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I have sat down many times in the last six weeks to write but never quite got there.  My last post was between Samhain and Winter Solstice, and now it is fast approaching Imbolc/Brigid.  It could be the way the cancer itself makes me tired, or the treatment that makes me even more tired, or the morphine I’m using for pain management that just makes me blissfully unaware of the passing of time. I am sleeping 12-14 hours a day, sleeping is healing. Somehow it is fitting that my body is paralleling the experience of the land Herself here in the Northern Hemisphere, after all between Samhain and Imbolc is time for quiet, for darkness, for the death of what grew last year being composted and metabolized so that new growth can happen as we move toward Spring.  

I think I've gotten sick four times in the past month.

There was that first cold, at the beginning of December: standard issue yuckiness that forced me to take a couple of sick days. (Since I've just come back from maternity leave, my sick days are in short supply, so it was a tough decision.) Then, when I was on the mend and just clearing out some chest gunk, I felt the telltale prickle in the back of my nose again. For a few hours I refused to believe it. Surely a just and loving universe wouldn't allow me to come down with a second virus while I was still getting over my first? But that's the sort of thing that happens when you have young children, and by the next morning I felt awful again.

I am infinitely awed by human bodies including my own.  I revel and delight in the full range of embodied human experience.  Now, in my late fifties, post-menopausal, I am experiencing another common embodied human experience, I have stage four squamous cell cancer in my body.  This embodied human experience, for me, is also powerful, amazing and fascinating.

There was a moment when I once again began to panic then was suddenly flooded with the grateful and strong presence of Descendants, the ones who may not even be related to me by blood but would benefit from research on the cancer cells being harvested from my lungs.  At that moment, that moment of gratitude and strength from the future, this time the needle passed through the wall of my lung easily.

She stepped out onto the glistening waters, hovering just above the surface seemingly weightless to any who may have observed. Once again, she breathed deeply into the radiant core of her bodies drawing up the energy of the waters and allowing them to move through her. Light emanated from her now expanded form and layer upon layer of her bodies moved undulating in response to the echoing she was calling them to.......

Read all of Part Two Here

It is no secret that we witches are deeply connected to the cycles of The Moon.  We use lunar cycles to make decisions about planting and tending herbs for healing, food for nourishing our families and communities, and what kind of magic is appropriate to do personally, communally, or politically.

In the collection Scottish Charms and Amulets George Black recounts a variety of folk practices, many of which linger on not only in word but in material form. Amulets always draw interested audiences in museums where they are on display and bring together the traditions captured in words as charms with a tangible force. Arrowheads are one popular example.

As in many places, Black notes that 'the prehistoric flint arrowheads so numerous in Scotland were long considered by the peasantry to have fallen from the clouds, and to have been used as weapons by the fairies to shoot at human beings' and also especially cattle. Like the well-known Anglo-Saxon charm Wið færstice for elf-shot cattle, there were a variety of ways to battle the illnesses presumed to be caused by the folk too small to be seen.