Category Archives: Sabbats and the Great Wheel

Skeleton II

This life,
ever fought for,
sought for, sacrificed for,
runs fresh in my veins,

It shifts my body before the notion to do so arises.

I am alive.
What I gained on the other side,
this glowing rock,
this molten lava,
this star bursting from my chest,
is not meant to be beared, but shared.

In stillness, I would cave and fester.
In movement, a booming echoes around me, from me somehow.

The magnet of my compass has grown so strong,
it is more trouble to ignore, now, than to follow.

What will I do?
What will I do?

I will discover in the doing.


[photo credit: https://downtheforestpath.com/2013/03/06/little-pagan-monastery/]

Final Reprise

PART ONE:

When the warrior finally reaches the green pastures and sunny meadow,
when the warrior puts her weapons down,
she feels the heat rise from the ground beneath her and lies down to rest
under the high grass,
smell of lyrical flowers.

Further no purpose, no quarry in sight, she dreams of battles
and then when she rises, all comforts greet her body
and she sighs, and she sleeps again.

When the warrior has found her way out of the darkness
into the light of her own heart
there is no longer need to strive

for arrival is come
and the land is still.

There is nothing left to seek,
yet the song still awaits,
and she waits for the song.

Soothe the jagged remembrances of evil.
Remember the misplaced soothing of jagged affairs.

Awake she is, like never before and
like never before, she draws from her sleep,

every fiber,
her being whole now,
glistening and listening to the holy voice within.

PART TWO:

I asked, “Once the debris has been cleared, the demons faced and transformed, what is left in the sacred vessel, in the shadow within us?”

and I heard the reply,

“That which one is connected to
but has no words for.

That which gestates and must not be disturbed,
lest it be damaged in the process.

The Great Mother, who holds us, who nourishes and weeps and cheers for us.

This is also the realm of the White Raven, she who has been burnt through and still lives. She who is Grace with a thin cloak of iron unseen and unshakeable. She who is container, soft as feather, hidden power capable of those very things she yearned to do when in pain but put down as soon as she was able. She is Death, she has seen and understood every aspect of Death and yet she has no need to bring on Death. She holds forgiveness, her compassion gently touches us with the naked light of presence aware.”

Once the stagnation is broken in the sacred vessel of shadow,
once the river is flowing freely,
dreams of the Gods quickly,
our journeys clear in the slipstream of their inspiration.

Then when we tell, we tell from a place of the Gods.

This is all I know and I pray for.

When the Veil

When the veil comes down, we are standing there like Innana, naked. Or maybe we are already turning on the spit.

What they don’t tell you about Innana is that by the time she gets to that point, she is so desperately relieved she could kiss the ground. She is sick of the long haul, the grasping for something, anything, the agony of loss – and she’s glad it’s finally all gone. Because now she can see that which could have never been taken. It is herself. And that undignified humiliation, that unbridled relentless unapologetic agony is what brings her to herself. She faces herself, and then she knows all that she has always known, this time without interference. And she thinks, “Holy crap. I am home”.

veil

And all that has been stripped, she knows she’ll never want back. Her jewels, her crown, if necessary will only be a prop for the real show that needs no casing. It is the people who need it to be encased in order for it’s rawness to be bearable to them. She can give them that. Such is the power of a woman.

And the veil to the outer world is torn down too. The antics of humanity, the circus show that has always tantalized in some way has now become a low hum because she no longer wants. She does not hunt. Her power, her nourishment is found, and she has become like the rocks, like the waterfall, like the moon. She channels the archaic ages of time and sips her tea while she watches. And she waits. She may try to trip us up once in a while hoping we may find our way to her, to keep her company, but she knows that no one can do that finding but ourselves.

Yes, we. We are all forces of nature, some to glow, some to build, some to sing, some to purge and some to awaken. Like waves crashing upon each other we greet, we encounter and we retreat to await the next surge. What will it be like next time? Will it be different? But who will we be? There is no other.

The wise woman, she breathes on the sea bed. She has seen it all. She has lived every form from hay flower to flea, from bat to snail. She has growled and been prey. She has birthed and she has lay down to die. She has loved and she has burned. She has prayed and crawled. She understands the value in things and the waste in trying.

The old woman, she is endlessly awake, her awareness our daylight, her dream-time our moon. And with her gaze she holds us all. She holds us with a love yet unfathomable.

Death

I see Death in the darkness.
It sidles up to me and says, “You are depressed.”
It says, “Here, I have sickness.” It says, “Look at your rage.”

