#bush witch

[tffuturelore]

Spy knows about snipers secret family, which is why he always calls him a bush man because sniper litterally married a bush witch. It’s why spy was comfortable with talking about his family issues to sniper. They both had a kid really young (nineteen) except sniper chose to stay. Sniper doesn’t hold spy choices against him.

The daughters name is Sprig(the red cloaked one), she’s 12 at the beginning of the comic (this picture is when she was 3), her cloak is red because she wanted to be like her dad even having black spots where her hand will be to match her dads gloves. Bush created a bush that pocket dimensioned a house for his 20th birthday. He still keeps the mobile house outside the bush pocket dimension, so don’t be surprised if you see a bush next to it all the time.

[temporary-dysphoria]

Witch Aesthetics

Australian Desert/Bush Witch: Red Dirt between your toes. Becoming energised under the blistering heat of the summer sun. Substituting rainwater in spells for 10 months of the year and then forgetting to stock up when it does actually rain. So, much, eucalyptus. And tea tree. And lemon myrtle. Wandering through scrubland and feeling like you've hit gold when you discover a small rockpool. Hanging out in your garden in the morning with the birds who flock to your birdbath. Learning to get sassy with the kookaburra who thinks he's hot shit. (Spoiler: he is, but we don't tell him that). Becoming intimately familiar with both the destructive and cleansing powers of fire.

Modern Medic Witch: Protection sigils stitched into your jackets and helmet linings. Smoke cleansing your boots after a rough shift. Sigils for mental clarity laser etched into your stethoscope. Tiny sigils being air traced above clammy skin because you've done everything modern medicine has to offer and you're still an hour away from hospital. Desperate prayers for desperate people. Recharging after shift because your energy has been completely spent. Liminal times of the year feeling especially crowded. The spark when you get a win, or a save.

Mechanical Witch: protective sigils stitched into your bike saddle, leather jacket, helmet and car seats - and etched into the chassis. The smell of petrol and oil becomes as calming and grounding as the smell of sage or lavender. Listening to the hum of the machine and asking it whats wrong, and expecting an answer. Maintenance as a ritual. Meditating with the roar of the engine.

[bone-deep-witch]

Working altar progress report.

Not a great deal of change since last time, but it’s taken ages because of reasons, so I feel like I need to check in! The skulls have had a nice whitening session even if it doesn’t really look like it - they’ve been heavily stained from being in the bark tannins for so long, but they are a lot lighter than they were.

The other new addition to that side is my deer hide. It’s an awkward shape and not at all soft enough to drape, so I put it on the altar and pushed it against the wall with The Macquarie Dictionary pushed against it overnight and Hey Presto! it now goes up the wall very nicely.

On the other side, I’ve added my raven skull to the Bones section of my Witchcraft Types platter. It was on my Devotional Altar in the lounge room, but the cats kept knocking it down and I don’t want it to get broken, so it’s in here instead.

I’ve washed the test tubes for my permanent offerings stand and will be filling those when they’re dry. My plan at the moment is oats for Cernunnos (as in, horse feed grain, not porridge oats), corn for Cerridwen (I hope she won’t mind if I use popping corn, it’s easy to get hold of!), tobacco for The Morrigan (my daughter is sending me some super-strong RYO a stranger gave her one day, she kept it for emergencies and is happy to gift some for offering), sea salt for Manannan mac Lir, and raven feathers for Raven, which is my Genius Loci for Tasmania.

I have some other stuff to add as well - my athame for one - but I need to make sure I don’t put too much on there and negate the whole “working” aspect!

[bone-deep-witch]

Just your friendly neighbourhood witch out collecting sticks in the bush... and the odd skull as well!

I had stopped by and picked up a skull that I was pretty sure was a small wallaby, but thought maybe I was plagued by brain fog and it really was the ringtail possum I’ve been trying to find again for a few months? After that, I was heading back to the car via a little animal trail through the bracken and I spotted some toadstools among some bones and... hey, they look like possum bones! Yup, a dig through the bracken and I found a rather broken possum skull. I couldn’t find the front part of either lower jaw, so I just left those.

Walking further on, two skulls balanced on my left hand, a sack full of sticks in my right hand, and my intuition says “Hey, cut through there next to the tree.” I look at the uneven ground and the thick layer of leaves, pine needles, fallen branches and bark and go “Nah, I don’t think I can make it through there with the stuff I’m carrying.”

