W is for Wash – Pagan Blog Project 2013

So I’m going to talk a little about something I did on Samhain.
 
In addition for doing an Ancestor Plate (I’m pretty sure this was my first time doing that) – complete with candle, a table/altar cloth made from one of my grandmother’s old scarves, phamily photos, and bouquets of crow feathers and dried herbs – I also added a step to my routine cleansing of the house.
 
I did a Door Wash.
 
Now this will come as no big shock to anybody who’s done this kind of thing before, but a “door wash” is basically the same thing as a “floor wash”, you just put it somewhere else (and, okay, it may Do It’s Thing a little differently, since you’re not walking all over your door with bare feet… but you get the idea).
 
In my case, I chose herbs and spices (and cider vinegar) for my washing mix that (a) had to do with death and the ancestors (timing, right? I did want them to know they could still come in – not that they need the physical door for that, what with the shrine inside the entrance way), but which also had to do with a mix of prosperity, love, happiness, sex, and protection. Y’know. Things with-which I’d like to bless my house and all the people whom I allow within it. 🙂
 
I boiled my mix of herbs and spices up with some (seasonally and olfactorially appropriate) cider vinegar plus a good heap of salt and a little water to keep things from burning, and then I went and washed my front door, plus the door frame, and the stones across the threshold. Then I wedged one of my bay leaves and one of my cinnamon sticks (from the washing mix) into the autumn-leaves wreath on my door. They blend. And make my threshold smell lovely. 😉
 
The salt and the vinegar (and the protection element of my herb-and-spice choices) are there to repel people and things with shitty intentions or who/which might do us a harm. Everything else is to call in Good Things For My People.
 
In another year, who knows, I might be doing it with the windows as well.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

V is for Vague – Pagan Blog Project 2013

Hello again!
 
Today I’m writing about “vague” both in the English sense of “nebulous” and in the French sense of “wave”. Possibly more the latter than the former.
 
See, I don’t (typically) get visions, and very few of my brushes with Otherworld/Moreworld stuff/people are particularly visceral. But I get feelings. Feeeeeeeeeeeeeeelings. I can feel the top of my head open up (or possibly just get tingly around the scalp line above my ears) and then get some kind of quasi-confirmative statement about that feeling like “You had a visitor – this ball of purple light blinked on about a foot above your head, just then”.
 
Sometimes I do this thing – we’re on the French definition of “vague” now – that, in a different religious context, would be called “rocking in the spirit”. It’s how I know (or react?) when Someone is brushing up against me, trying to make contact, trying to come through.
Sometimes it’s pretty intense (by my standards) – I’ve had people sharing the circle with me get rather worried that my head was going to wind up in a candle-flame; I’ve felt – not often, but once or twice – like Someone had literally grabbed me by the head and was just shaking me up and down until they were done (and the “done” part was very much like being let-go-of, too).
 
This happened yesterday afternoon. Not the intense kind, but the “It appears that I’m being compelled to rock back and forth without my having a say in whether it happens or not… Hm…” kind. I was saying Hello to the sewing machines[1] and… it’s not that they said Hello back because, honestly, I’m enough of a brick that I doubt I’d pick up on something that specific/subtle that… easily. But Something/Someone was awake and… “aware that I was paying attention” is maybe something a little more accurate. Like someone making eye-contact, but not with their eyes? A confirmation of “Yes, I/We see you seeing us. Okay”. That kind of thin, maybe?
I don’t know. It’s fairly guess-work on my end of things, but that’s what was going on yesterday, so I thought I’d bring it up.
 
I can’t help but wonder if all of this stuff – these antique machines being put to use doing ancient work by my wife, the amount of fibre-arts stuff that I’m learning and trying and making part of my life, even the candle-making – I can’t help wondering if it’s feeding my Lady Of The Hearth in some way. More on that later, I suspect.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] My leather-working wife has something like eight at this point, and – being mostly antique (pre-1960) cast iron Singers, they make quite the wee flock of Strange Black Birds in our living room.

New Moon – Frost Moon Begins

Frost Moon started almost a week ago, and things are indeed getting frosty. You can see your breath when you walk outside (as I’ll be doing quite shortly, so this will be a short post), and it’s dipping below freezing on the regular. There was snow in the air while I was running my errands yesterday.