Thirteen Things About Ostara

1. Ostara is a pagan celebration of spring, normally celebrated on March 20th or 21st, at the spring equinox. The equinox is a time when night and day are equal on Earth. The Spring equinox marks the beginning of the light half of the year, where day gradually grows longer than the night.
2. The name Ostara is thought to have come from the goddess Eostre. All this probably sounds familiar - as Easter is yet another name supposedly stemming from the same.
3. At its heart, Ostara is a fertility rite, celebrating the return of life in the spring.
4. Eggs and rabbits - two ancient fertility symbols - are its main themes. Both remind us of new beginnings, new life, and growth. These are present in modern day Easter, as well, in case you ever wondered what the heck bunnies and colored eggs have to do with it.
5. In certain pagan lore (mostly Wiccan), the young God at the Goddess choose this time to mate. A child is concieved: the young sun god that will be born nine months later, at Yule.
6. Modern day Easter is always set according to the spring equinox, as well - it set each year on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox, which is why the date varies so much.
7. Rumor has it that at the exact equinox (down to the minute), the world spins just right, and you can balance an egg on its tip. Curious. I’ve never had the opportunity to try it.
8. Pagans often choose this time to plant magical or herb gardens, or at least prepare for them, to concescrate their tools, and to bring balance to their lives and their spiritual workings.
9. Traditional Ostara colors: pastel green, yellow, and pink.
10. Some Ostara gods and goddesses: all love, fertility, and virginal gods and goddesses.
11. Traditional foods: Eggs (especially hardboiled), fruit, leafy green vegetables, dairy foods, apples, nuts, sprouts, hot cross buns, honey cakes.
12. Plants and herbs associated with Ostara: Acorn, celandine, cinquefoil, crocus, daffodil, dogwood, Easter lily, gorse, honeysuckle, iris, jasmine, jonquils, narcissus, olive, peony, rose, tansy, violets, woodruff and all spring flowers.
13. Decorate for Ostara with spring flowers, bunnies, eggs, and garden motifs.

1. Candy Minx 2. Christine 3. Uisce

4. Janet 5. Laughing Muse 6. Games,Video 7. You're next!

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Last night was the Storm Moon, or so said my witchly planner. It was indeed a gorgeous - though thankfully not stormy - moon: a bright, pale-yellow disc half shrouded in clouds and set against a darkening blue sky, all seen from my kitchen window. I had the urge to howl at it, but since I was making spaghetti and had company… I resisted said urge, and instead called A to the window to peek. She was impressed, but not as impressed as I was.

I considered doing some witchy things, but I got caught up in the more mundane but still satisfying house-enrichment activities. I put up some St. Patty’s day decor, mingled it with some springtime decor, and then, since it appears I’ll be staying here for at least another 18 months, barring some miracle, I put up some more of my regular decor. Unfortunately, I discovered that my special handy screwdriver no longer works, and I’m now in need of a new power screwdriver.

Instead of power-driving screws into the wall, I suffered through screwing two in by hand, which took some time, and then discovered a quick trick involving a small nail and a hammer to create a bit of a path for the blasted thing. Worked like a charm. I now have up two of my three shelves, and the third would’ve joined the others if only I had mrew screws of the right size. Evidently, they got lost in the move.

I also put up my two little sconce lanterns, which I adore, to complete the look, though frankly, I’m not sure I like the look or not. Whatever, I guess. They’re off the floor, anyway.

Now I just need some larger artwork/decor type stuff. Hmm, where, though?

I didn’t link last time. Oops. I get this from Witches Weekly.

If you were to plan your own Wedding or Funeral ceremony, would you create two separate ceremonies for pagan and non-pagan folk, or would you just plan a ceremony around your beliefs. How would you feel if any non-pagan friends or family did not wish to attend such a ceremony?

I would not plan or create two separate ceremonies for pagan and non-pagan folk - nor would I really plan a ceremony “around my beliefs”. I am the only one I know personally with my beliefs, and while not in the broom closet, per se, these beliefs are rather quite personal and I certainly don’t go shouting it into the streets.

