Consecration

Consecration 

Consecration: association with the sacred.

This a process that is at once a blessing and a transmutation. It is taking fermented grape juice and turning it into holy wine. It is taking a substance (water, salt, wine, oil) and dedicating it to spiritual, ritual or religious work.

Different faiths do this in different ways.

Salt is using blessed on an altar. It is usually charged to cleanse in the name of a specific deity or in the names of the Lord and Lady.

Sometimes it is very ritualised.

"I cleanse you oh of creatures of salt. I awaken you to cleanse the way. To remove all malignity. In the name of..."

Of course saying the words and drawing a star doesn't awaken anything if you are still sleeping.

Sometimes it is charging a space with power and channelling it all into an item (a wand, cup of wine, crystal). Touching it with your breath and seeing it awaken.

Consecration is difficult for those looking outside themselves for their power. It is about drawing in what is holy in you, reaching out and digging deep within and connecting with that light, and connecting that light to a simple bowl of salt.

Bright Blessings xxx

You can buy my book The Key here or here and buy our salt here.

The Eduction System

The Eduction System

Before I was a Home Educator I knew there were things wrong with the education system in this country. My mother had been a teacher (mostly supply and/or music). I was also rather lucky at junior school (aged 7 to 11 years) to have not one but several really amazing teachers.
They were inventive, inspired and most often projected based. We did basic weaving. Made sweets. Read together. I learned to read music and sing in a choir. I even learned cursive script (though I hated it at the time).
I could see that being a good teacher (something I still believe) is about have a presence and control of a class, and yet inspire them, liberate their ideas and excitement. To create moments that change the way they think about something.
As I was leaving university a lot of my feckless peers who "wanted to be famous" decided to go into teaching to cover the bills. I knew I would be a great teacher but I refused to do it. I knew I would have to be one of those sparky teachers and after my degree I was exhausted. I didn't have it in me to do it at all. No if I was to do it, I would have had to have been amazing.
Then I had some life. Teaching craft to adults was different. Harder, easier. Having a family. Writing, readings.
My daughter went to school.
As a parent, to watch my daughter be damaged a little more everyday was soul destroying. Truly. I did everything right and it was still hell, hell for all of us. After the second year I began to research HE. The third year was a little better, she got a great teacher, who then promptly left after one year for a better school.
 Sometimes you don't realise how ingrained the system is, how broken, how controlling until you really leave it. I had had some friends who were teachers (still have some too). Some teachers had never not been in the education system and it is really weird how...odd they are! School is their only frame of reference. They know nothing outside of the bubble. Tiny things become huge and huge things become hidden. Like colonies in space, anything outside is alien and dangerous.
The thing is we know more about children than we have ever known. Yet all this knowledge is not used in schools unless it can be bent, restructured or twisted to fit into the "school" shape.
This why schools don't work well for most students. It is not just that there is poor teaching (there is) or that there are poor teachers (there are), it is that system is more important than the children. Yet the system doesn't work.
There of course, there are still great teachers. Yet many leave, struggle, have health issues due to amazing amount of stress wanting to teach in a sparky innovative and inspired way, and not being allowed to do so.
Teaching craft is one of those things, (I have taught all kinds of people of all ages) that has shown me that people (and default) children don't learn the lessons you want them to learn. That if they don't want to do it, they won't and if they do, they will moved heaven and earth to do it.
A great teacher inspires. Shows the the hem of something. A hook. A good student will then want to follow it where ever it leads and will devour it. Once a student is shown how to learn, how to grow their knowledge they won't stop. They can't.
Until the system is not controlled by politics (big and small) and what we know about child development is put into an education system it is going to keep fail, letting down and destroying children.

Bright Blessings xxx

Death is not the Enemy

Death is not the Enemy

When you live, really live death is not the enemy. It cheats us of nothing, because is sweeps away the pettiness and pointless things and brings into clarity the things that matter. Who we love, how we love. What is left when we stop. Death is like winter. The seeds I have sown by accident and by design will grow on without me, but something of myself will nourish what continues to grow.

