Little Bird and the Temple in a Green Place

When I was growing up, I lived on 10 acres on a granite hill. There were thick woods and little creeks and a rock wall. My mother raised rabbits, and at one point she had over 100, all in cages in a large barn at the bottom of the hill. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but there were ranging chickens and a garden and plenty of times when I was forced to pull weeds or shovel out mounds of perfectly round pellets of poop. As much as I did love the woods and the horses that came to the edge of the property where the neighbor had cut a pasture, I saw life in a rural area as something I didn’t want for myself later in life.

As a growing child and a young adult, my complaints came from the close-mindedness and ignorance of the people I went to school with. I also disliked the scenery around me – I grew up in the rock-hard red clay of the middle of Georgia, while constant logging left only scraggly pine trees and plenty of dust to blow around. The land was hot, flat and full of angry wasps looking for someone to sting.

I played video games and surfed the Internet (I had my own AOL account at six years old), exploring fantasy worlds full of trees and moss and mountains. My mental scenery was all wild and outdoors, but the real space around me didn’t match it. I never realized that my desire for quiet and stillness in an old-growth forest was possible outside of my head – it never even occurred to me. I thought that moving to a large city was a far better idea because I would be able to find intelligent and engaging people to interact with.

Of course, staying in the cities cured me of that belief. It took me a few years, but some crucial experiences with the nature I had always fantasized about helped me slowly develop a new idea. I started to crave the things I had avoided and even hated as a child. The concept of raising animals and tending a garden had been unpleasant to me for many years, but it slowly became the only thing I found interesting. The more time I spent in coffee shops and exploring art museums, the more I realized I felt alien and couldn’t engage with even the artificial layout and forced flow of the coziest residential neighborhood.

I can’t overlook the amount of energy and magic that was alive in the city – but it wasn’t the only thing I had to deal with. The close press of people no matter where I went, the inability to feel truly alone when I could only be a few feet away from someone else at any given time. I felt like an animal confined in a cage. No matter how large the city or how many activities I threw myself into, I could only feel more uncomfortable about the entire idea of such a structured physical environment.

There are plenty of people who are writing interesting and revolutionary things about city and urban magic. They are exploring the surroundings that feel natural to them. I’ve spoken to the spirits of old neighborhoods and worked counter-magic on an area bound by a specific group, watching as the foot traffic to my friends’ shops increased and violence dropped. But it’s not for me.

You can find a lot of information on traditional magical practices and how they intersected with rural/agrarian life. You can also read plenty of personal testimonials on people who dropped this kind of magic because it felt disconnected from their modern city lifestyle. What I am interested in is homestead magic, not re-creationism. I don’t want to build a farm that is an exact replica of a 6th century Viking village. I don’t want to stop using electricity or make my own quill pens just to feel authentic when I’m doing magic or farm chores. I am building a modern intentional community, and I am building a modern homestead magical practice.

An update in five parts:

1. Beltane – Over the winter my partner and I spent a lot of time discussing the advantages and disadvantages of attending a large group ritual. We talked about the dangers of tying your energy in with people that have very different goals and ethics, but we also discussed the importance of attending an event with people that we didn’t agree with. In the end we went to Beltane again this year, but differently than before. Our little group camped in a little grotto up in the woods rather than the public and crowded spot we used in prior years, and during the main rite we stood outside the circle and held our energy slightly separate from the rest of it. People definitely noticed – but as with the rest of our behavior that weekend, it confused them more than anything. We also held a very impromptu ritual to invite the Trickster archtype as a sort of mid-point between the dualistic Goddess and God rites that are held, and it was very powerful (and confusing for everyone that crossed our path during the Fool’s Parade)

2. Compartments – As I could have expected, my vague attempts to compartmentalize my life by only writing about one topic per blog/social media outlet failed miserably. My life has been dominated by the garden, as it will be every Spring, for the past few weeks. Since all my magic and work has gone towards the plants and the land, I didn’t have much to say here because it was all intertwined and inseparable. I’m going to start using this blog to cover all of the work I do around the Witch House (that I feel like discussing) instead of trying to keep my multi-faceted efforts cleanly segregated.

3. Training – I’m still in the planning/dreaming stages of my self-imposed training program. I have been struggling with some physical issues, mainly the fog and brain funk that accompanies depression. I never have to spend all day in bed, cry for no reason or give in to the rat-wheel of anxiety attacks anymore, but I can’t control the fog. I’ve been working on building my self-discipline instead of jumping into the training program because I want to stick with it once I really start. I keep forgetting how far I’ve come in just the past year – last year in May I had a half-assed garden and was doing a passable job of paying the bills, while the year before that I could barely make enough to keep us fed and often retreated for days into mental isolation to cope with the new challenges. All I tend to see is how far I am from my idealized goal, not how far I’ve already come.

