Hey there!
New theme! I know, I’m enjoy it myself. It’s called “Motion”, and I have to say I love the colors. I’ll also be merging one of my other blogs (poetry one) into this one, so bear with me, okay?
Category: Uncategorized
So today I went to Chapters and was able to pick up two very interesting books (as well as a copy of Permaculture Magazine). The first was a book I’ve been waiting for: The Way of the Hedge Witch, by the lovely (and Canadian) Arin Murphy-Hiscock. The second was Voices of the Earth by Clea Danaan. Reviews to follow in my other blog, nolwë parmalambë. Suffice to say I am very excited about reading both these books. And is it just me, or have newly-published Pagan books developed a sense of style that doesn’t involve the color purple (I’m looking at YOU, Power of the Witch).
Moving on…. I said before that I am changing my path from Wiccan to a more looser, sort of generalized Pagan path… of green witchcraft. Reasons for this change include but are not limited to:
- a growing push by BTW for “real Wiccans” to be initiated by a BTW… which I am not.
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a desire to move away from a path which is contradictory and inflammatory…. which disgusts me.
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a desire to move from an immature (and I mean that in the sense that most Wiccans I’ve met have been very immature) path to one that is more mature and logical for me.
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a desire to create a path or system of belief which is ethical, meaningful, and individual to myself.
So there you have it. I realize of course that many “Pagan” practices are Wiccan or stem from Wicca, and I will address these hurdles as they come up. I look forward to working on my new faith and “un-Wicca-ing”it as much as possible. The first thing to go, of course, is my Book of Shadows, which is going to be mostly dismantled and reworked into my Journal, which will now be in a scrapbook. So pictures to follow as they occur. Officially, The Book of Shadows of Kuruni is no more.
I realize I’ll be walking a fine line for a while between my path and what is “Official Wicca”…. which is fine, that’s the transitory process. I may never get rid of some Wiccan precepts (hello Sabbats!), which again I am fine with. After all, if Wicca borrowed from ceremonial magic, why can’t I borrow from Wicca? Lol. Turnabout is fair play!
This is my green witch journal. It is also (and specifically, today) my traveling and healing journal. Today I experienced an epiphany, which led to some emotional thinking & wound cleansing for me. It’s been a bittersweet day for me – which is all to the good.
I got up at 6 ack emma and drove into town to pick up my friend and coworker Tara M. Tara’s a nice person, but her story today sort of begins and ends with the fact that she accompanied me throughout the day (and was not present during epiphany, etc.) Essentially she is Prologue Girl. Anyhoo, picked her up and we drove out to Camp He Ho Ha, which is just past Gainford/Evansburg on the Yellowhead on the way to Edmonton. We had a camper to pick up, which we did so. On our way back we stopped at Kokomoko and picked wild raspberries, and I drove the rest of the way home with a stained mouth.
Tara and I had decided to ease our way back home with camper. So after we picked up camper we mosey-ed our way down the Yellowhead (or Highway 16) and kind of let ourselves explore all sorts of things that (at least for me, as a group traveler) often get missed. Isle Lake was one of them, and so was Kokomoko.
I was struck by the tiny (and often not so much with the tiny) houses that dotted the lake fronts- so much so that you could hardly see the lake for the houses. Some houses were modern: high, huge monstrosities which seemed to say “look how rich I am – this is just my summer home”. The best houses, and the ones Tara and I oohed and awed over, were quaint and tiny. In a word, they charmed us. We saw beautiful gardens, including one that was filled with hard-to-grow-here sunflowers. One house had a beautiful clematis growing up the walls. One house had a fence with stone columns – the columns were actually mesh tubes filled with ordinary stone rocks.
Kokomoko was our chance to pull over so camper could make like ET and phone home, since we’d finally cleared the dead cell zone. While I had the car pulled over and turned off I happened to look past Tara and out her window. I saw this large patch of wild raspberries and jumped out and basically ran into the ditch and denuded one bush of a handful of berries. All in all we must’ve had about eight or ten, but to me the berries were some of the best raspberries that I’ve ever tasted, and I’m not really a raspberry kind of person. It was a sweet and wild and clean taste, and far nicer than anything else I’ve eaten today.
