In my general scheduled plan, I wanted to ideally be finished with Twelve Wild Swans by now (doing a path per week, a section per day, for three weeks total) and finishing up What Witches Do this week. Next week, Week 6, Stella and I will be away at camp with lots of other magical things going on so I had planned for it to be a week "off" or grace period. If we wanna do more of this and have time, cool, but it wasn't being counted as necessary time.
That was the ideal plan, but I know myself, and I knew that traveling during this time and prepping for camp would take up time, space, and energy for me. There have also been other, unexpected things that came up this past month because, you know, life is like that. So as I expected, I am a bit behind where I wanted to be "ideally", but that's okay! The plan is not rigid, it's there to help keep me from getting totally lost as I lose track of linear time. It happens.
So here's where I am at this point...
Swans
I have finished the Elements Path reading in Swans, which is the third time I've done that path in this book! I actually decided to start a list in the front of the book on one of the blank pages, keeping track of the different times I work through all or part of the book. I worked through the whole book by myself in 2013, Elements Path with my local community in 2021, and now I'm doing the whole book again alone / in tandem with a friend but each at our own pace, in 2023.
Have I redone all the exercises this time around? No, but I've done them all before and I do several of them regularly as part of my practice. The "Tree of Life" style grounding meditation is a staple, as is the "Saltwater Purification" (which I also know variations of, and tend to do a version without salt more often, since I can do it with any drinking water I already have available). Going on a "Witch's Walk" is also something I got from this book, have continued to do regularly over the years, and have taught to others. Basic breath work, energetic shielding, and trance techniques, plus ritual steps from Circle casting to welcoming Elements and invoking Deities (if applicable), are all found in the Elements Path part of this book, and all are things I engage in regularly as a Reclaiming Witch.
What Witches Do
I'm reading an ebook version of this book. Though I do own a physical copy of an early printing (lucky second hand find!), it was in Ohio and I was not when I began reading. I like mixing ebooks into my reading because, unlike a physical book usually, I am more comfortable reading an ebook on my phone while laying down in bed before I go to sleep, after waking up while I still want to relax and not fully get up yet, and so on. As a result, I found myself breezing pretty quickly through the first chapters of this book. I'm reading it on hoopla (an app), which also allows me to highlight passages in a few different colors, underline, and add notes, and then quickly view just my highlights and notes in their own separate screen, so I can quickly reference the things I want to go back to.
There haven't been a lot of "exercises" or "things to do" so far in the book, but the few I have come across to the point where I am, I've highlighted in a specific color so I'll be able to find them more easily. So far it's concentration/focus exercises, mainly. Nothing I haven't done before, but still something to make it a point to do and see what comes. Other than that, I'm making notes about my own reactions and responses to the text, and Stella and I are planning to discuss it as our way of "completing the lessons", since there aren't as many "tasks" as such. Read the book, engage with it by taking notes, discuss... That's mostly how I was looking at this one!
Other Tasks
There are several other things on the list of things to do for Charm School... I wrote a lot more about them in my first blog post about this challenge, which you can read here. Here are my updates on just some of them that we aren't doing differently or already considering done.
- reading To Stir a Magick Cauldron & specific tasks therein
- Stella has read this book multiple times, but this will be my first time reading it so I want to read the whole thing. I have not started this, except to look through for specific parts that pertain to other tasks and mark them with colored sticky note tabs.
- for example, I found the "qualities of a proper person" section and read through them. I have not yet begun attempting to memorize the list, but I would be able to give a general paraphrased idea of what it means at this point, if not list all of the exact qualities Silver has printed in the text.
- I also bookmarked the "altar devotions" section since one of the other tasks is to know one by heart, and this is -- as far as we can tell -- a term used specifically by Silver in these books, so I don't already know what it entails. I can guess from context clues, but, yeah.
- memorize 3 circle castings and quarter calls
- because I didn't have all my books with me at my mom's, I started with what I did have. I chose a quarter call from Twelve Wild Swans. There is also a circle casting, but I already know several variations of that one by heart, since it's very traditional in Reclaiming. The quarter/elemental calls, however, are something we usually don't hear set versions of, and instead improvise on the spot. So I decided to memorize the one given in Elements Path. I do have this one memorized and used it once in a meeting/ritual with my ritual planning team, to practice.
- the other two quarter calls, and all three circle castings, were waiting until I got back to my books to look through them and choose some! I have done my info gathering now -- turns out a lot more of my beginners books do NOT include scripted cast/calls actually! many of them just explain how to do it and leave it up to you to decide the words from the heart, which may well explain my comfortability with that form of practice -- and to save on carrying multiple books around while I choose, I took photos of the relevant pages in various books. I already knew I wanted to do something from Ravenwolf, something of Ray Buckland's, and something from Scott Cunningham. But I still need to choose the exact ones from my variety of options.
- one thing is, most books that DO include scripted versions of these things to try out, they will have both a circle casting and a quarter/elemental calling/welcoming in one because they are parts of ritual that often flow from one to the next seamlessly. So it's been tough to feel like I can separate out just one from the other from some texts! so that's part of my issue in decided which to do, and whether to do the circle casting, the quarters/elements, or both pieces from the same source.
- completing a personal challenge we assign to one another
- Stella and I have chatted about this just briefly so far, only to say that we're not yet sure what challenge we would issue to one another! We've known each other for over a year, but it's not like we know EVERYTHING about each other's lives and practice at this point. So it will require a bit more yet in order for us to come up with something that would be both a challenge for the person, and also doable in a relatively short period of time. Not too simple, but also not too time-consuming. (Also, what is "simple" versus "difficult" totally depends on the person.)
- creating a solitary ritual
- these tasks were on my schedule for after camp anyway, so I haven't worried about starting this piece just yet!
- keeping a magical record
- we decided to try to do this by jotting down notes daily... I think Stella has been doing this. I... have not lol. I started doing it, but daily is just not my vibe. Instead I messaged Stella a few times here and there when something super magical came up that I wanted to discuss, and I've been making notes of other times for myself that I did not immediately message Stella about. Plus, I feel like the spirit of this task is for a potential initiate to show that they have been regularly practicing and keeping records of their efforts over the course of a longer period of time. I do that, absolutely. It's just not on a daily level over here. And that's okay. That's something I already know about myself.
- being able to tell whether a circle has been cast
- we planned to do this in person at camp, which is next week!
-C-
No comments:
Post a Comment