All best-laid plans come tumbling down sometimes and I need to learn to be okay with that. I had a lot of ideas for my weekly blog update but none of them are quite gelling together at the moment. This week was a lot. This pandemic has been a lot. Life is a lot. February is a lot.
That said…I’m getting there. In a month that has always proved challenging for both my mental health and my emotional wellbeing, this doesn’t feel that bad. Just a bit scattered which does make some semblance of sense when Mercury stationed direct late on Thursday evening.
As such, I’m writing a this-and-that style of post this week – more of a recording of the things that I did – for myself – proof that although I couldn’t come up with a concrete idea to write about this week – I did do a lot of things.
Moonday
My Moonday was simple and quiet (just like I like it). I cleaned my house, did some work for a big project, finished up some client work, and got together all of my ingredients for my new moon in Aquarius workings. I’ve learned that I liked to gather my tools at least a day in advance as it allows me to further process what I am trying to do and make any necessary changes.
Tuesday
Here on the East coast, the new moon went exact very early in the morning. I’ve been working on a solar success spell of sorts and wanted to perform it under the energy of the new moon in Aquarius while the Sun, Moon, and Saturn were closely aspecting my Ascendant in Taurus. Here I worked with the solar energy (sun meets moon), on a Tuesday (for Mars/effort), during the hour of Jupiter to bring in all three of these powerful energies to my spell working. I’m very pleased with how the spell came out – I might talk about this more as I begin to explore more publically how I’ve been doing celestial magic without working within the ceremonial magic system.
Wednesday
My tiny coven agreed to get together for “Candlemas” to celebrate the lunar new year of the Water Tiger with some cat magic. My lovely coven mate Gray carved cat candles for herself and Dora, seen here, to represent things that they wanted to bring into their lives with the new lunar new year. We walked to visit the statue of St. Brigid in my cemetery and generally enjoyed the nicest (see also: warmest) weather that we’ve had here in Southern New England in a number of days. It was both wonderful and startlingly hard – we’re all so people starved but I can see how atrophied our social skills have become. (We also watched Encanto because Dora hadn’t seen it yet which was amazing).
Thursday
I crashed hard on Thursday. I had a lot of work to do since I’d taken a great part of Tuesday and Wednesday off from my “job” to work on magic. But I couldn’t – I don’t have the reserves for dealing with people that I used to. I was reminded of a (paraphrased) quote from one of my favorite books A Slow Regard for Silent Things by Pattrick Rothfuss: Some days are just for crying.
Thursday was one of those days for me. It’s okay. I’m human. I’m allowed to cry.
Friday
Things felt somewhat better on Friday but I was still feeling pretty low energy. I struggled to work on my current commission and felt generally uninspired. I had to push to get up the energy to do some road opener work in honor of Mercury stationing direct late on Thursday night – thankfully, road opener work is something that you CAN do when you are low energy. Unsurprisingly, that helped a lot. I was able to get up the motivation to edit some photos from Tuesday and do a bit more work that evening.
Saturday
All week I have been dreaming about Eastern White Pine. My partner thought to grab our stash of eastern white pine vodka and use it in a new way which really opened my eyes to a number of possibilities that I hadn’t thought of before. In order to do this though, we needed to go and collect some more. The “safe” pine (free of pesticides and other gross stuff) is at our friend’s house up in the hills. With the ice storm that we had on Friday, we weren’t sure we were going to be able to make it but thankfully, we did. And what a view it was! Their entire yard was like a museum full of ice sculptures! Such a wonderland!
Mind you, I didn’t bring my camera because I was focused on picking eastern white pine. That’s okay because I was joined by five hungry goats who were, truth be told, a bit dismayed at how cold the pine needles were underneath the ice!
And collect pine we did – some of it is going into our latest batch of fire cider and I am planning to make a very experimental batch of pine lemon bars with the rest.
Sunday
Today has been an industrious kitchen day. My partner and I were up early and eager to get into the kitchen to try out our experiments. They were on Day 2 of this week’s batch of kimchi (we eat some almost every day!) and I got to work making pine sugar. Then we tackled the beginnings of Batch #2 of fire cider for the season. We use fire cider as a catch-all folk remedy (I enchant it to banish illness), so you can imagine that we’ve been going through it much quicker than normal during the pandemic. I think this is going to turn into a post all of its own but for now, we’ll leave it there. We’ve never added eastern white pine to our fire cider before but this time we substituted it in the recipe for dried rosemary since we didn’t have any. I’m excited to see how it will turn out!
So, not at all a bad week – I’m pretty sure that it’s just February and that’s why I’m salty about it.