This entry was originally published on Medium.com on September 2022. I've continued to celebrate the seasonal changes and have made a new crown for each.
Later this week, the seasons will change (all over the earth). Where I live, in the global north (Colorado, USA), the season will change from summer to autumn. This is my favorite of all the seasonal changes, as I love the cooler weather and the festive times to come — the traditional “harvest-time” of my ancestors, a memory that lives in my DNA.
It’s a time known by pagans & witches as Mabon. It’s a time that I celebrate as a nature-based event that was and is observed by humans rather than created by some humans and imposed on others.
Two Years of Helpful Reading
I’ve written often about my mental health challenges. They are hereditary and they have very nearly cost me my life. I’ve also frequently written about my spiritual rebirth and the progress I’ve made toward being a truly joyful person. So, you could say honesty is kind of my niche.
Since January of 2021, I’ve read only books that I perceived as being helpful for my spiritual development. Part of my path has been allowing my Better Version of Me to lead me to the next thing I’m supposed to do or find in my quest, and the book Year of the Witch: Connecting with Nature’s Seasons through Intuitive Magick was right in that path.
In it, the author (Temperance Alden) details her own relationship to the cycles of time, putting that relationship in the larger context of not only her own spiritual tradition, but also demonstrating ways that different cultures and traditions have celebrated and marked cycles and seasons of the natural world.
I read the book just over a year ago and decided to follow her lead in marking in my own way the changing of the seasons.
One Witch’s Year
Beginning last September, I’ve decorated my altar and my lair (as I’ve christened my basement bedroom/yoga/meditation room) to mark the changing of the seasons. I’ve bought inexpensive seasonal decor (think acorns and fall leaves or sunflowers and poppy garlands) and spent a few hours just cleaning and rededicating these sacred spaces in my life. I’ve come to anticipate that quarterly time with joy.
Having done this for a year, I can confidently say it’s contributed a lot to my spiritual practice, though it’s difficult to articulate exactly why it’s so powerful.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that it puts me more in touch with the natural world and her changes. There are subtle energies constantly at work that we simply don’t understand (it wasn’t that long ago that electricity hadn’t even been imagined, after all). Maybe honoring those energies helps me align with them and live in that elusive flow I’m always seeking.
I think this practice also helps me subconsciously with the idea of boundaries, with which I struggle. And on the other hand, sometimes I get so removed from the rhythm of nature that I become too rigid, even resentful, about life and the changes that it inevitably holds.
It’s balance, after all, that I’m seeking.
But I don’t like it to get dark earlier!
In the past, I felt almost victimized by the colder weather and the coming of the darkness. Too, I feared and hated death (though I loathed living!) and was livid and raging about the cycle of birth and death. It sounds almost comical now, but I feel compassion for the woman I was, confused and hurt and rejected, I felt, by life. Convinced I shouldn’t have been born. Angry that I had been. I guess I rejected life, too.
Honoring the “wheel of the year” in this way has been only one of so many changes I’ve made that have saved me. I’m a neurodivergent creative woman with some physical and mental issues that almost drove me to suicide. Yes, the life I saved was my own. And now I’m on a mission to help other women who are struggling.
An Auspicious Time
These cusp times, new moons & new seasons, are excellent opportunities to make changes in your life. They’re auspicious times to connect with your Better Version of You and figure out what her habits are.
If your habits don’t match those of the Better Version of You and you’d like to make some changes with the help of a friendly neurodivergent witch, I’d love to talk to you!
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