I have no fear of death or dying. 

I don't want to go just yet, I have things to do. Places to see. To feel the sand and dust beneath my feet. The sun and rain against my skin. Words to write and share.

When we lose others, when they die you can rail at it. Kick at it. Draw the shadows of grief around you. At some point you have to look at your own face in the mirror and know it will be bones and be okay with that.

In a odd sort of way this knowledge doesn't make me sad in the slightest. Part of me, (I am sure it is Fae part) keeps grinning at all the mischief I get to do first.

I do aim to misbehave. Not in a cruel way. I just enjoy being alive. I like singing and dancing. Oh I love to eat too.

I want to bang my drum loudly. Paint the world with colour and kindness. Throw those seeds around like a Goddess.

I have all kinds of chronic conditions that can make making hell difficult. Yet in the gamble of preserving my "life" in the future, or my quality to live now, I choose now. I might get hit by a bus!

The other thing is there are many deaths over one lifetime.

It is good and right to mourn their passing.

I will never be who I was, and I am fine with that. That angry slip of thing that danced and drank and was a whirlwind of power is gone. So too is the cynical and bitter person I was a few years ago. All that fear, that need to control! I honour them. They are me. I let them go. It is a privilege to carry their memories.

You see I am happy. Not for some great miracle. I am happy because I am alive. I am happy because their are blue skies and clouds that look like ancient beast floating in the sky, and snow and thunderstorms. I am happy because there is tea and cosy blankets and music.

I am happy because I am loved. Loved my others and finally, finally loved by myself.

Am I perfect? Nope!

Does that matter?

Nope!

I was never enough! Smart enough (clever people make mistakes too and that is PART of the process). Pretty enough (I was too thin, too pale, too fat, too short, too much hair, for someone at some point.) Spiritual enough (in a weird bloodless, joyless and pseudo-Abrahamic sort of way, that I could never fit into no matter how I cut myself up into bits.)

Do I have a temper? Damn straight I do. A righteous fury that burns in me like a battle Goddess brushed my cheek with her Raven's feather. I am a red-head. I come with a visual warning! This has keep me alive, given me great power and it is my deep feeling caring heart, that cares so much that gives me the capacity to feel so deeply. It allows me to protect the weak and vulnerable, even that is myself.

Of course I am better at letting things go too now. You can't cure stupid or crazy and it is not my place to correct every idiot I meet! 

My job is to put the knowledge and passion and the magick out into the world. To stand in my presence. To be me and inspire.

Bright Blessings xxx

Detox? Start with your Mind First!

Detox?

 

Start with your Mind First!

You want to "be a better you" this coming years? Well don't start with a juice cleanse or a gym membership, start with your mind and soul.

Firstly setting yourself up to fail at something again isn't going to "do you good". No-one is ever "enough". Thin enough, healthy enough, cleansed enough until they deal with their hearts and minds and souls. What are really hungry for? What is it you really want or desire?

Secondly doing something crazy and difficult to maintain makes crashing in late January early February almost guaranteed. 

That doesn't mean you shouldn't or can't strive to better yourself, far from it. You can transform your life and self. Truly and you don't need to spend hours at the gym.

You can spend 10 minutes meditating every morning. You won't need any special tools, and if you do you can find them easily and it changes your mind from the first time you do it! You could buy a book to help you. Take a class or watch some good video's on Youtube. 

You want to detox? Let go of the idea you can change from the outside in. Has it worked before? Did it help last year or the year before? How about letting go of anger? Or fear? Fear that we "should", that we are not "enough". This year, drink one extra glass of water a day. Take a walk some where green. Be present in yourself and in your own magick and power.

Wouldn't it feel better in late winter to not be carrying all the anxiety and disappointment?

That you have achieved something real that has nothing to do with your relationship to a set of scales?

They can not measure your journey. They can't measure how kind you are. O how gentle. Or how full of magick.

You want to do more? Dance! Walk dogs for those less mobile. Do something fun and that most importantly MAKES YOU HAPPY.

You can be more. You can carry less "weight". You may even get healthier.

