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.
That “Joy of the Future” card from the Heart of the Faeries Oracle is proving HILARIOUSLY CHALLENGING!!! Da fuq!?
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 kid you not, that Faeries Oracle card is “A Collective of Pixies” which was not only perfect for the show, for dancing, and for May Day but ALSO for the precise thing I’ve been asking the cards over and over again. For those of you who own the deck, go read the guid book entry for that card!!!
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.
“One morning, one morning, one morning in May, I saw a young lady all wrapped in white linen. All wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay.”
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!
Sitting in my weedy lair, thinking over creative ambition, doors between worlds, and the way witchcraft works wonders – staring out at blackbirds, hooded crows (and a wren!) flitting between drifting spells of rain – I finally finished two poems.
The first, paradoxically, took over a month.
If fantasies are fractals, then Death is periwinkle.
The second was a classic case of how most of my poems emerge… “No-facing” them up from the gut and barfing them all over the page like so much ectoplasm.
The winter weather continues but I’m not sad about it. On Imbolc, I went for a river-side walk for several hours. Starting in the morning mist and ending in the midday sun through fields and several different woods, my partner and I saw two grey herons fly overhead with sticks in their beaks. The Cailleach gathers firewood! Six more weeks of winter. As it happened, we also saw their nesting place: five full grown grey herons perched in the tree tops overhanging the edge of the river… uncanny in their beauty.
~ Saoirse.
(Decks shown: “Trionfi della Luna (Paradoxical)” – 3 of Coins, Knight of Wands, 2 of Coins – and “Oracle médiéval et merveilleux” – “Colère” – in inverted blacklight)
PS. A personal reminder, “Eviscerate” by Faetooth playing as I post this <3
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:: ^_^
Recent shots of my desk – homemade beeswax candles, card readings, and musical practice. You may recognise the first image as the thumbnail for my most recent video post. Terribly cringey and an algorithmic shot in the foot… sorrynotsorry!Before and after mending a rip in my skirt (not pictured is the black cotton backing I incorporated into the stitching) & some homemade earrings (paper layers, glue, varnish; real wishbones, cleaned and varnished; paper mache clay, gold paint, varnish.)Recent shots of glamour altar (including perfumes, paper mache clay horns, and ultraviolet pigments) & a shot of the colours my tattoo artist was mixing and blending directly onto my skin!Adventures in making my own nail polish colours! Ultraviolet green (in various layer combinations)… I called it “Poison Apple” but my partner wants to call it either “Mutant Ninja Ooze” or “Aggressively Green”… thoughts?Random OOTD shots of the general vibe I’ve beeen going for these days! Complete with Evenstar & glow in the dark bugs and sex dice! ^_^
That’s all for now folks. Have fun storming the castle!!!
The paradox of wanting a place online to express creative process (or the development of visual languages, portfolios, bodies of work…) is that the effect can only be viewed over time and in retrospect. Time passes between visible stages – in my case probably a lot of it – because the internet is where we come when we have full sentences to say, or photos to share, or sketchbooks to showcase and so on. That’s why I like it here! I want to show those things.
The trick is understanding how to pace that expression and what constitutes something ‘share-worthy’ in the context of our platform goals. But let me explain that better…
Each person is going to have different aims for any platform they choose to build. They may establish goals at the outset, they may develop and change them as they progress, and they may or may not ‘end up’ where they thought they would be. Ideally, along the way, a person will be able to say “yes, this is what I mean to say/share and here is why”. Each point in that journey would reflect what & who they are as authentically as possible… right? It would represent them accurately… right?
This is how the internet – especially sites like youtube – work in real time.
But what do you do when the way you process information and think about creativity doesn’t break down in a granular fashion like that? I very much doubt that anyone in my life could look at any one thing I’ve made or said and understand not only why it exists and what function it plays in the larger whole BUT ALSO that I approach what I do like… not just an album of family photos, but years of albums of family photos!