Get past the tree and my intuition starts yelling “GO THROUGH ON THIS SIDE OF THE TREE!”

Dude, okay!

One step past the tree, next to my foot I see a bone sticking out of said tree detritus. Fam, I think, that’s a deer tibia. I look to the right and boy-howdy if there isn’t a pelvis with femurs right there. Then I turn towards the tree and see not one but TWO skulls nose down in the detritus. Another doe and a faun!

I got the skulls and brought them home, and tomorrow I’m going to take another couple of sacks and some gloves and see how much I can recover of the skeleton(s). I’m hoping I can recover a whole one and then articulate it. Then at Christmas I’ll put an antler headband on it and put it on the front lawn! 🤣

[bone-deep-witch]

I went and tidied up my outdoor altar in the Sacred Grove today. I had the dogs with me and had to stop Galahad having a nibble on the sheep’s spine. No veneration for bone collections, that dog.

[bone-deep-witch]

One Week Witchery - Day Six.

Day Six - Witch Crafts. 

Okay, so my planned decorating of my storage box didn’t happen, because last night I had a super strong urge to go out and do some photography today. With that in mind, I had my day all planned - do the laundry this morning, have a shower, and then after lunch go and move my horse to the other paddock, then head out to find a place I could safely pull off the road near some roadkill to try and get some photos of ravens. Either that, or try hiking out along the Convict Road to the empty creek and have a bit of an explore out along that way. One time when I did that, I ducked under a tree that’s long been fallen across from one bank to the other, looked at the dry bed wending off into the distance and the thought popped into my head “It’s the road that leads to the Land of the Dead.” So of course I went off to explore!

Anyway. Just as I was finishing my lunch, it started pouring with rain. So, photography adventures not for me today. The place I was planning to try for raven photos is not the best to try and get out of in inclement weather (blind corners and drivers who don’t slow down for the conditions), and the creek bed comprises round rocks that are very slippery when wet. Not conducive to lone hiking in the rain (my partner can’t come with me, his back would never cope).

And so, my craftiness today has been digital. Not exactly what I had in mind, but I haven’t gotten myself motivated for drawing yet and it’s not looking great for the rest of the day.

I’ve been working on a semi-printed journal I started on last year but then forgot about. The idea behind it is that I collate as much information as I can about my deities, general witchcraft and spell tips, moon phases, Solstices and Equinoxes, my own personal practices and observations etc, etc, type all this into a Word document and intersperse this with blank or lined pages. Once I have as much as I can think of typed up, I’ll make sure everything’s in order, and then I’ll upload the file and a cover to lulu.com (the website I use to print my novels) and voila! they will print, coil bind and send me my own personalised witchcraft journal!

I’ve been using CC0 vintage vector graphics in amongst the text to illustrate it, because I’m a sucker for olde worlde line art. So it’s not quite as crafty as it could be yet, but I am keeping my graphic design skills honed! (Most of my graphics have come from pixabay.com, with a couple from free-images.com)

Here are a few pages:

This is one of the tarot spreads I came up with last year. I’d never tried to make my own spreads before, but once I got started, the ideas just poured out of me! I’d like to come up with some more, so there will be a bunch of blank pages after the printed tarot section, both to record readings and to add new spreads.

I’m debating between these two borders for my Initiating Contact with the Morrigan page. I like the one on the left because even though it’s called “leafy border” the leaves remind me of stylised feathers. But even though the Morrigan seems to quite like that too, she likes the shield at the top of the border on the right as well. I’m going to leave the decision for now and come at them fresh tomorrow morning.

And if anybody’s wondering, the fonts I’ve used are Celexa for the headings and Thyme for the body text. Both are available free for commercial use from 1001fonts.com.

And that’s me for today. This coming week has a big night out smack in the middle of it, so when I finish my One Week Witchery off tomorrow, I won’t be leaping straight into another commitment to keep me on schedule, but I will be aiming to do little things to keep my focus witchy. More about that either tomorrow afternoon or Tuesday!

[bone-deep-witch]

Today I decided to get my bits and pieces together and decide how to lay out my working altar.

