Black Wattle Nemeton

Gallo-Germanic polytheism and druidry in Australia. Devotee of Heimdall. I also worship Veles and various Continental Celtic and Germanic deities. Queer as hell and very tired. Formerly torchandhailstone. posts for beginners | BWN on Wordpress | online shrine to Heimdall | online shrine to Veles

[magnoliamyrrh]

Cave paintings from Magura Cave, Bulgaria, estimated to be around 10k-8k years old depicting animals and people, hunting, ritual dances, and deities

[elbiotipo]

why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

[elbiotipo]

If you read ecology books printed in the 70s and 80s, they were absolutely convinced that whales and tigers would not survive the century. There's a whole plot in Star Trek about how whales are extinct actually. Here in Argentina, we were sure that yaguaretés would have gone extinct. It was thought that rainforests would be forever lost, because there was no way that such complex ecosystems would be restored.

Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?

We've becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.

I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.

Millions of people are working on this. You can learn about it, perhaps even become one of them. Or be a pointless doomer in my ask box. Your choice.

[crabussy]

if there are people who care, it's never a lost cause. at one point, kākāpō, a nocturnal flightless parrot species from aotearoa, were thought to be entirely extinct for decades. until 1977, where booming calls from males were heard on the small island of whenua hou. now, thanks to people who care so much they dedicated their lives to caring, kākāpō numbers are close to 300. despite the setbacks. despite the small gene pool causing infertility and health problems. people cared so fucking much that they survived. this is one of COUNTLESS, countless similar stories. I'm studying ecology so that I can go into conservation and all around me, every day, I see people who care enough to put years of their lives into learning about and solving environmental problems. I don't know man. hope isn't just some nebulous thing. it's tangible if you do something with it.

[kedreeva]

Tim Wong saw the decline of the pipeline swallowtail butterfly, and dedicated himself to providing habitat and raising babies, and it worked.

Spix's Macaws were extinct in the wild for 70 years, and now captive breeding and conservation groups have reintroduced a small population (with more on the way) and there are babies being successfully raised in the wild again.

And what else is there, but hope? We exist for the grace of hope. Those who have lost all hope don't stay here. If you are here to send an ask like this, it is not because you have given up, it's that you are hoping someone will show you that that hope is worth having.

It is!! It always is!!

There will be good things and if you cannot find them, make them! The time will pass anyway, you can choose what to do with it, and so many, many people are choosing to try to help.

[coinin]

The Lord Howe Island rodent eradication project never fails to make me cry, it’s so beautiful.

The population of an entire island working together to eradicate every last rat and mouse to save the native bird populations. They had to trap a bunch of the birds and keep them in captivity so they wouldn’t be hurt by the rodenticides, and released them after the rodents were gone. Normal residents helped by phoning in tips whenever they saw rodents. And they did it. Lord Howe Island, last I read, remains rodent free, and the native bird populations are rebounding!

Acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer, both of which were terrifying specters of my childhood, have been largely dealt with. Ecosystems devastated by acid rain are also recovering.

We are making a difference!

[aetherograph]

In 1979, an audacious, expensive conservation project was begun to try and breed california condors in captivity toward being released into the wild again. This was considered useless and hopeless by many people, but many more people said we had to at least TRY.

In 1991, the first captive-raised condors were re-introduced to Big Sur, Pinnacles, and Bitter Creek.

In 2006, three months before I turned eighteen, the first wild pair of condors was seen nesting in Big Sur in over a hundred years. A hundred years.

We did that. We fixed it.

How about another example.

When my mom was small, in the 1960s, there were many, many days of the year she was not allowed outside. Days and days they had recess indoors, because the air was so poisonous to breathe. Here's an article about it, with some good pictures.

My mom was 13 in the picture on the left. She was 50 in the picture on the right.

In 1987, there were 27 California Condors in the world, all captive.

In 2024, there were 566.

369 of them fly free.

That happened within my lifetime, and I'm not even 40 yet.

When you lose hope, think of our stories we're telling you. Recount them to yourself like a prayer. That's what I do.

There are 369 California Condors flying free in the sky right now.

There is no more acid rain.

There is an ozone.

There are wild tigers.

There are still birds on Lord Howe Island.

There are 369 California Condors flying free.

[dragonfly-wings1]

Black footed ferrets were considered completely extinct in 1979. Then we found a single den in Wyoming in 1981. In 1996 it was classified as extinct in the wild.

