Full Moon – Raspberry Moon Crests (and Fades): Lammas Edition

Hi folks.
So I’ve been putting this off for about a week, but I’ve been enjoying a day of handicrafts and gardening, and now I have a few minutes, I figured I’d rather be blogging than catching up on the last of my data entry work (big surprise), so – partially in the name of procrastination – I’m blogging.
 
Raspberry Moon – blue moon that it was – has crested and is well on its way out, as we head towards Apple Moon (and, yes, there are already apples – sweet ones, and crabs – ripe and ready for picking around town, so the name definitely fits). I’ve been harvesting raspberries off the bushes in the alley a few times, and it’s still producing (thank you, Everbearing Varieties…) although it’ll probably be mostly done a month from now.
 
I’m getting lots of chard, still a fair bit of kale, and heaps of lovely, tiny tomatoes from my garden. Less-so the zucchini or winter squash, alas, and no cucumbers to speak of. My neighbour – who is a hell of a prolific gardening – gave me a bag of them in exchange for a few branches worth of mustard seed come October, but that’s all we’ve got. (Good thing I wanted to make dilly beans this year, instead of pickled cukes, isn’t it?) Sadly, my plan to find out how much I could cultivate in two 4’x8’x1′ raised beds is… turning out to be Not That Much[1].
At least not this year. (I’m definitely learning a thing or two, though, which will hopefully help me out when I’m getting the garden ready for next year).
 
As far as all of the “is this gonna work out” stuff that I mentioned back at the beginning of this lunar cycle… Things are still up in the air, to a degree, but they’re looking pretty goo from this angle. (We’ll see how/if things settle in September, mind you). My wife is set up enough in her new shop that she can do production, so she’s cranking things out like there’s no tomorrow – partly because: Self Employment, but also because she’s got things she needs to get caught up on for people. So that seems to be going well. My casual-hours job is ticking along nicely, and I hope they continue to be happy with my work. We shall see, since the next batch of it is due tomorrow around lunch time. Things are still kind of up in the air for our girlfriend, but at least her girl is home and safe, and they’ve started Phase One of setting up house together, which is good.
 
The past two weeks ahve beena big learning curve for me. I did a tarot reading just after Lammas, to see what’s up and what’s coming next, and what I came up with was a lot of Fire cards – some sort of big, transformative breakthrough-type-thing[2] having to do with passion, creativity, and/or personal power. Not sure which it is (although I have Theories, especially given the past week or so), but given how intertwined those things are for me, it could be All Of The Above.
 
Hopefully time will tell, and I’ll have good things to show for it, no matter what. 🙂
 
Onwards to Apple Moon!
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden
 
 
[1] Although I’d hazard a good $120+ worth of food, so far, and that’s a conservative estimate – If I can keep that up for another 4 months – iffy, but possible – I’ll have “grown back” the cost of the soil I planted my food in… It still doesn’t cover the cost of the plant starts, but it’s a LOT closer than I was expecting, given the lack of cucumbers and zucchini, and the unlikelihood of winter squash, going on.
 
[2] Okay, less a “Break through” and more an intense but slightly slower process of moving from one set of attitudes to another… Not a lightning bolt of understanding, but a “getting the hang of things” situation where I leave behind some messed up thinking/feeeeeeeelings and move towards a more secure headspace. Or something.

New Moon – Leaf Moon Begins

So we got home from Toronto yesterday, just in time for New Moon.
I’m not gonna lie (though I am going to be kinda vague), but my heart is brim-full of hope. And dread. But mostly hope. Sitting on a patio in Toronto without a coat, on Friday, eating a late lunch with some of the Chosen Family, soaking up the sunshine and watching the leaves open up on the shrubs… I feel like this right now. Like I’m opening, knowing there’s still a danger of frost.
 
In Ottawa, the nights are still chilly, and the leaves aren’t nearly as far along, but I feel that, by the time Leaf Moon is full, they will be. Leaf Moon is our month of spring, between the winter of slush & mud and the summer of lilac blooms (to pull on the weather of Palimpsest to describe where we live). My garden bedframes are waiting to be filled with earth and seashells and coffee grouds, and then with seeds (and perhaps some mulch, if I can swing it). My Secret Project that went live back in February is stepping things up ever-so-slightly. My heart is full of My People and the amazing, got-your-back community that we’ve built, the love that blossoms every-which-way on so many levels.
 
