Peers

Peers

We have been swallowed up by a storm of bureaucratic bullshit and it's fall out here at Witch HQ over the last week or so culminating in a rather long "assessment" of our home, our child, and our schooling today which lasted over three hours.

The general upshot from all this for us was a deep seated feeling that they just didn't get it.

More than that they were happy academically with where E is but doesn't she need friends her own age?

I pointed out I had tried to encourage her. That she used to play out in the street but she had (and still has) very little urge to do so. 

She is certainly not shy, or reluctant to talk to people she just has friends who are much older, from all kinds of backgrounds.

Now I had friends in school (of all kinds) but I got on better with the teachers than I did the students.

Even at sixth-form, my peers (of all ages) tended not to be the other actors but the musicians, techs and others.

I fell in with a crowd in their early twenties at 17 (of mostly guys) and for the first time in my life I felt I belonged, at least a little.

I had a couple of best friends at school, but this was different. My friends from school taught me a lot and I even had a lot of fun, but...I didn't have friends until I found my little nook of support at school, I would have been E's age then. 

Yet while I grew into being out going and semi-popular, few people knew me.

No it was this guitar playing, hippy, grunge, pool playing, poetry reading, smart ass university students who drank a lot of hard booze (not that my school friends didn't) that shook up my world.

We played chess (I still suck at it), discussed history and politics, ideals and ideas in a way I had never had the freedom to do before. I heard weird new music, weird old music and sang songs from my soul too drunk to lift my head from the sofa cushion. When I got to university I again had to find a spot and again it was not with my "peers". I couldn't stand most of the writing students (doing the writing/philosophy combo), or the dram llama ding-dongs (all tits and teeth). No I found friends with people like the wizard (20+ years older than me) who lived in the tower over looking my building (this is the stone cold truth) and the freaky rock club D.J's (10+years older than me), Runesmiths (20+ years and some serious life experience) and street performers (+ but no clue by how much), and wild dance drop-outs (my own age but much more worldly). I meet and got to know law students, artists, and as the pagan world opened up to me a whole host of other weird and wonderful people, most of whom couldn't give a crap when my birthday was. 

 

So why do schools (it is a particularly schoolish idea) think your peers will be people who were born roughly in the same year as? It isn't like that at work? It isn't like that in families. So why do they create an alien environment and then judge us if we don't fit into that box?

They can't see that having friends of just your age is actually very limiting and kind of weird.

I just have this knowing, that it isn't important if she does or doesn't want to hang out with people her age now. She will grow into friendships of all kinds for all kinds of reasons. Some will be older, some younger. Some will be the other side of the world. Some next door. Some will have their own lessons, and reason, their own seasons too. The best friends might not be the ones who give us the comfort of who we were but challenge us to be smarter, faster, bigger and brighter.

Of course I hit this plateau in my twenties where I gained younger friends too, and as I have aged I have lost and made friends with people from all kinds of backgrounds, of all ages, races and beliefs, with all kinds of passions and desires.

So this anxiety of "abnormality" is based on an artifice they themselves create. As the people around her grow into and out off their bodies and hormones as well as experiences, as she does herself she may wish to re-join the world of her "peers". She may just be waiting for her tribe, her soul friends to find their way to her.

Bright Blessings xxx

Ar Hyd Y Nos (All Through the Night)