Bright Blessings xxx

Yule ~ Family Traditions

Yule ~ Family Traditions

Yule for us as a family usually starts on the 21st of December, and lasts for 12 to 14 days. We bring a live tree into the home and make our own decorations. Some out of clay. Some out of spices. On our tree we add corn stalk decorations too.  The image of the green man is either above the tree or facing it. The star atop our tree was made by E when she was LittleWitch (I can hardly say that now as she is about the same height as me). It is an eight pointed star painted gold and held onto the tree with red and gold ribbon and florists wire.
When E was little we would leave our treats for Father Yule (much like Father Christmas) and she would get gifts every morning for two weeks. Sometimes they would be little stocking fillers, sometimes bigger gifts.
Even dead broke (and there were quite a few times we were) we always feast. We would get gifted things, or even have what we wanted fall in our lap for a discount price. We also feed others. Often those without family, or those lost and struggling. Sometimes it is just those we would love to see.
When I was running coven's we would have a coven meal and/or ritual over the season too. With the Holly and the oak king fighting.There are some real comedy moments that spring to mind with that one!
Most of our gifts for people were handmade. In fact when we were suddenly flush one year and I was going to buy things for friends there was a revolt! "I want my hamper of Lucy's food" was the cry!
I love Yule for the reasons that I like Christmas.
I love the food, and I love the magickal quality sitting in a room of sparkly lights and candles. I love the smells, and the quiet as well as the laughter.
TK rules the kitchen at feast times. Even when I did 90% of the cooking he did the roasts.
This year was no different. It was actually really relaxing yesterday. Some friends dropped of gifts and we gave them there's. (I did attempt to get everyone up to watch the sunrise but I was super foggy from lack of meds and I got snuggled into submission).
We had a lovely late lunch of cheeses (well I had a bunch of cheeses), salad leaves, pickles and pork pie. Then we gamed for a while and E got an in game bunch of keys to upgrade her character (one you pay for).  We sat down to eat our family feast at about 7 pm. It was a pork joint roast stuffed with pork, sage and apple. We had roast potatoes, parsnips (my favourite) and carrots. Savoy cabbage with bacon, and a rather full gravy boat! It was lush! We all raised a cup (mine was very small and full of mead) and toasted, again and again. When we were done I gave what was left in my cup to my house spirits (including the Green Man).
 Today will be StarWars day (my treat).
Of course there is much pudding for me to eat today and my cake (a heavy boozy fruit cake) is almost half gone! Still we have enough left over (except roast potatoes and parsnips) to eat the same meal again, as well as sandwiches and salads. It will last us about four or five days.
Some of this year will be spent with me up a ladder painting E's room (her present proper).
There will be other feasts, more gifts and cheer. Yule is a celebration of magick, of light and hope. Of hearth and home and those who make us happy.
I would love to sit and do circle too over the season. Yet it is a time for restfulness.


Brightest of Blessings
Lucy Drake & Co

Don't forget to by my book The Key for recharged spiritual journey in the New Year, or as a gift, after all who doesn't want a little magick?

Doing the Work

Doing the Work

No amount of platitudes or shiny things from Etsy or Ebay or Gothic, Hippie clothes will make you an awakened magickal being if you don't do the work. Work on yourself and work for others. Witch is a job description, witching and witchcraft is something to do. You study, you read, you go out into the cold, wet world and you do it. Balls to bone. You have to do it. You can't not do it. It hurts your heart to see the injustices, the pain and fear. It makes your soul soar when you see the kindness, goodness and grace. You have to do it. Alone in the dark facing your demons so you can help others do the same. You have to wait up all night to see the sunrise. You need to bake that cake, light that candle, do that spell, hold that person's hand. It's when you sit and channel during your morning cup of tea. It is the blessing of the food you eat at lunch. The silent prayers and sacred songs. In the child-like wonder at the gobsmakingly glorious world around you. Yes you will have bad days. You will get sick or broken, or even kind of crazy. Yet you get back up. You pull up your grown-up knickers and get to work.
Yet you can do it. You can change the world in big and small ways every single day. Every. Single. Day. It has an awful lot less to do with mystical charms and an awful lot more to do with stubbornness. Stubbornly refusing "that's just how it is". 