My inner archivist is showing. My favourite books, documentaries, and radio broadcasts etc about artists are always the ones that talk about the greater stylistic trajectory on which an artist functioned over time. Some academic saying, “well, what you have to remember is that by this time, post war, so and so had only just come into contact with such and such a philosophical circle… it would be years before they were all more closely knit and years before they relocated and that reflected in the fragmented nature of their style at this time. Part of my research is dedicated to tracing the development of [insert now classic leitmotif here] in their body of work!”
So… If I write too many poetry posts in a row, that’s awkward if this isn’t a poetry blog and I don’t ‘brand’ myself as a poet. Am I supposed to ‘cultivate an audience’ that has the patience for that? Is that my ‘brand’? I’ve written poetry my whole life, but I’m not a poet. I make most of my own clothes, but I’m not a fashion designer/costumer/commissioned sewist… I like folklore, slow living, flowers, skirts and candles, but I’m DEFINITELY NOT cottage core. I wear lots of black, I’m #deathpositive, I love macabre dance music, I’m interested in decay and darkness and strange fantastical worlds and corsets…but I’m not ‘a goth’. The list goes on. You get the idea.
Or… if I write that for the past months I have been not only making several changes in my personal life – not least of which are increasing the accuracy of the lexical gaps around my sexuality and gender (xenine, bi, & flammasexual… if you’re curious) and a potential change in living arrangements – but I have also been very slowly working on improving my health and seeing the results as I continue the journey of leaving neurodivergent burnout… what exactly about that do I show you online?
This isn’t *directly* reflected in my sketchbooks (yet?). I have continued to sew. With the exception of the pearl-beaded hair net (and second-hand boots) featured at the top of this post, I’m not ready to show what I’ve been working on until I can think of a more cohesive way to put it (because… again… my personal preference is to provide at least *some* context for ‘content’)… I have been called slow in the past and while it was meant in a mean way, it’s not necessarily untrue.
One thing I will endeavour to do is begin migrating some of what I collect as inspo/reference on my personal pinterest over onto the tumblr account I have associated with this platform. At least, on tumblr, it’s understood that the point is in the aggregation of images and posts … rather than in the minutiae or specifics of any one image. I have my work cut out for me though, I have multiple pin boards organised by topic, time period, and to some extent a hierarchy of intention for each… and some of them have more than 1000 images in them! It’ll be fun though, I hope? This idea seems to have given me a better sense of what each of my sub-platforms (tumblr, Youtube/Makertube, blog) are separately for.
Another thing I can say is that I am continuing to make my own soaps and experiment with homemade cosmetics & perfumes (I have to re-make my lip balm after someone I recently ‘met’ not only sampled it but also literally *licked me* in a pub… long story) as well as some store-bought makeup… and because that familiarised me with working with beeswax, I have progressed to making my own candles too! ^_^
Lastly, here are a few recent photos. I take photos of my readings alllll the time… though not with any consistency. I’ve been having a blast dancing more, especially for a few hours each Friday night, which of course is desperately sweaty work. I’ve taken to lighting candles, putting on my projector light, pouring myself a glass or two of ice cold Jade Absinthe (my FAVOURITE is Esprit Edouard yum yum yum yum yum!!!) and dancing the night away. It certainly feels ritualistic. ^_^
Thus, resisting the urge to explain everything to death, I have now posted something resembling an update. Don’t get to granular about it, folks, but resonate with whatever point appeals to you on a very much non-static continuum.
For the weekend that’s in it (Imbolc), I actually do want to reflect on how the time since Midwinter has progressed. It is not my intention, in general, to force posts that are relevant to each of the quarter and cross-quarter days – or to reflect on quintessentially comtemporary “witchy” themes at those times. If the genuine desire is there and the aims for the post are authentic I will do so, of course, but not otherwise.
Turn of the century fruit relish/ketchupHomemade bread, sauteed kale, & medieval pork loin in spiced wine with brown ale to drink.Gingersnaps and nog with rum and cinnamon, all homemade.Prep, set table, and spiked after-drinks of our Midwinter meal.