Often, anyway.

But I would also not plan it around Christian beliefs specifically. I’d probably go fairly neutral in the religious arena, but also touched with some purely… pagan things. Like terminology: handfasting. That, to me, is romantic as hell. Things involving the seasons, the passage of time, the turning of the wheel. Perhaps mention of deity, or the spirit, but nothing particularly /pagan/.

On funerals in particular: I believe that funerals are for the living, not the dead, and frankly, if it makes them feel better to have a priest saying comforting things to them, so be it. But I do have some personal wishes on the actual burial, none of which are particularly religious - or at least, not particularly pagan. I’d like to be either cremated or buried ‘naturally’ just wrapped in linen cloth and covered up. Or at least in a plain wood box. Why people spend thousands of dollars on a beautiful, satin lined box they’re just going to bury for all eternity is beyond my comprehension. And I don’t want to be embalmed. Period. I would prefer not to have the whole Christian ceremony stuff and all, but hey, I’ll be dead and beyond caring by then.

It’s Lent. Actually, it was yesterday, but to me, it’s still today. (See this post to understand.) So yes, today was the beginning of the Lent season, that season of giving things up for God. The way I always understood it, the point of the whole thing was to take up a sacrifice that would be difficult in order to keep one’s mind on the ultimate sacrifice that Christ made. I’ve never - even when I was a practicing, bible-beating Christian - participated in this. It wasn’t mandatory in my church by any means - in all the years of Sunday School, it was never even discussed. But I always found it intriguing.

Tradition holds to a fast of some sort, but many people give up a favorite activity, or a bad habit, or whatever. And some, of course, don’t go the path of giving up, but just giving - charity work, money to a good cause, volunteering, more prayer time, whatever. (That’s like a sacrifice of time, I’d say.)

I’ve been thinking about this, and I find the idea of a spiritual fast of some sort intriguing. It’s certainly demanding. Doing some sort of fast for 1-3 days before each new moon is something that has occured to me in the past, and something I’m considering even more now that sacrifice is on my mind. Due to certain medical issues, a full fast would be inappropriate in my case, but day or three of dietary restriction wouldn’t be all bad, and might actually be - gasp - spiritually enlightening. On the other hand, perhaps all I’ll be enlightened to is my ravenous hunger. Seriously, it shouldn’t be too hard to drop to a fruit and vegetables type fast for one day - sundown to sundown, if I could get some fruit and vegetables that were decent on the day before the fast, of course. Where I live, that can sometimes be a joke.

Just a thought. For anyone participating in Lent, good luck!

To work graveyard shifts day in and day out is a difficult task, and one I relish being done with once it has passed me by, though only the goddess knows when that will be. While I am - and have always been - a night-owl of sorts, it’s become increasingly difficult for me to reconcile my inner cicardian rhythm to the earth’s cycles to the shifts I work. Everything changes when you begin sleeping through the day and working through the night, from sleep to meals to socialization to shopping. It’s almost like living in another world, or at least on another plane of reality.

I work from midnight until eight in the morning. I typically sleep anywhere from 8:30-10am until 5-6pm. Today, when I woke up at 5:30pm, it was just growing dark. A month ago, it would have already been dark for almost a half an hour. Today, when I woke, it was February 19th. By the time I settled down with my tea at work, it was February 20th. I live every day split in half and straddling the line. Every day is two days, and sometimes, it feels like it, too. My ‘last night’ was really your ‘today’, and somtimes my ‘tonight’ was your last night, and my ‘tomorrow’ is actually your ‘day after tomorrow’, or, depending on the time, it could very well be your ‘today’. See how confusing this is? It confuses me, too. Today is now Thursday, February 20th, and at eight am, “tomorrow” will still be February 20th. That’s because I might still be thinking it’s “today, February 19th”, but it’s not, not anymore. And “tomorrow” on February 20th, at, say, eleven pm, I might look at the calender and think to myself: “Gosh, it’s Friday already [because it almost IS Friday, if Friday actually starts at midnight, which, according to my work schedule, it does], and tomorrow [meaning Saturday], I have to clean house!” But then people are confused, because ‘tomorrow’ is actually Friday to them, not Saturday… because in fact, it’s still Thursday.