“There is a power in you. Old and strong and deep. It remembers being a wolf. It is time to stop pretending otherwise. To stop the platitudes and insincere niceness. You need not be cruel but if you are look at your cruelty squarely in the face.  To be strong is to find your weaknesses and to sit with them, give them tea and look them in the face. Often they are ourselves, ghosts haunting us from the great beyond of self death. Sometimes they wear our parent’s faces, or grandmother’s or that teacher who made you terrified.
You don’t have to like them, or forgive them or be suddenly transform them with love. Yet after really looking at them, seeing how they hold sway over your internal life, of your thoughts and feelings and desires these faces fade. Sometimes they crumble into dust before your eyes and are blown away by the beating of your living heart like moth wings.
The strangest thing is that those who don’t fade, the scariest parts, like the wolf, stop snarling at you and sit at your feet. They growl at those who would harm you long before you see the knife. They push you to live when you are pulled into the soft glorious afterlife draws you. It digs you out of the numbing cold into the fire of being awake, aware and living.
When you walk in this, with a thousand angels at your shoulder and a wolf at your feet, some only see the angels, and some only see the wolf.”

Magickal Names

Magickal Names

I am sure I have written about this before but, I can't find it. So lets have a quick chat about this frankly irritating woo woo nonsense that seems to "do the rounds" every so often shall we?

Right.

Firstly your Magickal witch name is not:

Your on-line avatar

 A way to show off

A way to re-brand or market yourself in the pagan community

A thing to prove how cool/magickal you are.

First off your name is not about creating something. It is about peeling away all the bullshit and finding something pure, your spirit, your soul, your highest of higher beings. It is like an essential oil of you. It is unlikely to be long (if it is this is not an essence). It should to totally secret, except to those you trust with your mind, body and soul. Totally secret.

If you have/want a cool on-line name, go for it. That doesn't make it your True Name. It just doesn't. I would never, ever, ever use my name as an on-line name. For a start it is not clever magickal practice. Your name (as your essence) can make you vulnerable to magick as giving someone a lock of your hair, your tears or blood. In some ways more so. You blood belongs to your meat suit, your name belongs to your soul! 

You want to use your name to show off by all means create on. The problem is old(ish), more veteran witches and pagan folks will probably think you are kind of an idiot. If Pixie Raven BloodWytche is what you are going with be aware you run the risk of pissing off people who work with Fae (Pixie is cute to you but not so much when you actually work with Fae); people who have deep ancestral reasons to work with corvids ( from First Nation people's to those who walk the Morrigan Paths) and BloodWytche offends pretty much anyone who likes grammar. Now I don't care if this your on-line handle, it just is NOT your True Name. If you want to market yourself to the pagan community or re-brand yourself this way you run the risk of upsetting or offending folks. It doesn't make you look cool. It makes you look like you read too much fiction and not enough actual pagan books. If you use this as a protection because you are firmly in the broom closet great, fine, not my business. 

It however is an artifice, not an essence. 

Your True Name has nothing to do with your birth month, your star or moon sign, your age, or books you read.

Your true name is the colour of your soul, or the closest thing in a word to it.

Some people just ARE Willow, or Skip, or Rain, or Ember. Some people are Bird, Ratty, Raynard, Heather or Pearl.

That is what someone's true name is.

It is a revelation of something divine and higher and pure. It is beautiful and sacred.

