branches up, roots down

On Sunday there was a Reclaiming initiation at my home, up in the ritual room in the attic. Reclaiming is a tradition of witchcraft in which initiation affords you no status or special standing in the community. It is a personal journey, a private commitment to the gods and the guardians of the elements. It is a process in which you commit to the path of priestess and witch, letting go of the life that came before, and in the rite you symbolically die and are reborn. Reclaiming is a child of Feri tradition wedded to the feminist spirituality movement of the 1970's. After close to thirty years, it has now grown up. It appears that some new children are in gestation. As I did the intitiation, I knew that this was the last one for me in this form. Something is passing for me, and I am paying exquisite attention. So much of this form of initiation involves the letting go process, the surrendering and sitting in the dark. It usually leaves me drained and exhausted. So different from the...

My household is changing. Patti, Karl, and Colin will be gone by June. And yet, my household will also remain the same. It is a house of spirits, and it is a house full of life. The first time I walked into it, I felt at home. When we moved in, my then two year old would talk about the “giant in the attic”. At two different initiations - magical weddings to the divine - the initiates, after spending time alone in the attic, talked about meeting a tall ghost who gave advice and guidance on a variety of things. He is not the only one. I know that this house has slew of spirits who oversee our goings on. The bones of this house are ancient redwood, built back before the last century, the house surviving the big earthquake and privy to several generations of stories. The well in the backyard is now covered with concrete, but up until the 1920’s it provided water for the local fire brigade. I can sense the water flowing deep under the ground in my backyard, adding it's harmony to the ...

One of my clients came in today and asked me if I was a witch. Being the psychotherapist that I am, I of course couldn’t just answer straight out, but had to first explore how he came to ask that question. He’s a client who is very interested in Jung, who’s actually borrowed books of mine he’s spotted on my bookshelves. He has an amazingly rich dream life, and is certainly embarked on leading a mythic life. He said he’d dreamt of me as a witch, the kind of witch who is a healer, and I was telling him something about magic, but he couldn’t remember exactly what it was. So he’d been wondering, given that it’s San Francisco and all, that maybe I actually AM a witch, and then walking here, he passed a bookstore and there was a book in the window about witchcraft, and he thought he’d ask me. So, my questions answered, I answered his question. The excitement that ensued was sweet, excitement that his intuition was dead on, and excitement that he had finally met a witch who seemed like the “r...

Easter is approaching. Some years I celebrate spring on the Equinox, and some years on Easter. For over ten years now this celebration has entailed going up to the land I bought way back with my then coven sisters. Spring is stupendous there, daffodils and wild iris everywhere, the earth erupting in beauty. My friend Anne always comes up with her children, and I sit on the deck of the decaying cabin we call “the cookhouse” and make psyanky eggs and eventually we have big egg hunt and build a beautiful altar to Easter, the goddess of spring. I’ve been making psyanky eggs since I was 13. They are traditional since pre- Christian times in the Ukraine. Using a mini batik type tool, you paint the egg with beeswax and using the method of wax resist, you keep painting symbols of rebirth on the egg and dipping it in different colors, until finally you gently hold it near a candle flame and melt the wax off. Ukrainian women made these over the winter and early spring, and then used them magical...

It has been raining now for days. As a result of the rain and mercury going retrograde, my house of the spirits cut off communication with the outside world. The internet and phone have been off for two days. This is the first post out. We've been an island. Tonight it looks like the storm is passing. There were small cyclones down in South San Francisco and a water funnel appeared up the coast. If a frog is in a pot where the water is steadily heated until boiling, it will not know the point to jump out, and will die. Like the frog, we are steadily getting accustomed to stranger and stranger conditions. Frogs jump out of hot water if thrown in, knowing the right action for survival. If we were thrown into this time period from ten years back, would our actions be different? The phone rang a few minutes ago, I'm hooked back into the web and the net. No longer an island, I join the mainland.

It's really raining today. The soft spring rain of the weekend has turned into a deluge. It is pouring. I'm thinking of the fetid waters of the world that got poured out on Brigid. I'm thinking of the Inanna chant that I sang so much in the years leading up to my son's birth. "pour it out for me, pour it out for me, all you send me I will drink". That song is rarely sung at Reclaiming rituals now. I now know that if you ask for it to be poured out, it will be. There has been a lot to absorb. There still is. What a relief to have the waters of the world be poured out....to keep the water moving. This spell is working in me and on me. There is a sea change at hand, everything moving and shifting and changing. And meanwhile, this hard rain is falling.