See, it makes no sense, and that is why I never know what day it is, and sometimes, today can be yesterday, today, and tomorrow all at once.

Then there’s sleeping. It’s hard to sleep in the daylight. Even with black curtains, light still seeps in through the adjoining bathroom window, and around the tops of the curtains, and through the doorway leading to the living room. And it’s warmer in the daylight. A person’s body temperature drops slightly when we prepare to sleep, and the cooler night air aids one in this task. I’ve learned something in the last two years - I cannot sleep if the room temperature is over 70 degrees F. I wake up, I sleep restlessly, I wake and sleep and wake and thrash and toss and turn and struggle. It is difficult, even with air conditioning in the summer, to keep a south facing bedroom below 70 degrees. In the winter, it’s easier on both conditions. Unfortunately, that means I suffer a bit from SAD, since I…. never ever see the sunlight.

Last December, I walked home at eight in the morning and could watch the sun finally poke over the horizon from my living room window before I went to bed. And when I woke, it had been dark already for over an hour. Sunlight was a bit foreign to me, and I grow a bit… homey and lazy and a little depressed because of it. Believe it or not, darkness makes me want to sleep! *laugh*

Other oddities - I eat ‘breakfast’ every day… but my ‘breakfast’ food turns out to be more like… dinner. Because everyone eats dinner at exactly the time of day I’m waking up. So for ‘breakfast’ I’ll often have, say, tacos, or roast beef, or spaghetti. And for ‘dinner’ I’ll have hashbrowns after I get off work, or cereal, or eggs. Breakfast food at normal breakfast time, but definitely not ‘breakfast’ for me. And for lunch, of course, it’s leftover ‘breakfast’ or something nukable since I have no lunch hour at work and must just be content with whatever I have at the office. Not like there’s any stores open at 3am!

More, I deal with being social, spending time with family and friends, right after I wake up. In fact, A often calls me within 2-3 minutes after I climb out of bed. Yes, this is deliberate. Sometimes, she calls many times in a row hoping I’ll be semi-awake while I’m in bed and hear the phone, and get up to answer it. Because hey, it’s social hour for her. For me, it’s like… wtf, can’t I shower, man? So often, I’m up and out of bed and having company before I’ve even eaten ‘breakfast’. Which is a little odd. I actually would love to be able to, say, get up and have some me-time before I greet the day. Doing yoga right after I wake as the sun rises or whatever sounds lovely… but it’s just not practical. For one, the sun is going down, and for two… people don’t like to start calling on friends after like, eight o’clock. I mean, they have lives, too, and sometimes they actually sleep during the night…

So some of the daily rituals I’d like to do just aren’t very feasible. I’d love to live a more natural, in tune with nature daily cycle, but I just can’t do it with the shift I work.

Oh well. Bigger and badder things to worry about, I suppose. But it’s something that’s been vaguely pricking at me for… like… a year.

What tools do you feel are essential when performing rituals? (Give the reasoning behind each tool and what it means for your ritual)

Mmm. Good question. Essential tools would be:

Candles: And lots of them. Why? Because that, to me, is really what helps me make the transition from ‘average everyday’ to ’spiritual magic’. Certain candles mean certain things - my spirit candle, elemental candles, etc. - but I’ll just lump them together.

Oils: I’m big on scent, as well. Annointing myself with oils is a spiritual thing, almost like a repeat baptism.

Tarot: I do a bit of divination most every ritual. It’s important to keep connected, and more, to keep focused.

Salt & Water: For purification of the ritual circle/altar area/whatever.

