Читать книгу Seasons of Moon and Flame - Danielle Dulsky - Страница 11
ОглавлениеNestled somewhere within the untamed psyche of every wild soul is a wise elder with a salty sense of humor. If we listen, we can hear that cunning hag share her potent medicine with us, singing us songs of haunted autumns, deep winters, and lush-blooming springs. That old one has a long memory, and she speaks the lost rebel language of the wilds with a primal intonation. She helps us make sense of these ever-unraveling and eternally restitched stories of ours, continually offering us an invitation back to those hallowed, heathen lands our deepest selves have never forgotten.
Without the voice of our inner crone, without our well-aged wilderness guide, these flourishing and fertile lands, these ancestral dreamscapes that bud and bloom in our hearts and beyond our walls, rarely offer us definitive answers to our many questions about love, loss, or the sacred. Even gifted with her elusive guidance, we still inevitably struggle to discern what messages the natural world holds for us. Our minds howl for certainty. We want concrete answers. We resist the discomfort of a mystery-riddled life, but the wilds whisper only the softest songs, speaking in a slower and less predictable rhythm than our many screaming, fast-talking screens. The hag tells us of our inextricable belonging to the world, to the wild unseen. The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes: “This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate.” We are creaturely. We are cocreated and dismembered by these wilds over and over again. What persistent unknowns our modern, overbright technologies struggle to illuminate, those holy wilds embrace in moon and flame.
To remember how to hear that inner hag’s voice often seems a near-impossible task, an arduous journey home after being away too long, when the comforts of certainty are begging us to rest and stay with all things known. The old ones are whispering, but the devices are shrieking. The haunting lure of the forest beckons, but so does the softness of our beds. We long to remember to listen, but our lives are full of contradictions. Remembering how to hear the hag’s voice means making peace with, though rarely resolving, these many beautiful and bizarre conflicts that show us our chaotic complexity, our magickal and messy humanness.
Hag Lesson #1
The best stories are not heard but met.
For some, the remembering happens only in dreams, in those subconscious spaces where that primal tongue is spoken through monstrous imagery, overgrown landscapes, or otherworldly spirits. For others, the remembering occurs by light of day, as they take notice of synchronicities, nods from nature, and suddenly realized patterns within their personal myths of wounding and healing. For all, the task is to fall in love with the liminal: the place between the illusion of our separateness and the unnamed sparking and numinous spirit evident in all — the cosmic dance between our feeling flesh, the beloved dead, and the yet-to-be-born; between the human and the beast; and between the stories we live and the stories we share.
Sovereign within the Collective
To walk with our inner hag requires such remembering, and this remembering is hardly a finite goal to be attained or permanent plateau to be reached; it is a journey of eternal becoming, of a constant and ever-weaving dance between our singular sovereignty and our intimacy with the collective. Regardless of context, the remembering sparks a subtle stirring in the blood — an ignition, of sorts — that can turn an everyday person first into a mystic and then later, perhaps, into a Witch. To be a mystic is to come home to that fog-filled space of not knowing, time and time again, and to be a Witch is to not only regularly return to liminal space but continually open to those many seasons of confusion and certainty, of shadow and fire, of chaos and order. To be a Witch is not only to acknowledge these many seasons but to humbly and humorously live of them, to cocreate a life worth living with time as partner-lover and transformation as teacher-friend. To be a Witch is to have begun learning the greatest lesson the wilds have to teach their human children: Time is a spiral dance of eternal becoming, and to move in that age-old rhythm is to remember the wisdom of not only those crones who have come before us but those yetto-be-born babes who will be inherited by the new world we leave behind.
To me, the wilds speak in the ancient tongue of the elder-storyteller, and that primal terrain is a burly and resilient beast. In this language of treespeak and crow poetry, there are few words denoting the definite and many words for mystery. Ours is a lexicon of feeling, of beauty, and of the space between. This language includes no concrete truths but favors that pivotal and sacred encounter between the inquiry and the answer. Within these hallowed lands blessed by mist and lit by moon, the Witch finds themselves on an epic journey that is always beginning and always ending. Every year is their wildest year yet. Day by day, they dream their worlds into being. Night by moonlit night, they learn all they can from the fertile dark.