4. Connections – It’s been a tentative and gradual process, but it seems like we have a functioning Intentional Community on our hands here at the Witch House. I can’t say too much but there are four adults (including me) working together and things are really getting done. We’re calling it Runewald for now and making a bind-rune to represent us increased cohesion noticeably. Awakening a long-dormant farm is much easier when you have multiple people coaxing the land and giving the barn the support it needs to come together again.

5. Temple – I’ve been renovating the Temple ever since we came back from Beltane. When the men went off to the God Ritual during the hottest part of Saturday, I sat with my feet in the water of the little creek running through our campsite and smoked my spirit communication blend and read the tarot. There were butterflies and low flying crows and spiders with golden bellies, and I received a lot of guidance that made things clearer to me regarding my responsibility to the spirits. Nearly half of the shrines in the Temple have been re-built and the rest are in a state of beautification right now. Having the space match what my inner vision feels like (not necessarily looks like) will help me feel comfortable spending time here, therefore increasing 1) my self-discipline when it comes to meditation and other spiritual work and 2) my mind-set during services.

I linked in to the Prosperity web during the original firing on December 21, 2010. It’s a group working designed to build a web that delivers prosperity, specifically in the form of moneys, to participants. It builds on the web of the Linking Sigil/Ellis and also links to Jupiter and Mercury. I’ve seen results with it since the original firing, but only in the past few months has it really been active for me.

A few months I created a sort of mojo hand as a physical link to the web, and since then I’ve felt like I have an ally in the prosperity related works. He ended up manifesting one day as a small green devilish fellow, and then a few days later I stumbled over an image depicting him quite clearly.

Domovoi by Alice Duke

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Seasonal changes are always a hard period of time for my brain for some reason. My focus and concentration starts to drift away as soon as winter starts turning into spring. The constant tension between warm and sunny days and the cold, bitter rains doesn’t help things either. Right now I am knee deep in trying to get a number of things off the ground, and most of them are in their most difficult stages. Temple Day gives me something to base the week around and guarantees that I get at least a few hours of clear thinking and intentional quiet.

I’ve been working to develop rules about etiquette when entering and exiting the Temple space. Since there is a door, it’s easy to define how to act during this time. I’ve drawn inspiration from the etiquette expected at temples around the world, including Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and Hindu mandirs.

The rules I have written in the Temple journal so far include:

-Purifying with sage and holy water before entering each time, not just the first time during a service. (I have to come and go a few times to clean out the offering dishes and fill them)

-Bowing to the shrines when entering. Bowing is a sign of respect in a wide range of cultures, and has less of the total piety that kneeling or genuflecting represents to me.

-Touching the ground, and then touching the forehead. The dust on the ground of a sacred place is holy, and works as a reminder of the physical as well.

-Working around the room in a clockwise fashion in the beginning, then counter-clockwise at the end of a service. It adds structure and makes movements more intentional.

-Starting with Papa Legba, who is in the center of the room at the intersection of all of the altars and shrines. If the Temple has a gatekeeper you should start everything with their permission and end it with their blessing.

Other common rules of behavior found in historical and modern temples involve dealing with other visitors, which are slightly less applicable to my situation. No one currently living here or that visit want to enter the Temple of their own accord, so I don’t tell them they need to. Since it’s mostly my responsibility, I’m going to put off developing etiquette for interactions until the need arises.

Wednesdays are my days for going upstairs. I work a half day and do some chores so things don’t get behind, but at most that only takes a few hours in the morning. By the afternoon or evening I head up the stairs and into the temple. I’m still spending most my time up there just sitting and letting it all soak in, but I’m working towards creating a more structured weekly service. I’ve got to feel it out instead of just writing something down and hoping that it works since there’s 13 deities and spirits currently residing in the temple, with 5 more scattered throughout the house. That’s a lot of input on what I’m doing and it takes a while to listen to them all in turn.

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For some reason, the past few years have driven me towards taking up all the practices I swore I would never use during my adolescence. As a kid I grew up with parents who moved to rural Georgia for reasons I still don’t understand, and we kept animals until the year I moved out. My mother bred and showed rabbits (think of the Westminister Kennel Club Show, but with rabbits). This meant 10+ a week caring for them. They weren’t a source of food or money, so I grew to see animal husbandry beyond a few pets as a waste of time. The stifling idiocy of the small town around us also convinced me that the city was a far more preferable place. Of course, I was also an atheist.

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I’d like to say that moving was an uneventful process, but as you can tell from my months long absence, it was not. Moving into the new Witch House (what my mom called it when she came to visit) started with a 6 day period of no contact with the outside world because 1) the only Internet service provider in town is really a front for brain parasites, and 2) we had no car. Then the lymph node in the crease of my right thigh swelled up to the size of an orange, then my sinuses exploded, then a million other things happened. A car happened, a roommate happened, Imbolc happened, moving the fire servitor and cleaning 5 gallons of creosote out of the stove pipes happened, etc.

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