Lying on the floor listening to music in between drawing belladonna on my walls, I no-faced up a bunch of poems yesterday. Here are two of them…and a third (a repost) from which they are a continuation on the same theme.
Pear Tree contains a direct quote from on of Seamus Heaney’s bog-body poems (‘soft moraines’ and ‘thighs’ being the first and last words of a particular stanza in Bog Queen.)
I’ve never been a blue calm sea. I’ve always been a storm
~ Stevie Nicks.
~ Saoirse.
It’s great how things come together sometimes. When a combination of planning plus serendipity collides to make something really *work*, it’s deeply gratifying. That’s how Lá Bealtaine was this year.
First in the new house. It is my habit most years to make a flower crown in May Day colours (yellow and white) for the day itself and then dry it out and hang it on my wall somewhere. The number of crowns grows as the years pass. Intentionally, however, I did not bring any of the flower crowns from the old apartment into the new house. So this year, the first crown has now officially been made, used in art, used in collective spellwork, and is drying in preparation to take it’s place on a fresh new wall.
I have been going through a really…interesting… time lately with old baggage and insecurity. It’s a good thing I’m a witch who knows how to eat their old skins. I’ve been reading the cards (and asking friends) repeated questions over and over, from different angles… really trying to go the distance with a few snags in the ball of twine that is my life. Pull on one thing, find it loops back to a shadow wiggling behind you, journal about it, cry about it (a LOT), feel it begin to process, rinse, repeat. I am aware that having the good fortune to finally feel safe in my living environment has provided the perfect setting for this kind of work – it’s in the safety and quiet that you finally realise… it’s just you now, bitch. Do you even KNOW how to be happy!?
The answer is yes…or more accurately, that I can learn. If there’s one thing I KNOW I’m good at, it’s learning…and beginning to learn… and beginning to begin.
So May Day. Full moon. Time to let some shit go. Also the first day of my period such as it exists. Other than emotional dysregulation (grrrreat), my chief symptom is swelling… waxing full and round just like the fucking moon. Good for shadow work though. And I guess it means I’m sloughing more than just metaphors…
I went a bit quiet in the days preceding. Journaling, reading cards, squirming at the answers, and resting. Then May Day came and despite the swelling, I wore all cream and white. All handmade. Two petticoats with lace trim. A handmade corded bust support based on the top half of the famous Symington “Pretty Housemaid” pattern. A corset cover inspired camisole made from the same wide lace trim that’s gathered into the hem of one of my petticoats. I had intentionally left my hair unwashed (but *not* uncleaned or untended) for over a month (May Day was day 35) and my roots were growing in like crazy (half an inch in a single month! weee!!!). Then I attended Mixtress Rae’s radio show to dance with my shadows and expel evil. I took part in a planned collective spell she lead during the show – 5 people working the spell including me, I think… across 3 continents. She followed up the spell with Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House” which was very cathartic and effective.
I took all of this very seriously (amidst the joy of dancing and so on). I mulled my readings over and did follow up readings through the course of the weekend. I also finally fully washed and re-henna’d my hair. I haven’t used shampoo or conditioner in 3 years… or anything soap-like on my hair in 2.5 years… what I use varies a little but it’s mainly a hand-prepared clay mixture followed by a diluted vinegar wash about once a month at the moment. I like that I have to pay attention to it. I followed this up with some ‘home-spa’ style care. It was good. Medicinal. Needed.
I’m not done processing things, of course. Who is? Ever? But this is ultimately what witchcraft is about for me… I’m grateful to have it. None of it’s my first rodeo but *that* feels pretty fucking cool!
~Saoirse.
So, I’m in the middle of a massive change right now and, at the same time, I have also recently done myself the (mixed) favour of getting two full days of colour-work done for a tattoo that covers almost a quarter of my body…
Suffice it to say I’m hecking tired and I’m gonna stay that way for a bit and I did it to myself and that’s what really hurts >_<.
To make up for the lack of posts – but *not* the lack of creativity and general witchery – this post essentially contains a photo dump of (some) recent projects and artistic goings on amidst ::wooooooo:: big change ::woooooooo:: ^_^
That’s all for now folks. Have fun storming the castle!!!
~ Saoirse.
I have been working on categorising my poetry. I knew there were a few themes that, in general, a lot of my poetry might fall under… but I have spent the last week or so slowly charting, dating, accounting for and making sure I had back ups of my poetry and the first realisation that came out of this is that I have written over 70 poems since the beginning of 2021.