 Ar Hyd Y Nos

Add there, in my dream, it’s Wales, just outside of Llangollen, just in the wilds of tumbled down buildings and it Christmas morning.
There half wild, half wilder with a shock of white bristling through his hair in green willies and heavy knit jumper is The Bard himself. Father Wales. Gwilym! As I live and breathe it’s Gwilym! I hear his voice first in the mush and muddle there are after all so many of us there. We are at his workshop, we are in the Welsh cold air. In the Welsh cold of Christmas morning. The smell of excitement and hot spiced wine is in the air and he is talking .
At first I am distracted by the other people there, Bryony is there, be-mittened and beautiful in the crisp cold air. We are there to listen but most of all we are there to dig.
Father Wales voice rings out, he sings, not as himself but with my father’s father’s voice. A deep bouncing sound of songs I don’t remember, from a choir I never heard. It is a huge sound but it is only the first line of all through the night, Ar Hyd Y Nos, sung exactly the way my father sung it. Like the life of him would end if he sung it quietly.
Then it is over and we, there must be thirty people there now, head towards the workshop and he say
“I kept finding things. Things that ort not to be there, things they said could not possibly be here, under the black mud. Timbers to start, then other things and I knew, I knew I must follow it. It was not but a lump when we started. A lump of what we didn’t know”
Then the hot spiced wine is brought and the smell of it in the Welsh cold, on the Welsh damp air, so cold it is green and cleaner than pine, colder than death, lifts me to purest joy.
He has not stopped talking and now in my mits I have a small trowel.
He say "So I began to strip it away piece by piece brick by brick and clear as day there was something there. There were bricks and tiles, there were pieces of timber black but there, more whole in the mud. Tiles like jewels of medaval design with copper flowers and leaves the colour of flour. Under the ivy and the black mud it was all still there. Glass too.”
As he speaks as so often when he speaks I see the landscape shift and change. The world shifts and the gems spring to mind the different things happens in moments before my eyes. And I am left breathless.
On and on, his voices (that is also so many voices) talks and my head is down digging, picking at the black black mud and I see it. The place -the place as it once was. It looks like a cottage but it is so much older.
So much joy and excitement! Such a buzz of doing something, seeing something hidden be revealed. Then back to the workshop, to the fire , all of us milling when Gwylym grabs Bryony and she laughs then his voice become serious they move a log between them.
“You must not add anything. You must only take from it what was there, show what is really there, and you are here because of the liver, not your liver, your Mother’s, you stay because of how hard it is, when it should be soft., nothing to do with dogs.”
Her face darkens but it is because we both know it is the truth of it. It is the truth of it and he turns to me with eyes like weirs and says
“We only reveal what is there. You should know, that soft things become hard and hard things become soft if it is left in the mud. Come the pub is warm and they have the best pies."
“Not the best!”
“The best for Christmas morning!”
Everyone laughs and jokes and our willies leave foot prints as all of us, the throng sit by the fire. I am so full of joy I wake with tears in my eyes and know I must write. That I must not forget what I have seen and heard, All through the Night...

Meditation Made Easy.

Meditation Made Easy.

While this is the classic image of meditation we tend to see it is easy to think meditation is a passive thing, or something difficult and even other-worldly.

Mediation is a process of thinking deliberately about somethings and excluding others, sometimes deepening into a state of thoughtlessness.

If that sounds impossible, I promise it is not and if I can teach TK I swear I can teach anyone!

It is far more important to meditate for short amount of time daily than try and achieve deep meditative states once a week.

3 and a half steps to success.  

If you follow these simple steps for a few minutes everyday the benefits of meditation (which are many and beginning to be documented scientifically) you too will be able to meditate. Firstly don't do too long when you first start, 5 to 10 minutes of a morning is the best way to stick at it.

Step 1 

You can't breathe in without first exhaling. I don't care how you sit or lie but a straight spine is useful and when you are first learning a quiet room is useful. Now you sharply and deeply exhale while drawing your bellybutton towards your spine. This sets you up to breathe deeply into your belly. Breathe deeply and try and focus only on breathing 5 deep belly breaths. 

Step 2

Your focus. This can be a great many things, even simply the darkness before your own closed eyes. I wrote a whole book about it (find it here it is really good) so there are thousands of different kinds. Let us start with a bowl of water. Place the bowl before you and focus on it, observe it to the exclusion of everything, including thoughts. Let your gaze soften so the rest of the room goes all blurry and smooshy. Close your eyes and try and "see" the bowl with your mind's eye. If you can't simply open your eyes and return to contemplating.

Step 3

Add in the word PEACE to your mind. Keep contemplating the bowl both inside and before you. Try and accept (with the breath is good) peace and as you exhale gently allow peace to radiate from you. This part can be tricky to start with but it does get easier after a couple of days.

And a half

This is the part most folks don't do terribly well. This is where for a couple of minutes everyday especially when your shoulders begin to rise, your hands and jaw get tight and you feel the stress creeping in, STOP. Go take an couple of minutes. On the loo, in the break room, outside, at your desk, where ever you are. Close your eyes. Exhale drawing your bellybutton to your spine and taking 3-5 deep breaths. Then remember the bowl of water before you. Remember radiating peace with your breath. How soft your face was. How soft your hands. 

In a pinch just do the breathing.

Health benefits

The health benefits for meditation are amazing. You don't need expensive tools or to be especially fit or mobile. Meditation changes the brain (there are some great new studies about this). Grey matter changes and new more efficient path ways are made within the brain. It can help to detangle unhealthy or traumatic thought or neuron path ways or even reduce parts of the brain that have grown bigger due to stress and trauma reduce in size and density. Check out about the Harvard study here.

I hope this has been helpful and you remember to check out the video on youtube here of this meditation 

Bright Blessings xx

Don't forget to buy the book The Key Opening the Doorway to Magickal Practice and check out our shop Lucy Drake & Co on Etsy.

