Anti-Racism Resources

Dear Everyone, really, but especially white people,

We all have a lot of work to do in the fight against systemic oppression, racism being one of the big systems of abuse and discrimination that is currently on everyone's minds, especially where police brutality against BIPOC (black indigenous people of color) communities is concerned. I have been posting some things on my Instagram, sharing MANY things from other people in my story there to amplify other voices, and I'm working on a video that will go up on my YouTube channel tonight (31 May 2020).

I wanted to put together a post here with links to some of the anti-racism resources for white people that I've been finding thanks to other people sharing them, so I can link people to all of these more easily and have them handy for my own future reference, as well as everyone else's. I will continue updating this occasionally as I collect more. Please share any more resources you have.

~

Anti-Racism Resources for White People: bit.ly/ANTIRACISMRESOURCES

This document includes resources for parents to teach anti-racism to children, podcasts to listen to, movies or videos to watch, articles and books to read, social media of organizations to follow, and more. There is a LOT here and I recommend starting here and going through it a bit at a time.

One of the articles I found via the large compiled document above: "75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice". #38 is decolonize your bookshelf, which is one thing I've been doing -- looking up all the authors whose books I own so I can see how many are white men, as opposed to women, POC, queer, trans*, gender non-conforming authors, and so on.

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7 Days a Week, Pt. 2: Magic & the Planets

Hello again, Readers,

Welcome to Part 2 of this two-part blog mini-series! It's taken much, MUCH longer than I thought to get this second post together, and multiple people have asked me about daily magic and related things since I started working on it, so I'm excited to finally have it posted for everyone!

If you haven't yet, go back and read Part 1, Planets & Deity Names, which focused on explaining how the English names for the days of the week came about, and how they are related to the planets and various Deities. In this post, we will be taking the information from Part 1 and using it to determine the best magical timing for certain types of spells or other workings, to set intentions that align with the planets and/or Deities, and so on.

Image by me, symbol images from solarsystem.nasa.gov

The days of the week as we know them in English are as follows:
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.


These names are associated with the following "planets", respectively:
The Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn.


In magic, we talk about a concept known as magical timing, which is the process of choosing the "best time", according to various correspondences, to do a magical working. Timing can include one, or a layering of many time-based associations, from the Moon phase, to the day of the week, even down to the hour of the day should you choose to delve that deep. In this post, we're focusing on the magic of the Days of the Week.

Saturn Returns course is back!

Hello! I'm excited to announce that the next Saturn Returns course is finally here!

We start on the 5th of October (a Saturday, of course). Registration ends on the 30th of September, and payments are offered at a sliding scale.

Click here to go to the Saturn Returns page to learn all about it!

Blessings~

-C-

7 Days a Week, Pt. 1: Planets & Deity Names

Hello, Readers,

As I've been reading through some beginner-Witch material again lately, I've started thinking again about basics--building blocks of magic, timing, simple things we can do everyday--and one of the things that came to my mind was timing and intention based on the day of the week. Many people know where our English names for the weekdays came from, but many people also still do not. I remember years ago, when I was first studying Paganism and Witchcraft, mentioning the origin of the days of the week to my mother, who had no idea! So I figure in 2019, maybe some other people still haven't had this come up for them, either. And even if you do know this naming origin stuff, a Part 2 of this post will be going up next, talking about using the planetary and/or Deity associations with the days of the week for deciding what kinds of magic to do on what days. If that is a sort of magical timing you're interested in, look out for that post next.

Image by me, using symbol images from solarsystem.nasa.gov

Days of the Week: Planets & Deities

There are seven days in our calendar weeks, and this has been the case for centuries although it was not always that way. The Roman Empire was responsible for the shift sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries, according to the Wiki article which I will link below with other sources. There were also seven "classical planets", or moving celestial bodies that, at the time, could be seen with the naked eye and were known to the astronomers of classical antiquity. We would not use the term "planet" for all of them today, as the definition has changed over the years. One of them is our Sun, which we know as a star. The other is our Moon, which we consider a "satellite" today because a planet would have to be orbiting the Sun directly, whereas our Moon orbits Earth.

These seven classical planetary bodies were the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Earth was not included because, well, we live here. It was all about what we could see up in space from where we were.

Naming the Full Moons (in 2019)

Moon sticker on my mini laptop, which is also the
header photo in my Moon Magic group.

Hey, Readers & Moon lovers!

This was originally going to be a post in my Moon Magic group on Facebook (edit from the future: which no longer exists as I do not use FB anymore), but it quickly turned into FAR too long of a post for that. It is, however, a fairly normal length (for me) long blog post. So here we are!

Earlier this year in the Moon Magic group, I shared two tables with the Full and New Moons for 2019. The original tables were generated from moontracks.com and the Full Moon one also includes some of the most commonly known "Full Moon names".

Readings Page Update LAUNCHED!

[Note: This was an update for an earlier page version that no longer exists. I've removed the link, but am leaving the post as a record. =) Thanks! ]

Dear Readers,

My Readings page reboot is finally done! And live! Here it is!