The last six weeks can be defined as internally chaotic. Everyone I talk to at the moment seems to be having a similar experience – it’s emotionally intense, it leads to and feeds off of dysregulated behaviours and coping mechanisms. In my case, I am struggling to regulate my time online. For example, I’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole recently by obsessively following commentary on developments in the pop music industry and the ongoing fallout from 2024 (::cough cough:: a-certain-Canadian-rapper-who-I’ve-never-liked’s lawsuits ::cough cough::). It’s not uncharacteristic for me to do this – sudden hyperfixations aren’t new – but it’s leading to far too much screen time, to the detriment of my other passions and pursuits, and I can tell what I’m really doing is running from myself… spending time ‘anywhere but here’.
I AM slowly getting a handle on it. Patience and self-directed kindness are key. These days, being overly punishing or strict in my self-talk feels incredibly puritanical in origin and style. I want to make adjustments because I *want* to, not because I’ve self-flagellated with *false* moralisations** about productivity, worth, and depth.
For the time being, I am not posting on youtube or making any videos. I don’t know when I will come back but I KNOW I need time away… long enough to detox. I’ve always enjoyed making videos but hated the process of having them published. Posting them publicly has always felt like an exercise in waiting for my cookie while talking myself around the possibility that no cookie will be forthcoming, that I don’t even need the cookie, wondering why I’m even seeking a cookie, am I seeking a cookie?, I don’t even like cookies!!!*** … It’s time for a break until I can think more clearly about that.
Instead, I have redesigned this blog to be more in line with the direction I’ve wanted to pursue. I have taken the various gallery pages and poetry pages down because they felt too static. I’m less inspired by presenting my portfolio at the moment and more inspired by working through my personal artistic/conceptual processes in an informal setting. I would like things to emerge more organically and dynamically here… I would like to post when I wish to without having to worry quite so much about polished presentation.
A sketch of a dream/nightmare, August 2024 & my 2024 copy of Benebell Wen’s Metaphysician’s Day Planner. Of COURSE my cover customisation is always extra.
My creative endeavours have been geared towards world building for a long time, obviously, but in the last… hm, more than six months… I have felt the need to buckle down and start sketching, drafting, practicing and looking up techniques, and fleshing out what I mean when I refer to visiting the Otherworld or going into The Labyrinth. My The Labyrinth. I want to practice drawing some of it’s architecture… I want it’s music to be audible, even in paintings or drawings or the clothes I ‘bring back’. I want to develop a stronger more identifiable visual vocabulary to help give form to the way I experience and move through the world(s).
Left to right: Almost finished drawing for Major Arcanum Key 18 (few tweaks left); reproduction printed chintz for next sewing project; a quick journal doodle; two homemade perfume oils; this year’s Metaphysician’s Day Planner 😀
I have rearranged my altar and made (subtle?) adjustments to the visual symbolism around me. My magical practice is shifting (especially in the absence of witchtube and tarottube…which I haven’t followed for some time.) Everything is more organic, more me-ish now. Nothing remarkable or more meritorious than others, just more specific and suited to me than is relevant to most online ‘communities’ or ‘search & discovery’ algorithms.
Recent books have been Jorge Luis Borges’ “Labyrinths”, Terri Windling’s “The Wood Wife”, Peter S Beagle’s “The Last Unicorn” and “In Calabria”, Patricia A. McKillip’s “The Tower at Stonywood”, Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, all of Le Guin’s “Earthsea” materials, Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching” (the Penguin classics translation by D. C. Lau), articles about Alan Garner’s Alderly Edge loose trilogy (I’ve read Weirdstone a few times… not keen on the rest really), more articles on medieval magic, and a bunch of books I’m forgetting at the moment. (Oh, I read all of the Terri Pratchett “Witch” books and several of the “Death” books for the first time.)
Most of the above books are re-reads specifically selected for the post Christmas/New Year ‘season’ but I don’t think it’s insignificant that I finally regained the ability to read last year after ca. 10 years. I’m back to building sensory worlds. I’m back to perceiving and walking through my imagination. I’m back to being able to retain imaginative detail in a way that I haven’t in a long time. At last, my fingers are itching like they used to bring that into creative fruition.
