On Wednesday, February 14, 2018 the unimaginable happened in our community of Greater Fort Lauderdale. 17 people were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the affluent city of Parkland. 17 teenagers and teachers will no longer kiss their family good bye and hello every day. This tragedy was committed by an emotionally troubled former student that accumulated many guns over the past year, including the weapon he used to murder all these innocent lives, the assault rifle, AK-15.
Loving Yourself First
Our regular program at MoonPath CUUPS for February 15th was titled “Loving Yourself First” with our Crone Priestess, Opal Luna. The day after this tragedy occurred, the topic no longer seemed fitting, we were in a state of shock, rage, sadness, and numbness. Opal Luna and I agreed to change the class to do group magick to ease the pain and use these raw emotions to facilitate change.
Approximate 25 of us gathered on Thursday to work this magick. I led the group in a meditation to find words or symbols that could be applied to this tragedy to effect positive change. Opal Luna and Moanna began led us in songs of peace and love. As Moanna played the ukulele we sang “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance” by John Lennon.
The magickal working we did was an active meditation. We sang, we meditated and then we all eventually wrote our thoughts on a pink poster board with markers as to ways we personally can help prevent another tragedy like the one we just experienced. Our evening of group magick ended as we gathering in a circle, to do something we call “Swinging Hands”. We chose three words that captured the magick of the night, those three words were: Love, Peace, and Wisdom. Standing in a circle we swung our hands back and forth in rhythm, one third the way up in front of us we said “love” in unison, in a low voice, then we swung our hands out in front of us, again repeating the word “love”
in a stronger voice, then finally we swung our hands high above our heads and yelled “love”. We then repeated this for the words peace and wisdom.
Upon concluding the night, we all agreed that we need to continue to focus on the magickal working for three days. Myself & Wyver committed to burning the poster board with our magickal spells, hopes, prayers, wishes in our personal ritual fire pit on Saturday.
Putting Magick into Action
Friday and Saturday, many of us put action behind the group magick we created. Some of us wrote our representatives at both state and federal levels. Other of us took to social media with cries for “Not One More” and some of our teachers in our pagan community attended a rally in downtown Fort Lauderdale calling for stricter gun control laws, gun registration requirements, age limits to purchasing guns, and a need to help people with mental illness before tragedy strikes again.
Magick is the bending of reality, we do spells and such to laser focus the working, but the work does not end once we say “And, as I will it, so mote it be”. Thoughts, prayers and spells are not enough to effect the change we need to bend this reality…. We as magickal practitioners must follow through with action, passivity is not a friend to facilitating this change. We must march, rally, sit-in, protest, write letters, run for office, raise our voices to follow through to see this magick work, to make reality bend, to effect the change we need to stop future senseless killings.
Blessed Be ~ Edie “Moonday” McAnulty
Moonday is the Co-Facilitator of The MoonPath CUUPS Chapter in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Priestess – Elder – Chaos Magician
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