I have SO much stuff that I’ve collected over the years! I could make every surface in my house into an altar - only the cats would knock everything down, of course! Hence this working altar being in the library where cats only go if they’re unwell.

My daughter is going to give me her black altar cloth with gold pentagram print, partly to disguise the fact that the top of the dresser is covered with Kmart contact, partly because I think the bones etc will show up much better against a dark background.

The test tubes I’m going to use for a permanent offering vessel - each tube will have a different deity’s offering in it. I was going to use little jars sealed with corks, but I was worried about moisture build-up and spoiling/molding, so when I remembered I had this (it’s actually a set of vases) on my oddities shelf, I knew it was perfect. The centre tube will have raven feathers, because Raven symbolises my connection to the Spirit of Tasmania (the state, not the ferry) and the other four will represent my deities. As yet, as mentioned the other day, I’m not sure who will be my connection to the sea, but I know I will always have one, so sea salt and shells will definitely be one of my offerings.

Front and centre I have my little daily ritual spot so I can light a candle and some incense each day and have a few minutes quiet contemplation. On the leftI have Mama Doe and The Fawn. I was planning to whiten them right out, but my peroxide mix was so weak that it was going to take aaaaages and I’m impatient. I might try a peroxide/bicarb paste to get them done quicker. Between them is one of my mini cauldrons - both Cerridwen and The Morrigan are associated with cauldrons, so it’s important to have one on my altar, I think! I also have a little Celtic-design tealight holder I found at an op shop to one side of the skulls. I think they’ll look good in the candle-light when it’s dark.

In front of the offering vessel, I have three deer vertebrae with candles for my deities - blue for Cernunnos, green for Cerridwen, and red for The Morrigan. I was going to use larger candles so I could have my bleeding vampire candles, but they don’t fit in the vertebra. They will fit in an atlas, but the atlas I have are propping up skulls... Once I work through developing my connection with The Morrigan and find my connection with my Ocean deity, I’ll set up another vertebra and candle for them as well.

On the other side, I have my crystal ball (which I have still never learned to read, I really should get onto that!) and my supply of daily candles, and my little shrine to the four pillars of my Craft - beach, bush, bones, beasts. I love the little conga line the animals have, the devil looks like its having a swingin’ good time!

Most of the bones have just come out of their baths today, so I’ve deconstructed things again and put the bones up to dry. Once they’re nice and dried out (and maybe whitened up a bit more, depending how the mood takes me) and I have the altar cloth, I’ll set it all up again and then I can take more pretty pictures, and in the meantime I can start hanging thing on the wall around the altar and storing things in the drawers.

[bone-deep-witch]

One Week Witchery - Day Four

Day Four - The Great Outdoors. 

The local pine plantation - known as The Pines, it has had proper noun status for decades - is one of my special places. It’s a Crown Land reserve, and to most of the locals that means it’s junk land. When I was in high school it was party central (not that I was cool enough to party there), and sometimes new collections of alcohol bottles, cans and boxes show up. It has been used as a dumping ground for many years, especially when tip fees were introduced. Hunters dump the unwanted parts of their kills there (it’s where a huge proportion of my bone collection comes from), and sheep rustlers also dump their castoff bits there (yes, Tasmania still has sheep rustlers in the 21st century. How far we’ve come since convict days...?). Sometimes people go in and chop down trees. Sometimes for firewood, sometimes apparently just because they want to knock trees over? Occasionally someone sets bits of it on fire.

So, y’know, it’s not the most loved and cared for place by the local populace. Which is a shame, because it really is a special place. There are native orchids there. Lots of pockets of other native plants. A multitude of native animals, including wombats, echidnas, bettongs, and a ton of birds.

Our little volunteer group has done two cleanups in The Pines in the past year, and we have some ornithologists involved because of some of the bird life I discovered is living there. So even if most people are blissfully unaware, that’s actually okay because it keeps The Pines off the radar and mostly left to its own devices.

Here’s me, showing how much sleep I didn’t get last night. Having to heat the bedroom in winter gives me sinus headaches. Freaking yay.

Here’s some sunlight through from the very edge of the pine plantation and into the area where the native vegetation is taking control back from the bracken:

Here’s a fungus-y stump that I thought was pretty cool:

And here’s a grove that’s very special but I can’t tell you why because I’m sworn to secrecy: