Season and Spirit: Magickal Adventures Around the Wheel of the Year

The Wheel of the Year is the engine that drives NeoPagan practice. Explore thw magick of the season beyond the Eight Great Sabbats.

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Leni Hester

Leni Hester

Leni Hester is a Witch and writer from Denver, Colorado. Her work appears in the Immanion anthologies "Pop Culture Grimoire," "Women's Voices in Magick" and "Manifesting Prosperity". She is a frequent contributor to Witches and Pagans and Sagewoman Magazines.

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

I don't think I've ever been so happy to welcome the Spring as I was this year. This Winter was so cold, so long that Spring really was a dim memory. Even warm-ish days didn't get my trust. I have only recently packed up my winter clothes, and despite a lot of mowing and weed whacking, I haven't started putting in my garden quite yet. Because the Winter was inside me by the time the snow and ice and freezing weather finally retreated. A hard Winter, like the one we just had, will wear on you, make you feel tired all over, a deep tired that will take more than just a few warm afternoons to shift. This is perfect for introspection and meditation, but beyond the usual quiet of the Descent, I realized that Winter had settled into me, settled into my bones and muscles the way it had frozen the lake and bound the land under snow. Even when the snow started to melt, the chill didn't leave me. It was hard to remember what sweet breezes had felt like, with icy blasts blowing in my face.

This Winter brought lots of worry and sorrow to my door. The stress became part of the the work of Winter: the slogging through the cold, the shoveling of snow, the march through short days of low, subdued energy. Even as the first gentle days showed up, when the world seemed to be a closed fist slowly opening, it was hard to trust it, hard to sink into the promise of warm days to come. It was hard to feel the Spring, or I should say, it was hard to allow myself to feel Spring's optimism and new beginnings. The Winter had settled into my mood, and it was hard to generate much “fire” for anything beyond getting through the day. I wasn't depressed, exactly, but a certain limitation had settled down on my thinking, like a visor. I stopped thinking about a time when I might have more energy, more enthusiasm, when I felt passion and excitement for any of my fallow projects. The world outside was monochrome, all pewter and taupe, and even as the light came back, and the land opened up, my thoughts remained dull like that as well. When the sky got even darker with the brooding rain clouds of early Spring, my thoughts did not leap ahead to the sweet green season yet to come. They remained in the inky black nimbus clouds that poured sleet and hail down, that made tame creeks open up into roiling muddy rapids, and turned the stone cold ground into brown mud. Dark weather for dark moods.

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Towards the very end of Winter, the weather suddenly turns darker. The days have been getting longer, so by early March, there is a lot more daylight. The weather is slowly warming up. There may even be signs of the approaching Spring in birds returning or buds developing on trees. But suddenly a cloudy day no longer has a white or pale gray sky. The clouds are brooding, bruise-colored, dark. The clouds that pour over the mountains on those days are not fluffy and soft. They look dirty, like mop water. I call these dishwater days, the late Winter days when the season has lost all its icy sparkle and it looks as though all the grime and soot from the past three months is being washed away.

Because as thick as the cloud cover is, the clouds get blown away by strong winds, after they dump whatever sleety snow-rain mix they carry, and the whole next day feels fresh and clean. The wind is bracing, not brutal. It suddenly seems easy to think about new possibilities, new ideas. The wind blows through our hair, through our thoughts, sweeps detritus away like a broom.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

I've been helping my oldest kid with her homework lately. Her grades are slipping a bit in science, which is normally her best subject. It's not a mystery why this is happening: she's in middle school and the work is getting harder, the concepts more complex. Her class is working on geology and evolution at the moment, so she's learning about continental drift, natural selection, DNA, fossils and mutation. She's working hard on it, and I'm glad. She has to work hard because there's a lot of material and it requires her to put real effort into understanding and applying it. It's hard because she's learning science, real science, and that's something you cant take for granted anymore.