By 2013, there were approximately 1,200 living wild, across 18 dens. Their numbers increase regularly, and while the face challenges due to habitat loss, climate change, and their limited genetic diversity, they're in a much better place than they were.

Because people cared, and they worked, and they fought to make things better.

[blackbearmagic]

one time I saw a photo of a skinned whale/dolphin flipper on reddit or something and I've just never recovered

there's just. A paw in there.

[gallusrostromegalus]

One of the most spiritually profound moments of my life was when I was sixish and at a natural history museum with my parents that had a whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.

So thanks dad, for pulling your shoulder a bit to show me that I am part of the universe. I love you too.

[morganathewitch]

Lush greenery.

[jasper-pagan-witch]

I wanna start discourse that isn't usually on the Witchblr Discourse Wheel of the Year. Everyone give me your controversial elemental opinions.

Mine is that I think a fifth element added on top of the Greek ones (air, earth, fire, water) is dumb because it gets positioned over the others instead of incorporated into the existing dynamics. Like a bad team leader that just got transferred to an existing team.

[stagkingswife]

I have another one! And give my first hot take I feel like I’m allowed to submit multiple because it’s in keeping with my theme.

Anyone not using the periodic table of elements as the basis of their elemental system is a coward. Get on my level.

[blackwattlenemeton]

Hmm bout to go try Runescape runes as my elements

[leupagus]

James Harrison, blood donor whose rare plasma saved millions of babies, dead at 88 | CNN

James Harrison, a prolific Australian blood donor famed for having saved the lives of more than two million babies, has died at age 88.

It's worth noting that there are some extraordinary people in the world who have been quietly doing the work for decades, and they should be celebrated with all the fervor that we denounce the villains. I first read about Harrison twenty-odd years ago, when he'd already been doing this for about fifty years, and this is one of those guys whose life can, indeed, be summed up by his headline.

James Harrison saved millions of lives. Millions. Not with anything flashy or dramatic, not with profound speeches or brilliant strategy or any of the things we insist are the ways to impact the world. He simply kept himself as healthy as possible so that every few weeks he could go and sit quietly in a room and give away a fundamental part of himself — quite literally his lifeblood — to people he'd never meet, for no pay and no expectation of acknowledgement. (He was, it should be said, acknowledged quite a lot per this article, but that's beside the point.)

When we talk about the kind of people we want to elevate and celebrate in our societies, I often think of people like James Harrison. I hope we get more of him; not just for his blood, but for his heart.

[petitworld]

by Fabian Frei

[malefixium]

the trees you grew up with have not forgotten you. their branches still whisper your name in the breeze and their roots remember the paths your feet once traced through their shade.

[fromthewillowtree]

I really love this as I spent a lot of my childhood sitting up in a tree in our yard. The branch I sat in was cut down by the neighbours unfortunately but the memories still prevail. To think that my beloved tree remembers me as fondly as I do it fills me with such warmth

[jadeseadragon]

@_merilver_

[artofmaquenda]

I had always hoped that art school would connect me with kindred spirits, people who shared my passion, and provide guidance that was nurturing and supportive of each individual's journey, free from judgment. Instead, I experienced the opposite, criticism and dismissal. My teachers didn’t understand my work, particularly the pieces I created about my dog's passing and the larger mysteries of life and death that I was trying to explore through it. They saw it as naive and childlike, especially the idea of grieving an animal.

And maybe, in a way, it is childlike. I approach many things with a sense of wonder and curiosity, which I believe is essential to the creative process. But at the time, their reaction made me feel ridiculed, even pathologized, as if my emotions and artistic perspective were something to be corrected or made to fit a more detached, conceptual mold. My way of creating, deeply personal, emotional, and raw, was seen as not artsy enough, not intellectual enough, or even 'too personal', as if true artistic value had to be filtered through layers of theory to be taken seriously.

On top of that, they pushed intellectual analysis, words, theories, structured critique, when I was still trying to process everything through feeling and emotion. I didn’t yet have the language for what I was exploring, and I didn’t even fully understand my own place in the world as a highly neurodivergent person. The framework I was given was entirely Western philosophy, which didn’t touch on the depths of impermanence, the beauty and mystery of existence and death, in the way I personally felt them. It left me disconnected, lost in concepts that didn’t resonate with my raw experience of loss and wonder.

It wasn’t until later, when I read more about Buddhism, that I found something that truly spoke to the questions I had been asking all along. The concept of impermanence, the interconnectedness of all living beings, and the idea that suffering isn’t something to be avoided, but to be faced with open awareness, changed how I viewed my own emotions. I learned that the Buddha himself meditated in graveyards, contemplating decay, not to dwell in sadness but to strip away illusion and see life as it truly is, fleeting, interconnected, and sacred in its impermanence.