And I say, “Yes I see it. There is a seat at my table for you. Please. Sit.”

I call in the Healing Darkness, this darkness velvety deep
and in course I feel an embrace that slips into my secrets,
those spaces where my despair is known by no one but me.

The healing Love says,

“I am with you.
You are known.
I am holding you.”

Tears soft slide, quench soul-thirst, release.

There are glowing beings around me,
unseen,
they are moving,
glowing as no other could but in a place such as this.

I say, “Sit. Eat with me, Death. There is much to talk about.”

and we gleam, looking far into each other.

A feast awaits us in the deep winter.

Time in the Lady’s Cauldron

The orchid will bloom in her own time.

The dirt will lie, perfect patient receiver of the rotting life. It will change slowly as pungent passes and chaos reorganizes into readiness.

Then she will lie down, too, and listen as everything passes by her.

She will dream her dreams and sort through all the possibilities of what to be. She will listen and listen until she remembers and then she will yearn with all of her might, her yearning the only power within her purview. Her yearning can only be truly answered by that which makes orchids, so any wrong turn, any receiving of haphazard medicine will shape her asunder.

photo credit:  thank you Hans Partes

So, patience, patience.

She yearns, her little mind filled with orchid visions and of the sun kissing her buds.

One day, in delight, she realizes that her yearning has burst her shell and she has become a seedling, thrumming with tender excitement. She dawns in her stretching and she ever reaches. Her intoxicated wonder bursts forth with her bloom and then dances a wild interplay with her new world, filled in the diversity of the cosmos. She receives and receives, sure of her vision under the nurturing great forces of moon, sun, water and wind.

Be an orchid my friends, bide time. We cannot stay forever in the cauldron, but we cannot leave until the Goddess opens the way, lest we run our dreams back into darkness. As decomposition turns to fertility, as the path is etched in dreamtime, each step is a long passage, each a juicy time of medicine to be schooled by and digested.

Our yearning is synchronistic faith and singular force of creation together. The nature of yearning is to birth, to co-create with the Gods. Hold this, my ones. Nothing is more important than the clear, unprecedented arrival of your bloom.

Blessed Be.

by Tasara

The Hag

When the hag invites you to tea, beware, because she is going to eat you for dinner. You will go down to her cave beneath the oldest oak tree and hang your hat on her door. It will start off nice, but everything you thought you wanted or needed will be stripped away with her look from across the table. Her gaze will stop time, it will, as the blood rushes from your veins.

She will say without saying it, “I have seen you and I see you, bones.”

and if you quake she will not care.

“Truth is truth”, she says. “It is what is.”

You will not be able to charm her. You will not be foolish enough to lie to her. As she mixes the tea, her frozen look will whisper to you without speaking,

“I have been hurt more than I could ever be. I have lost it all to the very last, my children, my pride, my plans and my hide. I am alone and no one can touch me now, because I want nothing. In wanting nothing, there are no ears for illusion’s siren songs. And having lost all of this, I have lost my own fear.

You will look back at her, and drown in your foibles. And she will watch you in your drowning.

If you survive yourself over tea, then she will dance for you, her wretched dance of pain and broken clattering. Will you withstand, as her body shakes in terrible jerks, a show, a vessel of power for a raging volcano? Her eyes host lightening bolts and her frame surges. With every gesture, she has become matter of fact, and in that rawness, her sex will have awakened without her knowing it – because it has become something else. Something not found in moving pictures and magazines. It has become something normal and personal. In her rawness, her scorched throat will have been quenched, and the air will feel authentic.

And after she has cooled, if you can sit with the rock in her heart and look back her gaze with love of your own, then you will be laughing at the night and she will laugh with you as the moon blisters bright and the owl howls at the river.


When Spring comes, the hag will go outside and fall into the earth as the Sun begins to warm her. She will lie there, rotting, waiting to die, wishing to die. She will even leave her body a ways but then she will be driven home, because in her belly will be new life and she will be drawn to it’s light. She will rock and hold herself. She will hide her baby as long as she can. But the Winter will be over and she’ll be drawn to rise, uncontrollably, to surrender herself once more to the labor of love, a love everlasting and relentless.

by Tasara

Winter Dreaming

– A Time of Dreaming –

dreaminthedark

We have crossed the threshold of Winter Solstice. But, darnit, it is still dark! We called in the light in holy ceremony, but where is the actual light?

