branches up, roots down

I’ve been up to my neck in sugar skulls for the past week. The Great Studio Cleaning began as a hunt for my molds, which were never found. After several attempts with rigging my own out of cheap plastic skulls from Walgreens, I finally gave in and bought the expensive clear molds I’ve had such contempt for. Finally, in my travels to the cake decorating store for icing fixings, I found the molds that I had originally had, molds straight from Mexico , made from heavy duty plastic and much more traditional looking than the clear versions. It seems the dead this year want a variety of different kinds of sugar skulls, and it’s my job to create them. As I left the house this morning, I left behind a sticky stove and gritty floor. As usual, the magic is much more in the process than the product. By Samhain, my altar will hold beautifully decorated skulls of sugar, with names of the dead written carefully on them with brightly colored icing. However, up until that point the magic is in ...

It’s been well over a month since I broke my elbow. Since then, equinox has come and gone. Samhain approaches, with each day the air thickening with incoming dead. I continue to mull on the meaning of the break, it being the third in my household in the past year (my son and housemate both were on crutches in the early spring) and the third time I’ve had an elbow break in the last fourteen years. Was it a lucky break or a break-through? The crack in the elbow facilitated a break from writing, the longest one since I began writing this blog. A break was taken, due to the break. Being a witch, I can’t help but try and divine the significance in every little thing. My broken elbow was a rather middling to big thing, so you can imagine the sifting of significance this has engendered! Six years ago (November 11 th to be exact) I found myself out on the street with my young son in the middle of the night, clothed in only the top of my flannel pajamas. My house was on fire, and the flam...