There are almost no poems before that until you travel back about 10 years.
Turns out field-working autistic burnout and shuffling personal care away from heavily medicated *misdiagnoses* brings the poet back out in a person… but I digress.
What is challenging about assigning organised and uniform categories to my poetry is that, of course, there is organic overlap. This is precisely what it is to be an archivist (i.e. why we don’t rearrange physically what we categorise intellectually) …Or if I were to try and write up a descriptive summary of each poem and derive collection schema from there… THAT would be more like the work of a rare books librarian wrangling unique/historic items into DCRM(B) and MARC-XML friendly formats.
…I digressed again.
The point is, it’s tough but I LOVE doing this sort of thing… ad infinitum, it seems.
Here is a pie chart I have constructed and colour-coded to represent the themes and distribution of my poetry as of right now. Representing 71 poems written between January 9th, 2021 and October 15th, 2024. (I’ve written a few more but for various reasons they are not included on this list.)
(Interestingly, there are a few I cannot find copies of though I know I at least have physical copies somewhere. Bad LIS-professional! No cookie!!!)
The colours are loosely significant but the important thing to absorb here is that a) poetry is one of the main ways I channel my anger… especially as an autistic who goes largely non-verbal under social/interpersonal duress and b) I actually think of the Tower Quartet and (Channeled) Anger as subsets of a larger intellectual fonds …which is called “Excavations”. You will see that title in the pie chart as pertaining to a single slice, but really you can also view “Excavations” more broadly as occupying just over 45% of the chart! …The unifying emphasis is on digging deep, getting into the chthonic, and shadow-working my shit… oh, and a little revenge poetry here and there.
The thematics in the rest equally relate to each other pretty intensely. My poetry is always devotional in nature but some poems are more direct forms of near-audible gnosis. This makes sense to me from a mythic perspective as it is (personally) derived from the function of verse, alliteration, sorcery, ‘supplication’, evocation, and so on in medieval Irish literature.
I have made “Death” green mainly to evoke a #deathpositive association – ‘verdure from void’. I could equally (and perhaps should) have made it some kind of gold colour:
“I know you’ll remember me when I’m gone
remember my stories, remember my songs
I’ll leave them on earth, sweet traces of gold
oh, they’re calling me home, they’re calling me home.”
~ “They’re Calling Me Home”, Rhiannon Giddens
I will likely include little blurbs illuminating each category on a basic level whenever I manage to post them.
At any rate, I still need to figure out how to create a poetry gallery where poems that can’t occupy a single slide might appear… Until then, here are some of the poems I’ve written in September and October (minus “Athame”… which I have posted already.)
I suppose this set is all rather on the nose, but the themes of each are as follows: Love, Excavation, Death, Anger, and Anger.
For what it’s worth, I guess.
~ Saoirse.
* Get it? Theme-attics and Scheme-attics? Because it’s a post about poetry thematics and schematics? And I have a thing for sad attics? Ba-dum-tssshhh!!! Genius at it’s finest. I kill me.
[CW – there will be reference to symptoms of trauma but I will not discuss details nor will I indicate any specific type of experience other than to discuss how it affects my magico-spiritual process.]
Half moon this morning. Waxing gibbous. Serendipitously, this is the card I received in a single draw from the Pagan Otherworlds Tarot. How apt.
I have been posting a bit more openly about music lately. Mostly here on the blog. I want to talk a little more specifically about why this – for me – constitutes witchcraft and deep magical healing work.
If anyone wants a recommendation for an amazing young musician and singer coming out of the American ‘Old Timey’ Trad world (as distinct from modern bluegrass!) they should check out Nora Brown. Holy shit her work is good. She’s currently collaborating with a fiddler named Stephanie Coleman and equally her style is deep, rhythmic, and rooted.
I’ve known of Nora Brown for a few years now but yesterday I made an attempt to watch the Tiny Desk concert above. I say ‘attempt’ because by the time they started into ‘The Old Blue Bonnet’ I was shaking, hyperventilating and so on. Having too many visceral and deeply loved memories of American-specific experiences… looking up at the moon through pine needles… fireglow shining through a cabin window at the bottom of a mountain valley… a small trickling stream beneath my feet… elk in the morning, bears on a walk. The music of the unassuming – jeans and t-shirts – trading information, laughing, and the deep heartbeat of boots on a floor keeping the tunes flowing. People talking with their feet and singing with their hands…
I couldn’t do it yesterday.