Left to right: Lao Tzu & Borges; a sketch of a childhood nightmare (“Golden Slumbers”) playing around with two point perspective; a raglan jumper I’m knitting for my partner (I found Irish sourced DK wool! … can’t get Shetland wool anymore due to GPSR).
…So to return to this idea of chaos, running from myself, fixating on ‘anywhere but here, in MY life’, I understand it. I can’t speak for everyone but I was raised and socialised to flinch from my self-expression. I am capable of and even prone to terrible potency and it can be scary and destructive. But now I’ve officially**** been a witch for almost 8 years (and I’m 37, not 17). Not a whole lot scares me for long and, of paramount importance, I have learned to turn around and walk straight towards the source of my shadow and fear. Like Sparrowhawk.
In all the heightened emotions, chaos, internal dynamics, and even external gnostic perceptions of the past six weeks, it really does feel like I’m pushing against the inertia of top soil after a long dormant period. Imbolc is the start of Spring here in Ireland and what I love about that is that Spring starts before you can outwardly see it. Change begins before the first translucent shoots appear. Seasons are so liminal and full of process and development. That’s why today’s blog post is to honour and acknowledge the arrival of Imbolc, and the beginning of Spring.
~ Saoirse.
** By which I mean that the knee-jerk assumptions of the social demographic I grew up in are assumptions I disagree with but that are intrusive and persistent in my head regarding ‘how I spend my time’.
*** i.e. The joy of making and wishing to publish videos is a different/separate phenomenon than the experience of ‘being on youtube’. Youtube the platform is increasingly difficult to navigate in a steady manner. It sucks up so much time and energy (to post AND to sift/watch) that is better spent actually sketching or sewing or…literally anything else.
**** By which I mean both that I explicitly converted to a Pagan paradigm and that I adopted the term “witch” (entailing daily acts of witchcraft) just before Lughnasadh of 2017. I had written college papers on the Morrígan, comparative myth, medieval and early modern mysticism, religious commentary, and crafted my life away with art and clothes and fairy wings for YEARS at that point. But in 2017 I stopped running from ‘the label’.
Time for some #spooky #autumnal #fallvibes! Featuring tarot and witchy shit. Call me crazy, but I think there’s something in this group of concepts – something creatively stimulating at least!
Decks featured:
The Somnia Tarot by Nicolas Bruno
The Deviant Moon Tarot (Paradoxical edition) by Patrick Valenza
Two books that strike me as worth reading in tandem with tarot are “Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke and “Titus Groan” by Mervyn Peake. It would be tempting to consider picking a specific deck to work with in each case but there might be the risk of over associating that deck with those books afterwards. An idea to be approached with caution, perhaps.
I seem to have regained my ability to read fiction for the first time, properly, in over a decade! There are many reasons for this but paramount for the purpose of this blog post is that I have been allowing myself to define my own terms for my taste. I know what I’m looking for in a work of fiction at this current stage in my life and I am allowing myself to articulate that and pursue it.*
Titus Groan
I can’t vouch yet for the further Gormenghast novels (the rest in the trilogy or any of the further works – short stories, the ‘rediscovered’ book written by Peake’s wife and so on) but I suspect they would all make an interesting study with tarot.
As I finished Titus Groan one specific card leaped to mind: Justice. Justice, in any system (meaning whether you see it at the 8th or 11th Major Arcanum, I think it would apply).
From my admittedly limited experience, the Justice card will often get described as cosmically neutral. It’s not automatically synonymous with legal justice, or social justice, or anything anthropocentric in nature. It’s often viewed as possessing the kind of neutrality that registers to the subjective human mind (and the collective) as “cruel”… unfeeling.
