branches up, roots down

I wrote this awhile back for the British Reclaiming Newsletter. Seems a good time to put it up and out in cyberspace.. Spiritual Authority , Ethics, and Community - A Reclaiming Feri Perspective To be a Witch, and especially a Reclaiming Feri Witch, is to ultimately create and live by your own moral compass. Reclaiming and Feri both encourage us to be our own spiritual authority , which means picking and choosing the tenets by which we live our own life and deciphering and abiding by our own moral code. This is challenging enough, but even more challenging is creating community with people who are also in this process. Spiritual authority , like any other authority , is not gained overnight, but is something that is attained with time, study, practice, and mistakes made and learned from. Spiritual authority does not come easy, neither does consciously creating our own sturdy moral compass that we can turn to, rely on, and that guides us towards behavior and actions which ha...

The outrage over the chocolate Jesus is being discussed all over the blogosphere. Meanwhile, the full moon is shining down and I’m full of gratitude for being part of a tradition where the only blasphemy is in the degradation of the life giving elements of this green planet. Toxins in a river, clearcutting a forest, this is sacrilege. There is nothing a pagan could make in chocolate that would be profane, thank Goddess! Chocolate Gods and Goddesses, the only response is YUMM….even if unrobed and buck naked. Reading about the hubbub I took even more pleasure in Steward passing on the work of the )APAUSICOTS( . This apparently stands for the All Powerful and Ultra Secret Inner Circle of the Spiralheart. There’s one of these in every community, but count on those east coasters to make it official and produce documents. And what a document they have produced!!! Proudly, the document us west coasters produced was and is the Reclaiming Principles of Unity . I love these p...

The older I've gotten, the more I trust my intuition. Once again, I'm trying to trust it, but it's not exactly easy. My intuition has guided me once again to being on a witchcamp team, and not only that, it's a team I never expected to be on. Have I done the right thing? It remains to be seen. Last year the team I taught with at Spiralheart had the great honor of being asked back. We were a great team, and I am proud of the work we did together. We treated each other with respect, had each other's backs, encouraged each other to stretch, and modeled the values that shine from Reclaiming's principles of unity , something that does not always happen in a witchcamp setting. It helped that the Spiralheart community was actually that.... a community. I loved the setting in West Virginia, loved the people, loved the magic that unfolded, and even loved the food. It was great experience. After being asked back, despite the positive experience, I kept having the nig...