Category: Magick and ritual

Living on the Edge

Happy Alban Arthan all! Winter Solstice is upon us and the light is returning. It doesn’t feel much like it right now, still so dark and cold, but slowly, slowly, minute by minute, the days begin to stretch out until before we know it, it’s Spring Equinox and we’re all about the light and the sun again.

As discussed in my last post, I was going to do a ritual today to mark my Irish citizenship and root into the land I now call home. I completed it this morning and it brought to the fore a thread I have been tentatively unwinding and following recently.

A black and white photo of items on a rug on the floor. The items are a cast iron pot with smoke coming out of it, a lit candle, a lighter, an Irish passport, a large stone, a homemade wand and two pots with dried Vervain and Meadowsweet respectively.
The ritual begins!

But before we follow that thread, we need to rewind back in time slightly, after my accident, one of the things I lost was my friends. Let me tell you, when the shit hits the fan, everyone disappears. There are a stoic few who remain to climb the mountain with you and they are priceless, but the majority float away like dust in the wind. There are many reasons for this but the biggest one is that they just can’t deal with whatever monstrous debacle you are going through. This was a hard lesson for me initially, I got promises of ‘keeping in touch’ that were quite frankly….bollocks.

I’m over it now, I’ve accepted the fragility of humans and our relationships and to be honest the years of human-free time I’ve had in recovery have been much needed. I have two close friends (who are both in England so we connect via computer), my partner and our two lovely doggy children and that’s the extent of my social circle.

Now, here we come back to the thread, I’ve recently been feeling a need for community, I try to dip into communities that are in areas of interest for me and every time I’ve come out disappointed. Especially when I’ve gone into places where I’ve expected more enlightened folk and found it full of…well…wankers.

I’ve always been an edgewalker, even when very young, I didn’t want to fit in, I couldn’t fit in. I wanted to do things differently or the opposite way to everyone else. This has been a constant motif into adulthood, I’m a weirdo, I like weird things; High strangeness, magic, the paranormal, Druidry, Veganism, talking about death, graveyards, folklore and tarot. I’m also politically left (not centre left, not liberal, proper left). Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that people exist out there who also like these things, I’ve found a lot of lovely connections on Mastodon (open source social media place, come find me at Lauren the Hermit) but when it comes to actual flesh and blood, standing in front of me and talking, it is non existent. I know, I know, I live in the middle of nowhere in a place that is still coming to terms with the trauma caused by its own civil war and colonisation and ‘ruled’ (I say that whilst laughing) by out of touch, shouty, older, white Christians. People like me are well hidden and scattered to the four winds and finding like minds is hard.

As a result, I’ve resigned myself (quite happily) to the fact that I’m in a small gang and that’s ok.

Until recently that is.

I have just finished the Foundation training to be a Death Doula, an experience that I went into with a dash of my usual cynicism and with my barriers up. It was around week seven on the course that my walls began to break down, the class watched a short video of a dramatisation of someone’s death in a hospital. It showed the differing reactions of their loved ones and the aftermath as they lovingly prepared the body after death. It was soundtracked by this

https://youtu.be/avabPY3XgRc

And I just lost it, full on snotty crying that burst out of me. A triggered memory from my recovery when I played this song all the time mixed with a feeling of “when I die, there’ll be nobody there” a revelation that I need community. Death is not done in a vacuum, it is having a community around us that helps us to have a good death. The funny thing about that moment is that sharing my vulnerability with my classmates allowed my heart to open like a flower. From then onwards, for the rest of the course, I was open and let the love I felt for that community flow.

This brings me back to the beginning of this post, during my ritual today whilst I journeyed, the importance of community was hammered home, whilst seeking to root into my ancestry, the land that is home and fully embracing my Irish heart I know I need to find community here. I was told by voices linked to the land that it was time to come out from under my cloud of safety and sadness and to begin finding joy. To be free-hearted and to stop taking things so damn seriously. I have had to be serious for so long, to recover, to heal my soul, to protect my fragile heart that there’s a part of me now just dying to be let loose with abandon, a part that was always pushed down (by me and others).

