close quarters

Witchcamp is spellwork. It’s also a week of teaching and training others in the art/craft of making magic. But how can you teach or train others in this art without it being unleashed as well? By casting a circle and working in sacred space for a series of days, a spell is inevitably cast. Also it needs to be factored in that as the years have rolled by, less people come to camp to learn magic, but to practice it in a community setting. Seasoned witches abound now at most witchcamps, and even the newbies have read more books than I had on my shelves for the first decade or so of being a witch. From the moment we all join hands in circle, a major magical working begins.

Most camps clearly state the intent for the working in the beginning, but sometimes, even with a set intent, the magic takes another turn and something entirely different is brewed. I find this unfolding immensely interesting and I try to pay close attention to what is being mixed in the cauldron of our blended energies.

Avalon Spring had a lovely intent, but once we traveled to the new venue, a youth hostel in Epping Forest, it was clear that there definitely was going to be a parallel and quite powerful other working happening as well.. Six of us had planned in teams of two to teach morning “paths” covering a variety of theological and experiential material. We’d hoped to be meeting in the forest, amidst spring blossoms and warm sunshine. Four others had formed a “hearth path’, which besides doing all the shopping and planning for our meals, was prepared to lead the camp in the experience of cooking and eating food with sacred intent.

However, the “spring” was hard coming, with snow covering the ground the day before camp started and hail pelting us the day of. The forest was beautiful, but muddy and going outside entailed a kind of bundling up that invoked brisk walking, not laying around doing trance work.

There was somewhere between 30 and 40 of us, from a variety of countries. Walking in to the hostel, I kept looking for rooms other than the enamel yellow one which held a small kitchen in the corner and was the size of my living and dining rooms put together. The only other spaces to be found were the ones off the small hallway to the side, which all were small and cramped with bunk beds. Could several dozens of us really co-exist in this space and create something particular and precious?

We could. And did.

Our separate paths became one path, and occasionally huddling around a portable fire bowl on the small patio outside, we spent the days and nights together in good humor and with spirits buoyant. We traveled between the worlds, took stock of what stories we chose to tell in this lifetime, and spoke to the allies and ancestors who love us beyond all reason.

All the while, vegetables were being chopped, dishes being cleaned, and people being fed. One morning I found myself blissfully scrubbing dishes as Anne-Marie and Susan Farley were leading a trance on becoming different states of water. Did I say that everything happened in one small big room? It was no metaphor that we were all in the magic together, cooks, cleaners, and trance priestesses. We were.

The magic in Avalon Spring was about working together in close quarters, negotiating space and needs and doing it with grace and good will. The spell that was spun was about this rippling out in to the world and into the future. As the days went by, I kept hearing the Rolling Stone’s refrain that I sang to my son when he was small and prone to whining. “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes, you get what you need.”

This was not a glamorous camp. There were no glorious and glittering outfits, no dramatic aspecting of Gods, no raucous and bawdy talent shows. Yet, the sense of the sacred shimmered in all that we did. At Avalon Spring, there was no division between the mundane and magic. I believe we were better for it.

We human beings are such a mix of shadow and light, of the cranky and the affably adaptable. That mix was potent and palpable at Avalon Spring.

And it was Divine.