Hag Lesson #2
The revolution will be wildcrafted.
Their annual adventure around the sun is a thirteenseason living-and-breathing ceremony of honoring the wilds as they converge and dance within them. When their memory of magick falls short, they slow their pace. They pay a visit to their inner wise one, and they revisit the stories of their ancestral lines. They feel into the shaping more than the shaper or the shape. Their springs are garden altars to healing the human ache, built with much love by the hands of the forebears, an annual mission to uncover the deep medicine of their lines that was carved out, hidden, burned, and demonized. A Witch’s summer is an intense and moving spell of gratitude and grace, activism and joy. Their autumn is a sacred séance and beauteous grief ritual spent communing with those knowing ancestors who still walk with them, year by year, moon by moon, and their winters are cocreated rituals of rest and reflection, divination and embodied nourishment, guided by intuition sourced straight from their inner snow-haired elder.
Way of the Witch-Fractal
To live as the Witch lives is to allow your world to be shaped and reshaped by those swelling, cresting, and ebbing wilds to which you already belong. To live as the Witch lives is to continually remember, as the magick maker’s journey is not solely one of knowledge acquisition but so often one of simple recollection. Whatever particular ancestral medicine runs in your blood, whatever hallowed recipe of many lands, songs, and ceremonies has brewed you, you are a wisdom keeper with much to gift this wounded world. You are a holy confluence of many fertile and fast-running rivers of lineage and land knowledge. What I offer here in these pages is an invitation to awaken that wisdom, that wild and soulful meaning you already embody, to find sanctuary in time’s cyclical movements as you would in the warm, firelit home of an elder healer.
I invite you to use your magick to silver-thread not only your own story but also the collective love story we are all living right here, right now, at this pivotal moment when the human community must, simply must, fall in love with this planet. The story has for too long been one of unrequited longing, dragging on and on like a many-millennia-long play ordered in act after act of horror and greed against indigenous people, against the sacred elements — with the wild earth, all the while, waiting for us with an aching patience we do not deserve. Perhaps the play’s plot will shift like this: The human animal, faced with the prospect of living in a world of rising seas, will open its ears to the subtle whispers of the beauty beneath its feet; will fall to the ground weeping and begging for forgiveness; and will resolve to do all it can to repair, restore, and rejuvenate what will otherwise be irrevocably lost.
A problem of such magnitude cannot possibly be solved using the same strategies that created it, but what if the way we define these wounds is also part of the injury. Scholar and educator Bayo Akomolafe says, “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” No more can we rush away so quickly from the ache, for our shared scars are sacred portals where we just might meet the medicine we need, where we can again know what it means to belong not to a collective trauma but to the whole of our cocreated story. We can look one another in the eye here on this hallowed ground, Witch to scientist and believer to skeptic, and say, “I see you. You are hurting, and I am hurting, too.”
We are witch-fractals casting our spells and speaking our truths in the name of not only our own liberation but that of all people. We must embrace the knowing that we can be fully empowered, fully and wholly sovereign creatures, but still acknowledge whatever privileges we may have and how racialized trauma and cultural context affect our lives. We can act in ways that are just, center voices that are not our own, and use whatever powers we have been graced with in this life to heal our Earth, the mother that bore us. We can dig out the deep, buried medicine that runs in our blood. We can mend, and we can find the immense pleasures and bountiful treasures that are ours to claim. There is not only discomfort to be found in the unknown but a necessary and humbling delight.
Hag Lesson #3
Joy lives in mystery.
We rush so quickly to solve the unsolvable, to run toward the familiar, but our elders teach us to slow our pulses just a bit, to hear what stories we can, and to listen to those whose input was not valued when this world of ours was built. The poison lies in the absolutes; in the immutable decisions; and in the stubborn refusal to admit that we do not know what good means, that maybe, just maybe, there is no solution that does not begin with the strange sanctuary of slowness, and that, importantly, slow living does not mean apathy. May we cease to equate our I-don’t-knows with our I-don’t-cares, and may we reframe what it means to be wild, empowered, and free.