This Solstice with its new beginnings and returning light is a perfect time to begin this new path ( the fools journey has been discovered!) this coming year will be a time for the Hermit to forge community, in joy and in love.

The Rite and the Ritual

It’s cold. Friggin’ baltic as we say over here. It feels like Winter proper. A welcome feeling because the past few Winters have been too warm, making us feel season-less and lost.

Winter Solstice, Alban Arthan is approaching. A time I have grown to love as I evolved from my immature, pre-trauma, sun lover into an appreciator of dark and The Shadow. Solstice is a time of beginnings as the Sun returns to us again. The longest night, a time of stillness and silence before the wheel tips once more into lengthening light. I’m choosing this years Solstice to mark my Irish Citizenship with a ritual. Usually, there is an official ceremony in Ireland where you receive your certificate and take an oath of fidelity, but due to COVID-19 my acceptance came with a bit of a quiet whimper. A brown envelope in the post in December 2021 and a quick photo in front of the fire.

Black and white photo of a smiling woman, holding up a piece of paper in one hand and giving a thumbs up sign with the other. She is in a living room in a house with a large picture on the wall behind her and a lit fire in the fireplace.
Hooray!

This suited my Hermit tendencies, a couple of days away with hundreds of other people at a formal ceremony is not my thing at all, but what it has done is make my transition into my Irish identity feel lacking somehow. My Irish roots are very important to me, my family, the O’Donnells from Donegal fled the Gorta Mor (Great Hunger) and ended up in Scotland and then sometime later Northern England. I subconsciously found my way back to Ireland and it is now my beloved home. I feel rooted here, reconnected to my ancestors whose trauma and subsequent uprooting is in my DNA. I have never felt ‘English’ and always like a fish out of water when I was there. I have journeyed to meet my ancestors and they are glad I am back, I am home and healing the relationship they had with the land.

This brings me to the importance of ritual and how in Western Society in general we have lost the ability to mark rites of passage in any meaningful way. We look at transitions as yearly birthdays and New Year. They get celebrated but usually in a pretty perfunctory way. Yet there are so many transitions and rites of passage in our lives, childhood to adulthood, old house to new house, a change of relationship or job, deaths, births, traumas, illness, the stages of menopause and transitions in our sexuality and gender identity. The ability to look deeply at these events and to mark them is something, I feel, that is fundamental to our psyche. We too easily let things pass and wash over us without marking and processing, that it becomes part of the soup that sits in our subconscious begging to be acknowledged and when we don’t, we can become overwhelmed and over wrought.

I love ritual, my spiritual practices over the years have allowed me to look at ritual and it’s importance. Ritual for me, is a charging of the batteries, it focuses energy and I always feel fabulous after I’ve taken the time to craft a solo ritual and then perform it. Ritual doesn’t have to be complicated or involve lots of trinkets and gee gaws, or be held in a sacred well or inside an ancient cave. It can be done quickly indoors or in the shower and sometimes all you need is some paper and a pencil or a single candle and some alone time to sit and journey and process

What delights we uncover when we enter our internal landscape and explore. We are not confined by our existence on the material plane, we can meet whatever or whomever we want and ask questions, listen to wisdom and enter places not possible with our solid, lumpy human bodies.

So, here we are thinking about my ritual for the Solstice, a time where I’ll enter the liminal space to bond with the land I call home and thank it for its beauty and its acceptance, where I hope to hear the voices of generations past who have lived, loved and struggled here, who will hopefully receive and welcome the tie to their home I have now created.

Creating meaningful ritual is the way of the Hermit. It is a door to a deeper sense of self that we miss and is sorely needed. Try it.

A wide black and white photo of a woman in la long cotton robe standing in the middle of a garden in front of a small standing stone. Surrounding the garden is a vast expanse of sky and undulating fields and hedges.
A ritual from this Summer. I’m lucky to be surrounded by this beauty.