It continues to rain off and on all weekend. Not a hard winter rain, but a soft, almost warm, spring rain. It's officially the equinox, a time of balance. From now on, light returns. It is also the second anniversary of the official war our empire is waging in Iraq. This weekend anytime I turn attention to major media new stories, what is front and center is the fight to keep a woman who is on a life support alive. Her husband goes along with the medical opinion that she is brain dead and wants to take her off life support - her parents are arguing it, backed up by the strange right to (some aspects of) lifers. What a weird nation. What a wierd time. All sorts of brouhaha about protecting the life of the brain dead woman while as I write this the majority of my tax dollars are going towards killing. Spring equinox is a time to reflect on rebirth, which by it's nature involves something dying. This nation wants to hold on, to not let go, of this woman. Why? In the dream of my li...

"How beautiful is the black, lascivious purity of small children and wild animals" - Victor Anderson For years I've embraced the metaphysical Feri concept of the Black Heart of Innocence, a state where we are coming from our raw, wild and primal nature - connected to the power and force of sheer being alive, feeling our sexuality and the pleasure of being embodied, devoid of shame or self consciousness, and able to speak with the honesty, directness, and innocence of a child not edited by social convention. This concept has proved to be a useful tool for me. It has helped me access and draw from a state of being which is authentic, it taps into the joy and fierceness of the life force. The Black Heart is being back in the garden with the absence of shame. The paradox of lascivious purity is a good one, and I love the mysteries of paradox. And yet. I'm a parent. I have a thirteen year old son. I'm thinking of how so much of parenting has been channeling that lasciv...

My pledge at Brigid was to know the difference between what was dead and what was living and to put my energy into the living. A week ago or so I couldn't for the life/death of me remember my pledge. A few days ago, while soaking in the beauty of this glorious spring in San Francisco, it flew back into memory. The rains of winter have given way to the green of spring. The glory of new life is everywhere, in the blossoms, in the buds, in the fragrant air. Spring equinox is within the week. My friend and neighbor Moj is Iranian-American. She celebrates the Persian new year at spring equinox. Tonight the cleansing for the new year begins by jumping a fire (so very like my own tradition of jumping the fire at Beltane) and consciously leaving behind what you don't want to take into the new year. My son and housemates will be going over to her house soon to join in this rite. Unfortunately I will miss it, being at work. But I've spent the day musing on this moment in time, and on...

Yesterday I talked to someone who I may eventually initiate in Reclaiming Feri, and one of my original initiators into the confusion of "second initiation/Feri initiation". Both I told about my recent realization of what I am; a witch who is of the Reclaiming Feri tradition, and both enthusiastically claimed to be Reclaiming Feri as well. Reclaiming Feri does not have a system of wands, does not have grandmasters, does not condone hexing or cursing , abides by the Wiccan Rede and the threefold law, and doesn't have (or doesn't aspire to have) what Thorn calls "Luciferian aspects", distinguishing it greatly from Anderson Feri tradition. Talking to both of them, I felt free from a maze of confusion, and I kept thinking of clean, clear water. My eyes are open. I was recently talking to my friend Reya, lamenting the stark reality that we'd embraced a tradition that overtly dismisses the law of three and the Wiccan Rede, and I found myself repeatedly saying ...

Things certainly are moving! In the last week or so I have crossed over some membrane into a different reality, a different sense of my world. A deep and profound reconciliation is occurring. I've been a priestess of Reclaiming and of Feri. Like I’ve said before, there’s been an intrinsic discomfort with both – and I’ve been somewhere between the worlds with both, not quite Reclaiming, not quite Feri. Events of the past few weeks have catapulted me into this new space, this taking on of what I actually am – a Reclaiming Feri witch, part of a tradition that has been gestating, that now begins to take form and find structure, that by naming, comes consciously into being. Last summer, at Avalon witchcamp, Georgia and Susan had an encounter with the Goddess Brigid at Chalice Well. This encounter led to changing a spell that the Reclaiming community had been doing for years. Instead of collecting water from around the world and mixing it together and holding on to it as the pollutants b...

It is nearing dusk here in this hilly city on the edge of the pacific. The fruit trees are in bloom, jasmine is flowering, and it looks like it will be one of those unusual San Francisco nights where the dark still holds the heat of the sun. It was downright hot today, and no fog is creeping over twin peaks. It will be a fragrant warm night, a night for walking around and taking in the beauty of this psychic seaport. I need to soak up some beauty, and it looks like the dark will be rich with it. Today in the heat, I found myself thinking about Lucifer, and the incredible power of words, of names, of language. I've spent years reclaiming the word "witch". Back in my early twenties I never could say it without a big reaction, and of course, the inevitable questions about Satan worship. In the last couple of years I've noticed that it no longer seems to be such a big deal... a lot of times not an eye is blinked, and now questions about black magic and Satan are an aberra...