Down the Faery Path

Down the Faery Path

Well I have been a merry dance, is so often the way with these things. Where to start?

Well my Witchling is a ling no more. Her first blood came and with it a whole bunch of release and joy and as a mother a pinch of sadness too (my baby).

I was all of a dither, especially after being so violently ill. We had very little prepared. 

We as a family did her official initiation. She choose her name (she will be referred to here now as E).

It was simple and beautiful and moving. 

Friends and family from all over the world sent her gifts and her athame arrived and TK worked her new name on it.

It was a bright beautiful time.

Yet many folks didn't bother. Didn't even comment. 

I have been meditating a lot. I have also been dreaming profusely. Last night I out did myself by meditating in my dreams!

The house has been a buzz with magick and faery energy. The garden is full of bees (about a hundred on one tree in the back garden). I have been cleansing, clearing warding my temple and home. I have been with drawing back into my Faery space.

They have been very healing, loving but I have had this strange coldness (I am rarely cold) and I have been a human Popsicle under blankets and even socks (I am a barefoot girl) since the beginning of...what ever this is.

My Blue Lady and AA spirit guides have been around a lot. I have been on the end of the phone trying to help folks in pain and heartache too.

Yet this phrases has been bouncing around my skull (thanks to Gayla and Mumsy)

You already know who you really are.

It is a truth and I have let go of the need for approval and made space for all the Faery in me. All the witch; the healer, teacher, poet, seer, Priestess, Warrior, dancing into the fullness of myself.

 So many things have unraveled in the salt of my baths (I'd live there right now if I could) as I wash away other people's memories and dreams. Wash away their feelings, their rages, guilt's and fears. Wash away a few of my own.

I have barely been able to eat too. Everything makes me feel queasy.  Some toast here, a meal there but the heartburn catches me. I have been eating a lot of vegetarian food, mostly for it's simplicity. So many people have been tangled like knots in my hair eating my light, my fierce alive fire and as I wash them away I watch them drain down the plug like fragments of soap worn too small and thin.

I feel so light. So free.

So light-headed!

I am working on arty stuff, on Morrigan incense and Great Crow Queen Morrigan Spirit Dolls as I weave between worlds. 

Bright Blessings xxx

Don't forget to buy the book The Key Opening the Doorway to Magickal Practice or visit our shop on Etsy (while they still allow pagans to do anything on there!) Lucy Drake & Co.

Great Queen

The Great Queen

 

She of many names and faces, She who is blood and death and life is holding me tightly today. Rather than push her away I fill up my nostrils with Her scent and create. Design. Make in Her honour.
Drawing crows and feathers, spirals that twist in and out.

Bright Blessings xxx

Visions and Monsters

Visions and Monsters

At 3 a.m. the visions start. Maybe it happens before that. Maybe this cold spirit energy has been with me a while but I have pushed it away (but not released it) longer.
The vision starts with me in a garden with two little girls.
I am not me, I am a 50 something year old lady in an orange house coat. The girls are hastily given under my care and at first I am anxious because my house is not suitable for children. Yet I give them a change of clothes these pale blonde girls.
Their hair is dirty blonde and the eldest has big blue eyes. They are such quiet girls. We head in from the garden into my house. The carpet in bright orange and very fluffy, I know it is new and I am pleased with it. My home is white and orange surrounded by green hedges. I have never seen such quiet children. We sit and have tea out my china cups. They eat some jam on toast and drink a little. I put on my record player. I give them a pair of my old sunglasses to play with. For a brief moment they begin to be children. They laugh and sing-a-long.
I can hear him before I see him. Sense he is in my neat little garden. I turn up the music and tell the girls to "Just stay there a moment girls."
He is tall and white with a dirty rusty crop of hair. He is yelling and screaming at me. At first I am in a rage. I curse him, for what he has done to those poor girls. I yell at him holding my housecoat button tightly. I tell him social services are already on the way.
He seems to leave, or maybe fall back. I head inside the house. My hot angry courage spent and a cold slick dread washes over me. My heart hurts. Is it my heart or my own first against it.
My white glass and wooden door, previously so proudly owned feels so flimsy. The locks feel like nothing.
"Go upstairs girls, go on now."
They cling to each other and even though the small one cries they are both so quiet.
He is there again. His image broken into irregular pieces. He is waving a gun. It isn't a big gun but that doesn't matter. I have already dialed the police. The operator is on the line.
He wants "his girls".
I tell him he has lost that right and that the police are coming.
He kicks the door and even though I am pressed against it, it opens. I don't know who I am more scared for, myself or the girls.
I am slim, but wiry and for now keep him out.