It was a good weekend. I hope it’s set the tone for Leaf Moon, and for Life going forward. 🙂
 
What secret seeds are germinating in your world? What things are starting to poke their noses above the soil to see results?

Full Moon – SnowMelt Moon Crests

So the snow continues to melt (and fall again, and melt again, as is the way of things in Ontario, apparently). My sister gave birth on Friday. We are babysitting the pet cockatiel of one of my lovely wife’s Other Partners while said partner visits a friend out of town. Eat From the Larder Month has begun (and is still in the easy stages). I’ve made more beeswax tealights and remembered to light up my altars today. My wife and I slow-danced in the living room and we finalized (uh… for a given value of “finalized”) the design for the garden’s raised beds. I’m drinking tequilla (straight) for the first time. It’s… a weird drink. But hey.
 
I finished my nibbling’s baby blanket – my mom is taking it, along with a co-ordinating cowl/infinity-scarf/knitted-accessory for my sister, down to Calgary late next week when she visits for a few days. Currently working on a co-ordinating scarf for my sister’s fiance/baby-daddy/partner so that Everybody Gets A Thing, though the scarf (and an accompanying “Welcome to the family!” card for baby Zain) will be sent by mail once it’s finished (2 more days, unless I want to spend every waking hour knitting, which I don’t – shocking, I know, but It’s Spring).
 
The perfume/ritual oil that I ordered from The Mermaid and the Crow… works? I’m saying that tentatively because (a) magic means pushing the odds in your favour, so maybe it’s not shocking that the responses I’m getting are largely from reasonably expectable corners, but also (b) It’s Spring (among other sitautions) and Certain People tend to be a little more energetic in X department at this time of year anyway. I think we’re all a little bit solar-powered in that regard, though I could be wrong.
I confess, a little part of me is going “What have I gotten myself into” on this front, but I’m a Big Fraidy Cat, so it’s almost definitely nothing to actually worry about.
 
Anyway. I feel like life is (finally) starting to look up. Here’s hoping it keeps going like this. 🙂
 
By the time this Lunar Cycle ends, we’ll be on the train home from Toronto and, hopefully, the front yard will be full of tulips and daffodils (or, well, crocuses and scilla, because the tulips and daffs won’t be up until early May) instead of snow.
Big changes coming. Good ones, I hope.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

Big Gay Aunties R Us! (My Nibbling Was born This Morning!)

My sister gave birth to her first child today. The “official” (read: roughly when said baby was all the way out of my sister’s body) time of birth is ~10:45am Calgary Time (AKA 12:45pm, where I’m at).
This child’s name is a deliberately unisex name. Whether this is because the parents are clueful enough to prep for the possibility that their new-born son may turn out to have been their new-born daughter all along, or just for the sake of some other sort of convenience, I have no idea, but this Big Gay Auntie is happy to see that choice regardless.
 
I finished my nibbling’s baby blanket today, sitting on the back porch in the sun(!) on the first really beautiful, honestly warm day of Spring. New life into the world. Persephone comes above ground again, and this baby came with her. ❤ (Granted, I doubt my non-practicing-but-technically-Abrahamic sister would be totally thrilled about being put in anything resembling the role of Demeter). I sang blessing lulabies into the yarn as I finished off the last rows, blocked it in a bath steeped with lavender and salt.
It's now roughly the size of a couch-throw, so considerably bigger than planned. My hope is that I can schlep it to the laundromat early next week and put it through a hot wash + hot dryer with a load of towels and socks and stuff, so that it'll shrink, felt just a little bit, and, hopefully, set the dye.
 
Right now, I'm trying to speed (Ha!) through a coordinating scarf (I know, I just said it was finally WARM outside, but my sister's getting a coordinating cowl, and I want both the parents to have a Thing to commemorate the birth of their first child that just happens to be completely devoid of Baby Markers if you aren't intimately familiar with a certain Security Blanket that (hopefully) gets dragged around everywhere) for my Brother-in-Law, so that when they eventually all drag themselve to my (Read: my MOM's) end of the country, I can hand them over with all due ceremony.
 
