Seasons of Moon and Flame. Danielle Dulsky

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СКАЧАТЬ you might also make and decorate egg-shaped cookies or place small wishes and blessings inside eggs and hide them in that time-honored tradition with quite Pagan roots; the egg is hidden as a symbol of gestating the new, and uncovering it is a symbol of birth. With your wild circle, wear vine-wrapped flower crowns and call the days to swell toward fruition. Share stories of lineage healing and sweet remembrance, knowing that every belly laugh is as holy as any incantation could ever be.

       Season of Tender Roots: New Moon

      Grandmother Speaks: Let’s Get Some of This Blood in the Dirt

      At long last, you have arrived. Something about this place sparks childhood memories of dewy forest floors and visitations by those mythic fair-folk, those thin-limbed creatures made of lightning that you were so sure were real — that is, until you were told you were dreaming. The Garden Hag’s house is surrounded by blooms so bright they seem to hum, unable to live as such beauty and stay silent. You believe the house is made of stone, but those creeping ivy vines have wrapped every wall in deep emerald curls, and the door eludes you.

      For a fleeting moment, you wonder if you are still alive, if perhaps you did indeed die on that winter mountain, and this is your afterlife, a lush place that has never known chill or famine. Even so, your heart beats loudly, and you smell the sweetness of wet dirt. Surely, in the ethers, the gods would never allow flowers to hold such potency, to be more glorious than the deities themselves.

      “What are you waiting for, child?” Her voice startles you, and you can see nothing now but tall-growing sunflowers and rosy thickets. “Come, you must be hungry, and I daresay you look a fright.” The garden becomes less forgiving now as you move thorny stems out of your path and make your way toward her voice, struggling to choose the right path. “That’s it. Keep going; it will be worth it, I promise.”

      You’re in the briars and brambles now. You question whether you took the hardest path, or perhaps all ways were fraught with such sharp-toothed obstacles. Your flesh is carved up by these wilds.

      “You’re nearly there. Just a little farther. Stay on the path you chose; don’t second-guess yourself,” she urges, and you think her voice sounds far too optimistic to belong to a hag. Blood runs in rivulets down your arms, and you taste iron on your tongue. She’s really there now, though. You can see her thick gray curls through the brush, and you make one final push beyond these angry grasses and bladed branches. Erupting from the thicket, an aged blackthorn with low branches pierces the flesh of your legs and soft of your belly. You fall, bloodied but free, at the feet of the Garden Hag.

      “You didn’t think such beauty came without a price, did you?” She reaches to help you stand, and you blink the red from your eyelashes to see her better. She’s a raw one, for sure, and the sun has loved her well for many years, but her rose-and-pentagram tattoo is still clear on her cracked-skin chest. She’s dressed in sheer pastels, and you can see every sharp curve, every thick and raised scar, of her wise-woman body through her clothes. “Come, before you eat, let’s get some of this blood in the dirt; the roots love it, and I have just the story to welcome you to my humble haunt.”

      The Garden Hag helps you to her bountiful table, lushly blanketed with all manner of homegrown fruit and root vegetable. Hiking her skirt between her legs, she sits at the garden’s edge and leans close, smirking. When a hag such as this twists her mouth in that sly way before she tells a story, you can trust the tale will be a doozy. When the roses themselves seem to bend a bit closer to hear her words, you know you are about to learn much from this old one with a child’s heart.

       The Chicken-Witch of the Grove: A Ceremonial Equinox Tale

      To participate in this story ceremony, collect a single basket and eleven objects that can represent the passions, wounds, joys, art, memories, and great loves of your foremothers. These might be eggs, as they are in the story; crystals; flowers; or any other symbol of forgotten stories and hidden secrets. Scatter them around the room or in a natural setting, tucking them away as if you are hiding treasures for a curious babe, then begin to read aloud, setting the intention to symbolically recover lost pieces of your lineage.

      Oh, child, you might want to cover your ears, for I’m about to tell you something that’s sure to shock even the likes of you. Take a breath. Are you ready?

      In all parts of the world, even that humble piece of green beauty you inhabit so well and with such grace, there exists a creature so wild, so beastly, no one dare speak her name. In truth, though, there are many reasons to go searching for her, this long-tongued mistress of all monsters, but only the bravest hearts ever do. They never have to look far, either; she’s in the house around the corner, pushing the cart in the corner shop, and rocking the grandbaby on the park bench. Yes, she’s fearsome, but she’s hardly rare.

      Do you know what she is yet? Can you tell by the lilt in my tone? My smirk? The spark in my eyes?

      She’s the lusty grandmother, low-breasted and sharp-tongued, compassionate in deed but obscene in humor. You might seek her out for advice; she’s got years of wisdom tucked under her tunic. You might seek her out for a listening ear; she’ll hear you like no one else can.

      There is, however, one reason above all reasons why you might search for that mystery-keeping, hip-swaying hag — she’s got the greatest stories.

      She tells the stories no one else tells, those tales of unchaste-women-gone-warrioress and loose-lipped Witches who shared too much. She tells the stories others won’t, and this is one she tells only the truest of hearts, only those who have expressed a longing for sacral wound healing that goes beyond talk and digs into the muck of it, into the fecund depths of shadow and rot, trusting that often there is, in the end, much growth to be born of disgrace.

      Now, the lusty grandmothers all begin this tale like this, and I’m not one to part with their traditions:

      Once, in a land where the mists remembered what people forgot, where the air was heavy with story and legend but those who lived there spoke in short bursts of arrogant rhetoric and one-size-suits-all maxims, there lived an ordinary woman who hungered for more. She yearned for poetry and passion, for those long-gone days of forbidden love and youthful rebellion. Where could she ever find her sisters-in-lawlessness who yearned to live as she lived, with an insatiable thirst for hedonistic ceremony, first-and-only kisses, blooming gardens, and sensual majesty?

      This woman, this plain and simple chicken-witch who collected eggs at sunrise and tended to her garden until the evening skies glowed pink, woke each morning a little more ravenous for that particular secret that left unknown to her would continue to keep her from a more pleasure-filled life. She never kept a lover long, and her few friends maintained a careful distance. She boasted sacred solitude and a love of the land to hide her loneliness, but, indeed, there was an egg-shaped hole in her heart that she could never seem to fill.

      Now, the lusty grandmothers who tell this tale disagree on many things, stubborn crones that they are. Some say that this woman, this woman whom we’ll call Juniper, hailed from a long line of women who shared her distaste for illusion, who yearned for something greater and more mystical than this ordinary world was showing them. Others say that Juniper was unique in her particular quest for joyful community and magick making. In the end, who’s to know? Isn’t that precisely where we all find ourselves, in that place of deep and debilitating uncertainty where our grandmothers are but black-and-white photographs and our more primal ancestors are mythic legends, at best? Juniper was much like we all are these days: trusting in her belonging to something greater than she had known but unsure of where to find the medicine she needed.

      The lusty hags agree on this next bit, though:

      Against СКАЧАТЬ