Everything else varies by the ritual at hand. And mind you, these are things that are essential to me - not essential to ritual. While it’s been said by many that magic - and ritual - can be done without anything whatsoever, I’ve always been a bit of a material girl. I like my things. I love my things. I like to use them. I don’t have any particular designs on simplifying my life (though I do need to do some serious decluttering/organizing) by ridding myself of my possessions, and I don’t see any particular need to better enlighten myself/work pure magic/whatever by forgoing the tools of the trade just because they aren’t /necessary/.

I’ve met a few pagans who seem to have designs on impressing to others how cool they are because they aren’t trapped by all the trappings - they don’t need to use [insert tools of choice here], all they need is their mind, themselves, yadda yadda. Well, that’s fine. They might not need a spoon to drink soup, either, but I’m sure not going without one, and it doesn’t make for a better person, or even a more sincere/honest/better pagan to do so.

That said, I like to have lots of things on my altar. Herbs and candles and cloth and plates and bowls and water and salt and oils and random stuff piled everywhere. Some people might look and cringe. But it’s important to me. And dammit, I’m not gonna change it just because certain people feel no need for frivolous earthly trappings.

January has been a month of reading. To be honest, I haven’t done a lot else. Knit 1/3 of a scarf. Finished up a sewing project I should’ve finished in November (the advent calendar - which, by the way, is totally super adorable), no baking, no intriging projects, nothing but cozying up and reading.

January’s a good time for that - unpredictable weather, harsh winds, chilly snow, so very little daylight, so very little warmth and energy. The rush of the holidays and the excitement of autumn long gone, I just sort of… curled up and rested all month long. I suppose I might have went into a bit of a hibernation like the bears. Is that so bad? All this month, I’ve been berating myself for it. Lazy! I’d write in my planner for the day’s events. Sometimes I wouldn’t write anything at all. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

But then I think of the animals that curl up and rest in the winter, and I think of all the furious knitting I did throughout autumn, and I think of the sewing and the crafts and the moving and the baking and the rush, and I think that perhaps a month-long resting period wasn’t so bad at all. Maybe it’s just what I needed.

I’m starting to feel the fires of creativity burn again. I want to sew, I want to knit, I want to /do/. I wanted to knit tonight, but it’s been a couple weeks since I worked on the scarf, and I’ve forgotten the pattern, so I’ll have to dig it up. Perhaps tomorrow.

But I read! Tonight I finished a book I would recommend to anyone who loves an enchanting story: The Thirteenth Tale, which is lovely and haunting and mesmerizing and too many other words to put down. If you have a love of books, read it! I also read On the Banks of Plum Creek - one of the Little House series books tonight, and those books always make me feel so warm and cozy and wanting to have a little house and a little family somewhere out in the middle of nowhere like that.

I read 14 books in January, and you can see which ones, and short, semi-coherent thoughts on each, on the 101 Things Booklist, linked to the right. Not bad. Approximately one book every 2 days or so. Not too shabby at all! A good way to kickstart my imagination.

Soon, it will be Imbolc, and then, I will pay homage to Brigid/Brigit, Irish goddess of creative inspiration, among many other things, and perhaps then, I will rise from this hibernation to return to life again with the growing light.

Tonight (or last night… both, really) is the January full moon - the Cold moon, or the Wolf moon, or whatever you’d like to call it. Tonight, being Wednesday night, not Thursday night. I put a moonstone into a jar of water and set it out in a windowsill to capture the moon, to make moonwater. It’s my third night of doing this - I prefer to get a full three days of the full/nearly full moon’s glory into my bottle of spring water.

I’ll then use this water in my rituals when I need a little extra kick. It’s good, I think, for blessing things, for consecrating them. It took effort to make this water, and that’s good enough for me. I would prefer to do this entirely in the dark, so that the water gets no other rays of light, except perhaps candlelight, but I suspect that’s difficult. There’s still a lot of ambient light around - streetlights, barn lights, and even sunlight during the first rays of dawn while I’m still at work and quite unable to rush home to remove it to a dark, shaded place. However, unpure as it may seem, I haven’t noticed that it’s any less useful to catch a bit of stray non-moonlight here or there.