Anyway. Lovely Wife and I were hosting a bunch of people for coffee and similar when the call came in, so I got to announce it to a (small) room full Awesome Queer (and mostly, if not entirely, poly and kinky) Chicks who'd been asking about the knitting project I was trying to finish, so. 😀
 
Welcome to the Family, and the World, kidlet. We're happy to have you here. 🙂

Big-C Crafting, Little-C Crafting, Moving Your Body, and Unblocking Your Magic

As I’m writing this, people I care about are making their way towards my city (and, in a couple of case, my house) for a Leather Family Reunion of sorts. I’ll be bringing my handspinning with me (again, and along with a couple of big vats of food because: this is me we’re talking about) in order to soak up some of The Fam into the yarn I’m spinning (and spinning, and spinning… I’ve been doing this for most of a year now and, possibly because I’ve been deliberately felting the yearn when I wash it, I’m still not finished my various shawl stripes and keep needing to generate more yarn to get the lengths right…).
For a brief little bit (like a couple of hours – there was, to my relief, a bit of a crossed wire there) I was on the hook for a short-notice workshop/craft-and-chatter-session about the work of one’s hands and how it relates to Power (in the kink sense) and also Power (in the spirituality sense).
 
My personal unified theory of How I Function Best has a lot to do with how (and if) I move around. Given that I spend a tonne of my time ensconsed on a couch, or in a chair (less frequently), typing away at All The Things, this may explain why it’s so easy for me to become despondent and generally get bogged down the Swamp of the Psyche (if you’re familiar with Brene Brown, you will probably alreqdy know that this means Shame).
Doing things with my hands – and, more generally, working my body – is a way to combat/avoid this, yes. But It’s the WHY of it that gets my attention from a Witchy perspective. Dancing, singing, blending yin and yang (hatha) yoga, going walking, working in the garden, doing handicrafts, doing the chopping/kneading/general-prep of a slow-cooking meal, even hand-cranking our little, borrowed laundry pod… all of that stuff helps to get my Energy moving freely. No blockages. It shakes off the random, yet never-ending, tiredness. It helps me direct my own energy (practically and magically) towards whatever goals I happen to be wrestling with at the time.
 
I realize that this probably sounds pretty Artists-Way-y, but there it is. Move your body, make things with your hands, and you (or at least I) will find it easier to make things (create things, create changes, make things happen) with your mind and your magic.

Spring Equinox and New Moon – SnowMelt Moon Begins

Spring is springing, at least in the way it usually does around here with its two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of loping, unsteady dance. The buds on the magnolia trees are swelling and, in the spots near the west-facing walls (you know, where the snow is already gone) you can see the tips of snowdrops and scilla poking through the soil. Our patio is becoming a small lake – here’s hoping that our basement doesn’t do the same thing – and the glacier that has been our back porch since early December is slowly receeding.
Hurrah!
We are plotting the garden that will be once the yard is free of snow and the raised beds can be built. My lovely wife has already decided that there will be a tiny steam engine circumnavigating the whole thing. C’est la vie. 😉
 
I ordered perfume oil from The Mermaid and The Crow and I’m putting it to use in a couple of different ways. For now, this is basically an experiment, but I’m Noticing Things, so there’s that.
 
Lovely Wife and I went out last night and wound up going home early (alas – because we are Old, and also Sick, apaprently?) and missed having martinis with some cool people because of it. Pity. Granted, I’m bringing this up because we wound up having a bit of a Radiomancy experience halfway between Event #1 and Event #2. Specifically, we stopped in at a pub to grab a little bit of a food and kill the hour between the end of Event #1 (Laverne Cox’s lecture in our neighbourhood) and Event #2 (martinis with the VE crew + Midori – what were we thinking, giving that a miss? I know!) and, as we nibbled on sweet potato fried, a song came on over the speakers with a chorus that went “Go home, go home!” over and over again. We looked at each other and decided to call it a night, because stuff doesn’t usually speak THAT clearly (at least not to me – they do it to her all the time).
 
So there was that.
 