This is the dream that has woken me twice in a single day. My heart hurts. I feel sick on waking.
I have tried to tell the lady that she was right to protect the children in all her fierce glory. That she can be forgiven or even praised for her courage and creative cussing.

The sick dread takes a while to leave me and if I blink I can see it all clearly. Not like a dream at all. The way the doorways buckles and splinters. The orange of the carpets. The silence of the girls.

I hope that in the writing of it, it fades for me. That I have passed on the message that wanted speaking. I hope she moves on gently to tend her neat garden and listen to her music.


Bright Blessings xxx

Entering IN

Entering In.

My beautiful daughter is now a woman and stands on the threshold to become a witch this night.
I am both nervous (silly I know) and immeasurably proud.
Witchling for just a brief fragment more.

I'm BACK!

I'm BACK!

I know, I know! Where have I been! Well I have been right here mostly.
After my big event Awakening the Key, only a few days passed before a very old friend arrived and I spent much of that time healing and teaching. All good! Then however it all energy out left me a bit wibble and at the tail end of her visit I came down with (how do American's put it?) stomach flu?
What a delicate way of putting it!
I am still a little delicate, but I can now eat and drink and it stay in my body the way it is supposed to.
TK was brilliant and looked after wonderfully and was just awesome.
I am feeling very loved up, and very blessed! When you appreciate every sip of water it shifts your focus some what!
That doesn't mean to say I have been doing nothing (I won't go into the gross stuff).
I have been helping someone who is in a really dark place right now both physically and emotionally on-line and on the phone.
It is weird because he is someone I sort of knew. We meet roleplaying and got along but never really sat and chatted, certainly not as ourselves but it is not unusual for me to attract people in need this way. It is strange because I have this disconnection. No, that is not the word.
When he reached out to me he was alone, in agony in the hospital and I could feel it all. Then it all goes quiet and I feel this constriction, this drawing away.
I know how much I can do on-line and one the phone but it is hard to get a read on him sometimes and well that bothers the shit out of me.
I don't want to demand, or push, though he might really need it, but it is like trying to do everything with one hand tied behind my back and my face is in a bucket.
Sometimes he really opens up to me, deep dark things about his past and pain. Yet I know nearly nothing of his life!
I know I have been busy technicolour yawning but I am getting frustrated doing it at his beck and call and time frame and not my own. I am tired that when we begin to work through deep stuff I can't even hear his voice to figure out if he is really doing okay.
I am also bending over backwards biting my tongue not to slag off his girlfriend. I know that she is his choice and that he is not being totally honest with me, AND that there are two sides to every story. That said, what a fucking bitch!
No, well maybe!
I "think" (from what I have gathered thus far, which we take with pinch and half of salt) she is doing the  "I don't want to be the person who ends it, so I withdraw until the other person does."
Again I am only being shown some of it. Yet she just doesn't really seem to give shit that this guy is in huge physical pain and needs her. Needs her to step up and take care of him, hold his hand, tell him he will be okay. No matter how big and tough we are, a couple is a team.
Seriously, TK is coming out of the last few weeks really well. Talk about appreciating sitting in hospital waiting room, and wards. Of being there no matter how gross. Of telling me I am beautiful even at my grossest. Of making me laugh, and me seeing how much we all laugh together all the time (you notice that when your back and ribs are sore).

So  not the best blog in the world but I am counting my blessings today.

Bright Blessings

You know you can support what I do by buying my amazing book The Key Opening the Doorway to Magickal Practice or visiting the shop Lucy Drake & Co for incense, runes, charms and so on!

Awakening the Key

Awakening the Key

I held a workshop on Monday and other than being disappointed by people not turning up, the workshop was wonderful. The space was lovely. The weather was great and the people there really got it.
After I chased a few people on the Sunday night and got cancellations last minute before (as well as someone rushed to hospital who is totally excused), I felt a little lost, a little doubtful of myself.
One of my clients had come all the way from the other end of the country and had stayed the weekend with us. I practiced a bit of the workshop with her that night and while the doubt in myself was there I believed in the work, in the process, in what I am doing.
It works.
It cuts away all the dogma and things and show people that they are the key to unlocking their own lives, their own magick, their own happiness.
While this my own work, my own creation sewn together from teaching Craft for years and years, it is so much bigger than me now. My task is to help other people awaken, so they can carry this forward in the hundreds of way I can not even imagine yet.
This feels so important.
It feels not only a change in how magick is taught, thought about, written about, but in awareness.
I believe it is my destiny to help in an awakening.
So it has started small, many great things do. So it has been ignored by the mainstream pagan community, that too was ignore.
Maybe next I could run a taster on skype or g+, then run a course in the States. Not only is something I want to do, it is something that must happen.