This also reminded me of chöd, the Tibetan Buddhist practice of confronting fear directly, offering oneself to death, to the unknown, dissolving the ego rather than resisting what feels uncomfortable. It made me realize that facing loss, mortality, and transformation head-on isn’t morbid or sentimental, it’s a way of embracing reality fully, without turning away. And in that, there is something deeply creative.

Of course, I’m human too. I struggle with the fear of losing loved ones, with the ache of knowing that everything I love is impermanent. But I’ve also come to see grief not just as pain, but as a doorway, one that allows me to feel more, not less. To love more deeply, to appreciate more fully, to connect in a way that isn't just about holding on, but about being with the fleeting, beautiful, aching reality of existence.

Beyond Buddhism, I also found echoes of this understanding in animist and indigenous perspectives, where the boundary between life and death isn’t as rigid, and where animals, land, and spirits are deeply woven into the fabric of existence. These views made me feel less alone in my instincts, grief for an animal is real, and so is the mystery of their passing. It doesn’t need to be just for children or dismissed as sentimental.

Now, years later, I understand things differently. I know that outside of school is where I found my people, the fellow weirdos who get it. And with them, I finally feel seen. And while outside validation isn’t the most important thing, it is important. To be seen by others helps you see yourself, to recognize that your way of feeling, thinking, and creating isn’t wrong, that you are not alone. And more than anything, I know that my ability to be vulnerable, to face impermanence, to create from love, loss, and the vast mystery of existence, is not a weakness. It’s worth it.

[contremineur]

Blue glass beads from the Late Bronze Age, found in 1885 when a Danish farmer ploughed up a cremation urn at Kongehøj. Made in Mesopotamia approximately 3,100 years ago, they offer evidence of long-distance trade connections in the prehistoric world.

image from here

[windvexer]

You just have to be good at one thing.

Hear me out. This is just an example, but let's just say the one thing I can actually do really well on a magical level is dig a ditch.

It's a super earthy activity. It makes sense to me. Earth stuff just works well for me. The technique I've found to do this magically is really fulfilling to me - maybe I draw lines in trays of salt, or go outside and dig with a trowel. And it works for me.

When I magically dig a ditch, magical ditches are dug.

Someone wants a friendship spell? I dig a friend-shaped ditch around them that friends fall into.

Someone wants money? I dig a sloping ditch that leads from Money to their bank account.

Someone wants protection? I dig a ditch and use that as a foundational barrier, like a moat.

Other stuff might not work. Maybe I can't really raise up a wall. Maybe when I try to work magic with the conceptual energies of money and prosperity in a candle spell, it just fizzles out and falls flat. Maybe I can't conjure a spirit road for shit, unless I'm digging a lazy river for the spirits to float down on.

I enjoy casting a wide net and doing many magical experiments, but lately I've been leaning into magic that just works really well for me. And what I've realized is that I end up doing the same things, over and over again.

Maybe all I can do magically is tie a knot. Maybe all I can do is break a stick. It kind of feels like cheating, like mashing a combo move you know will win every time. Simultaneously, it makes me feel like I'm not as well-rounded as I thought I was. All I'm doing over here is digging ditches.

Anyway, I just wanted to say ~ I think an important avenue of exploration is finding any little thing you can reliably do, and going full hog. After all, life as we know it would collapse without ditches.

[applefoam]

Sometimes, I look back on the gods I used to worship and feel a strange sense of nostalgia. I might try rekindling some of them... I miss them sometimes, you know?

[notthesomefather]

I think about this with Nyx often. For the first few years of my journey, I worshipped her and Tyr exclusively. As my horizons broadened and I opened myself up to more signals, Tyr and Loki eventually led me to the heathen path. I still feel immense respect and love for Nyx, and am not quite sure what to do with that. Transferring all of that one-for-one to Nyx's norse "equivalent" feels disrespectfully reductive. They could be entirely separate deities or they could be aspects of the same deity and that's just it--I don't know. I owe it to her to ask those questions. It's a ritual I'd like to dedicate a lot of energy towards, so now isn't the right time--but soon.

[blackwattlenemeton]

I had this with Veles, whom I worshipped pretty intensely for a couple of years. Then my pantheon and cosmology changed completely and another god, Cernunnos, fits that "niche"/equivalence now. But it felt disrespectful to just slot in Cernunnos where Veles used to be. I asked Veles and he communicated "that's correct, it would be disrespectful - include me alongside or not at all, I'm not here to fill a niche".