I made bread yesterday (two loaves – I’m now out of whole wheat flour and running low on cooking oil, but supplies are holding up really nicely in terms of everything else) and bone stock today – eight cups from the first boil, but I’m running a second batch over night, which will hopefully get me as much again of more solid “meat jello” stuff (and that’ll be one more bag of bones out of my freezer – hurrah!).
I’m looking forward to a weekend full of friends, creativity, and flow-arts stuff, hopefully with some thinky thoughts about spirituality-type-stuff thrown in. (I have a pot-luck lunch to make – brown rice salad with cramberries, carrots, greens, beans, and whatever else I can throw in there) – and dinner plans with a cute lady + her partner + my partner (likewise a cute lady). It should be a good time. 🙂
 
By the time this moon is full (because New Moon and Equinox were both about a week ago at this point), it will be April. We’ll be four days into our Eat From The Larder Challenge for 2015, and I’ll hopefully have called the clothing shop to remind them that I’m still interested in working for them if they’re hiring in May (at which point, my lovely wife may be making a slight career adjustment – which would be helped by me having a similar career adjustment going on concurrently). Here’s hoping this spring will bring with it new growth, more wakefulness, and a general stretching forth in terms of what I can do both with what I have and with what I hope I can get.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

Things I’ve Learned About My Own #Preserves – March 2015 Edition

Okay. So it’s mid-March. I just did a quick eye-balling of the freezers (yes, plural – one fridge-top and one SMALL chest freezer) and, damn, we’ve got tonnes of food! 😀 Including lots of stuff that I froze last summer & autumn (ruby chard, red currants, roasted eggplant, serviceberries, and even edamole), two recently-accquired dressed-and-ready-to-roast rabbits from the local Rabbit Lady who free-runs them in the clover patches on her Xmas Tree farm, and, oh, half a dozen big bags of bones that need to be simmered right the hell into stock as soon as I can swing it. (Maybe I should be sticking to boneless cuts of critter for the foreseeable? That’s a lot of bones…) I’m happy to say that my stores of preserves are holding up nicely, too, though we have perhaps too many (!) jars of cucumber garlic-dill pickles lying around. There may be a spate of giving stuff away in the next little while, if it comes to it (or, alternatively, I just won’t make cucumber pickles this year, and we’ll use all our cukes for salad-fixings).
I’ve got half a dozen tins of beans, a cup or two of pot barley & black lentils, half a dozen tins of tuna, a few big jars of stuff like red lentils, Great Northern white beans, wild rice, red quinoa, and pearl barley, plus more damn brown rice that you can shake a stick at. There’s a bout 5kg of white flour plus the usual salt, sugar, and baking powder supplies. There is peanut butter. There is honey. There’s a tonne of maple syrup. There’s even a tin or two of coconut milk.
Basically, my larder is quite well stocked.
Which is a good thing, because April will be Eat From the Larder Month again (let’s see if I can get through it with less whining this time…) and the goal, as it was last year, is to not buy stuff[1] in an effort to (a) save some money, but also (b) eat up the 2014 preserves so that there’s space (and clean, empty jars) for the 2015 canning season and so that we don’t wind up having jars of Who Knows What sitting around for five years at a stretch, not getting eaten.
 
This year, the Eat From the Larder challenge comes with a little extra incentive: I now have A Yard. Which means that, this season, I get to have an actual GARDEN. You know: Somewhere to grow at least part of the food that I’m planning on preserving over the course of next summer and autumn. My goal is to grow enough beans (snap and butter/shelling varieties), winter squash, summer squash, greens (kale and rainbow chard), and tomatoes to cover most of what I want to preserve for the winter and spring. Whether I’ll be able to do that is a different story, but it means I want to pre-emptively clear out the chest freezer in order to make way for the diced-and-blanched butternut squash that I want to put up, the snap beans, greens, and golden zucchini slices I want to blanch-and-freeze, just so I can say “I grew them, too!” when I haul them out again in the middle of winter. 🙂
 
