JOURNAL: Invoking the Goddess

Within, without, above, below....... where is the Goddess to be found? In my entrails, carried within the stream of my blood, in the darkness of the pupil of my right eye, or my left? Or is the Goddess found in you? Can She be found within you? male you? You greet me with persistent silence and I begin to seek you in the night, faraway friend of my soul. Shall I be insistent as wind when angered, as insistent as pounding surf, as the aeons since we first grew into each other? from within the witch I think I shall awake the enchantress until you can deny me no more, until I am a fervour in the light that touches you in the dawn of your awakening. Until your breath suddenly grows shallow and you inhale my scent or drown, until the memory of me is etched on the inner surface of your eyelids. And this is not love......

JOURNAL: re-membering

re-membering: a use of words which I learnt from Dianic feminists, to squeeze out the juice of meanings. To re member is to put together the limbs of the past into a coherent whole once more. I have the right to define my own use of language and to use it as a tool for my personal creation.

re-member: a vine harbour in the garden, beneath a rug and cushions and the makings of an altar on a purple cloth. Bunches of white and black grapes hang above. Dionysus not the God of choice. An athame: sylvan within its scabbard (miniature sword) and flowers engraved on the hilt. An athame of plenty, of fullness, of birth. Perhaps strange for a cutting tool, but true.

Now I sit beneath the same vines and remember that night with its moon incandescent in the sky, low and pregnant with light. The warmth of late summer. The joy of the occassion. Searing pain for quite a few seconds, then the mouth sucking at my finger as if life depended on it. Night without, full sun within. The die cast, the course run, the commitment made.

Now to bed, with the scent of jasmine entering my window and scenting the blue room as it did then, as it will tomorrow and tomorrow.

JOURNAL: brick by brick

The cottage is fertile, within its womb grows a basement room, a little cave where energy is stored, where memories linger, where layers between realities are thin. The shelves on two walls are lined with books, the kind of books visiting relatives are not meant to see, oils with little labels and dates. A small table bears an egyptian shrine, as it used to before in another place. Isis and her crown have pride of place. On the floor, rugs which remember the shapes of two bodies united in a quest of the spirit across time, across space. A tiny window at ceiling height lets in some air, a few stray sun beams which just manage entry past its metal bars. On the ground, strewn rosemary for remembrance and lavender for blessed sleep.

I wonder where hobbits do go in the dark of winter, their slow, heavy bodies well covered against the cold. Perhaps they too dwell in dark warm places lit by candles.

Poem: riding night mares

In the dark, in the dark which is inviting and full-scented
my body lies prone, a freedom of sorts, to abandon it

you enter, by what path I know not
since I blocked the paths with quarried stone
and the river of feeling that led here
I let it bleed dry
so that you might never sail its waters in the warmth of the night

before thought, before awareness of myself
there is awareness of you, of scent and skin
of flesh different to mine
and of blood which makes my heart beat fast

your unique signature: that the blood in your veins
makes my heart beat as my blood makes your heart beat
the occult significance of blood in a neat resume

neater than jagged piercing

JOURNAL: The earth

Soil. Clay in places, overly dry in others, moist and dark. Even the earth seeks balance in my life. Balance it shall find. The garden prospers and soon another set of hands to prepare the place and to plant the new trees chosen for shade and for healing. Among them, quercus ilex, an evergreen oak with its male and female flowers and perennial leaves. It shall be the centrepiece of my little grove of sacred trees, together with drimys winterii (Canelo o Foye). The tree of peace among the Mapuche and the tree from which the kultrun is made, the sacred drum of the Machis. A meeting of European and Mapuche trees, to provide a space in which to retreat and listen to the voices of ancestors, by and by. When I am an old woman I will find shade there. There my ashes shall be spread.

JOURNAL: The garden

The herbs gathered at Litha hang now dry from the oak log which holds up my worksurface in the kitchen. Soon to be put away properly labelled for winter use. The herbs are flourishing in the garden since their trimming, the mint particularly fine and in full bloom. They shall be used for magical workings rather than health, not enough to go round.

Tonight before sunset I cut some and also some malvarosa and rosemary for a posy for a love altar, crowned by two very fine pink hortensia heads. Placed in my bedroom, by a window, and accompanied by some hand-rolled pure wax candles made by a former love, they should be very effective in bringing the joy of summer into my little abode. Now the exact shape is a matter for the powers that be.

Today a day of high, warm winds that swept the garden and entered into my bedroom all day long until sunset. Then calm set in.

JOURNAL: pain

Blue to counter the fiery red of pain.....nothing as exhilarating as the feeling of being pain-less after great physical pain.