What is interesting about that, however, is that in any given reading where we receive the Justice card, we rely on the cards surrounding it to provide context. In Titus Groan there is a bewildering amount of heavily detailed (deliciously rotten) context. There is a total pointed stylistic preoccupation with the minutiae of a given moment from many vantage points. The book doesn’t really have chapters as such but the manner in which it is structured seems aimed at giving the reader a very specific kind of whiplash…and gaslights you about it too. It oscillates between the estate/house of Gormenghast occupying all our ideas and definition of ‘the world’ or ‘the cosmos’… gets us deeply invested even in the movements of its motes of dust (so often likened to starlight) let alone the emotional landscape of it’s morose and Bosch-like characters… only to zoom far out, like a choppy jump cut, to the world outside the walls; full of archetypal passion plays, journeys, trade routes, forests, and mythic relationships. Every switch takes only a page or so to re-frame your sense of perspective and proportion. It warps your sense of time and space in a deeply compelling way. To be back inside the walls of Gormenghast is almost to forget the narrative of only a few pages prior.
And none of this sense of “loyalty” that you develop in the reading is particularly well rewarded if what you’re hoping for is Justice in its more desirable or “fair” aspects. “Loyalty” is actually an explicit theme in the book but it’s presented as a lived reality, an arch concept, and a dysfunctional source of festering rot. Justice lurks behind it all. Past a certain point, every page feels like a waiting game and you, the reader, bear witness to sociopathic plots and action with no clear idea of the deeper motivations or drive behind specific characters …other than as projection of the rotten dysfunction of Gormenghast itself. Gormenghast (with its own societal ideas of “Justice”) is the living breathing house that is THE world but is also only one small estate inhabited by the rigid seemingly endless loyalty to pattern, ritual, and heritage. What is structurally integral and societally established IS ‘just’ and ‘good’… right?
If this rendering of Justice makes you feel rather enclosed and sweaty, I think its supposed to. It’s also weirdly sympathetic though. I felt continually rather caught and called out!
In Gormenghast, Justice is communicated through sensory experience… a pendulous blotch of wine on white linen flashing in and out of the shadows… its details never relent but that’s the point: perspective becomes acrobatic!
All of this is enhanced, of course, by the fact that Titus Groan is only the first book – as far as I am aware – for the convenience of publication. Weren’t the Gormenghast materials intended as one long work of fiction? As the book opens and closes it feels very much like you have only read a near 400 page ‘first act’.
The Justice card stood out to me throughout not, per se, in its conspicuous absence (though… kind of) but more because the book just screams out that you don’t even know what Justice IS. You are just as limited and ridiculous and totally absurd and strange as any other character in this narrative.
Piranesi
With its overt thematic play on labyrinths, Piranesi feels similar in genre to Gormenghast. The writing is much more direct, the method for telling the story is totally different than Gormenghast. But the tarot also would make a great tool for exploring the book. And the book would do the same for exploring tarot.
What is our concept of Justice in Piranesi? I’m reminded in a way of the development of mind, voice, and perspective in the works of Albert Camus: the Stranger, the Plague, and the Fall. Each has their sort of hints at the next, archetypal touchstones… anchor points.
In Piranesi there are many deliberately archetypal presences. The albatross is a purposeful one, both real and full of reference. The point, perhaps, is that the literary reference is what makes it real to begin with. The statues take on roles almost of silent guides, warnings, or companions. Popes, charioteers, cloaked figures shining lamps in the dark or perpetually pouring vessels of water, nature goddesses, fauns, personifications of becoming, personifications of time or of youth and innocence and so on. There is explicit divination in the book too of course which I found totally riveting… “ornithomancy”.
I loved the book SO intensely and, as is often the case with me when I really get into something, I read it in a single evening. It’s not long and it’s characterised by a clear and open writing style (unlike Gormenghast) so it wasn’t difficult to just sort of… flow through it. It’s also very deliberately structured and that the reader might ‘flow’ through it’s clear and segmented ‘structure’ is VERY apropos and clearly purposeful.
The way it depicted divination, spiritiual knowing, and total quietude felt uncanny in that it reflected so well how I think and feel about these things. Even down to the use of certain phrases – which, of course, to my mind is the act of affirming the efficacy of witchcraft… To me, it’s not a “what are the chances!?” perspective. It’s a “but of course” perspective. If you’re engaging with it and pursuing what you care about than many aspects of it will feel shared even as they differ in various details.
