Greetings, gentle readers! We are officially halfway through winter, according to both the Wheel of the Year and the ever-accurate groundhog – huzzah! I talked about the spirit and tradition of Imbolc a bit last time, so today I just wanted to show you a little of how I celebrated this year in pictures: Bath with chamomile and lemon herb tea…
Category: Half-Assed Witchery
Getting Into the Spirit of Imbolc
Greetings, gentle readers! I have indeed been absent for a bit, but I’m going to claim my right to winter hibernation to excuse that lapse, because frankly, winter totally sucks. Well, maybe not everything about winter totally sucks (my kid was born on February 5th, after all!), but the weather certainly does. Especially after the holidays drain every last ounce…
Solstice Sojourn: Hygge Bags
Greetings, gentle readers! Today’s post will be short and sweet because I mainly just want to show you a nifty thing I made for those friends of mine who need a physical and spiritual recharge during the cold months to come. I’ve given homemade gifts lots of times before, but I want to start making it a tradition to put…
Lady’s Half-Assed Christmas, Part 1
If you’re like me, gentle readers, you love the idea of the holidays, but also dread them because they are a hell of a lot of hard work. When it comes to decorating, gift giving, and treat making, 99% of that hard work falls on me, no matter how my body feels or how worn out I am from trying…
Preparing the Hibernaculum – Magical Housecleaning Part 3 – Decluttering
Roll up your sleeves and get out your recycling bins for this one, gentle readers – it’s magical clutterbusting time. Cleansing and Blessing 4: Clutter Removal (for real this time) I left this section for last because sometimes it can be the most daunting – even worse than moving furniture and disturbing the dust bunnies. I am, as I’ve said…
Samhain Sojourn: Giving Thanks for the End of Harvest
Greetings, gentle readers, and Happy Thanksgiving! Today we have our feast, but before I go once more into the traditional Thanksgiving food breach, I’m taking a moment celebrate the End of Harvest and to truly give thanks to my yard and garden for the joy it brought to my life this summer and abundance of herbs and vegetables it gave…
Samhain Sojourn: Thanksgiving Thoughts
I honestly can’t remember if I told the tale of my strong dislike of Thanksgiving last year, gentle readers, but just in case I didn’t, I’m going to tell it again now. For the first 8 to 10 years of my life, I somehow managed to be violently ill on Thanksgiving — either sinus-infection-can’t-even-move-my-eyes-without-barfing ill or full-blown-stomach-virus-gagging-at-the-smell-of-all-food ill. My loving…
Preparing to Seal the Hibernaculum: Magical House Cleaning, Part 1
Fall is fully upon us, gentle readers, at least here in the Midwest, where the leaves and temperatures are both dropping drastically. One of my goals for this season is to get my house, affectionately called The Hibernaculum, mundanely cleaned and magically blessed and protected before Winter sets in and I basically seal the doors until Spring. Traditional witchy sources…
Samhain Sojourn – Ancestor Worship
Hello again, gentle readers! This past week, in honor of the veil’s thinning at Samhain, I’ve been spending some time with my dear departed grandma, Gayle. She had the ability to drive me up the wall in a way nobody else could, but she also was a pretty wise old lady who showed me how to craft with love (not…
Samhain Sojourn: A Different View of a Familiar Season
Halloween is nearly upon us, gentle readers, and for me this year, that means celebrating Samhain – the Pagan festival that marks the end of the light half of the year and the beginning of the dark half. Growing ceases and decay and dormancy begin – things in nature that need to die and break down into the earth so…
Mabon Wrap-Up: Seasonal Reflection and Gratitude Galore
The great thing about celebrating the Sabbats of the Wheel of the Year is that I jive much more fluidly with the seasonal calendar than I do the Julian one. The bad thing about it is that time seems to fly by within it just as quickly as it does in the traditional calendar! The end of Mabon is upon…
Keeping Mind, Body, and Spirit in Balance with Planners and Journals
As I talked about in my article about The Dark Mother, this time of year always sends my anxiety into overdrive and makes me feel very off-kilter – like walking-on-eggshells-through-a-minefield off-kilter – and it doesn’t help that everybody around me is probably feeling the same way, so they’re just as keyed up and touchy as I am. When my anxiety…
40 at 40 Revisited (and Goals for 41 of a sort)
So yesterday I turned 41 – and again, as my son would say, “So that happened.” When I first thought about going back to my 40 at 40 article from last year to see how I did, I was very reluctant because I am pretty sure I didn’t manage to do a damn thing on the list. Despite how good…
Mabon Musings: The Dark Mother
One of my favorite and most beloved axioms comes from a professor in college whom I could not stand in the least – which always kind of rankles me, but the axiom is SO GOOD that I still hang on to it anyway: There has never been a Winter without a Spring. No matter how bad things get, meteorologically or…
Mabon Monarchs
Fluttery greetings, gentle readers! Mabon is a season of marked change, and there’s not much I can think of that symbolizes change better than the transformation of a caterpillar into a beautiful Monarch butterfly. I had the privilege of being up close and personal with a LOT of these lovelies as I raised over 120 to adulthood this summer and…