So even though my connection to him is not what it was, I include him in addition. And I remember the relationship we had, and sometimes touch base. It feels better than leaving that connection entirely.

[windvexer]

Advice for if your practice is feeling stressful or unfulfilling (that isn't 'just stop practicing')

Before you expand: long text post!

I think it's interesting that the first line of advice stressed and unhappy practitioners often receive is 'stop practicing! take a break,' because besides a breather this doesn't actually do anything. When a person is done with that break they're still going to have the same stressful, unfulfilling practice they did before.

Stop practicing is useful advice for someone who is about to deep-fry their brain in uncontrolled Witch Fire. It's useful advice for someone who experiences unexplainable catastrophe every time they engage in magic.

I'm not sure it's useful advice for people who want to practice and are actively seeking help figuring out how.

So here are some ideas. Feel free to add your own.

If your practice has too much of a time load:

Scrape over-engineered ritual. Examine ritual formats. Are you spending a majority of your practice time engaging in elaborate ritual? Where can that be paired down?

Swap ritual for enchantments. If ritual performs an action (laying a compass), can you substitute for that ritual action by making enchanted objects that take less time to activate (enchanted compass altar cloth)?

Minimize ingredients. If you regularly perform spells that require lengthy enchantment of ingredients, can you use fewer ingredients to achieve the same results? If you're using more than 3 correspondences for any spell, is this because you are wise in your own ways, or because you just feel that more is merrier?

Mash rituals together. Do you have a string of rituals, even small ones, that you perform one after the other? Is it possible to reorganize these so they're all done at once, in the same ritual? For example, setting out an offering to the gods, a different offering for the ancestors, another for helper spirits, etc. Can you combine these all into one single offering?

Check for over-tending. Is it possible that you're repeating magical acts, like feeding wards and cleansing, more often than you need to? Did you arrive at this schedule through trial and error, or did you just guess this is how often you should do them?

Check for your own levelup: spell maintenance. If it's been a while since you re-evaluated your ritual/offering/maintenance schedule, your increase in skills may mean you need to do these tasks less often to achieve the same result.

Check for your own levelup: techniques and routines. Some techniques, like carefully entering trance, grounding, and centering, are like training wheels that wear ruts into our paths of magic. As we improve in skill, old rituals and techniques that have been carefully couched in these helpful devices may become ingrained in us so that we can perform them in almost any state of mind, much faster and easier than we could before. Experiment with any technique you've been doing for a while and see if you still need to perform time-consuming meditative or focusing techniques before you can perform the skill.

Be reasonable with your own goals. I find most 'laywitches' give themselves daily and weekly schedules that would put actual cloistered monks to shame. Did your spirits tell you they expect daily offerings, or did you decide on that an run with it? Where are you overcompensating and overexerting in your path when nobody, including yourself, asked you to?

If your practice has too much of a work load:

Much of the advice of the prior section applies. Also,

Just work less. Are you putting in 100% effort when 20% or 30% would do? Are you treating every act of magic like a performance review that will control the outcome of your magical career? I'm not being sarcastic; an actual solution to your path being too much work is to just put in less effort. If you've never tried this you may be shocked at how effective magic can be when you're only doing what needs to be done.

Find simpler, more reasonable stuff. Find new techniques, and spell and ritual formats that are paired down to fit the amount of effort that's reasonable to exert for any given magical act. If you can't work with correspondences without a lengthy act of activation, find a way to cast simple spells that doesn't rely on correspondences.

Limit research and prep. Ask yourself how much research you reasonably need to get started on any given project. Remember that a huge amount of a witch's education is experiential; you will probably never know enough until you've already done it three or four times.

Be goal-oriented; prioritize actions. Ask yourself if you've set arbitrary workloads before you can get started with anything, such as forcing yourself to write artistic grimoire pages before you're allowed to perform a ritual you're interested in.

Learn skills to help prioritize actions. If your practice is consumed by acts of upkeep such as cleansing and empowering objects, focus on learning energy sensing so you can reasonably determine whether or not an object actually needs to be cleansed or empowered.

Administrate your own practice - what can go on the back burner? Make a list of all your active ongoing projects and maintenance, including upkeep of energy batteries, spells that require maintenance, and situations you want to change and are casting spells on. Prioritize them; see which ones you can set aside.

