Long Shadows

The days grow shorter. The sun casts long shadows in the middle of the day.

A warm breeze caresses my face.

- What is wrong with the world, an old woman cries out. – What are the CLAWS I feel, reaching for my throat?

People look at her as if she’s addled, while it’s they that, in truth are not right in their head.

It’s a timely question, even though the beyond strange and uncommon weather isn’t really the worst of it.

What’s truly and horribly wrong has been so for a very long time. The human created Global Warming is merely one more symptom of that.

I and my fellow witches come together in our circle. We feel the growing imbalance of the world; the horrible imbalance humanity has created. We don’t even have to try.

We suffer all of us, in this world of steel, and concrete and glass and plastic, the world of creativity gone insane, where people creating ever more destructive tools are considered geniuses. Hands seek hands, mind seek mind, as we sit there contemplating the insanity, the sick despair blanketing the world. The world is lost, and we are slowly, in pain picking up its pieces.

There is a glimmer here, some piece there, of the humanity, the life and fire we once knew by heart. We have to think about what was once as natural as breathing. It’s awkward doing what we should do. And that is wrong, so very wrong.

We seek deep into the forest, into the wild, wild areas of humanity and the world, to find the so very valuable, essential pieces of ourselves.

The Broken Circle

I became a mother today. One of my sister witches gave birth. A boy was born into our circle, our tribe. It’s a cause of great joy, and we rejoice. We dance within the circle, and celebrate with wild abandon.

I have not yet given birth myself, but I am just as much the boy’s mother as my sister is. We see things like that in my tribe. All the members share equally the joy and duty of being a parent, like we share almost everything.

We are very critical to both the nuclear family concept and the kindergarten method, both so popular in the current world. They are imposed on us, like all the unnatural stuff demeaning us in the current society, in civilization. In the nuclear family parents are chained to so-called parenthood, removing their freedom for the next twenty years, while kindergarten relieves them of responsibility and reduces parenthood to a duty.

My sister can, after a while, travel the world, without her child, if she so wishes, knowing that he’s safe and warmed and cared for.

I like this, our third way better than any of the unfulfilling ways we have been taught.

Too fat to move

An increasing number of United States’ citizens is too fat to be x-rayed. There is quite simply too much fat for the x-rays to penetrate. Not that the fact that this particular piece of technology won’t work on them is the greatest tragedy in existence, but it still says a lot. It is yet another symptom of a far worse condition: that of humanity distancing itself ever more from nature.

Sixty-four percent of United States’ citizens are considered fat, about one third obese, many so fat that they can hardly move. Beds must be reinforced to not collapse under the strain.

- The statistics will be even worse next time, if something dramatic isn’t done, and fast, James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver says.

And this situation is far from being unique to North America, but is more or less similar in all «developed» nations or areas of the world.

Wrong diet, too much sitting still. Cars are used to cover the smallest distance or move up the smallest rise. Physical exertion is rare. Many people hardly take a walk anymore. There are predictions stating that eventually, in a few generations, we will never leave our home or even our chair.

I can believe that.

The Good Mother

Mother visited me today, concealing it well, but brimming with the usual concerns for my well-being. Poor woman. She has never been good at hiding her numerous neuroses.

She always beat around the bush, but still manages to put forth her objections to my lifestyle, my chosen path in life. My blood relatives are basically christians, and they use every opportunity in their zeal to «save» me from eternal damnation. Some witches find similarities between themselves and christians. I can’t for the life of me understand why.

So mother is worried, and she tells me, in a thousand words or less to «leave my destructive life behind and return to the love of the family».

This wasn’t much of a problem when I traveled a lot and didn’t have a fixed address, but they have all taken advantage of the fact that I’m staying fairly put these days. Now, they often stop by unannounced and do their utmost to save me.

The sad fact is that she isn’t really caring about me at all, but about her own vanity. The rumors of me being a witch gets around, and returns to her, and worse to the nagging hags she call friends. My father loathes my choices in life, too, but at least he’s kind of honest about it with his open antagonism and hostility.

I tell them all, in return that they should liberate themselves from their own chains, that they should stop living in a prison of their own making, and stop worshipping anything, especially a mirage, and they get very upset and even angry with me, even more so when I patiently and not, make a last-ditch attempt to explain to them and confront them with the obvious contradictions of their «reasoning».

