It's been a while since I've posted on here, mainly because I've been working on my new book about Hedgewitchcraft, out in October 2022! While I get back into the swing of writing here on this channel, I'd like to share a video with you that I made this month, about the liminal places, which are so important to the art of hedge riding. x
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If you're interested in the psychology underpinning Donald Trump and the roots that fostered his way of thinking and the breaking down of empathy. Here's a man I studied Spiritual Activism (part of my Human Ecology Masters degree) in a fascinating talk...
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So, apologies for being so long since my last blog post! I’ve been burning the midnight oil, with my new book being launched on 8 July. Now I can take a step back, as I’ve done all I can, and wait to see how the book is received. It’s an anxious time, but also an exciting time for most authors, an in-between time. These liminal times seem to be a recurring theme in my life. And not least to do with the denizens of the Otherworld.
There are certain times of the year when I feel closest to the Fair Folk, the Faeries, the Twlwyth Teg, the Sidhe, however you wish to call them. Beltane and Samhain are the usual portals when the veils between this world and the Otherworld are at their thinnest, but the time around Summer Solstice and high summer also holds a great and powerful bridge that spans across to take us into the most enchanted of places. The long twilight nights are ideal for communing with the Otherworld, and it’s lovely and warm enough on a summer evening.
As a Hedge Druid and a Hedge Witch, I have found several places around where I live where I feel a certain magical quality exists, one that is most definitely fey.
So, how's the last month been? Was it intense? If not for you, then for acquaintances, social circle, family members?
Or maybe not. One thing I have learned as I have saged with age, is that the more you become conscious - mindful of all the various strands and strains, as well as the bigger issues - less dramatic happenings, well, happen to you personally. Some people need the neonlit drama to din in the meaning or life lesson that has been avoided.
...Just as a field has a fence or hedge, and every forest an edge, so does every household have a boundary, a liminal space in which, for perhaps no more than a split second, one is neither in nor out. One is in between.
Power lies in these in-between, or liminal, spaces – power that can be benign or malign. Scholar Claude Lecouteux describes the house as a "protective cocoon, one that is sacred and magical" (48). As ancient homes tended to be passed down from generation to generation, it was common for a man (as women often joined the homes of their spouses when they married) to be born in the house in which they lived and to die there. This means that inherited homes were also the places in which one's parents, grandparents, and so on had been born, lived, and died.
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We have two Foo lions who guard our front door (male and female) and an iron dragon who watches the back. We also painted protect
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Very nice! I also have a bindrune written beneath our threshold that I created for protection. Love your guardian figures as well.
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Informative and interesting, Thanks!
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My parents kept a wreath on the door most of the year. Theirs was just decoration I'm sure but the habit probably grew out of ear
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Thanks for sharing! Very cool that your parents carried on that tradition with their wreath. I'm not very familiar with Jewish or
I live in a landscape of liminal spaces. This past Samhain I have been hovering, neither truly in this world nor out of it. Partly this has to do with pondering mortality and how we may live out our last days. I am not dying (well, not that I know of at any rate), but there are others close who have been taken to that edge physically, mentally and spiritually. 2015 was a challenging and exhausting year, with many highs and some gutting lows for me and those close to me. I have had to pause, hibernate and dip into the no-words place before I could break surface.
Winter has a stillness that I truly value. I am grateful for the ice that hems us in. I am grateful for the wood that snaps in our log burner and the candle that glows with my many special intentions. I sit and knit little squares that will eventually become a blanket for a refugee or migrant and I am grateful for the meditative space between the click of the needle and the flick of the loop.
...At certain times of the year—especially around Samhain—you hear that “the Veil between the Worlds grows thin.”
This language speaks to something that many of us, I suspect, have ourselves experienced: those times when our Known World becomes an Otherness to us, often with such intensity—perhaps in response to that same Otherness within ourselves—that it seems we could step through and enter into the Interiority of things. In the lore this sense is frequently associated with the temporally and spatially liminal ( <Latin limen, “threshold”), the times and places of the In-Between.
As a quick web-search will demonstrate, the notion of the Veil Between Worlds comes to the Craft from Spiritualism; mediums are said to “part the Veil” to enable contact with the dead now in the Other World. Most likely Spiritualism derives the metaphor of the Veil (probably via Freemasonry) from the Veil of the Jerusalem temple, the curtain (Hebrew parókhet) that separated the “nave” of the temple from the Holy of Holies.