Bright Blessings xxx

Psychic in Real Life

Psychic in Real Life

I stopped doing public readings and parties and such like when my health got bad.
It wasn't that I didn't enjoy it, it was just such hard work. The energy of travelling to the space, setting up the energy, then the readings, then travelling home.
Every reading is unique. You are drawn into their lives and loves, their hopes dreams and nightmares. You see the discord between the face they show and the sorrows they walk with. Not to mention the spirits that are often with them.
I "got the message" very strongly that it was time to do readings again about six weeks ago, but I resisted because I was going through hell myself.
Then I get offered a spot and Cosmic Jewel's (a little stall in the indoor market in Hanley).
I did four readings the first week, which was great and the next day I felt energized and up. I could see the difference I was having in people's lives. I worried (as I do) that I wasn't good enough. I did struggle to find the words (especially with the young man who has the exact same problem).
By the end of that day everything felt a bit like mush though. Everything was just, SO LOUD.
I felt drunk and tired as I pressed through the city centre towards the taxi rank.
This week (Friday) I did ten readings. Often straight on top of each other. I felt I managed better, and most were only short readings, but I detached some oook from a "ghost hunter", felt their longing for home, held the hands of the heartbroken, wiped tears, and so on and so on.
It was all very intense and hard to explain to folks who might do a reading every so often what it was like.

I am overwhelmed by the privilege but it is not an easy thing for the body, spirit or mind. I am good at forgetting, but some images haunt you long after the reading ends.
I healed and help those who needed it (that is always the message I send out into the light).
It was sad for me to see C grow more annoyed with me that more and more people came. She resented me and that they weren't buying her things. I was "stealing her thunder" or "invading her territory". None of which was spoken. None of which was any of my business I suppose either.
I can't make her see that it is not about me. I am just a vessel for the light and it has a will all of it's own. I have no desire to look especially clever or important, I spend a great deal of time trying to be as "normal" as possible. That if she sees me standing in my power, owning it and radiating it, I do it to inspire, not intimidate. In the past "knowing" this, feeling it in waves from people made me want to shrink. I know now that I won't any more.
I wish she would raise her gaze from the ground. That she would stand up in her light and power. She has had to dim her light for others. I see the scars. She spreads her energy so thinly and has not faced her shadow, and I worry.
It feels better to give voice to this feeling. That I see a person struggling as I struggled, as all spiritual women do, with being so much more than we are "allowed" to be.
I spent much of yesterday asleep. It is the spiritual equivalent of running a half marathon (a full marathon is doing ten half an hour readings). Even if I Cosmic and I's journey ends tomorrow ( though we are not yet done I think) I have helped a lot of people the last few weeks and that feels priceless.

Whatever happens I will embrace this. This new place where I am to be the seer ad healer again.
It has only ever brought important people into my life.

Bright Blessings xxx

The Magick of Scents

Follow your Nose

I am very much lead by my nose in things. I can't easily be in a space that has a smell I don't like in it. I can smell much from people too. Sometimes just standing down wind from people is enough! I can tell health, habits, pregnancy and death.

They all have very distinctive smells.

Little wonder aromatherapy makes sense to me. That the too much of this or that in someone's scent can be balanced with oils. Too hot and dry, rich fresh and moist scents. Too sickly sweet, something spicy or herbaceous.

This instinct is also how I mix my herbal mixes for spells, spirit dolls, oils, salts and incense.

Much of my life I have studied herbs, flowers and trees to try and explain what I know with my nose.

When I make a blend of herbs or an incense I make a scent-scape.

A moment or and idealised moment in a ritual or spell. 

My Yule incense HAD to have pine needles, real pine needles in it. Nothing else smells like it. Nothing else makes me feels so full of the holiday spirit as that smell! Growing up in the 80's with a mother who hated the holiday's with a passion we had the worst fake pink and white tree you ever did see. I would see the great giant trees we had at school and feel sad and embarrassed.

No the smell of the tree is as important to me as the smell of orange and clove, or the crackling fire. Of the sweet herbs and resins, and the smell of rich fruity cakes and puddings.

Yule to me is sitting by the fire with a slice of Christmas cake and mug mulled wine, orange and clove pomades, the tree bedecked with lights and shimmering baubles in the low light.

That is place I want to smell. That moment of peace and stillness. Something warming and comforting. A little bit magickal for no reason, except that feeling of possibility.  

I haven't been in much of the seasonal spirit but as the storm passed over us yesterday I climbed up to grab some whole bay leaves and found an unmarked jar. 

"Oh, is that my Yule mix from last year?"