I’ve given them up, really. There is very little hope left in me that they will ever to be able to see the world even remotely like it is, but keep living their very dangerous and horrible fantasy. I have found myself a true family, among other witches, other practitioners of witchcraft, among political radicals and anarchists, people able and willing to take me as I am, and don’t want to form me in their own cracked image. We live and grow together, but we don’t live each other’s life and don’t try to.

«The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof».

Richard Bach

Forget

I haven't really been blogging for a while, but like with many others the recent events in the Middle East «encouraged» me to return to it.

I will cover something that hasn’t been covered so much.

The Israeli apologists say, in yet another desperate attempt at diversion that there are victims on both sides, and that is undoubtedly true, but let me state the obvious, what’s fortunately becoming obvious for quite a few people these days: Israel is the aggressor. Israel is the BAD GUY here. So let’s focus on Israel’s numerous atrocities, on Israel’s utter disregard for anything resembling humanity.

Let’s forget the ridiculously few Israeli victims.

The Good Neighbor

The neighbors stare at me. I’m a practicing witch and the neighbors know this, because I have never made any attempt at hiding it, any secret of the life I lead, but on the contrary calmly explained it every time I’ve been asked, treating my craft as a completely ordinary thing, as natural as any craft, any way of life. Which it is. At least it would have been in a society approaching sane.

I work with herbs, a healer in my own right, using the ingredients nature gives me, without resorting to poison and unnatural compounds. I light fires in the night and dance naked around the seething and scorching flames.

Rumors are abundant. I sacrifice chickens when no one is watching. The children are restless and I am to blame.

I am to blame for everything, from disease to a boring life, for all the poxes mankind has visited upon themselves.

I’m alien to them to them, a curiosity, exotic, worrisome and dangerous. My confidence in self, my ability to stand out from the crowd, to seek what is unknown and different, is a threat to the Big Lie they have created to sustain their mundane lives.

So they stare, and Hunger for what they don’t dare grab, and their hunger turns sour, turns to fear, resentment and hatred. They see a person free as a bird, see it possess what they have lost, and they want to cage it, and if they can’t cage it, destroy it. Their distorted hunger is a horrible thing. The good neighbors stare at the witch with envious eyes.

At best they want to manage and tame us. At worst they want to burn us at the stake… and they will... unless we stop them.

The Path

I’m Maxine. I am what others may call an eclectic witch. That means I follow my own path, not that of others or any other established, fixed path. The Path is Mist and Shadow, and that is also how it should be. Every witch, or any human being for that matter, should experience life and magick their own way, not conform to any preconceived tradition.

I discovered that I was a witch about fifteen years ago. I didn’t become a witch then. I have always been one. But I realized beyond doubt who I was that night. I had sought for years, for a way to change my life. It was Midsummer Night’s Eve in 1991, when I attended an unofficial, very unofficial celebration of life in London’s Hyde Park. We shared bodies and minds, and everything possible, the hundred or so of us, and my life, like that of many others present, was irrevocably changed.

Today’s world, the official part of it, is so indifferent, superficial, in all ways that counts. It’s an illusion, a mirage, in most meanings of the words, not in the sense that it doesn’t exist, but in its significance. Once you’ve learned to reject today’s world’s glitter, buzzwords like money and success, a much bigger world reveals itself to you. We opened up that night in Hyde Park, opened up to the world, to the vast Universe, its endless variety and depth.

I watch you sit there, yes, you, sit there in your tiny house, never going outside, hardly ever being aware of other houses, and certainly not those outside your tiny cluster of reality. You deny the Universe, deny yourself. Even when people show you the world beyond your limited understanding, you see merely the gray neighborhood of your house, because you are colorblind, and the slightest glimpse of colors scares you.

I am open. I reject the narrow chinks of your cavern. I am Maxine. I am a witch. I am the world.

Mist and Shadow

Is there a wall there?

Is there a wall, there, at your fingertips, rough and hard, or is there nothing there, nothing but Mist and Shadow?

Such is Time, is it not, such is Reality? Can we touch it? Is is tangible, is it solid, a brick wall or a boundary we cannot cross?

Of course not!