Wander ’Round the Path
Linear time is the enemy of magick, at best, and the catalyst for hard-edged individualism and colonization, at worst. Perceiving time as only linear encourages fierce movement toward a given goal and the concurrent ignorance of our creaturely cycles. Such rigid thought patterns take us away from the past, from innocence, from memory. The vilest philosophies were used to validate colonial conquests, bound by common and insidious threads of rot called distance, speed, and dominance. We have heralded the stories of ambitious heroes who begin with nothing and end with everything, all the while reinforcing the circle as servant and the line forward as king.
Witches tell the small stories, though, and Witches live on the fringes of society for a reason. If they are too far removed from the wilds, their souls starve and they lose their sense of belonging. If they are too isolated from the human collective, they are unable to effect change, to weave the world they hope will come to fruition. They dance in the great between. They live on the edge, you see. They live on the edge, though not often by choice, to witch their worlds from the inside out. And, to my mind, the greatest lesson the elders, Witches, mystics, and healers can share at this pivotal moment is that of long vision and spiraling time. In Grandmothers Counsel the World, Carol Schaefer writes, “The Grandmothers teach us that time is not linear in the Spirit World. All time exists at once, enabling the seeing of events far into the future.” This does not mean aggressively and adamantly choosing spiral time over linear time but rather choosing to see the world cyclically when possible — knowing that all birth is also a death, every beginning is an end, and there is a holiness to the dark, to the shadow, which is only wicked when it is shunned and shamed.
What if we loved to live this way? What if we befriended the circle-round again? This is the spiraling path of the embodied Witch, where linear time is often an illusion and each morning’s dawn is akin to the new moon, to spring, to youthful joy and conscious innocence. We are sacred workers and magick makers at noonday, feeling the pulse of the full moon and the high fire of summer burn bright on our inner altars, before dusk calls us toward the holy, autumnal energies of the waning moon. We rest, at long last, in the blessed lightlessness of night, our daily dose of wintertide, held in the arms of the dark moon. This is our dawn-to-dark dance, our opportunity to be dreamed alive not once but over and over again.
You may be thinking that the proverbial real world does not permit such slow movements; how our schedules, calendars, and deadlines rule over us without ever getting our vote; and how helpless we all are to live the way we like. But here is precisely where those on the fringes come into play, entering into our collective story of becoming not with penetrative ambitions of victory but in deep song, sharing their rebels-in-time ways with those who care to listen. We become outlaws by letting our lives breathe as much as possible, by feeling into the emptiness as much as the full, by pushing against and tenderizing the hard edges until they begin to give way. Reflection and rest are radical, and the very systems we wild hearts wish to counter rely entirely on our lack of both.
Given the weight of what is at stake, cultivating a more nourishing relationship with time may seem like a small task, but what if those brief moments of pause are where incremental revolutions begin? What would become of our exhausting quests for perfection if we fell in love with imprecision? This is a lunar journey of becoming, a journey with no destination.
This book is a story of your eternal transmutation, and I invite you to both dream awake and be dreamed alive. Let the place to begin find you, then scry your own way forward. Just like the practice of Witchcraft, this book asks you to begin whenever and wherever you are called, regardless of geography, past study, or access to material resources. You do not need to live in a place where all four solar seasons are neatly defined and easily predicted, for all thirteen moons live within us, just as all the elements, directions, and deep archetypes of light and shadow run in our very blood. Do not look to nature to show you how to feel; rather, look to where nature meets you — look to that space of coming-togetherness, and tend to the spirit of the moment.
Hag Lesson #4
Nonlinear movement is rebellion.
You may find yourself in the dead of winter but feel strongly pulled toward the rituals of the summer moons; begin there. You may be raising your hood against the first autumn wind but feel called to read the invocation for the spring season; begin there. You may live in a brilliantly sunlit place never visited by ice or snow, or in a seemingly uniseasonal land of eternal mist and rain. Even so, begin wherever you feel called. This is not a story with a clear beginning and definitive ending but an ongoing, ever-unraveling, and perennial fairy tale of spellcraft, dream visions, small stories, and moon medicine.