I opened it and had a good whiff, and it was. That little sparkle of that moment washed all over me.

No tree up here yet, but I am definitely feeling the spirit now!

Bright Blessings

Lucy Drake

Family

Family

Family is a funny thing. The more I heal who I was the more I see family is not biology or blood. Family are those around you that pick you up, worry, walk the path with you, or leave a space to sit in their home at 2 am when your heart is breaking. They are the ones who look us in the eye quietly to call us on our bullshit. Make a joke at just the right moment.

Family is something we make, not something that makes us.

We live so many lives, even in one life time and we have the opportunity to create so many kinds of family. Family is those who sit around a table with you. Message you to see if you are okay. 

Family is who we care for and who cares for us. It is unselfish. It is more simple and more complicated than that. 

Age, colour, gender, sexual orientation, distance mean nothing.

They sing our song back to us, when we forget it. Tell us we are beautiful when we feel like crap.

You might have one, two, a hundred in one life time.

Family is a thing you make.

Self Preservation

Self Preservation

It is difficult to explain the how's and why's of the strange habits of adults who grew up in aggressive, violent or abusive homes. Our seemingly aggressive attitude to what other's think are slight things, especially personal space. Our defence is offence and sometimes, no matter the years, the healing, the work we are constantly doing to heal ourselves; something wild and fierce erupts from us.It is something primal. Yet something I have been ashamed of, and shamed by other's for doing.
I have a strong sense of duty as well as a deep well of kindness. From family to friends we have had several people live with us, even when we had nothing.
I will give what I can to help others all the day long. I made myself sick running around the country caring for the spiritual and otherwise needs of others.
It took almost dying, I had people calling and asking for my help in A&E (ER) to wake me up to the healing I needed and also deserved. That I had to give to myself if I wanted to live.
I have had a lot of surprised eyebrows and sidelong looks or raging silence from people who have known me a long time and were shocked I didn't rush to my dying mother's bedside.
In truth, I surprised me too.
When my Nanna (my father's mother) was dying in hospital, I was the only one in the family to go and visit. I washed she unconscious face and hands. I sat with her. I opened the door for her to pass over.
Yet every fiber of my being simply refused to allow me move. I was peaceful ad calm, yet I did desire to do the same as I did for my Nanna. Yet any attempt to try and go there, even speaking with my sister on the phone left me with a cold sickly feeling of dread. I was aware that being there (I tried to attribute this to my sister presence but I don't know if that is a rationalisation) would harm me deeply, maybe even cause my death.
After I finally got the text message that my mother had passed the dread stopped. Then I felt guilty and confused. I deal with the unexplained all the time but I couldn't find the words.
My sister began her punishment of me by refusing all access to the funeral, in fact any details about it at all. I see now it was her last weapon.
Everyone was outraged. I was hurt. Which was the point of course.
Comfort came, as it always does, from strange places too. An author whom I had connected to on facebook sent me one of his many books.
I am not finished yet, nearly though, it has already lifted such man-made weights like guilt and fear from me.
I was not "being selfish" or "uncaring", I was heeding my need to stay alive. It was self-preservation and I do not need to feel any guilt or carry the weight of other expectations. I do not need to hurt myself there are plenty of ego driven drama makers who would love to do it for me.
Unfortunately they have no sway, and no oxygen from me any more.

 Bright Blessings

Poetry These Eyes

These Eyes


These eyes are sore from tears.
Again.
My solace in soothing strangers
Who will never know my pains.
Yet the wolf in me knows.
Growls and draws back.
Digging deep into the snow.
What is underneath this cold?
I am frightened of falling
Into the abyss in my heart.
Of losing my balance.
Cover me in the ashes of my burnt bridges.
Let me howl like the wind.
Can I be brave enough to be hopeful?
Can I?
Can I dream of the desert and the warm sun,
So it seeps into my broken bones?
My mother's corpse lies,
Small and fragile.
Black blood on snow.
What are my tears for?
The ghostly reflection of my own death?
The idea of love?
Or is it the cold in me that burns my eyes?
There are no words.
Only the wind
The moon
The snow.