On Monday, we came home from our annual week-long summer camping holiday at Canada’s largest Neo-Pagan festival, Kaleidoscope Gathering. We had a truly fantastic time, spent time with friends, met great people, gave a Tarot workshop, attended workshops and rituals, and relaxed at our lovely campsite by the river.
Tuesday we spent trying to come back down to earth, and I went to pick up our pup Carter from his foster parents in Ottawa.
Wednesday morning t! went back to work and I started the day with some time in my garden, and did a morning meditation & tarot card draw, followed by some very useful and cathartic journaling. Four hours later I found myself typing a resignation letter for the part-time job I’m currently doing. I hate it, it sucks my time and energy, chains me to the computer indoors when I want to be working outside, and the person I’m working for is a nasty bully. Plus I’m severely underpaid, and the number of hours I’m billing per month add up to little more than pocket change. The only reason I haven’t quit before now is that I was afraid that if I tried to quit, he would bully me into changing my mind and I would end up feeling even worse about myself and the job!
After I hit “send” on the email, and the proverbial weight was lifted off my shoulders, and I started thinking about how to make (or mark) a “fresh start” on this new path.
One of the books I pulled off my bookshelf after we got home from Fest was my friend Arin Murphy-Hiscock’s Hearthcraft book (which the publishers insisted on calling The Way of the Hedge Witch, even though it’s about hearth & home magic.) And while flipping through it again, I started thinking about the energy in our home, and how it affects me and makes me feel. Making our home more welcoming, cosy and “homey” is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and something that the icky part-time job was specifically stopping me from doing, for a variety of reasons. My own spirit feels renewed and refreshed after spending a week at KG, and I want to expand that sense of renewed energy to my immediate environment, our home. So my Spell for a Fresh Start is going to centre around clearing all the old, stagnant, negative energy out of our house and replacing it with fresh, happy, productive, creative energy.
I decided that the first thing I needed to do was get rid of anything in the house that was dead and/or decaying, in order to banish stagnation, death, and decay from our environment. So yesterday:
- The dried remains of some flowers got composted and the vase they were in thoroughly washed
- I cleaned all the science experiments and soggy vegetables out of the fridge, and washed out the veg drawer
- I cleaned up all the hairballs that the cats had horked up in the basement while we were away for a week
- I took the dead mole out of the freezer[1]
- I washed out the two coolers from the camping trip and all the icky tupperware containers that had held our camping food, and
- I even snipped all the dead leaves off the houseplants.
Then I went out for a walk with Carter, and picked a fresh bunch of wildflowers – wild purple asters as it turns out – and put them in the clean vase.
Today I will start on sweeping, to further clear the stagnant energy out of the house. Since we have a big house, sweeping (and vacuuming, for rooms that have carpeting) will probably take me two or three days (or more, now that I remember that I have to pick everything up off a floor in order to sweep it). I’ll try to get into every nook and corner of every room (except t!’s office, but he thoroughly cleaned it before our vacation), which will mean moving furniture, and get all the cobwebs off the ceilings too. As well as cleaning, and sweeping away any stagnant energy, this should also get rid of the last of the dead bugs off the windowsills, etc. And now that I realise what this plan entails, I’m thinking it may take me up to a week! That’s OK, I have some spare time while I’m waiting for the tomatoes in the garden to ripen so that I can start the canning…
I’ll check in again in a couple of days to talk more about how it’s going[2] and what I plan to do next.
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[1] SKIP this paragraph if you are squeamish. You have been warned! The cats, as they are wont to do, did a lot of barfing while we were away. When t! when down to the basement after we got back, he found a mole in the basement, eating the half-digested kibble in the cat barf (ewww!) Not having a better plan (he couldn’t bring himself to simply step on it), he put a mouse trap next to the pile of cat barf. An hour later when we checked the trap, the mole was caught but not yet dead. We scooped the mole into a plastic bag and dropped it into the freezer – death by hypothermia is one of the kindest ways to go, and how I usually dispose of deformed baby chicks.
[2] Yes, I know traditionally you’re not supposed to talk about a spell while you’re doing it. I don’t know who made that rule, but like with everything I do, I follow what feels right to me regardless of what the books & traditions necessarily say. That’s one of the reasons I’m a Green Witch and not Wiccan. Plus, how are us Solitary Witches suppose to learn anything if we don’t share? Sometimes when I do I spell, I tell no one about it, not even my husband. But this one feels right to talk about. So I will.
out here 