Greetings to all, at the precipice of Winter! I know you have begun to follow us recently, and want to hear about upcoming events. We have been very much looking forward to meeting in person, and now Harford County—where Faerewood is located—has crept back up into the Very High risk category, with cases rising. So I guess we’ll wait…some more.

We hope this latest rise of the pandemic will subside before our Between the Worlds/ Sacred Space conference (http://sacredwheel.org/BTW2022/) scheduled for the end of January, and that we can all be together once more. In the meantime, we wait for light’s return and Yule, and work magick for our health and safety. Look for an announcement about Brigid/Imbolc before then.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive notice of all upcoming Keepers events, go to the Contact Us page and choose “Add me to the Mailing List” from the Subject drop-down.  We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Here is a brief visualization to help you improve your body’s defenses against disease.  It was inspired by Laura Tempest Zakroff’s post on Patheos (link: Immunity Booster Sigil). The text of the visualization will be found below.

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Hold it for a moment, and open your awareness to the importance of breath in your life. Exhale, and visualize how breath carries the waste products of your metabolism out of you, and into the world where it will be recycled, and nourish other life. Inhale, and see not only the air, but the blue-green force of life itself entering you, beginning its circulation throughout the whole of your being.

Open your eyes and gaze at the sigil. Now, holding this image within you, see the sigil hanging in the air before you. As you breathe, see how the sigil attunes to your breath, and begins to glow brighter and brighter in blue, the color of Air. Blue, the color of the Throat Chakra.

Now, watch as the sigil begins to granulate, becoming a matrix of tiny copies of itself. With each breath, the tiny sigils divide like cells into even smaller sigils. Your vision is vibrant with powerful, microscopic beings of light whose purpose is to protect and heal, to balance the force of your immune system, bolstering it if it is weak, and moderating it if it is overly strong. See the sigils as living beings, filled with dynamic life force. Each is an individual, but they work in harmony to enrich your health.

As you breathe, the beneficial beings are carried into your lungs, mingling with the air. They flow into your blood, and circulate throughout your body. They surround each of your cells, and glow with protective light, available to ward against infection.

Now, see the sigil begin to move toward you. It enters your aura and finds its home there. It will be there to guard you. Remember it, and use it to strengthen your body’s wards whenever you have need.

Take three deep breaths, then seal this work with a single “Aum”.

So mote it be!

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The weather this week—cool and rainy—disguises the strong upwelling of energy from the depths in a fog, hiding it from our sight and leaving us with a vaguely unsettled feeling of dread. It’s worth your time to push the fog away, and center yourself in the energy of change, balancing on the crest and riding that wave. So many things this week seem to be pointing us in a dangerous, scary direction. The Dark moon is the time to step back a pace and observe, allowing your heart to slow and your breathing to relax, and looking at what is. Look with the eyes of the Bull, slow and stolid, immensely powerful. As a beast of 2,000 pounds, you need fear nothing, and can make your judgements from a place of your comfort and ease.

You find yourself in a clearing in the woods.  It is night, and the clear sky is washed with a spray of stars.  You turn to face the East, noticing that the darkness at the wood’s edge is slowly changing.  Within moments, the ruddy limb of the Full Moon breaks above the horizon, silhouetting the still-bare trees of early Spring.

Moment by moment, the Moon’s face is revealed.  It is enormous—overwhelming.  The high Moon of midnight seems small and manageable by comparison with this brooding hulk.  It is red, stark, and powerful.

We all know the Full of the Moon to be a time of madness.  Order breaks down, restraint is abandoned.  Creatures of dark legend rise up to do unspeakable deeds.  Our own inner demons feel the Moon’s tidal pull and we howl and dance—or cower in fear.

The sign of Scorpio is in play this night.  The forces of sex and death, magnified by the Lunar lens rise in a shadow play against the wall of our consciousness.  What is it that you hide from yourself?  Does the thought of your fragile mortality hold you from following your dreams?  Does the specter of unfulfilled desire choke your free expression?  Now is the time to face this!  The Moon, driven by the power of this moment, is poised to pull your darkness into the light, just as it pulls the tides of the oceans.  Will you respond?  Will you let your waters rise?

The magnetic pull, the rising force of the Moon draws you forward.  As the the globe advances above the trees, you feel yourself pulled upward, lifting off of the ground and into the sky!  Higher and higher you travel, and as your body is pulled, so are the depths of your soul.  The creatures that have lived within your darkness for years find an opening in your heart and—release!  That which has been hidden is now seen clearly, and the joy of this vision bursts within you.  You are free, and it is a freedom of your own making.  Every fiber of your being rejoices!

Slowly, the ecstasy of the moment subsides.  You settle to earth once more, and begin the journey that will take you from this place of magick, back into the life you live day to day.  But the days that follow will not be the same as the ones that came before; you have joined with the powers that live within.  You have done your Work, and are transformed.

Listen to the audio version of this meditation:

For further reading: Full Moon in Scorpio: Beneath the Facade

As walkers on the Wiccan path, we are regularly challenged to change.  We know well the words, “She changes everything she touches”, for the Goddess is the very embodiment of the concept of change, and Her power to change doesn’t leave a single thing in the Universe untouched.  This, of course, includes you.

Imagine change in this way: A large stone sits on the side of a hill, and you are responsible for moving it.  It’s fairly easy to see that moving the stone uphill is going to be much harder than moving it downhill.  If the stone is embedded in the earth, this will increase the force needed to move it and if the earth is wet, it will be harder still.  As you can see, the need to change is always surrounded by a variety of conditions that make the change easier or more difficult.  A wise person takes care to learn the conditions they face when making a change, and modifies their plans in accordance.

