One Witch’s Musings

There’s something that can happen in a witch’s life when life get busy and things you thought would be fine start going sideways. You don’t really see it until the things that are going sideways are fully perpendicular to you, crushing and enraging you with their pointy angles, demanding to be handled. I’m not sure if it’s a kind of tunnel vision, or what. I do know that when it happens to me, I can look back and see all the times that I could have taken magickal steps to remedy things and get them back on the track I want them to be on. I can see that if I had taken different steps earlier on, then I wouldn’t need to go the extreme that is currently called for, and I wouldn’t be feeling this way.

I’m not really sure that noticing in retrospect that I failed to notice what was happening in front of my face in real time will help me prevent it from happening again in the future. I think this is part of the human condition.

I’ve been thinking about this blog and what its real purpose is or should be. When all the circumstances of 2020 hit I was gearing up for a divorce. I moved twice last year and started a full time job during the pandemic. 2020 was actually a great year for me in a lot of personal ways, and 2021 is shaping up to be the same, despite what is going on in the world. However, with the changes that came in 2020 I closed my consulting business for the foreseeable future. I just don’t have the time for it anymore, and I definitely don’t have the energy for it. It’s still technically open, and sometimes I do take on the occasional client or make the occasional item. But in general, I’m not doing that work anymore.

 In a very real sense I stopped teaching and I stopped becoming available. I started shoring up my energy, becoming pickier about who gets my time and attention, and why, and when. I started focusing on my own home, and some of my own personal aspirations, and what I wanted for me. Almost three years ago I entered a distance-learning Medicinal Herbalism apprenticeship that I had three years to complete. I finally completed it this year. I’m happily knitting again instead of compulsively slogging through. I feel a faint glimmer of desire and joy in activities that had become horrifically mandatory before I quit them for a good, long time. And whatever I’m reading that is not about medicinal herbs, is fiction. Glorious, life-giving fiction. 

In the time that I have taken to build my life up again from scratch, I’ve dug deep into my practice and I’ve thought about my legacy. The most recent upheaval I’ve experienced was, I think, to remind me that there are still other things I like to do, and want to do. I wasn’t sure what would become of this blog in all of the changes that have been happening. I wasn’t sure- do I have anything left to give? I forgot Virgo in the last tarotscopes I did for this blog, which was also the last post I created almost three months ago. And tarotscopes were becoming drudgery for me. 

Most recently in the quiet, menacing waters of my rage I remembered that I actually love to write. That’s what boiled to the surface: my love of writing. And while I’m not sure I’m suited to teaching in a direct way, I do know that I am suited to writing and anyone who wants to learn will do so of their own accord, maybe even by happy accident.

So what is this blog now? Well, this blog is about witchcraft and spirituality, which my life is founded on. This blog is about the life of one witch- me- and my thoughts and feelings and sometimes, my practices. I’ll be happy to share more of my practices with you, when the time is right. For the next while you’ll mostly get my thoughts, and they’ll mostly be removed from anything specific happening in the world. We have enough commentary on “relevant” events. I don’t need to be another voice in that cacophony. Maybe I can be a solace. 

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The Lion’s Gate portal on August 8th has brought me violent dreams, nightmares, every single night. There’s a dullness to me during the day as a result. I feel battered down. I remembered that in 2019 I dreamed about my now ex-husband showing me apartment listings on craigslist, and when I told him about it he laughed, but a year later it happened. And I dreamed about a text conversation with my best friends about being in quarantine. And I dreamed about the world on fire. And I dreamed about meeting the love of my life in a room I’d never seen before in real life, and about him unloading a moving van. 

In a previous post I wrote about how prophetic dreams often take on a peculiar quality. I have learned that this is not always true. Sometimes, they just seem like regular dreams. I found an odd comfort standing at the pantry of the house I left in the divorce, staring at dry ranch packets and remembering that I had dreamed of that moment before. Like my ancestors and my own spirit were saying “this was written on your heart a long time ago. You’ll be ok.”

I hope that this blog will help you remember what was written on your heart a long time ago, and that you’ll be OK. But this blog won’t be about you or for you. It’s for me, and I’m sharing it with you. If we find a little way to connect in that, well, that’s the magic of it.  

Jessica Ripley is a Hekatean witch, writer, and spiritual advisor from Minnesota with a lifetime of study and experience in witchcraft and spiritual practice. She owns Owl in the Oak Tarot and also writes for Witch Way Magazine. You can connect with her on Facebook.

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