The ‘pull’ towards the abyss has ceased. We have had our brush with the great shadow, sat through our lessons with Grandmother Darkness. Some of us have even plummeted into and crossed the Abyss. Those that have plummeted and not returned have passed on to other worlds, to be mourned by those left in this one. What do we do with all these leftovers from the Death feast of the season passed?

To understand this, we can look at the Wheel of the year in a few different ways. Firstly as this big wheel with huge powers on it’s opposite sides, of Sun and Moon, Light and Dark, Life and Oblivion. Creation. Disintegration. The closer we are on the wheel to one of those powers, the more we are under it’s influence. So, it being just post Winter Solstice, we are still heavily under the influence of the great shadow – but in a different way than before.

Different, because the great Wheel is moving. There is a movement. When we are before a pole like the sun or moon, we are being pulled towards it. Once we have crossed it’s center, we have been released. The great event is over and all the ‘making sense of things’, repositioning, realignment, refinding, digesting.. all that after-the-event stuff happens. We are now riding on momentum. The light may be dawning but it won’t be until Spring Equinox, one of the balance points between the poles, before the Sun is able to catch us up in his infectious spell and pull us towards his massive heart.

Back at the time of Samhain, when the great gates to the yawning Abyss opened, it was a time to release, as the great forces of the void pulled us, inescapably in. We went into stasis, the time between Death and Life. During that stasis, under the influence of the sacred darkness, some Thing built up and happened. Some alchemy occurred. An event, which peaked and then made room for a pin hole of light to return and begin to expand.

So now, after the Solstice, there is another release while the light enters. We, tired again from the drama of conception, rest in the unfathomable womb of the angelic mother as our guardian spirits move in to dream with us the dreams of our new incarnate existence. Therein is the gentle complexity of a life’s layers being grown. There is the simplicity of lying fallow under the inexorable, slow dawning of the nurturing sun.

We are preparing for the moment when we nail down our intentions with the naked force of our honest will – or more gently put, plant our seeds. This happens on Imbolc, Feb 1st.

But true intentions cannot come before the dreaming. We are still dreaming.

As we sleep, inspiration touches us, sending reverberations into the bones of who we are. There arises a yearning for what is next in the truth of what we are. More inspiration comes and this yearning, an open space, a ‘need fire’ as they say in the runic alphabet, combined with the love of the inspirational spirits, (this sublime safety we feel with them which gives birth to devotion) this, altogether forms a seed.

A most precious seed of life, dreamt in the most sacred way. For we do not create in this world as humans. We co-create.

Such is the sublime ecstasy of living.

by Tasara

And when

And when the barriers fall
my love,
my folded heart breathes
my inner winds blows
and my limbs pick themselves up

my body flies from to to fro
the joy inside such light to throw
and I think,

This is what dancing is.

Where have I been? Why was it so hard?
But then the joy sweeps across
with the wind
and I don’t care ’cause I am free.

I don’t care about what happened and how it hurt
or where I lost things
or all the lost time.

I can do this and that is freedom.
My mother fought for what my grandmother could not
and I have found joy
in my body.

by Tasara

After the Flying Drum Ceremony – The Divine Below

She is the golden diamond,
drunk from the cool, cool springs within
she is the sweet, sweet nectar which the bear so cherishes
she is wholesome and olden
and fresh with bounty from the sun’s new kisses
the divine within
the divine mother earth
the rivers rush diamond, cleansing us
the pungent peat of life
receiver of all fallen
she who knows the steps of every creature who breathes
her delicious breathe
she is the giver
she is the responder
she
divine
from below
mother earth

by Tasara

The Great Gate

The weather turned and so did I. The dark came down early, the day ended, so I closed the doors. The shutters took a snap. I wondered what the night might bring. I am done. I am tired. I am taking off all of my tools.

The great forces of deconstruction say purge, purge, purge. The gates are yawning open and the maw of the crooning crone is soon upon us. The crisp air, the taking stock, the pull into retreat, these things we cannot avoid.

She calls, she calls, she calls.

She says look, let go, cover your eyes, it doesn’t matter because in the folds of mystery you cannot see. Time for the sacred to take the helm. Time to sleep. Time to sleep.

Who are your spirits to stand beside you in the dark? Where is your candle stick and your flint stone? What forms out of the dark are down the road?

Is it the nurturing womb of stasis? The crone’s cave? The turning spit of dismemberment? The hallows of memories past, released from their cages to fly through into the void? Who will help you?

Prepare, prepare, prepare. Prepare to lie down. To be one, to be naught, to not be, to be only what is left after everything else has left.’Tis the season. We come, we came and now there is nothing.

Sleep, sleep, sleep.

by Tasara