This night, the forces around us are strongly influenced by the place of the Moon in the heavens.  It is the Dark Moon, about to blossom into the New Moon; the waning phase ends and waxing begins.  This, in itself, is a powerful aid to change.  The phase of the Moon is but one piece of the puzzle, though.  Where it sits within the wheel of stars, and how it interacts with the other planets is a big factor in the power of the Moon right now.  It is in Aries, an active sign ruled by the planet Mars.  It’s as if you’ve been given a lever to move that rock.

Knowing that you have a powerful force available for change makes it extremely important that you choose your actions carefully.  Imagine sticking that lever under the rock and giving the heave-ho—only to watch it tumble down hill and crush your car!  While we have the quiet of the Dark Moon to aid us, take this opportunity to delve deep within yourself and take an honest look at the patterns in your life that trip you up and hold you back time after time.  It’s very difficult to face these—they lie within the shadow self and do their best to elude the light.  If you find that you can’t root out these shadow traits at this moment, then use the force of the Aries Moon to seal the resolve to ask for help.  This is difficult work, and is best done with the assistance of someone you trust.

If you are able to come face to face with a pattern that doesn’t serve you, or an aspect of your personality that you chose to shut down at some point in your past, now is a good time to use your magickal skills to craft a ritual or spell for a change in this pattern or a repair of the broken connection, charging this work with the Moon’s energy.  The time to act is at hand.  Don’t let it slip away.

For some excellent words on the astrology surrounding this Moon, please read Diotima Mantinea’s blog post, Don’t Go Back To Sleep: New Moon in Aries.

At your altar, you stare into a silvery bowl filled with water, shining by the light of the Full Moon.  The surface shivers as you breathe upon it, and as the ripples still, the bowl expands to become a large, circular mirror.

Your reflection in the mirror is sharp and clear, allowing you to see every detail of who you are in your day-to-day self.  Out of the corner of your eye, you catch a movement within the mirror, and then, another to the opposite side.  Within moments, the spaces reflected beside you, above you and behind you are filled with a myriad beings of many shapes and sizes  Some are the Shining Ones who inhabit the realms beyond our sight, realms that are truly but a hair’s breadth away from our own, did we but know it.  Others are parts of you that you cannot see under ordinary circumstances, but with the aid of the mirror, and the Moon, they reveal themselves to you. The beings acknowledge you, and you them, and you all continue to gaze into the mirror.

The light of the Moon begins to dim.  Within a brief span, its face is covered as if by a veil, the glow diminished to a dull blood orange.  Oddly, though, you can see as clearly by this light as at the fullness—perhaps more so.  The details of the eclipsed Moon are shown in sharp relief.  That which was washed out by the glare of the Sun is now revealed.

Returning your gaze to yourself, you notice that you are now revealed by a similar light.  You notice the damage that time has done, not merely to the surface self, but the one that lies beneath.  The hurts that caused you to shut down first one part of yourself, then another and another.  See them now revealed as motes of light, as doors that have opened to the strange light of the occluded Moon.  These could well be fearful places, but this night, you are shown these wounds in a different way, one that causes the waters of your compassion to rise within you.  Each one of us contains not only the wounds of the world, but the way of healing them, as well.  And as we learn of the hurt places, we can open our hearts to them, and make them a part of us once more.  More than this, we can act as gentle mirrors to help others find their hidden pain, and learn the path toward wholeness.

Now the veil begins to withdraw.  Moment by moment, the Moonlight grows brighter.  In this growing light, you can see not just the being you are, but the being you are becoming, the Shining One that lives within you.  Nurture this flame, and remember always that you contain the seeds of a better future.

On opening the Holly Chalice for our Dark Moon visioning this night, I hear the moan and roar of the highway.  As I shut my eyes, it follows me down to the Lake of Visioning like howling ghosts in the darkness. The water is illuminated by the setting Sun, now moving into eclipse as it  conjuncts the Moon in the sign of Pisces. Boundaries collapse and our Shadows leap out towards us in the gathering darkness. Will we greet them as friends and allies, or run from them in a panic?

I can see that the lake edge has become a wide and endless track; cars, trucks, and motorcycles race around it in ever-faster circles, rushing to find the exit that will never appear. The water throws back dancing, flame-like light, and the frightened hoard drive onward. Faster, ever faster.

Pisces dissolves us, and we become one. The track of cars becomes a ribbon of golden light and darkness, encircling the shining black lake.  Like a flow of lava, or the primal pulse of light and darkness.  Fear, anger, and pain transform into a partnership of duality, and we write our stories from a place of power and hope.  Here is the turning point; we can step through the frightening image into a world of our own making, a world powered by that which we had feared the most.

Take a breath, and the vision dissolves back into the flicker of candles as we return to our quiet home. The soft breath of sleeping dog and cats, and the bubbling of a pot on the stove holds the traffic at bay for a little while. Remember the vision of your own making, and hold it in your heart.

In mid-September of 2011, some members of the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, plus a couple of friends, took a bus tour around Ireland.  Our primary focus was to visit as many stone circles, dolmens, passage tombs, and other sacred sites from the ancient Celtic world as possible during our ten days.  It was, for many of us, the trip of a lifetime, as well as wonderful time spent with good friends.

One evening, toward the end of our trip, we were treated to an extraordinary visit with author and storyteller Eddie Lenihan.  I was fortunate to have a recording device with me, and recorded more than an hour of his stories.  Here it is for your listening pleasure, and for the sake of the magick in this world.

Books by Eddie Lenihan:

Meeting the Other Crowd

Irish Tales of Mystery & Magic

Devil is an Irishman