Camper ended the call and we continued home. After camper and Tara went home, I was struck by the epiphany. It occurred while I was meditating on the correlations between summer tourist season and Alberta Highway Construction contracts. After waiting for some time for the one-lane-crawl-only to open back up again I was thinking of those berries. They were good, but I began to feel as if I needed to cry. It took me the rest of the day to figure out why.
For me, the berries are not as important as what they symbolize. I do not make friends well, and I have had a long history of mistaking friends with “friendly people who want to use me for their own advantages and purposes”. One so-called friend charged me $350.00 to say overnight at her place (I was seventeen), and then tried to get me to have sex with her boyfriend as well. One would only call when she wanted me to drive her somewhere (she didn’t have a car), one wasn’t even a friend so much as a client at the drop-in centre who wanted to influence policies to benefit her, and there’s been more than one who have only been my friend when the weather’s fair. Some of my “friends” have been abusive (verbally and physically), and so I am being honest when I say that I am very, very suspicious when I hear someone say they want to be my friend.
I’m a nice person, don’t get me wrong. I’m widely considered a friendly person, and I will hang out sometimes, but real, actual friends? My epiphany was that I had two, and one was at camper’s home, working, and the other was in vehicle with me.
That was a shock, to realize that Tara was actually a friend of mine (and so is the . Better yet, near as I can tell she is a real friend, a true friend. We give and take, and share and bitch and joke and generally look forward to being with each other. For a while there I was convinced I was a lesbian and sexually attracted to Tara, and that’s why I looked forward to working with her.
Take a moment, let that soak in. I’m so relationship-challenged that I can’t recognize what friendship looks like. I look at Tara, and I think she’s a beautiful person, and I love her, but I couldn’t figure out that it meant that I wasn’t in love with her. I didn’t have any decent frame of reference for the word “friend”, so I wavered between worry and suspicion.
Today, it finally clicked, and it was a shock to realize that I. Have. A. FRIEND!!!!!!!!!!!! I am so happy the tears are just coming down my face as I type this. I’m an idiot. No. I’m a person who wears a mask of “I like to be alone so go away now”, when underneath it all I am really “I’m very lonely, and I think I am un-friend-able or un-love-able”.
I’ll have to peel the layers of these feelings, but right now I feel like tamping them down. So: ciao.
Lately the weather around here has been highly whacky. Raining and snowing, sun and snowing, fog and snowing, etc. Last night on the drive home I was horrified to realize that it was raining and snowing AND there was a heavy fog out, as well.
Now I don’t mind driving home at 11:00 PM. In fact, I kinda like it as it means less people for me to worry about. However driving home in the fog was hard. And OF COURSE the snow came down at exactly the right angle to mesmerize and blind a person.
At one point I sort of tranced out, and almost drove myself off the curve and into the ditch. Not something you want to do on a lonely rural road late at night. I panicked, slowed down, drove the middle line. Still, the fog gave the impression I was travelling way faster than 40 km/hour. I could hardly see for the life of me.
So I pulled over, got out. Prayed. Said “I’d like to get home safe and sound, thanks muchly, so could the elements of Air and Water please move the fog from the road so I can see?” Didn’t ask for the fog to quit. Just asked for it to get the heck out of my way.
All the way home I kept visualizing the fog clearing from my path. All the way home, although it was still snowing like crazy… all the way home I could see the road, and the fog kept rolling back to reveal the path.
Now. That’s what I call magic.
Well, we’re officially starting to hit the middle strides of spring and that means….
GARDEN PLANNING!
Which for me will be a first since I DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE A GARDEN! Ma used to do that for us! However I have quite a bit of unclaimed land (normal, since I live on 120 acres of mostly-unused forested graze-pastures) and I’d like a garden that belongs to just me.
The garden idea for this year is sensory-based. Since the Golden Idol to Consumerism (a/k/a Dollarrama) opened up I’ve been haunting the gardening section for ornaments that aren’t hokey plastic crap. Success arrived in the form of a cheap (well, what the hell at the Golden Idol isn’t cheap?) set of ugly-as-hell gargoyles.
However, so far I don’t have much of a plan on what to do with Them.
… is going to be held Friday @ Silverson’s Grille, AQPA. Don’t forget to bring your book! Sara Q, you’re bringing sweet yummy godlinesss….
