Seasons of Moon and Flame. Danielle Dulsky

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СКАЧАТЬ Hag Lesson #5

      Our circles can grow wider and wider still.

      To that point, I use the word grandmother and the pronouns she and her in this book when referring to one of the “four sacred hags.” This is primarily because, in my mind, all four of these beloved elders are, in part, shades of my own grandmother, and also because our language has not evolved to accurately reflect the complexities of nature. This is not to exclude nonbinary, trans, or other gender-nonconforming individuals from eldership or to herald the gender binary; quite the reverse, I hope this book speaks well and true to anyone with a heathen heart. When I say “woman,” I mean anyone who identifies as a woman; this absolutely includes trans women. Our circles can hold it all, and living slowly does not mean living unchallenged. Witches work with nature. Nature is change, and we were not born to be static in our beliefs, judgments, and ways of expressing our beingness in the world.

       Whisper Words of Lineage

      I am on an unending journey of restitching my ancestral lineage, as many of us are. The whole of my mother line is of Irish descent, and I have understood this for as long as I can remember. At age eighteen, I impatiently waited until I graduated high school, then immediately boarded a plane for Ireland with neither money nor a plan, committed to a stubborn teenage quest to belong, to feel whole. I lived there for a time, spending the potent summer and autumn seasons encountering much mischief in Dublin and escaping into the mists of the west when I could. Something held me there that did not — that in some ways still does not — hold me here, where I was born and raised, on the land of the Lenni-Lenape, the “true people,” outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Much of the lens — a lens I continually break, mend, then break again — through which I look has been shaped by the Celtic Wheel of the Year, by my brief and brutal stint immersed in traditional Wicca during my twenties, by my many elders and loving and not-so-loving teachers I have known since then, and by my sheer devotion to the wild nature that lives beneath my ribs, that pulses in thick rivers through my veins.

       Hag Lesson #6

      Everything is participation.

      The seasons, the stories, the verses, the spells contained in this book are not intended to speak to any particular lineage, and my sincere hope is that they are accessible to anyone, anywhere. They have a Celtic flavor because I have a Celtic flavor, but I believe this cyclical witchery to be universal. We all live in an ever-changing world, after all. We Witches are animists graced by constant rising and setting suns, waxing and waning moons, ebbing and flowing tides. I claim no mastery, and I am personally suspicious of the motives of modern teachers who teach the old ways as if they own them, as if anyone could ever own them, or as if we are living in the same world as the one within which the human-to-nature kinship was born. We are immersed in a constant flow, and we are all being cocreated by innumerable liquid currents, our old rough parts eroded away and new patterns marked by unforeseen surges. We are all in conversation with one another, with the world, and we must constantly consider and reconsider what we would like to be saying.

       Return to Embodiment

      The most powerful and harmful systems have benefited considerably from the human animal’s detachment from its feeling flesh. We have been taught to frame the intellect as king and reason as god, leaving our holy bodies to be servants, at best, to mind and thought. We have been indoctrinated toward transcendence of the earth, the elements, and our creaturely selves, housing long-standing traumas within our bodies, much to our detriment and that of others and the wounded planet, as these traumas unconsciously play out in our lives. Our bodies are where we meet the world, dissolving the false boundary between our individuality and the infinite, and conscious embodiment is how we integrate that meeting place into our lived-out-loud stories.

      As Witches, healers, and wildlings, we intuitively know that our magick is channeled through the body, through our very roots then out, in, up, and down again. Our magick is a dance with the wilds; thus, our breath, our movement, and the sounds we make matter. Our own healing, our own wholeness, matters. Magick is sensual, and there can be no separation between the malleable beauty of our own soft skin and the writhing collective of nature, both seen and unseen, grotesque and lovely. The imperative is to get low to the ground; feel the hum and the pulse not just in our hearts but in our bones; get under our thinking minds; get dirty; and reforge a felt intimacy with the spirits of land, sea, and sky.

       Live Cyclically

      To live cyclically is to welcome the transitions, to resist tallying the wins and losses that deny this hard Witch’s truth: All ends only to begin again. I invite you to reframe time as a living, breathing force that is always swelling and thinning, ebbing and flowing. I invite you to cultivate a renewed sense of in-the-skin nature intimacy by feeling into the words I offer here, and I invite you to come home to the hallowed lands where those wild hags are waiting for you.

      Ours is a journey of eternal becoming, an ever-expansive experience of being breathed in and out by nature itself, incarnation after blessed incarnation. To live cyclically is to be more forgiving of the self and, sometimes, of others; to acknowledge that we are all living altars; and to embrace those cocooned seasons of rest, self-care, and rejuvenation as often as those blooming, generative phases of creation, activism, and ferocity.

      How do we know when it is time to rest and when it is time to rage? When is it time to reflect on our most pivotal experiences in solitude, and when is it time to use those lessons to make beautiful art, to march to government buildings, or to dismantle broken systems? Listen to the hags; they will tell you. How can we know when we must spend an afternoon engaged in frenzied art making or radical spellcraft? When is it time to wander in mourning or dance in ecstasy? The hags have seen it all, the many heartening joys and well-shed tears, but their wealth of experience has hardly made them apathetic. Let them teach you their cyclical ways, and let them teach you through your own feeling body. These ancient elders, like you, are clever travelers on the path of eternal becoming. Let us listen to them, and this is sure to be our wildest year yet.

      

      Your journey begins here, in the House of Initiation. Take a breath, hum so loudly your teeth rattle, then whisper: “It begins.” Imagine this house at the center point of a simple map. To the east lies an ivy-walled cottage surrounded by lush blooms and kept well by the wise Garden Hag. To the south stretches sandy and hallowed grounds ruled by the loving Desert Hag, with the spectral Sea Hag enchanting the gray and salty waters to the west. Finally, in the north looms a haunting snowcapped peak where the Mountain Hag awaits you. Here, you are at the epicenter of your spiral journey. Here, you are the wild and sovereign hag who has learned a softer witchery, remembered how to dance with time, and made peace with her position in this wicked and wondrous world.

       The Spiral Journey

      Where you go when you leave your House of Initiation is entirely your choice. You might begin by asking yourself to what season you feel most akin. Which of the thirteen moons lives in your soul all year-round? Perhaps begin there. If you are only in need of some story medicine, a quick hag lesson, or a timely ritual, look to the appendices at the end of this book for summarized descriptions and see where the specific themes carry you. Of course, should you be feeling practically minded and find yourself on the cusp of a new moon, look for the chapter that is beginning for you in this moment, according to the season you are in. When all else fails, book divination always serves well. Leave it to the Mystery, flip to a page, and see what word-witchery awaits you. Permit your Craft to breathe. Grant yourself space. Leave out what is not СКАЧАТЬ