We live in a very conservative congressional district. Our house is literally surrounded by churches of various kinds. My congressman is rabidly anti-immigrant and has sponsored fetal person-hood legislation; he obviously does not represent me or my values. While I do not hide my faith, I do not feel empowered to speak about it to my neighbors or the parents of my kids' friends. I accept all of that with more or less good grace. While I hate to use the phrase 'culture war' and give energy to that narrative, I feel the annoyance and discomfort that comes with being a member of a minority religion, when the majority culture is resentful of sharing space. So I put up with the clueless chirping about “having a blessed day” and puzzled inquiries into whether I'm Jewish, when replying “none” to inquiries about which church my family attends. And I fully admit, I still fall back on traditions I grew up with, putting up a Christmas tree and saying, “Merry Christmas” without discomfort, and let other people make whatever assumption they want. I have no desire to do a mini-interfaith negotiation with random neighbors and co-workers by wishing them “Happy Solstice, and have a blessed Yule.”

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Driving past the reservoir the other day, I saw something on the surface of the water I have not seen in a while: sunshine. When the lake's frozen, as it has been since December's deep freeze, it's a somber picture of dull grey snow and slush, dotted with unhappy geese clustered along the shore. But it was a sunny day, and had followed a few other sunny days, and the ice had melted away in a large spot in the center. It was this unexpected ring of bright water that caught the light, and suddenly the turn toward Spring was revealed.

It was the light that caught my eye, because it's been so dark. Now that the lights and decorations of the Solstice have been taken down, nights are very dark indeed. The days are still short and freezing cold. And my body is not done hibernating. It's Winter, and we're still in repose, along with land. I look out in my snow-covered yard, and although I want to start plotting how I'm going to set up my garden this year, plotting is all I can do. Everything is still in the Underworld, the seeds, sleeping animals, my own thoughts, my energy. And even as much as that gleam of pale sunlight on dark water cheered me up, it still feels right to feel the dark of Winter all around, to linger in the dark even as we notice the returning light.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Years ago I read about the so-called Nameless Day, an intercalary day that marks between the last, darkest day of the dying Year and the first, brighter day of the newly born one. It's a movable feast. I usually mark it on the last night of the lunation after Winter Solstice, before the New Moon in Capricorn. This year, it fell on New Year's Eve, with the New Moon on New year's Day itself. It's not always that such delicious synchronicity brings such auspicious days together, the cultural and the magical aligned so beautifully. Such a purity of intention is rare. As an occasion of bidding farewell to a year that had taken such a toll on me, I was delighted to spend the cold sunny light of the Nameless Day in contemplation, reflection and release.

Everything about that day lent itself to letting go and wrapping things up. A brisk wind all morning felt bracing and clear, the clouds of the afternoon felt renewed, reassuring and gentle. I found I had come to the very last page of my to-do notebook, and had to literally decide which events and tasks to move into the new year, and which to just discard. Just that simple act compelled me to declare my priorities. I learned that two of my teachers were closing down or changing their classes. I decided that I wanted to pull my energy back from certain things, and put it towards other projects. It was a quiet, subdued day, followed by a sleepy evening. Just before bed, I cast circle and read cards for the year.

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A Light in the Dark: Celebrating the Solstice

Because the night is dark and full of terrors.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Going Deep

Last week we had the first true cold snap. We've had cold and snow so far this season, despite the warm weather that lingered long into November. But this was the first time we'd had a good hard freeze and as it does every year, this day caught me off-guard. It's really not that cold, compared to how cold it can get, how cold it will get soon. But this was first time, after months of warm weather, that the bite of Winter asserted itself. The wind was full of flying ice, and a lovely snow, dense but not very deep, seemed rather threatening.

The energy of Samhain and the darkening weeks that follow tells a simple message: shore up for Winter. The Sun's transit through Scorpio teaches us the paradox of “addition through subtraction.” Scorpio drives us to cut away whatever is non-essential, what no longer serves, what drains and does not replenish us. The call is to cut away the superfluous, the distracting, all the things that keep us from getting quiet and zoning into voices that do not echo the noise of our larger culture. These voices speak to us from our deepest selves, they carry the wisdom of our ancestors and Guides, they blossom with our imagination and visions. It takes incredible focus to hear these things above the din of the larger culture, especially now as we head into the end of the year holidays.

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