In any case, this is the first time in months I’ve done this, and I only made a bit. I wish I had twelve bottles, and could capture moonlight for each month. Actually, this year, we have 13 moons - we also have a blue moon in May, and here, I intend to make a much larger batch of water, since this moon is rather more powerful than others.

Anyway. There you go. A bit of moon magic for you, straight from me.

Well, another year has turned. It’s 2007 now. Wonder how long it’ll take me to remember to write that, instead of 2006, on my checks/other dated material. Hopefully not so terribly long.

The new year passed without much excitement here. I spent it alone, except for Maddy.

She’s cute, but a holy terror on four legs at 8 weeks old. She spotted my christmas tree, found the beaded garland, grabbed it, and /ran/. The tree nearly toppled over on top of her before I could stop her. And then she did it /again/. And /again/. So I had to sort of try to block it off, but that’s easier said than done.

Nevertheless, she slept through the turning of the year, so I could run and throw open the door to let the new year inside - and toss a few coins through the doorway into the house for good luck - without any, uh, ‘helpers’. I burned up my yule tapers simply because I didn’t burn them at yule itself - no big deal. To me, yule is rather like New Year’s anyway - my personal spiritual new year. Some say pagans consider Samhain ‘it’, but I don’t. I think Yule is it - after all, Yule is when the sun is born again, and when the ‘death’ of the old year is really complete, and the new year arrives with the promise of lengthening days. If anything, Samhain is the beginning of the end. Besides, Yuletide is marked with all sorts of glorious things that symbolize renewal and hope and merrymaking and all that jazz, and that’s more like a new year festival to me than Samhain ever will be.

So yeah. I burned incense, too. Finally - at last! - got my charcol briquettes to light up, which was a miracle. Good smelling stuff, this diviniation incense from Spellbound Secrets! I looove the smell of it, and I’m actually not a big fan of incense. I should buy more. Before they like, go out of business or something as small businesses are wont to do. I used my cauldron. My altar looks witchy now that I’ve removed some of the secular Christmastime stuff - my santa advent calendar, etc. etc. - and replaced it with my chalice, filled with water (an offering) and my little offering clay pots (I really wish I had something better) filled with frankincense and rice and sugar and mistletoe) and my big cauldron with the incense, and my new tarot deck.

That’s the new tarot deck. Thank you, A! I love them. They’re currently ‘charging’. I’m going through a whole schebang consecration ritual thing to really make them happy. It involves the four elements and the next four moon cycles and by the end, it should be all happy and magicified. Or something. In any case, I intend to make use of them for daily readings, and use the others for… less daily readings, like sabbats and full/new moons, etc. Or, you know, whenever I bloody well want a change.

I did yoga tonight. It was awful. This new dvd I got… well, it looked good. And maybe some of the workouts /are/ good, but the one I did sucked ass in a royal sort of way. Oh well. I did work out. It’s not really a new year’s resolution, exactly, but I did plan to do yoga 3x a week. At least for 1 month. At the end of january, I can… evaluate.

And finally - at last! - here are the photos of my December secret pal package! Got them uploaded at last, despite many internet issues tonight. *growls at network*

I tell you, I’m in LOVE with that yarn. And oh, the nail polish is lovely, too! And the books, though I haven’t yet gotten around to reading them. :)

I haven’t been doing a lot lately. Mostly sleeping late and reading books (One Hundred Years of Solitude was the latest, finished just tonight) and working. This whole week was work, ever since Christmas Eve. Christmas Day didn’t even exist for me this year - I woke at around six, went to Mom’s to have some leftovers and missed dinner, opened a present from my brother, and then went home. Exciting, eh? And the whole week’s been like that - dull and blurry, mostly.

However, I’ve been planning a new year’s ritual, and I’ll do some of my Yule stuff then, too, as I didn’t much think about it on Yule itself. Tonight is my last night of work for the week, so I’ll have the next three off, where I can hopefully do something useful with myself.

Like sew.