Restructure your projects to minimize maintenance. Consolidate spells and projects where possible. For example, if you have multiple protection spells for many people that require upkeep, condense them all onto a protection altar so you can feed and tend to them all at once.

Work in batch and bulk. See where you can do batch work to lighten your load. You can bulk enchant candles and incense, instead of enchanting incense every time you do a ritual. You can enchant oils, waters, and incense to feed your spells, taking time out of upkeep.

Levelup your charging and maintenance skills. Learn energy work to attach energy tethers to batteries and other important projects so they're able to drink from the wellspring you attach them to, and stay charged.

Scrape routines that don't serve you. Examine any daily routines. Are you doing them because they're helping you, or because you feel like you're supposed to be doing something every day? See if you can replace more intensive daily routines with something less tiring, like a prayer to your path itself.

If your practice feels too silly:

You have a right to privacy. Cocooning is valid. It's fine to take steps to limit who can see and potentially judge your practice. You can keep things to yourself until you're ready.

Tend to your emotional wellness. Self-therapy, in any form you feel comfortable with, can help mitigate the inner eye of judgement.

Reduce your beliefs to palatable doses. Believing in magic for only the duration of your work is perfectly fine. You don't have to 'believe-believe' 24/7. If you're not ready to integrate the belief of magic and spirits into your baseline worldview, don't - you can agree to buy in to those beliefs only while you practice techniques and cast spells, and then put them away the rest of the time.

Scrape stuff you really can't get past. Ask yourself what about your practice feels silly. Are there trappings - like altars, ritual movements, and speaking aloud - that you don't like? Change them. Is the idea that religious faith itself is a bit cringe? Self-therapy (or you know, the regular kind) may be assistive.

Ask for help modifying your process.Is there something very specific about a ritual or technique that you just can't get past, but you don't know how to change it? Research and see what other substitute rituals are available. Ask others and see if they can help you brainstorm.

Embrace the silliness. It's not going anywhere. Believing in your practice and holding it dear and sacred is not the same as being ✨super serious gravitas✨ all the time. There are lots of things about witchcraft, and the acts of the witch, that are silly and make you realize you're doing something ridiculous. I came out here at 2 am after it's been raining to climb down a slippery riverbed to get a branch of a tree that I think is talking to me?? Because some medieval guy said Tuesday is the planet Mars and I think trees talk to me?! Ridiculous. Yet I still love it dearly in a sacred place in my heart. It can be silly and glorious at the same time.

Cast a wider net. See if you're barking up the wrong tree. Traditional Witchcraft, folk magic, lodge magic, chaos magic, eclectic neopaganism... these things are not interchangeable. If you've never explored different traditions, why not give it a go? You might find another path that feels a lot more natural to you. A lot of people fall into a certain path just because they don't know what else they could be doing!

If your practice feels unfulfilling:

What are you doing to bring yourself fulfillment? Why did you get into witchcraft? Make a list of your top 5 reasons (if you have that many). Which techniques, spells, and rituals are you regularly performing are designed to deliver these desires to you? If one of your goals of practicing witchcraft is to 'feel connected,' how often are you performing acts where the only goal is to make you feel connected?

Grow your path deliberately in the direction of your needs. What do you wish you had in your life right now? Is it the feeling of being loved? Inner peace? Feeling like nature is alive and watching you? Look for what techniques and rituals in your practice will bring these things to you. If there are none, find or develop them.

Ask for help and share your feelings. If you work with gods and spirits, do you regularly tell them how you feel about your practice and ask them for help finding fulfillment?

Find contentment in the process. It's vital to find joy in the process. If you have regular routines or upkeep you need to do, how can you modify it so that process in and of itself is satisfying to you? Try considering the visceral element of witchcraft: the words, scents, sounds, moods, and thoughts that you want to experience in your present moment. Witchcraft is experiential: a great deal of the experience you create in the tidepools of routine is under your control.

Contemplate the larger purpose. Some witches do have magical chores and responsibilities they can't or shouldn't shirk. If this is true of you, and you can't modify those routines, try refocusing on why you're doing them and the importance they hold in your path. See if you can find balance elsewhere in your practice that feels rejuvenating; sort of a 'work-play' balance of your own craft.

Set short-term goals you can celebrate. Are you undertaking a lot of 'workout routines' that are designed to basically make you magically buff, or get good at a particular skill, but you're doing them with no endgoal? Try creating short-term goals that excite your sense of wonder or accomplishment. Like, practicing tarot until you can read the Celtic Cross, or practicing energy work until you can make a four-element layered energy shield. Build goalposts for yourself, both in the short and long-term, and celebrate your successes.