That’s how we get to talk about things like thought forms, egregores, shared culture, collective gnosis, and build systems like tarot!
But the book also shows us the dark abusive side of this. In my opinion, it makes for GREAT reading if you are already a little familiar with the history of Western Occultism… some of the specifics of societies like the Golden Dawn, figures like Aleister Crowley and so on. I’m sure the more you know the more you’d notice is snuck into the pages of Clarke’s fiction, but a baseline acquaintance will do! The book absolutely ‘goes there’ in looking at the dark underbelly of magic and the occult, particularly in its collective iterations. It asks what each of us become, what ‘being’ is vs what ‘doing’ is… What the evil, the ambiguous, the perpetrator, the victim, the isolated neutral, and the open work of having curiosity all are.
Justice sits behind all of this too. And both books don’t ‘answer’ our feelings on it, in my opinion, mainly because the Justice card/archetype isn’t a question. A tarot reading is often predicated on the formation of a question but, paradoxically, Justice isn’t an answer without that subjective context… the role of the reader and/or querent.
Neither of these books answer anything or even exist unless it be in the moment of interaction with their reader(s) and in so far as their readers share how they experienced them.
Okay, so maybe …two Major Arcana: Justice… and the World. But again, no answers. Only contemplation after the provision of context.
Have you read either of these books?
If you have (or if you haven’t and you don’t mind spoilers) let me know what you think! Would you pick the same cards or something else entirely?
~ Saoirse.
* I think the proliferation of blogs, aesthetic terms, and the existence of booktube have helped with this. As a ‘fantasy lover’, back in the day, there was a lot of pressure to ‘read everything you can get your hands on’ … which has never possible for me. Now I feel more able to just say what I’m aiming to read and why!
At the moment, I’m in the midst of a massive change. Posts and so on are going to be sparse for a little while…
However, I want to offer some thoughts and updates on how I have been interfacing with the world and raise some perspectives that, honestly, I’ll never be ‘finished’ exploring.
The best feeling of sanctuary is well before sunrise.
Ever since I was little I have been obsessed with the minutiae of what it’s like to live creatively. Have you ever read a favourite book (in my case, mostly fantasy) and then seen a photo (sometimes at the back of the book with a short bio) of ‘the author at home’. Or perhaps you have stumbled across a photograph, blog post, or a short video essay that portrays ‘the artist in studio’. Have you ever seen this and thought I need to know how they got to that point in their life?
Cardboard cutouts I made years ago of Terri Windling and Ursula K. Le Guin. I used to tuck them in my planner and bring them with me everywhere!
I don’t mean ‘art for art’s sake’ but rather something very much embodied in the world and part of it’s extended network of sensibilities. Something that interfaces with real ecosystems or socio-economic environments and real time periods.
Is there any purer form of magic than the little glimpses you get of those lives? I don’t think they require endless descriptive detail because the idea is not to replicate them. You have to make your own for it to work and that’s what witchcraft *feels* like to me. It’s what I spend most of my youtube channel, this blog, my whole life pursuing.
Recent reading right before a VERY intense first time experience.
In my case, it has output that others can experience because I feel the creativity must go somewhere but I’ve never been the best at keeping track of my portfolio (and, indeed, I was always rubbish at tracking my repertoire when I was a performing violinist too. #myexecutivefunctionsucks)
But this is why I’ll so often mention something in detail, something relatively mundane but *just* off the beaten track (debatable) and then go “see? Witchcraft!”
And the reading AFTER that experience to get a sense of where it was going.