Meet the Four Sacred Hags
The archetype of the wild and fearsome hag is found in innumerable tales across countless cultures. She comes as the Cailleach and the Baba Yaga. She comes as the sharp-tongued medicine woman. These wise crones reside in the collective unconscious, tending their cook fires and stirring their cauldrons from their huts, tents, and cottages well hidden within the unmapped terrain of our psychic lands. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in her classic Women Who Run with the Wolves that “this old woman stands between the worlds of rationality and mythos. She is the knucklebone on which these two worlds turn.” She is not to be overromanticized or made palatable in order to better serve our needs, just as nature does not exist for our consumption. For many, she is the very shadow from which we recoil, the part of our own psyches we have named vile; this is how we know she is our greatest teacher. We are closest to uncovering the hag’s bewitching haunts when we find ourselves tender and immersed in nature, brokenhearted but somehow aligned with those deeper rhythms that no linear calendar could ever adequately predict.
In this book, you shall meet four hags who are seasonal gatekeepers, elder-teachers of nature’s mysteries, who offer nourishment, challenge, and wisdom to those who dare visit them. There are three lunar seasons for every sun-based season, and it is within these shorter cycles that we truly evolve into more soulful — that is, both uniquely sovereign as well as intimately connected to the collective nature — versions of ourselves. Just as a wise grandmother, just as my own grandmother, might invite you into her home, serve you comfort food by her hearth; confront you with some piece of previously unrealized and hard-to-swallow knowledge; then, finally, provide some invaluably sage advice for moving forward, the three moons of every solar season similarly offer us such cronely education. The first moon of any season provides the sustenance we need, the necessary tastes and psychic nutrition, in order to move on to the challenge offered up by the second moon of the solar season. The last moon is inevitably an initiation to a new level of knowing, where the seeker becomes Priestess and death becomes birth.
In this book, our year is a slow-paced working retreat to the four houses of the hags, an epic apprenticeship of soul that we undergo again and again, each winter finding ourselves once more standing on the bones of who we used to be, reflecting our memories by the soft glow of a dripping candle. Each spring we seek to heal some still-ailing part of ourselves connected to our inherited aches, somehow discovering the precise medicine we need in the depths of our own psyches. Summer finds us at fruition, a swollen version of ourselves, where our magick is sourced straight from our heart-wells of gratitude and compassion, before shape-shifting our particular griefs into banishing magick during the most haunted season of autumn.
This journey is not an unending merry-go-round ride but rather a wondrous and ever-widening spiral. Each season holds for you new gifts, new lessons, newly unlocked opportunities to deepen your mastery, to restore and rebirth your way of being in the world. Your inner wise one does not give you anything you do not already have but only shows you where to look.
Grow the Circle Wider
For me, these pivotal times often spark childhood memories of watching apocalyptic Hollywood films, of aliens and asteroids come to end the human experiment once and for all. My young and recklessly curious mind, shaped considerably by a good deal of born-again Christian indoctrination and the constant threat of many-headed beasts and four horsemen, would wonder if the impending doom of the world was what was required for human beings to come together, forgive one another, rally, and finally save themselves like they always seemed to do in the movies. Did we need to be in the end-times in order to find a collective compassion?
As I grew older, as I traveled, as I began to consider a bigger world than the one in which I was raised, I had to unlearn so much about equality and justice, magick and manifestation — words that meant something very different to me, a white woman, than they did to others with less privilege than I had. Now, in my own few slow and quiet moments when I wonder if an Armageddon is, indeed, upon us, I am aware that the love and unity from the Hollywood movies is not possible without the active dismantling of deeply seated and systemic racism, ableism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, and classism, as well as a general fear of otherness.
My hope is that a commitment to your own healing, to your own story of becoming, coexists with a profound conviction, be it a newfound resolution or a long-standing knowing, that we are part of a collective. Our magick is stronger together. The Witch has been harmed by many of the same systems that continue to harm disproportionately people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, and the beloved planet, and we can, and indeed must, work to grow the circle. It is time to examine the many ways we may be benefiting from and unintentionally doing harm to those people, to those cultures, we claim to love without relinquishing our own wholeness. On the contrary, we are made more whole when we grow our circles wider, when the fringes swallow the center, when we question our beliefs and deconstruct the very systems that privilege us at the expense of others.
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.