Things I’ve learned (again):
I would much rather use bruschetta-mix or plain ol’ diced tomatoes than use tomato sauce. Most of the time. (When making bean stew, however, you can never have too much umami, so a one-cup jar of tomatoes PLUS a half-cup jar of sauce is a good way to go). Also, having acquired a nearby and rather dear friend back in October, who is badly allergic to All The Peppers, chances are good that my tomato sauce recipe will be changing slightly so’s as not to send her to the ER inadvertently (I have so far managed to not do this, fyi).
I’m hit-and-miss on how much frozen fruit I go through in a given year. Some years, I’ll go through a litre of frozen berries in a week. Other times, I’ll forget and find half a gallon of July-harvested red currants waiting to be turned into tarts (good thing, too, since we’re having people over for dinner next Friday).
I actually *do* like apple butter for baking and also for savoury dishes (mainly cheese sandwiches, to be honest) and missed it this year, since I didn’t make any. Also: Pumpkin butter is amazing BUT pear butter is probably a better way to go. I’m still planning on making pumpkin butter a regular feature of my larder, mind you, because I can grow pumpkins more or less like weeds around here, but I don’t have an apple tree of my own. Yet. But apple butter is going to have to be a thing.
Having only used my dehydrator the once… it hasn’t paid for itself yet. Basically, I’ve found that my home-dried peaches and nectarines… are mostly just really fucking dry. They’re not great snack-food, presently, is what I’m saying. So, while I’m hoping I can put it to work drying tomatoes and apples, or makingn snacky-snacky Kale Chips and similar, as and when I have kale, apples, and tomatoes to use in it, I probably won’t be going all out on dried peaches and similar next summer.
I may or may not do jarred peaches (or peach butter, or what-have-you) either. I love my tomato-peach salsa, and will continue to make that, for sure, possibly using nectarines instead of peaches (even though they’re more expensive), just ’cause I like the smooth skin better than the fuzzy, but I haven’t yet opened any of the apricot butter that I made, so I’m not sure that I’d bother making it again.
 
Seven weeks from now (or so), it’ll be Beltane, I’ll be on the hunt for groceries after a month of not bothering, and I may or may not (fingers crossed that I will) be started a new part-time job in the afternoons. Hopefully, hopefully, I’ll also be planting out the first of my cold-weather crops and rejoicing at a larder that’s ready to be filled once more.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] With some exceptions. I will totally still be buying milk and coffee. I may buy eggs or cheese, but would kind of like to not bother. (Alternatively, I may (break the rules and) buy 2 dozen eggs, a kilogram of coffee beans, and some Cheap Cooking Cheddar – provided it’s actually cheap when I get to the store – towards the end of March… and still buy milk as I go through it). But no veggies, baking supplies, fruit, meat, or similar since the idea is use up the preserved (jars, tins, frozen, and dry-goods) food that I already have on hand… And I have a LOT of it on hand.

Full Moon – Cold Moon Crests

So, just as Cold Moon was cresting (I’m technically a day late on this post), we flipped over into March. We’ve only had one day where the temperature got anywhere close to 0-Celceus, but we’re getting there. All around me are people grinning and assuring each other that we’ve made it through another one. I keep watching the snow on the neighbourhood roofs, wondering how much of the melt-off is due to poor insulation versus how much of it is the noticeably warmer (and longer hours of) sunshine happening these days.
 
I got my honey-pot made (finally) last week, and did some magic to help me out with my job interview, too (it went well, FYI, though I won’t hear anything until about May, so…). At the moment, things are feeling pretty “up” – although part of that is that it’s been an employment-full week – four modeling gigs plus an easy day of answering phones near my house – and I’ve got a cupboard full of groceries and even some tasty treats (I got us cheap fizzy white wine + orange-mango juice for mimosas, for example, and a box of mini pain-chocolates as well – we’ll will be brunching this weekend, and I wanted to get in something kinda fancy. $25 for three people is… pretty okay, really) as a result, SO. Part of the “up” is just basic stuff like “we paid the gas bill” and “the rent cheque didn’t bounce” (seriously, that was a worry, however briefly, a few days ago) and “our freezer is full of sausages and ravioli”.
 
