PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

When my heart is sore, I go to the river. When I want to forget my human separateness and remember how I am merged with nature, I go to the river. When I wish I had a sister to talk to, or a lover to hold me, I go to the river. The river is always there.

Sometimes it is in a fierce mood, with a strong current and leaves and debris sweeping down. Often it is gentle, the water soft as it washes around me and the view above – a ribbon of sky, with clouds, birds, framed by tall trees on either side – holds me serenely, telling me of the changing constancy of this place. Today there’s a bird, tomorrow clouds, the next day I watch leaves falling down the height of the tallest tree towards me, swimming underneath. Sometimes the mood is sleepy, the water not moving if it hasn’t rained for a while, leaves gathering undisturbed on the surface and the temperature layered down, mild on the surface but cool, colder, cold as it chills down through the water’s depths.

The south point is the base of the circle. In the northern hemisphere it is closest to the equator, but here in the southern hemisphere it’s closest to the South Pole. We think of it as the ground, in which things are planted and where seeds sprout and arise. It’s also a place of compost, death, dark – letting the old fall away and waiting. To see what will be born.

There’s a chance to deepen our belonging to a place when we move around through the seasons in a circle, or a wheel. We learn our places, our moods and activities as related to the time of year and can map our own yearly cycles. When we are on a straight line, changes from one summer or winter to the next are perhaps not that noticeable, part of a changing scenery that we move through, not necessarily expecting repeats. But when we consciously travel around the seasons we are bound to notice – that the winter we just had was unseasonably mild, that the rains didn’t come when we needed and expected them, that the number of major weather events, worldwide, are increasing year by year.

I came back to the southern hemisphere in spring. I had known it would be spring, of course. On the calendar I knew it – but that’s quite a different thing than seeing it, feeling it, hearing it. 

After walking the labyrinth on New Year’s Day my magic group was inspired to continue the ritual the next day. Oh, and the day after that and the day after that… actually for another eight days. We went to every direction in our Circle of Eight, one after the other, in order. At the end of that we couldn’t quite bear to end, so we committed to another round of visits, this time weekly so we could fit it in to our busy lives. One of the most amazing things was the amount of time we spent sitting around outside having breakfast or dinner picnics or late-afternoon homemade strawberry cocktails. It was Blue-Mountains-in-the-summer weather. It rained on many of these excursions, usually a light passing rain or heavy cloud arising or descending. It didn’t stop our picnic, trance or conversation.

Some of our Circle came on every excursion, the whole nine days in a row. Others came to several, or one but either way we spent a lot more time together than we usually do and that was wonderful. It felt like a spell for 2017 – if we begin this year with nine days of ritual (ten really, as we had done a ritual together on New Year’s Eve) – what a potent and deepening way to enter into the year. Surely our whole year will be filled with ritual? – and with each other? – and at the moment, we can’t think of anything better. 

On New Year’s Day we walked our local labyrinth. It was raining. We took our clothes off in the carpark, to keep them dry and walked, wrapped in a sarong, a towel across the small footbridge and along the avenue of apples, in full leaf by now and with discarded baby green apples, half eaten by the birds crunching under our feet over the bark mulch covering the path. The rain was light, gentle, not warm exactly but not fiercely cold either, it’s high summer here though most of the time you wouldn’t know it. When we arrive the labyrinth looks washed clean, its coloured mosaic tiles gleaming and small puddles across the surface of it.

We stood on a rock on the top of a ridge, forested hills and valleys on every side. It was past dusk and heavily overcast, though the full moon shone behind the clouds so they glowed faintly. The mists came in, blanketing out the further hills, filling the valleys. Five of us, and looking at the others, wrapped against the chill and dampness I thought I could be gazing at standing stones, not people, or druids from another time and place, or magicians gathered to create a spell. I could see only shades of grey and black.

We had gone to this particular place because it is in the North-East of our Circle, the direction of Beltaine in the southern hemisphere and that's the time of year it is, here. But the mists and the grey and the isolation - it could have been Samhain, it felt like a night between the worlds. Sometimes the opposite Festivals reach across the Wheel so strongly, holding hands at the hub of it that it's impossible not to see this open secret - whenever it is Samhain in half the world, in the other half it is Beltaine. The earth can never have one without the other, just as it can never have night without day, simultaneously. It's not just that the opposites both exist, but that they both exist at the same time. 

I planned a beautiful ritual with my magic group for Samhain in the Blue Mountains; at night in the labyrinth, with a fire and masks and an underworld trance. But I wasn’t even there for it – instead I found myself in Northern New South Wales, the place where the Circle of Eight was birthed and I had lived for so long. It wasn’t a time I’d planned to travel, or to travel there in particular; a tenant in my house gave notice and I knew I couldn’t organise the number of things that had to happen from where I live, a thousand kilometres away. I asked my son to drive with me, amazingly he had already taken a week off work, though it wasn’t the week that suited me. It was the week over Samhain.