Rejuvenation with the Cardinal Directions

A soft breeze is a wonderful thing, especially during the summer months. The summer is a time, too, to recharge intuitive powers. All that warmth and sunlight just invites a fresh perspective and a lighter outlook! The body feels a natural ease.

To hone my intuitive powers, I engaged a “Rule of Three” spell guided by the tenent that the energy put out will be returned three fold. The intention here was to call upon the spirits of the North, East, South, and West, requesting blessings and clarity. In particular, I made a request to receive messages to guide me in developing deeper intuition and to open a pathway toward knowledge.

Three by Three Rejuventation Spell

Prepare: Find a bird feather (if you are vegan, you can use a craft feather) and tie it to the end of a ribbon or string. The feather is meant to elevate the spirit, and also to carry messages from upper realms. Secure the ribbon in an outdoor space in which it can receive wind from all directions (in other words, make sure that nothing blocks the flow of air in any direction).

Spell: Observe the feather. When it moves strongly in a cardinal direction, turn to face the source of the wind (so, if the feather blows toward the North, face the South and offer your chant to the South). Repeat the spell three times, holding your intention in mind.

[Eastern] forces share with me
Leave no secrets, make them free
Wind and spirit, three by three
Restore peace and knowledge to me

May this magick rejuventate you and brighten your sacred intuition!

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Drying Herbs

Summer is an excellent time to harvest herbs. With a surplus of wonderful-smelling plants everywhere you look, this season tells of untold pleasures especially for the kitchen witch, green witch, an Earth elemental witch, or any witch who works with nature.

I dry herbs and plants such as thyme, chammomile, angelica, sage, mint, lavender, and red clover for use in smudge sticks or in my apothecary. These plants are easy to come by where I live, and I am learning more about forraging and identifying plant species here.

There are quite a few ways to dry your herbs but I like to have them hang upside down from hooks and tacks in my bedroom.

Black Locust Road

When Nature needs to speak, she will
Reach into her washbag of wet roots
Pull back handfuls of filberts, gambol
The dice down a road
Lined with Black Locust trees

Roll down each toe
Bone to powder that once stood
Atop domains, believing
Its tread regulates it all

I’m wearied of pretending, she’ll say and reveal
All is deciduous wild under her
Control

Blood of habit, she outpours
Cream-honey
Down the thread furrows of bark
The hardest heartwood around

They line streets of every town
Shawls of armistice and other invasive growth
Hawthorne springtime, at last

Winter is Always

Winter is always wintering
It covers up its wilderness
The hour before bedtime and the minutes
After departure,
It freezes bodies in the pantomime of quietus
A flicker of breath.
Fogging the darkness is the only sign of life,
Reaching out and pulling back.

Everything is prevented from blooming
Except in the flash fires that burn a kingdom
Around periwinkle cold skies,
Winking out.

A cry escapes — deafeningly silent.

He remembers her eyes were like ice:
The crop of tears hanging heavy from the tree.
Harvested, homes are made
That melt in Spring.

Bloom’s End

I tried to live at the top of that tree
In twigs, no matter the frailty
The green blaze, a din of temporality
Swept through with reserve

I fell to the trunk
The spine of an open book
Roofed over my heart:
The Return of the Native
Eustacia Vye’s heart and mine
Loosed in Egdon Heath

I wouldn’t mind all that furze
But for the hot walk home
Away from the tree and its supports
As it shoves me out
And back to Bloom’s End

I  run backward
And see it as a snapshot
Where I lived for a time –

I could say that it was green forever
But I’d be lying

When I Think of Trees

When I think of us I think of trees
Grounded and rooted and reaching
Up into the Unknown to know

We live in the present but still dream
Green and vibrant and feathered
Of a home crafted of our woods intermingled

Cork and Beech and Birch, perhaps
The striation and silk, strain and surrender

Of our concord, a fertile parasol above
Beneath which we can bear the splendor of love, unshaded
In late equinox precipitate

Our mingled bulk invents the weir
To crib the imminent snow and the successive
Freshets of sapling season.

The Immortals of Autumn

I am carrying the light of the Autumn to travel between this and the next
World and the worlds before as if I am with my husband of epochs
Swaying within a forest-cracked verandah to timbres evergreen, immortal

Heads of red snapper flanked by still-green callowed boughs that haven’t turned
Down the comforter yet to climb in for winter to marvel in lime brown whimsy
We touch, with wonder, each other amidst

Scarlet noses buoyed up as two cold vestibules that feel the breeze more
And the bud of transformation more – we could have instead been stars and missed vermillion
Instead of side by side, braving together, bracing what the other trees haven’t the intuition to feel
What is us

We descend limb by limb to forage porcupine Chaga in the full-throated sunbeams cast through
Leggy new-growth forest, not at all like ourselves
B
ut relish the sip of the soulful side of crimson umber

If there were no trees at all our hearts could take their place, and have
In time gone by.

Arboretum

Beneath the canopy of a weeping Beech
Wearing its molten roots like a dress
Its thin skin carved into with names of elapsed loves
Lump torso bowed and overthrown but held by metal crutches
Ordained by some idealistic Harvard undergraduate 

Even the most coached head
Cannot help but to fall to the stomach as if rolling
Down through the throat of the heart
Just being in the presence of that kind of onus

I emerge winded, merge
To fuse our souls that blossom like a flower of life
Free of crutch

Miraculously so
Celestial

We rove Oaks and striated Corks
Ropey emotion of the artist itself
These dresses swallow water to suckle the furthest sprig
Propelled by some electricity,
The very same
It must be
That stirs you and me

A passerby overhearing this eclogue
Would think that weeping was only an emotion in need
Of supports
And not a telluric invitation
To unlock the index of remembering
Love