Some of it is also this: I got a new purse.
Which you’d think, if I’m simultaneously worrying about the rent, is not something I should be buying, but bear with me.
The zipper on my one remaining non-ratty purse broke, a month or two ago. All of my other purses are pleather, and – while they started out beautiful – they are now peeling messes with jerry-rigged handles and they just don’t look very nice. And I am trying to Look Nice, at least when I leave the house.
I did a gig today, a portraiture class where they like it when the model gets dolled up in something kind of thematic. So I turned up in my Leather (and my PVC, and my Unholy Harvest dogtags), some dark lipstain & black eyeliner, and a pair of German engineers goggles and gave them a deiselpunk aviator to draw. Thing is, I felt like Amanda Fucking Palmer in that outfit. It’s not something that I wear all the time – waist cinchers being what they are, and leather “airforce” caps being almost as impractical and hard to keep on as miniature top hats – but it was comprised (with the exception of the goggles) of my actual clothes. I felt like a million bucks, and I loved what I saw in the mirror! AND I was constantly fretting that my hair and/or stockings would fall down, that my hat would fall off, and that I’d slip right out of my sling-backs because, hello, you do not wear open-toed slingbacks with nylons, end of story.
Look. This is going to come as a surprise to nobody, but Looking Nice Takes Effort.
A lot of what I’ve spent the last, gods, eight years(?) doing, wardrobe-wise, is trying to do what boils down to “Glamour Hacks” where you front-load all the labour – investing (by whatever budget you can reasonably do so) in clothes that fit & flatter[1], shoes that look good and are gender-consonant but don’t destroy your feet[2], and something to haul your crap around in that doesn’t make you look like the Loblaws Lady[3] – so that when you have to drag your ass out of bed in the mornings, or convince yourself (MYself) to really, really, this time, leave the house… the part where you look Put Together is already done.
The goal, in my case, is to get my Stuff dialed in enough that I just have to pull something, anything, out of my closet, slick on the easiest possible makeup (waterproof Very Black mascara, tinted lipbalm, and if I’m feeling really ambitious, a scribble of eye-shadow pencil, which is basically a crayon for your face), slap on wahtever footwear happens to be the most weather-appropriate, and GTFO… looking Fabulous and Noticeable all the while.
The big purse – which I bought for $30 off ebay and which, alas, has a couple of design flaws that I’ll have to work around if I want this to be the functional Diva Bag of my only-somewhat-practical dreams – is part of that process. It’s basically my answer to the Loblaws Lady problem. It’s big enough to hold a notebook, a novel, and even a makeup case on top of the more typical “purse stuff” all at the same time and, while I can’t stuff a yoga mat in there, I can use it to carry a water-bottle and the rest of my (minimal) yoga gear. It’s about the right size to carry a book of sheet music, if I need it to. It has a handy outside-pocket with a BIG, decorative zipper-tab where I can keep stuff – like a bus pass – that I want to be able to grab without having to dig around or take off my mitts. It’s Black And Shiny And Buckle-Y enough to work with my “edgy”[4] stuff while being Basic Black Professional enough to be appropriate when I need to not look Scary or like some kind of a tramp[5]. It may not be Mary Poppins’ TARDIS-like magical carpet bag, but it’s got enough pockets to carry at least a little bit of magic around.
 
So that’s where I am right now. The same place I always am, though maybe a tiny step further along, trying to balance What I Want with What I Have and What I Can Manage on any given day.
Now I’ve got altar candles to light, wine to chill, and a chicken to roast, so I’m off.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] In my case, this means hitting up the local second-hand stores + getting good enough at sewing to taylor items at least a little bit and/or make simple stuff myself, because gods know I don’t have a lot of money to throw around.
 
[2] A constant work in progress, I’m afraid…
 
[3] This was a (brief) conversation on twitter, earlier today. My sister used to be a professional actress. She bought a hella fancy purse that was big enough to carry a small child (which, ha, she is about to birth, as it turns out) because she needed to (a) carry big old scrips and indoor shoes and so-on around all the time, but also (b) actually look put-together when she showed up for an audition.
 
[4] Ahahahaha… At the moment, this basically means wearing black eyeshadow and pinstriped skirts.
 
[5] These situations are getting fewer and farther between, granted (and also YAY), but it doesn’t hurt to be versatile.