Scrape routines you're not doing for any good reason. Are your regular practices things you're doing because they fill you with mystery and wonder, or because you're just pretty sure that's the kind of thing witches do? If you're bored or unfulfilled by a particular routine, consider stopping it altogether, especially if you can't think of any short-term goals that it's helping you work towards. Think about the reasons you got into witchcraft: what practices would help you fulfill those reasons, while also feeling good to practice?

Seek out a likeminded community. A good working group of friends can be invaluable. My close group of witch friends, whom I've been hanging out with for years, started as a Tumblr post asking if anyone wanted to make a small server to study witchcraft. Reach out and see who's out there to study with, talk to, and practice with. It can be loads of fun to do short-term study and practice challenges with friends, and a great way to get feedback and support.

Evaluate your spiritual relationships. Although it can be painful and challenging, sometimes we enter into our paths working with gods and spirits that after some time, we need to move on from. Is it possible your path has become stagnant because you don't want to keep working with a god or spirit that your path has been built around? It may be time to see how you can move on.

When 'take a break' might be helpful advice to heal your practice:

Of course, YMMV :)

'Taking a break' doesn't mean stop being a witch, stop believing in magic, or stop 100% of your practice. It can also mean putting a lot of projects on the back burner, switching to bare-minimum (or below minimum) maintenance, and squashing regular routines.

I'm talking specifically about taking a break in the interest of your own practice - not the conditions under which someone is ""allowed"" to stop practicing witchcraft.

Take a break to rest and let your seeds germinate. 'Fallow periods,' when you have no desire or motivation to practice witchcraft, and when it seems like there's nothing for you to do, are normal. Some witches experience this cyclically, perhaps during certain seasons or when predictable life conditions are met. There's no need to force yourself to practice when it's just not flowing. The snow on your mountaintops needs to melt to replenish your waterways, bestie. There's nothing wrong with you, the sun just isn't out yet.

When you're hitting yourself with a hammer. When something in your practice is triggering or harming you, and stopping will have no consequences, then stopping your practice for a while is probably a good idea. Use the downtime to seek healing or reformat your practice.

To open your life up for necessary work. Not every witch can out-path every problem. Consider taking a break when the problem is something you will have time and energy to work on if not for your regular magical practice.

When you're about to deep-fry your brain with Witch Fire. Consider taking a break when the problem with your practice is that you are practicing too often - such as fatigue due to excessive spellwork, divinatory obsession, trouble staying out of the spirit world (compulsive astral travel), or focus on spirits/magic/the spirit worlds are starting to erode your home, school, or work life.

To let the ripples settle. When you've done so much magic or ritual work that your life is a boat on a stormy sea, and you just need to batten down the hatches for a while and let things settle.

[thesilicontribesman]

The Ipswich Torcs

Gold Torcs Found Together Buried About 75 BCE, Near Ipswich, Suffolk, The British Museum, London

All were made from two twisted solid bars. Four have cast terminals ornamented in high relief: they can be paired but their patterns are not identical.

[q8q-deactivated20250929-deactiv]

via

[wachinyeya]

https://english.radio.cz/beavers-build-planned-dams-protected-landscape-area-while-local-officials-still-8841536

A beaver colony in the Brdy region has gained overnight fame by building several dams in the Brdy protected landscape area, creating a natural wetland exactly where it was needed. It saved the local authorities 30 million crowns, and has the public cracking jokes about public administration and red tape.

The administration of the Brdy protected landscape area, which had gained approval for the 30 million crown project, was dealing with red tape and seeking the respective building permits from the Vltava River Basin authorities when the dam project was completed almost overnight by a local colony of beavers.

They could not have chosen their location better –erecting the dams on a bypass gully that was built by soldiers in the former military base years ago, so as to drain the area. The revitalization project drafted by environmentalists was supposed to remedy this. Bohumil Fišer, head of the Brdy Protected Landscape Area Administration says Nature took its course and the beavers created the necessary biotope conditions practically overnight.

[motorizedduck]

Helsingin Sanomat, a major Finnish newspaper, had this headline:

Translated:

A family of beavers built a dam worth millions in a couple of days

Czechia | The dam built by a family of beavers in a couple of days saved the Czech state a noteworthy amount of money and bureucracy

The Eurasian beavers living in Czechia do not particularly understand bureaucracy. Picture: David Woodfall / Science Photo Library