnarled, bent tree forever.

It is depressing, and it is hard, and I feel hopeless much of the time. I feel resigned. Fuck it, I say. So I’m a crone fifty years too early. I was always quick to grow up. Give me my cane.

But then I remember — me reclaiming my health isn’t just for me. It’s for my family. They depend on me, you see. My Ogre needs to be healthier, too — because I worry about the amount of processed food poison he puts into himself; I worry he doesn’t take proper care of his gorgeous body, the body that carries the man I love, the body that is the man I love.

I worry about my Ogre, and gods, I love him so much sometimes I think I might die from it.

I know that if his Ogress does not show the initiative to take back zir youth — if I do not start taking steps towards being healthy — then he never will. So I must be strong, for my Ogre.

And someday, I want to have Ogrelets with him. With my body as crippled as it is, bearing those Ogrelets will be hard — especially if our babes are anywhere near the size we were as infants. I was 10 pounds, right on time; he was 7 pounds a month early. My Ogre is also known as Hagrid, or Fezzik, for good reason. I was called an Amazon by many who knew me, for a long time, for I am tall, large, and used to have quite a bit of strength.

My vagina is terrified of the future, when it must push out our monstrous hellspawn, but not as scared as my spine. My whole body quakes in fear.

I must regain my strength so I can even have kids.

My mom, and my dog, Tyee the wolf-shepherd? I can’t even take care of Tyee by myself. I’m too sick, and he’s too strong and rambunctious. There’s a reason we call him the Awful Pawful. Which means I don’t get to see him unless mom can take him with her when she visits. Then, mom has to take him on walks — the last time I took him on a walk by myself I ended up napping the rest of the day, and that was before the spinal injury took me out this year.

Family is important to me. More important than most people guess, as I’ve spent so long talking about how much I hate it. But now that my family truly consists of the right people, I can be true to my nature. And my nature is that of a pack animal: I am a wolf, and I must do things for my pack. (Alpha bitch, naturally. Why would you ever think otherwise?)

More than all that — this is more Work. It’s always more Work. The Work never ends. My body, my land, and it belongs to Morrigan. Zie wants me to be healthy, to be fit. Zie wants the tree to stand tall, not cower before the elements.

I still need to reclaim bodily sovereignty, in many ways. This is one of them.

It’s time for Morag to put on zir big-fag panties, tie up zir Converse, and stretch this crippled tree Ogress wolf I lost the metaphor body out.

I am on my way
I can go the distance
I don’t care how far
Somehow I’ll be strong
I know every mile
Will be worth my while
I would go most anywhere
To find where I belong.

 

**Yes. I did just quote Disney’s Hercules in a post about posture and my crippled body and my terrifying future and all the Work I do not want to do right now. Yes, this entire post was a build up to quoting those lines.

The song galvanizes me, ok? I regret nothing.

Losing Time; Gaining Inspiration

Where did November go? I swear I just started it.

This is a huge problem for me, quite often. I just…lose time. It’s like being abducted by aliens. I look at the clock and it’s two; I look again and it’s ten. I’ve lost eight hours to…I don’t even know.

And it stretches on, into months. I swear it was November 1st only yesterday. My poison incident? Surely that was only a few days ago. No, really, Thanksgiving was just a few hours past, it can’t have been longer ago than that.

But no, it’s only my faulty memory; time has gone, and I stand wondering what on earth I did with it.

Well, I know I wrote 61,000 words in NaNoWriMo. I didn’t actually finish the novel, for reasons that will go un-ranted about for now. But I did win NaNo, and my winner’s shirt is on its way to me.

I also caught up on my reading. Blogs, that is. Those of you I follow may notice a bunch of new likes from me on your months-old posts. Sorry. I’m a slow-ass.

Catching up on blog reading has left me open to reading new posts as they crop up, and I wanted to share one with you that…I don’t know. It touched me. In a good way.

It’s a poem by Magaly Guerrero of Pagan Culture, and I can’t get it out of my head. It’s sweet and spicy; it’s like a warm cup of coffee with cinnamon and nutmeg in it, steaming upwards on a crisp fall day.

And I find it inspires me. Maybe it will inspire you, too.

Rice and Coffee Poesy.

-M.

X, or the Gift of Poison

Someone on TC suggested that one could do Gebo, the X-shaped rune for the Pagan Blog Project (like most of you, I’m sure, many of us were scratching our skulls a bit over what on earth we could write about). Gebo means gift or partnership, according to my copy of The Book of Runes, by Ralph Blum.

From my rune set.
From my rune set.

I want to talk about gifts.

For those of you who have been here a while, do you remember when I was trying to choose my new last name? I eventually settled on Spinner, but for a while I was toying with a few words that had “gift” or “vergift” in them.

Those words, in Dutch, mean poison.

Two weeks ago (gods, has it already been so long?) I tried a flying ointment with several different poisons in it. The spirit of Belladonna made it clear that she is not the poison for me on the physical plane. She also gave me a gift: the gift of life.

She helped me realize that I want to live. When I thought I was going to die, I realized that terrified me. 

That’s a huge gift. I have lived so long convinced that I did not want to live. For most of my life I didn’t think about living much further past 33. For some reason, that age just stuck in my head as when I could finally die. As if by then, I’d’ve given life enough of a chance to stop sucking, and could finally throw in the towel.