I love scenes in fantasy stories** that describe the seemingly mundane elements of a witch’s living space. Let’s say you’re in the Brooklyn apartment belonging to your aunt (umpty times removed). She has a gas hob that she lights with matches. There’s a colourful pot of coffee on. A fruit bowl sits on the coffee table below a daffy painting of old lovers in clashing robes. You wonder why their necks are so long… A cat lounges near an old pile of yarn or perhaps on a tatty armchair tucked in the corner. You look out the kitchen window to see she’s let the black-eyed susan vine overtake the fire escape …something looks different about the city though. “Honey, pick a different window” or “Sweetheart, come look at this old book of poems… people go mad looking out there too long.”
A reading about a specific… quandary and lived/sensory question.
Is it just because of the city chaos? Or is that the road to an Otherworld? What’s the difference between personal eccentricity and a real witch? Who gets to make that call?
… I’ve taken to washing my hair once every three weeks now instead of the usual two. I’m combing it, which I never thought possible with curls, but it seems that the key lies in using a wooden comb. I oil it with olive oil mixed with peppermint, fenugreek seeds, and rosemary (which I cooked in it myself. Magical intentions included.) Recently, I changed up my henna mixture for colouring too… the henna kept oxidizing far too dark and I prefer a lighter pinker red. I did a whole bunch of research on it and ended up with henna, catnip, and madder root! There are medieval recipes for colouring hair but I went with modern recommendations made by those interested in retaining length. Just in case.
So now I’ve got even more of a medieval-inspired head! Though I have no idea if it will register on camera over time, I’m very happy with the difference.
I’m making myself a new (to me) type of corset. And I’m going so very slow with it … partly because most of my time is eaten up with something else non-negotiable at the moment. But progress is happening! Hopefully, I’ll like it? I’m learning so much in the process though.
I’m still working on my current jumper project… historically inspired with billowing sleeves. And yarn the colour of crow feathers (black, but with many tiny multicolour fibres within so it has the optic effect of shimmering.) I can’t wait to finish it!!!
In other lights it looks more blue green!
I’ve also migrated over to the dumb phone life. I’d wanted to do this for a long time and had steadily uninstalled as much as I could from my old Samsung (having left a certain soul-sucking fruit-named empire behind years ago!) But the thing was still such a drain on my life.
My internet is based in my hotspot so my dumphone does have that capability. It’s the Matrix phone, for anyone wondering. A Nokia 8110 4G – and oddly it’s WAY faster than the old hotspot. I theorised to my techie BIL it might be that I couldn’t entirely keep my smartphone from doing other things in the background. He agreed.
In the absence of so much stimulation elsewhere, I have been getting better at aimlessly browsing less. And my witchcraft has immediately felt more real. More present. It’s colours are more vibrant. My relationship with deity has been reviving. Not that it was ‘dead’ but I had felt like I was fighting some kind of film that lay over it before I could really access it. That is much less the case now and I anticipate it changing further.
I mean, for example, Macha and Badb make an appearance masquerading as artists and tarot readers… They call themselves ‘Melodie Moonlight’ and ‘Breda Fairfoul’. One has blue hair, the other red. They ride a motorbike. They chew tobacco and smoke cigars. They file enamel handcuffs with their teeth and cry acid tears! What more could you want!
The way I keep describing it is, “I feel like I can see things better.” It’s not the best analogy but it will suffice for now.
Which brings us back to the magic in the mundane. Call it aesthetics, but I want to make real what I feel and perceive to be important. It takes sketches, notes, and even pin boards just as much as it takes altar work, moon phases, or wax drippings. Magic is art, art is sensory, and art and magic are visual-tactile-aural living.
The end.
(Or the beginning?)
~ Saoirse.
PS. I’ve been re-reading a lot of old favourites… Hounds of the Morrigan, The Left Hand of Darkness and so on… but I’ve also been embarking on a shocking amount of new stuff for me! Movies I’d never seen… The Crow (1994), What We Do In the Shadows, Witches of Eastwick, Beetlejuice (1988)****. I have THOUGHTS about all of this that links into what I’ve laid out above. Hopefully, I’ll get to post again soon!
** Urban fantasy is great for this but I can think of a few Patricia A. McKillip moments or Patricia C. Wrede moments and many others that do this really well too.
*** The header image is just a bunch of old photos of me aged approx. 16-21.