I told my partner it felt like a world had vanished but that I (and only I among anyone I know now) could hear faint echoes of it calling out “Goodbye! Goodbye!”*
So today is the half moon and I drew the half moon card. To me, the card says ‘Now you can do it and I will help.’ I took slooooow breaths, clutching the deck (my bridge between worlds), listened to this gem of a video and let what once was run its course through the channel of my emotions. Tears again but more manageable this time.
It is, of course, not at all accidental that so much of American trad songs are fixated on war, death, loss, poverty, jail time, labour, loneliness. (The backbone of the ‘American dream’?) When people move too fast over land that isn’t theirs their own pre-existing problems grow with them. I don’t find much to ‘redeem’ about this… but I do find subtlety and nuance, I guess. The tunes I like the most have the least pretense – they’re tunes by and for flawed people. Maybe even the damned (depending on your worldview… I use demonic imagery in my witchcraft for many reasons). They carry no false promises and their dogma sounds tired.
I don’t know if I will ever use my violin for fiddle music again… I have no idea how that would feel in the body. Playing music, by definition, replicates the movements and bodily experiences of the past. That’s what practice IS… taking what you have already done and keeping it alive. Maybe that’s what makes it so hard and so rewarding at once. I am comforted by the knowledge I have of different forms of music and the fact that deep down I am fortunate to have some access to those skills and worlds… but I tend to feel shattered by the awareness that I come from a world in which I did not fit and I live now in a world that doesn’t know about any of that – at all. And I still do not fit.
This, incidentally, is how trad music is formed. Traditions carried. Stories retold and reworked. Sources cited (as is done so amazingly in the Tiny Desk video!)
To be a witch for me (among many other things) is to go to the altar and lay my music at Her feet. To carve a space that is mine… with bits and bobs of my story – the stuff that makes me howl and cry; the stuff that makes me dance; and the stuff that I know emerges syncretic and flawed… and to let it emerge and take its new form anyway. I take it all with me. These things are in my satchel. It’s painful to perceive, now, that no one around me knows it. I’m a person with no context. It must be enough that I know it.
The half moon will help me see that and shift my perspective back towards joy. And, I’m not totally alone… I can still light a bonfire on occasion and surround myself with other music makers. I know I’ve left things behind for a reason and I guess I’ll keep the practice of fitting into nowhere at all. Chronically transatlantic like so many before me… but hopefully reckoning a bit better with empathy and collective responsibility!
Below, a couple poems I wrote a few years ago, during an earlier phase of processing these things:
This one (from 2021 or earlier… can’t remember) makes reference to two songs, “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” ** (performed by Bruce Molsky) and “I Lost Something in the Hills” by Sibylle Baier.
The Morrígan often ‘speaks’ to me through verse (UPG) and the following poem felt like an answer to wondering if she was there ‘even then’.
From 2022, it makes reference to John Prine as well as “Blackbird” performed by the Lonesome Sisters (written by Debra Clifford about her mother… Debra herself passed away in 2022.)
~ Saoirse.
* Rayna Gellert*** has composed some great songs out of this tradition that capture many of these feelings for me – “Strike the Bells” from her album ‘Workin’s Too Hard’ and “Nothing” from her album ‘Old Light: Songs from my Childhood and Other Gone Worlds’ come immediately to mind. Whew!
** This link is to a live performance (including the only mistake I’ve ever heard him make! ^_^) This is important firstly because I think his live renditions have a more dirge-like quality than his recorded version (which is on his album ‘Soon Be Time’) and secondly because he performed this song live for the first time one night at my college (a few years after I had stopped going to the mountains each summer to a camp where he and others taught) … I was talking to him after the gig and he asked me how the tune came across. I told him it was beautiful and made me cry and he told me it was the first time he’d done it on stage!!!
*** Incidentally, the same summer location was where I first had the privilege of meeting Dan Gellert, Rayna’s father. Holy shit that man can play and on the most gorgeous fretless banjo to boot!
I would love to hear your responses, thoughts, etc. in the comments. But please note, I’m not soliciting for comfort or validation. I’m wary of encouraging what I so often interpret in comments as codependent language. I’m fine! I am me and you are you. Concepts & practices such as witchcraft are shared but also truly individual – this is what makes them so potent! 🙂
As a rather belated follow up from this video:
I wanted to discuss some basic inspiration & information that went into this project as well as some aspects of what the reality of sewing historically inspired clothing looks like… and of course some of how this applies to (my) witchcraft.