New Moon – Cold Moon Begins

Normally, this is Ice Moon, but – in honour of the ice jam covering the north-west corner of our house – we’re actually just coming out of that one.
So “Cold Moon” it is, for this year at least. Having just spent the weekend in the Coldest Spot on the Planet (that being my town, because it was -45 or something with the wind chill, and that’s pretty fucking cold kiddos, pretty fucking cold), I figure it works.
Technically, Cold Moon started about a week ago, around-which-time my father-in-law called to remind me to start my leeks and onions before March turns up.
I don’t even want to grow leeks and onions at this point. I mean, I’m not saying they’re bad things to grow, but since I don’t yet actually have the giant containers for our raised beds yet, I’m really disinclined to start stuff early from seed. I want to make sure I have somewhere to transplant it once it’s ready.
None the less, it’s a good reminder that things are already stirring underground, in spite of the umpteen feet of snow and nasty wind-chill situation happening on the surface.
 
Last week, I got a call to come in for a job interview. Yes, I’m trying to land myself a part-time (mid-afternoon into early evening) job that would net me a few short shifts per week and, as such, give me a couple of hundred extra dollars per month to help keep my income quilt functional and covering everything. The interview is today (so do send me good vibes, right around 1pm, plz), and I’m hoping it’ll go well enough that they decide to hire me. There will definitely be prep-stuff done today to ensure that I’m magically delicious when I walk in the door. 🙂 I’m thinking bay leaves in my (new – arrived yesterday) purse and sweet orange + coconut oil for luck, optimism, and likeability. Maybe some echanecea tea for money-drawing, too, although it would also be for Being Less Sick, which is kind of a thin at the moment.
 
So that’s what’s stirring and (maybe) getting started in my neck of the woods right now. How ’bout you? What wee seeds have you planted in the hopes of making an early start? What ideas are germinating and starting to take shape?
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden. 🙂

C is for Corporeal, D is for Dance – Pagan Experience 2015

On the off chance that you haven’t guessed by the time, I ‘m writing about embodiment for the Pagan Experience Challenge today. I’ve been a singer (14 years of lessons plus, admittedly, 14 further years of, like, singing in the shower or otherwise letting myself get rusty) since I was 7 years old. Which basically means that I was actively being taught how to Be In My Body well before puberty hit and all the social pressures to do exactly the opposite of that started cropping up.
I think that’s relevant.
I mean, yes, staying in my body in sexual situations where I’m not the one “doing the doing” is not the easiest thing in the world, and I don’t think that’s a separate issue, but I do think that learning embodiment, learning to pay attention really closely to what your muscles and feet and lungs and all the rest of you are doing at any given time has made it easier for me to be, well, naked, for a start, but there’s more to it than that.
A lot of my energy-work – whether that’s stuff like Grounding[1] or stuff like Sex-Magic/Laying-On-of-Hands or stuff like charging up a honey-pot – is centred around the bodily stuff I learned, ages ago, for How To Sing Really Well. As it happens, it’s also really centred around lighting up those big, straight-line, chakra points on your body – but I didn’t realize that until someone who could See that stuff told me as much when I showed her what prepping to sing looked like.
 
It’s… Art is magical. It’s an act of both creation and transformation, just because of what it is. But art as magical action can be used to do that whole “creating change at will” business as well. I was at a workshop on ritual, last October, and I said “I’m a writer and a witch, and when I write things down I make them happen”. Which isn’t true most of the time, but it’s proven on multiple occasions to push those odds towards What I (think I) Want, so I’m going with it. Likewise, when I sing, all those energetic chanels open up and I can Do Stuff – stuff kind of along the lines of reiki, I think? – that I can’t do, or can’t do as easily, when I’m quiet. Dancing, too, opens me up. I can be a fountain on the dancefloor. My wife says that I glow when I do that, and I’m inclined to take her literally as she’s one of those folks who can See that stuff, so.
 
Embodiment, for me at least, is the gateway to making energetic changes in the world. So there you go. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] For a given value of “grounding” – I’ve got my feet in the river pretty much all the time. I’m what sometimes gets called a “cement head”. I can bring people back to earth, and/or their bodies, when they get lost. It’s part of what I’m for. How cool is that? 🙂