#novice corner

[novice-druid]

Three Element Correspondences: Earth, Water, Sky

On the off chance this will be useful to someone else:

Earth

Soil (sand, silt, clay, compost). Rocks of every kind. Living plants. Bones. Wood, especially bark, heartwood, and roots. Stumps. Green, brown, grey, terra cotta. Stars—after all, we live on one. Insects, herbivores, fungi, lichens. Shoes. Dried herbs.

Water

Water, collected from springs and wells, rain, dew, frost, oceans, and rivers. Bottles and pitches. The moon and all of its phases. Liquor and tea. Blood and the heart in animals. Stem, sap, and fine roots in plants. Syrups. Seaweed, cattails, and all aquatic plants. Fish, frogs, and herons. River stones.

Sky

Light and heat; the sun. Fans, essential oils, scents. Stained glass; really all glass. Suncatchers. Wind chimes and singing bowls. Honey. In plants, leaves, buds, blooms, and fruit. Mirrors and reflective baubles. Wood fires, hats, and windows.

[novice-druid]

I’m going out of town this weekend, so the Autumn Equinox/ Alban Elued (Elfed?) is coming a little early to my household.

The acorns are going to get used in crafting projects or spells or rituals. Any left over by Samhuin are going to go back in the woods where I got them.

[novice-druid]

Three it is, then

The last month or two I’ve been trying to explore and develop my sense for spiritual elements. Having gotten started with Greer’s ritual system, I’ve been looking at my experiences with the Sphere of Protection and Opening/ Closing Grove ceremonies, and tbh I’ve been struggling. The circle casting based on the four elements with directional correspondences just has not been working for me. Or rather, it has been working for me, it’s just that I expend almost as much energy into maintaining that way of seeing the world in my head as I do in any actual ceremony or working. It just doesn’t fit right.

So in the best of Druid tradition I decided to adapt to make it work for me; because what the hell is the point of leaving religious dogma behind if I just sign onto a new dogma, right? JMG rightly points out that plenty of Druids use three or five element systems; and so three it is.

Land, sea, sky.

I haven’t tried any ritual magic with an altered circle casting yet, but I have been toying with it as a way of thinking about things for almost a month now and it just fits into my head much better. I’m hopeful that this will make my experience of ritual magic feel a little more authentic.

[novice-druid]

I’d been thinking of starting to experiment with weather magic

But two days in a row now my ogham staves have patiently sat me down and said honey, sweetie, we support you, and someday you’ll do that, but you’re just not ready. You have other stuff you’re working on right now and you’ve gotta do that first.

Which, alright, fair enough, that’s true. I badly need to get my meditation routine pinned down so that it can be a regular thing. Same with dream journaling.

What good is divination if you don’t listen, right?

[novice-druid]

Like I said in that last post I still consider myself a Christian, albeit one with strong Unitarian tendencies, but I’ve grown up in genuinely progressive churches my whole life. Churches that were vocal and took direct action about racial, economic, and social injustices and partnered with organizations of other faiths to do so.

But I never heard the God/de I’d grown up with called She until two years ago, and it shook me. I was shocked by how deeply it effected me, the power of the feelings it brought up. I try periodically to think and pray in terms of Holy Sophia, but it’s been difficult to make that change and I’ve always given up. That last post has me thinking that I should give it another shot.

[novice-druid]

This year’s mistakes are next year’s compost. If you remove or hide from them all, they can’t enrich you.

[novice-druid]

I saw a living ghost

I saw a 38” green ash at work today, in seed and fully leafed out, and I didn’t recognize it.

I looked right at it, wondered why the seeds looked so familiar, pondered the pinnately compound leaves. Not a hickory, leaflets too small and even. Not a walnut, leaf arrangement, bark, and seeds were all wrong. Not an ailanthus or sumac or locust. I knew the samaras from childhood. What else could it be?

I didn’t recognize it because it was healthy. And huge. I think the last time I noticed a live ash that large I was a child. I literally haven’t seen an ash not in decline for so long that I *did not recognize what it was*. It’s been so long that it didn’t even come to mind as a possibility. But its beginning to decline; its time is coming.

Some days when I see ash snags in the floodplains I feel like I can feel their ghosts, their presence a weight on my mind. I think ash, not elm, might be the tree I associate most with death.

[novice-druid]

Meditations with an Old Cherry

9/10

I talked with an old cherry today. It’s slowly rotting to pieces in a park near a meadow. It taught me its bark, with its complex layered crags. It taught me the blessings of an island of shade on a bright day. There was wind, cool and fitful gusts. Cherry leaves sound like paper rain drops when they rattle together in the wind.

I asked it what else it had to teach me. I knew it was a dying tree and I wanted to know how it felt about death. With climate change on my mind, this is what it told me:

“Accept the gift and the sacrifice that the dying age is giving you. Remember it. You will honor it by learning its lessons. Make use of what it leaves behind.

A tree sometimes grows in the wrong place or in the wrong way and only later learns of the mistake but grows its best where it is, and where it grows and dies, it gives back. Every tree when and as it dies begins giving back to the community it died in. There is no loss but some of the whole gains. It will be the same for you.”

All of this made me think about the ashes, all standing dead in the forests, and how my future children will likely only know the American ash as I know the American chestnut. It’s sad, but I still fight to find the beauty in being alive to witness the turning of an age.