First – on my channel I have addressed a few of the reasons I prefer corsetry but, at some point, I will write a blog post with a proper explanation of the practicalities of corsetry in my life. That day is not today.
Q: What are my design references and aesthetic aims? What am I hoping to achieve visually?
This tends to shift around a bit but stays loosely within the parameters of 1) my time periods of interest and what potential I think they have for overlaps in design and 2) silhouette and colour blocking. Additionally, I like to evoke a mood and set of associations: a medieval decadence (in terms of color and texture); the proportional strangeness & darker shades of Northern Renaissance painters (Petrus Christus, Roger van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck etc); and a tongue-in-cheek reference to Victorian societal dysfunction (I like inverting value judgments based in puritanical virtue, assumptions around sexual permissiveness and mental health differences, reliance on religious institutional hierarchy etc.)
… A witch, at any given time period, would have existed largely in the same clothing expected of most people around her (and may well have identified with them religiously too). I like to explore that dissonance… An almost severe black silhouette with cheeky splashes of colour, perhaps? Dress me like a puritan but invert my cross!!!
Q: What about construction details? Isn’t it squeezy!? Did you make any mistakes!??!??
In terms of construction, I wanted practical movement and a well placed waist-line. I wanted better bust accommodation and garter straps for my socks! (On shorter sock days, I use garters just below the knee, fastened to the outside.) The basis from which I built this custom corset pattern was an early 1910s corset style called a ‘long-line’ corset*. This is not to be confused with the early Edwardian ‘s-bend’ corset. I am already exceptionally curvy and I wanted something that was elongated and smoothing to accommodate my more medieval days. (Corset didn’t exist in the middle ages). Think, John William Waterhouse paintings as a visual starting point… or something by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale.
The added benefit to this type of corset is that it is structurally already quite difficult to lace down too far. It’s a very flexible fit. The waist line cinches where the tummy and spine is the squishiest and most flexible – which serves as an anchor point – and the rest of the corset provides gentle support radiating out from there, up and down.
Without romanticising the ‘rustic’ or glorifying deplorable 19th century working class conditions, a lot of what I am going for is based in working class clothing and practicality. Minimal waste, strategic reuse of mostly second hand fabrics, patching and mending as needed… and planning for movement and more active daily patterns. I make my own soap, I like to cook, I cut out fabrics laid on the floor, I paint, walk, run errands, and frequent pubs in what I sew and the corset is part of what *enables* that (especially as someone with bad spine, joint, and inner organ problems! It works much like a flexible, custom fit back brace with almost no singular pressure points such as a bra band or staps!)
Here is a lovely tertiary resource – a youtube video by Cat’s Costumery – on working women’s corsetry:
In terms of the reality of sewing and making mistakes, I discuss various changes and design elements in my corset video but here is some added detail:
You will see in the photos that I made the corset too big and had to fold down the last panel on either side! At some point I’ll unstitch those panels and adjust them more thoroughly…You will also see, in the photo below, that it seems I made the bust too high originally. My body has also changed slightly in recent weeks so I have re-cut the top and sloppily rebound the edge. It looks messy but it’s strong thread and fits like a glove!
I think this is SUCH a fascinating process… homecraft & creative techniques to fashion a look and way of moving embued with dark mystique!!! I’ll be happy to answer any questions in the comments or even just say hi! And there will be more posts about sewing coming soon. I’ve been up to some pretty crafty shenanigans of late!
* Some basic starting points for this kind of corsetry:
I have put together a playlist creators’ resources to do with costuming/sewing techniques on my youtube channel. It’s called “Clothing is Magic” and covers techniques, diversity, inclusivity, and various different time periods I find interesting as well as some old footage of clothes in motion!
Further resources & citations on working clothes and photographic anthropological/social/immigration documentation:
NOTE: While there is a prevalence Nordic or Northern European imagery in this blog post, this is mainly due to a different (personal) research project on which I am working (very slowly). What I mean to illustrate is that there are practicalities of silhouette and construction that interest me in folk costume and working clothes. This post has also been limited by what is available in the public domain etc.
“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” ~ William Morris
Anyone who has followed my ‘output’ thus far will likely perceive that I spend a lot of my time immersed in the idea of ‘crafting self’, in the creative act of (re)making identity. Sometimes I call this ‘shape-shifting’ and it takes on quite literal ritual significance. Sometimes it finds expression through changeling motifs and the development of a personal mythology of sorts around my neurodivergence. It is, of course, present in all of my magickal workings, many of which manifest into clothing or art work. These are literal acts of creation that have a reflexive nature (in how they shape me) in addition to an outward one (in how I shape them, the effect their expression has on that which is external.) My most recent video focuses on taking attentive delight on beginner applications of paper marbling:
I even made an entire video about manifesting the astral or the realm of the imagination – weaving together ‘Secret Garden’ motifs with Edwardian, Victorian, and Medieval aesthetics… culminating in the commission of a real pair of shoes – in William Morris fabric and loaded with personal significance, magickal potency, and serious gratitude.
Late diagnosis autistics in particular face the challenge of unmasking, self-advocating and self-representing to the world even as they themselves strive to learn the basics of their own needs. There is a lot of discussion in that process of needing to *create a sense of self*… since everything you have been (or were permitted to be) has been focused on fitting in and survival. Personally, in the year or so before I sought my diagnosis, a social worker was talking me through some very serious and destructive circumstances I had left behind and she said “now is your chance to reinvent yourself”.
… One thing I have been working on is rebuilding my reading skills, knowing what I know now about neurodivergence. Non-fiction seems to be working better for me and I want to document some of the ideas I receive through that in occasional installments on this blog. Currently, I have begun reading “How We Might Live: At Home with Jane and William Morris”.
I found out about this book through a podcast ~
At Home With Jane and William Morris: Suzanne Fagence Cooper (1862) …from “Travels Through Time”
I had been looking online for any resources that might give me more information about Jane Morris specifically. Thus far I am not disappointed. The focus in this worldview, time period, and set of people is not only on making aesthetics a tangible element of daily life but on making that matter. I am excited at the prospect of getting a more holistic picture of the Morris’ family’s works and philosophies – and of those around them – but I am also interested to see flaws, to see where idealism potentially remains unwieldy or takes a less constructive real form. There is a quotation at the end of the first introductory segment that makes me feel so seen I almost cried (one of the reasons I struggle to read, I cry a lot!):
“When I first knew Morris nothing would content him but being a monk, and then he must be an architect, but when I came to London and began to paint, he threw it all up and must paint too, and then he must give it up and make poems, and then he must give it up and make window hangings and pretty things, and when he had achieved that he must be poet again, and then he must learn dyeing and live in a vat and learned weaving and knew all about looms, and then made more books and learned tapestry, and then wanted to smash everything up and begin the world anew, and now it is printing he cares for and to make wonderful rich-looking books: and all things he does splendidly: and if he lives the printing will have an end, and he will do, I don’t know what, but every minute will be alive.” ~ (Edward Burne-Jones after 40 years of friendship with Morris, p.6)
…In the past I have performed on the violin in master classes with the likes of Andrew Manze or in orchestral ensembles at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre. I have spent years throwing clay on the wheel or oil painting. I have immersed myself in learning trad music in the Rockies… or in studying Medieval art and social political history in Ireland. I offered hand painted wearable fairy wings for sale in a shop in Dublin. I have been an archivist in three different countries and a rare books librarian in art historical institutions…
These days my art focuses on textiles or coloured pencil, acrylics, and gouache. I make my own inks. I sew my own clothes utilising historical techniques and all my sewing is done without electricity. I make my own soap to wash my hair and my body. I use homemade hair oils and brush my hair with a boar-bristle brush from 1916 (to reduce purchase of new materials.) The list goes on… But what do I do with this cumulative hodge podge of intensity?! I am aware that such passions may lead to personal dysregulation and can replicate different kinds of personal and professional burn out over time. ‘How might I live’… if what I also want represented in my surroundings is both stable and flexible? (Especially in relation to the numinous world around me?) What does that look like? In my view, answering this question is the business of a witch.
I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments! How do you process your goals and dreams? What do they look like? Maybe you don’t even use visuals to do that! All perspectives are valid and welcome here.
With (potentially stubborn) sincerity,
Sorsha.
*Header image features “How We Might Live: At Home With Jane and William Morris” along with The Noble Art Tarot by Lennan Smith.
*This blog post has not been comissioned or sponsored in any way. Any products shown in my images are in the process of being used and no suggestions (implicit or explicit, direct or indirect) are conclusive or objective. I do not do reviews.