If you also follow my YouTube and Instagram (possibly also mentioned this on my Facebook page, not entirely sure), then you know I've been working on redoing my Readings offerings for the new year. I wanted to have it done by January 1st, but personal life issues in December threw me way off. I started redoing the page in mid-February and was making great progress to have it done by the end of February to start out with March as the beginning of my Spring Quarter (that's a new thing, you'll read about it on the page!). But then February 28th, in the home stretch, all the work I had done that week was suddenly lost when the page--for some unknown reason of technology--reverted all the way back to original draft... It was a blow, for sure. I spent two hours that night trying to redo everything from that week, realized it was already after midnight and therefore officially March 1st, and decided I needed a break lol.

So I finally got back to finishing the page today, and IT'S DONE! FINALLY! The link is above. Just wanted to update you. So many hours creating the images, taking the photos and doing the editing, typing out the descriptions of decks, deciding which decks will be available each quarter, typing the descriptions of the readings... and it's finally ready for the public. 💗

Blessings~
-C-

Gods, Grant Me Strength

Hey, Readers,

Before 2018 totally passes us by without another post from me, I figured I'd better write something up. I've been meaning to write again for a long time, but on one hand, it can be difficult to decide what should be a blog, as opposed to a Facebook post, Instagram post, YouTube video, private journal entry, or exclusive Patreon post. On the other hand... I haven't wanted to actually open up my mini laptop, sit in front of it, and type up a blog post.

As a matter of fact, I haven't wanted to do anything.

I thought the past few years were bad, but this year... well, it's been even harder. It's been one of the worst years of my life, in its own ways. It's also been one of the best.

As I approach the crux of my first Saturn Return, the effects of which I've definitely been feeling for some years now but the exact moment of which (when Saturn will be in the exact place it was at my birth, not just in the zodiac sign, which it entered last December--Capricorn, for those keeping track) doesn't occur for about another year yet, the challenges I find myself facing are only increasing.

I Am a Change-Maker

Hey, Readers,

Last month I posted a video going over the results from a viewer survey I posted about a year ago. Some of the questions I asked in the survey were about how people felt about the more political topics I had started to make some videos about, and in the video I responded to a few things I learned from the survey results. For example, some people said they don't understand why the political/justice related topics are relevant, and/or they don't think they belong on my channel. I explained briefly in said video, that my channel is about my life, and the identities I hold are part of my life. So when I talk about the LGBTQ+ community, I talk about my own place within it and my own experiences as a non-hetero person. When I talk about Paganism and Witchcraft, it is with the similar knowledge that I am sharing views from minority identities. There are more of us than people think, but Pagans ARE still a religious minority. And we get treated as such. I used to not think my life was political, and I "didn't like politics" (which, as a child, I thought of mostly as voting for Senators and the like, and voting for or against school tax levies).

Ever since starting my YouTube channel, however, I have made videos about my religious path and identity with the knowledge that this is a minority point of view. This is fringe. This is still widely and vastly misunderstood by many people.

Moon Sign Datebook: My First Impressions

Hey, there!

This blog post is a companion to my video review of the 2018 Moon Sign Datebook, giving my first impressions of it as I prepare to work with it this year. I also plan to do a fuller review at the end of the year, to share any further insight after working with it for the whole year.

Watch the video here if you prefer to listen/watch along!

I'm writing this blog post in addition to the video for two reasons:
1) So that people can choose to read this text summary rather than listen to/watch the video.
2) I can add updates here, as I've continued looking things up and adding information to my planner since the video was recorded and edited.

Trust & Who We Are

Hey, Readers,

Have you ever noticed people whose energies and personalities seem totally out of line with what they say they do?

I have. In the past, and again today, a similar thing.

In college, for instance, one of my friends and I got into a course that was usually for Nursing students only, because it fulfilled a core requirement we needed and overlapped with our studies in theatre. It was a course on bioethics and how narratives (theatre, fictional stories, non-fictional accounts, etc.) can help have difficult conversations about ethics in medicine. So it was myself, and one of my theatre friends, in a class full of people who were studying to be Nurses.

Long story short, not only did half of the Nurses-to-be in the class have poor attitudes and not seem to care at all about other people's needs, but a few of them actually actively fought back against having to learn about other people's views and needs, arguing that the Western medical system always knows best and everyone needs to just deal with it.

Needless to say, I hope no one I know ever ends up with such uncompassionate nursing care. But it's out there. There are a ton of people in fields like that because the medical field makes money, and has a certain amount of prestige. Thankfully there are also those out there who are amazingly caring and compassionate, and passionate about their work helping people--PEOPLE, not just names on clipboards, not just means to a paycheck. One such nurse is a friend of mine who also happens to be a High Priestess. Another is my partner's mother, who recently retired from many, many years caring for people. A third, though not a Nurse but a Nurse's Aid, is my mother. My mother cares deeply about people, who they really are, what they really want and need.

But, this isn't about Nurses. That was just an example, one of the more startling experiences I had, in that classroom with these people who were meant to care about people and flat out refused to do so. This is about people whose personalities make them seem out of place with what they're doing. Nurses who don't care about people seems a little odd, if the way you think of nurses is as people who care for others. Care-givers. Nurturers. Nurturers who don't nurture? Seems like maybe something else would be more suited to their personality and views, right?