Continue reading “X, or the Gift of Poison”

Pursuing Joy

T. Thorn Coyle linked this article on either Google+ or Facebook (or perhaps both), with the message that activists, caretakers, etc, shouldn’t forget our own happiness.

We do burn out. We become lost in hopelessness and despair. We forget to take care of ourselves because we feel so small in the face of the overwhelming odds that threaten to keep us oppressed, that threaten to keep our brothers, sisters, and sithers oppressed. The whole human race is in serious trouble the world over, and activists know it, and we work to stop it.

We forget self-care.

We forget that self-care is activism. 

I forget it often, and I’m a huge proponent of self-care being every bit as important as marching, or blogging, or writing letters, or getting thrown into jail with your fellow activists.

We forget to pursue our joy, because we feel guilty for being happy.

I know. I’ve been there. I’m still there. Being an activist is hard work, and it tends to wear down even the most resilient of people. The more crap you see in your quest for justice, the worse you feel for the happinesses you have. What is the point of your own happiness, you ask, if others are still oppressed?

It doesn’t help that there are so many examples of privilegefail where people say “Well I’ve never dealt with this problem, and I’m happy, so it must not exist; why can’t you just be happy? Stop looking for reasons to be angry!” We start to equate being happy with that brand of privilegefail; we start to avoid being happy, as if the only way we can keep our heads in the game is to be miserable. 

Well, to hel with that.

Since discovering I want to live, I don’t want to be unhappy anymore. I want to live. I want to embrace life to the fullest; I want to truly be alive. I want my heart to burst with the joy it carries. I want my joy to be as strong as my anger.

Assessment time: what brings me into the present moment? What energizes me? What motivates me? What keeps me alive? 

It didn’t take me long to figure out.

  1. Writing.
  2. Performing.

Those sound fairly general, however, so I should specify. Writing fiction and poetry, specifically. Sometimes writing a whole host of blog posts does energize me, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I just feel tired — because blogging is part of my activist work, and I burn out. So in the context of what consistently keeps me alive and joyful, what consistently helps me pursue joy, I limit “writing” to fiction and poetry.

And performing…I’m quite burned out on traditional theatre at the moment. But I love to perform my poetry. On Monday, I’m heading into town to perform my poem Blood Candle at the Vancouver Slam. (It’s all videotaped. I’ll share it here after.)

I also love burlesque. So I’m going to focus on physiotherapy and strengthening my back so I can actually do burlesque. I’m also going to look into doing film, perhaps, in the near future. Maybe try for some small TV roles.

I’m making it a goal to pursue joy. It is my hope that doing this will energize me for the rest of the Work I must do, and energize me for the work I must do. (Spiritual and what pays the bills, respectively.)

What energizes you? What brings you joy? What makes you feel alive?

Visualization: what it is and how to do it. A guide for everyone — yes, even you.

Visualization has always been easy to me. I don’t say that to brag; it’s just a statement of fact. It’s so second-nature to me that sometimes I’ll be talking about the things I do as a Witch, and someone will ask me “Well, how do you do that?” and surprised, I’ll say “I just visualize it.”

Simple. Easy. Done.

But it’s not, for others. A lot of people I talk to say they have troubles visualizing.

Let me ask you a question: do you enjoy reading fiction? Of any kind?

If you enjoy reading (I include audiobooks here) fiction, then how do you experience what’s happening in the story? Do you see it clearly in your mind, or do you smell it, or do you hear it, or do you feel it?

That’s visualization. Period.

The word itself is problematic, I know, and is probably what gets most people hung up on the idea that they can’t do it. Visualization. It seems to focus on sight.

Continue reading “Visualization: what it is and how to do it. A guide for everyone — yes, even you.”

He, Zir, Ey, Xyrs, What? (reblog)

(Originally this post was a reblog of this one. When I made the switch from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, reblogs didn’t transfer properly.)

I’ve been having the same thoughts about m’Lady Morrigan, to be honest. I definitely see Her as genderqueer/non-binary, though I refer to Her as a Goddess and use female pronouns. I’ve also been looking for a word instead of Lady or Lord, to fit with the Lady of the Stars, Lord of the Deeps, Ladybro? of the Blooded Land.

Finding pronouns will probably be easier. I could always use Zie/Zir.

Hmmmm. *ponders*

Restlessness and Ramblings

If you’re visiting the blog itself and not reading from a feed or email, you probably notice something different.

As in, the entire theme.

I get bored easily. I’m a creature of change. I like flame because it’s never static. I need earth in my life just to centre me and ground me long enough so I’m not constantly shooting into space, dying and being reborn. (Read: why I’m going to marry my Virgo Ogre. He keeps me grounded.)

I decided that it was time to change my blog’s look.

I found the theme “Monster” and immediately knew it had to be I&I’s new look. It’s so cute. And witchy/Halloweeny. And it has the option to have a member of the latrodectus family in the monster-spot, though drawn in an abstract enough way to not trigger my aracnophobia. (If it triggers yours, I apologize.)

Only thing I wish I could do with this theme is change the accent color — green — to purple. But as I like green just fine, I will live.

More on topic: I’m also feeling restless in my religious life, truth be told. Specifically, ADF. 

Continue reading “Restlessness and Ramblings”