Bright Blessings xxx

Remember to buy the book The Key Opening the Doorway to Magickal Practice and find handmade artisan magickal goods at Lucy Drake & Co.

The shop has been keeping us busy this weekend hence not much blogging but look at the cool stuff.

The Wisdom of Trees

The Wisdom of Trees

The wisdom of trees, and forests never ceases to amaze and delight me. As a child, I remember spending about three weeks living my usual life and on falling sleep I would wake up to this other life. I was in a forest with huge tree. Bigger than I could imagine. They were not a kind I was familiar with and the bark and wood was red and punky. It was dry and brittle and crumbled in the hands. In my dream I would build a fire a little way up the trunk of this huge tree. I would leave it smolder and go fishing in a brook near by. I used thorn as barbs and twine from a twisting mass of flowers. Then I would take my hair and make a fly, a lure out of it. I folded it and twisted it, a few strands making it quite quickly. Then I would catch small silver fish in the shallow waters. Then I would go back to the tree. I would take a stone that was thin and shaped like a scoop and dig out  the softer charred wood. I would take some of the embers and wrap them in leaves. The thin stream of smoke passing over the fish.

Sometimes I would eat. Sometimes I would forage.

Every morning I would wake. Get dressed. Sort out the animals. Go to school. Come home and my eyes barely closed before I was back.

Scraping away, deeper and deeper. It became a tunnel I crawled into. Night after night, after night.

It became a cave inside the tree. One I could hide in and eventually stand in. 

This was my "house tree". 

After it was made, I would go back sometimes, but the making of it was intense. 

The trees were alive and knowing in ways I knew but could not express. I found it odd that people were suprised that tree were (and are) sacred. 

A forest is a cathedral to me with twisting columns of silver, green and grey expanding into ceilings of stained glass leaves. Moss prayer mats and altars for offerings a plenty. The birds and beasts shaping and showing the way to deeper and ever more sacred spaces. 

Each tree a priestess, a column, a part of the living sacred place. Healing trees, wise trees, warrior trees, smooth and rough, twisting and bowed or straight. 

I keep a piece of gorse, a twisted mossy covered root I found in Wales on my shrine. It is connected to the fae folk, to my spiritual home and to the that great green knowing. To the wisdom of trees.

I can only speak of the trees I know, the ones I grew up listening to. The holly and apple. The sycamore. The rowan and rose. The beech and ivy. Oak and heather. Those tree I swung from. Yet as each tree is a teacher they are one and just connected. 

I wax lyrical.

Bright Blessings xxx

Remember buy my book The Key Opening the Doorway to Magickal Practice.  

Amazing Reviews

Amazing Reviews

"Good morning. Would like to start the day with a book recommendation for a book, to my Witchy inclined friends. 
The author of this book is a dear and loved friend, and a powerful, knowledgeable and compassionate Witch. she is also, it turns out, a great teacher. one who guides, pushes and encourages. the tasks in this book are deceptively simple, but by no means "easy"you WILL have to push yourself to get the best out of yourself with them. But even if you find them a challenge, they will create a space in your mind for that growth to take place, at a pace that is natural to you. 
You are expected to work at it, and work hard at it, and with this, your abilities will expand and grow.
I purchased the first edition of this book, and have dipped in and out of the exercises, and found them good for focus.
With this new book, I am biting the bullet and following the schedule. I can keep it up, Lucy Drake believes in me :P
The part I expect to find trickiest is to journal the experiences as they go. I have never been a great one for this. but I have written plenty on my day one. so maybe it will come easier in time.
This book will be MOST useful for people starting out. for many years, I've said there's not really a great beginners book out there. Too many of them have at least one or two things there that are misleading, misguiding, or to be taken with a pinch of salt. so that when you recommend them to people, you find yourself saying "that bit, this bit, don't pay it much mind, but the rest is good"
this is all good. 
It doesn't tell you what to think or what to believe, but how to make it WORK. 
Essentially it teaches you how to train your mind.
Having said this is most useful to beginners, It is also of great value to the more experienced, whether that is by following the programme as laid out, as I am now doing (and I am starting at Novice. no ego here. when I complete, I will give it time, then start again at the next level) or by using the excellent exercises as a psychic M.O.T, reset, or tune up.
So any Witchy people. please consider this wonderful book. It is for people at any level of practice.
you can see my five star review of the first edition here"


I might have to print this out for my wall of awesome! Not a bad way to start a Monday?

Bright Blessings xxx

Don't forget you can buy the book The Key Opening the Doorway to Magickal Practice on Amazon today!