Wot I Did On My Hols (?)

A quick visit to the UK - M.I.L. in hospital. Impressions of her region and her flat.

Attraction

A little witches protection bottle, rose quartz heart and recharging my attraction magnet.

Some very strange ingredients in the bottle - mostly secret and should remain so.

Essence of Self

I have been considering what makes up my true essence - considering for many years. I want to record my thoughts, to add to the trail for others to follow.

I took some photos tonight with the new camera - only know how to work it on auto so far, so the pictures were grainy. I decided to play around with the basic tools in picasa and found I could add a quick caption to give a pointer to where my mind was rambling at that time.
Here is one - my favourite:


I thought the grainyness made it look like canvas - and I would like to paint this one day. Still Life with Lemons and Apples.

Where am I going with this?

It´s been so long ....

Never apologise, I was once told; because those who hate you won´t believe your excuse, and those who love you, don´t need any excuse.

I´m having one of those, hmm, where am I going next nights. Sort of in the flow, but it´s a bit fast. In danger of getting over-excited about ... what?

Further insights on my last reading

I just remembered two further links between Mum and the Swan card:

Firstly, how could I have forgotten before that Mum had been a collector of glass swans!

Secondly, she always wore a plain, gold necklace that Dad had given her. She never took it off, even refusing to remove it for surgery. Now, I have inherited it, I never take it off either.

Samhain divination

Samhain greetings to you all!

I want to share with you the following tale and a little personal connection with it. Tonight, for Samhain, I felt drawn to pick a Druid Animal Card for remembrance of my mother who passed over a year ago next Sunday. I drew Swan. Placing it next to the wedding photograph of my parents on my alter, the significance for me was that Mum would prefer me to remember her as the young, beautiful and happy woman in that photograph, rather than the failing and feeble image of her in her last years.

The lwb description of the card hit me right between the eyes: "Being associated with the Druid festival time of Samhuinn (their spelling) the swan is also a bird of the threshold, and represents that part of us which can travel into the Otherworld. Drawing this card may indicate that you will receive inspiration from the Otherworld, or that love is entering your life." The books goes on further with swan tales that reference not only Samhain and the Otherworld, but also St. Kernoc - Kernow being an ancient name for Cornwall, where my mother and I both hale from.

Finished my wand

I've been working on this wand since I gathered the materials in 2003. Today, I finally got a result I am satisfied with.



The wood is English Oak and the feathers are Little Owl. Both were collected at a place where we were camping, near Fareham. (The owl paid many early morning visits to the oak tree we were parked under.)



For a while, I just held onto them with no clear idea in mind. Then at Spring Equinox 2004 it came to me to make a wand with them, as the stick has a lovely curve at the end that makes it comfortable to hold. At first I just made a rough point and tied the feathers on with red thread and that was it.



Frequently, the stick-wand was neglected and ignored but I kept coming back to it and felt I could make something very personal with it. For a long time I toyed with how I could attach a small crystal to the point but it never felt right. Then, after I'd used it during the Spear Ceremony (see my Hallowquest blog at http://myhallowquestjournal.blogspot.com/), at Solstice, I decided to sand the point until it was sharp and the other end until it was smooth enough for me to draw a rune on it.



I decided I would burn the rune Algiz (for spiritual protection) on the end. This was the first time I'd tried pyrography and, after a little practice, found it not too difficult, albeit a little dangerous! I then burnt a small hole where I hold it and sealed a tiny piece of quartz crystal with some beeswax candle. This got around the crystal thing rather neatly I thought, as I have the energy of the crystal, without a cumbersome attachment problem. The beeswax was from the remains of the candle I burnt at the Solstice ceremony, which fits my current efforts at recycling wherever possible.
I thought I might have finished then and sanded the wand lightly and rubbed it with a lump of beeswax Snr Antonio had given me. As I was doing this, I discovered that a raised area near the tip was beginning to look like the head of a snake. I was suddenly fired with passion about how I finally wanted the wand to look. I used my penknife to cut out a snake's body, coiled around the wand with it's tail near the hidden crystal. Then I sanded again and finally set to work highlighting and decorating my snake with pyrography.



I felt an adder design was appropriate for several reasons:

• Snake is one of my totem animals. I have snake medicine "within" and have felt it's power increasingly in recent years.
• Snake's power is "transmutation", the ability to transform one thing into another. Very appropriate for a witch's wand, although I have no intention changing anyone into a frog!!
• Caitlin and John Matthews, in their Hallowquest book, explain that adder is one of the totem animals of Celtic tradition. It represents the "Goddess of Sovereignty in her dark phase". It is depicted in the Arthurian Tarot on The Cauldron (trad. Temperance) and Sword 2.

So, after another light sanding and oiling, the wand was ready for the feathers again. I had to renovate the feathers a bit using steam. I tied them together with the thread that had been placed around my wrist at the Kali Temple in Kolkata. The priest had made it clear that I shouldn't just throw the cord away, so I was glad to find a use for it. I used the power of 3; 3 knots around the feathers, 3 times around the wand and 3 knots to secure it. The melted remains of the beeswax candle was used to bind the ends.

Now I have just to create a consecration ceremony, which I plan to do tomorrow at new moon.

One final aside: there was a tiny bit of cord and wax left, so I thought it best to destroy these by fire. As they burned I visualised a nest, with a flaming heart in it's centre. The ashes looked like a distorted sheep or goat. I took the ashes outside and offered them to Kali. Now the next bit sounds like an exaggeration but I assure you it's true. At that very instant, a massive whirlwind blew across our land - enough to slam doors and blow debris into the house!