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.