Short and sweet this month, because things have been fairly quiet.

Coven

We had a (two person) picnic for summer solstice – other people’s health and needs didn’t allow. (It was nice to talk, though!)

We’ve been pretty quiet since then, since I’ve had a series of other scheduling commitments in July. (We don’t schedule things over three day weekends generally, then I had something on the 17th, something this coming weekend, and long story short, we’re picking up for Lammas on the 31st.)

Witchy

I’ve been making steady progress on my seasonal projects, the rune study, and so on, but didn’t get brains to do a bunch of other stuff this month. That’s okay too. I have been walking (whenever it’s not too hot) and enjoying seeing the plant and nature changes, and my fairly minimal container garden is doing nicely.

Personal

The 17th was my entire family (my mother, brother, and sister) getting together in one place for the first time in a decade. (There are not many of us, we’re spread out geographically, and we often have competing ‘when we’re free for travel’ schedules.) Also my brother in law, my nephew, and one of my niblings.

That was a good outing, and it was good to see and chat with people not in email.

This coming weekend I’m at a virtual but intensive (8ish hours a day for four days), so a lot of this week has been clearing the deck of household stuff and other stuff I need to do to make that happen.

Coven

The big news is that we have a new initiate, as of the 12th!

It feels wonderful that the first time I had someone over since mid-March 2020 was our new initiate (for a pre-initiation step in our tradition), and then her initiation (with our other initiate). We had a little chaos on the front end, but everything worked out wonderfully.

We also had a (okay, two person, people had to cancel for various reasons) picnic for summer solstice. (I got a bit too much heat, and spent the rest of the day sitting in the cool dark without much brain, but that’s okay. I’m awfully heat intolerant.)

We’re continuing our rune discussion (we’ve got three months left…) And we’ve got coven things scheduled through December, though the next big one is Lammas in early August.

Witchy

It’s been a fairly quiet month on the personal front. I’ve been thinking about some things I’d like to reset about habits for summer solstice (so far so good, half a day in…)

I’ve mulled some mead with spices for offerings this quarter, and have been sitting in my living room watching a candle burn on my shrine while doing some witchy reading and monthly prep. (I do a spread in my journal for the new sun sign, plus did a Tarot reading for midsummer.

Some conversations after the initiation ritual and some other things out in the world have got me thinking about witchcraft and transformation – I’m hoping to get an article about that up on Seeking this week. (I’ve got a few others in progress, but need to wrangle an afternoon sometime to get them formatted and up online. Watch this space for notes when they’re up.)

Personal

We’re still not sure exactly when we’re going to stop working remotely (My office is in the same building as kids, many of whom are medically fragile, so they’re being incredibly careful about bringing us back. I’m fine with this, especially in the summer – my office has air conditioning, and so do our stacks, but the main library space doesn’t.)

In the meantime, I’m focusing on nudging some habits and patterns better so when I do start commuting again, I’m in good shape with them. I’ve started getting my farm share (from a farm the next town over that’s been going for almost 150 years…) and thus have many vegetables to do things with.

I’m taking some vacation around the 4th of July (for editing purposes) which I’m looking forward to.

Coven

Again, another quiet month. We are – excitement! – preparing for an initiation in June, now we can put vaccinate people in a room without masks. We have a preparatory piece that we’re doing this coming weekend, and then the initiation is scheduled for June 12th.

Other than that, we’ve had rune discussion, and then Beltane.

We’re making plans to do a picnic outside for summer solstice, as the first time we’ll have seen each other in person in 15 months or so (no ritual plans, just hang out, maybe share some food, and catch up.) Also very exciting!

We’ve also plotted out coven calendar events through December, which makes me feel really good, because I can tell when I have weekends free to do other things (mostly writing-related.)

Witchy

A couple of conversations with seekers recently have made me kick around the idea of doing some non-training discussions with plenty of time for Q&A about stuff people are trying to sort out.

Note! I’m still figuring out what this might look like, and I’m not planning to start until September or October (I’m expecting the eventual return to work in my library in person to take a bit out of me for a while…)

If you’re not signed up for my newsletter, keep an eye out there for more early details, or here and my Patreon for more specifics as I get things set up.

My theoretical plan is a once a month web call class on some topic, probably focused not so much on “how do I do witchcraft”, but more on “how do I figure out useful sources of information for witchy/Pagan/magical/etc. stuff?” and “what do I do when things contradict, how do I figure that out?” and “how do I put together a way to learn about this that doesn’t feel totally scattered”.

My current thought (which may change in the next few months…) is to make it available to anyone who backs my Patreon or makes a small donation (and by small, I really do mean “very small” as the minimum, like $1), with some options if online payments or money are a problem at all. (Money will help support the time and energy need to put something like this together.)

My thought is to make the audio (plus any slides or handouts) available to anyone who’s registered, but not video (because I don’t really want my video self out on the Internets). There may also be a Discord channel.

As I say, still a work in progress. If you have topics you’d love to see me tackle, let me know!

Personal

I released another book in my 1920s romances with magic series! This is, as I have said elsewhere, my “Did you have pedagogical issues with the fundamental structure of Hogwarts? Me too.” It’s about astronomy, the power of eclipses to change perspective, academic politics, and a friends-to-lovers romance.

(The next one involves people putting together a complex ritual more or less on the fly, and takes place on an ocean liner in 1901 in the icy waters of the north Atlantic.)

Other than the writing, I have been working on figuring out what routines and habits are working well for me, so that as we look at being back on campus eventually, I can keep up momentum on writing

Coven

We’ve been largely quiet month or so.

Our one current Dedicant is taking a break for a bit (due to a bunch of life change coming up.) They’re still going to come to rituals, but we’re pausing classes. We’ll revisit sometime this fall (or maybe next spring, depending on how things go, and if we have any other interest from other prospective Dedicants in the meantime.)

On the exciting front, we’re moving forward with an initiation that has been on hold for about 10 months (our prospective initiate completed all the relevant stuff late last spring, so we have been in “when it is safe to do ritual together.) Now, the two people who need to be involved (me and the prospective initiate) are fully vaccinated, and the other person we very much want there (our other initiate) is in process, and we have an initiation date in June!

(We have one more step a couple of weeks before the initiation that they get a couple of weeks to prep for, so lead time is a thing. Lead time also gives me a chance to redraft the initiation ritual for two people and my current apartment layout… This is one of the few times we get super detailed with that, but it’s also one of the times we really need to make sure everything goes smoothly.)

Stuff we’ve done:

• Rune discussion (March 27th)
• A couple of individual discussions with people.

Coming up on May 1st, we’re going to spend some time talking about what kind of scheduling people want going forward (including whether we continue doing some things online by preference once we can start meeting in person again, what people need to feel safe doing things in person, etc.)

Witchy

I’ve continued making progress on some personal learning and projects, though not as much as I wanted. Aries season has had a focus on other things. I’m thinking about what’s working for me for new and full moon personal work, and the fact that no, I apparently don’t really want to do specific things for first and third quarter moons most of the time.

I’ve also been really enjoying getting outside and walking more again. I live about three quarters of a mile from a large and historically interesting pond, off the main bike path, and I walk down there most days right now. (Tomorrow, I’m going out to a farm owned by the Massachusetts Audubon Society – it’s only about a 20 minute drive from where I live now, but I haven’t been there since I was in summer camp there in my late grade school years. Since it is a) a farm and b) it is baby animal season, that seemed a great place to go while I’m on vacation this week.)

Personal

Part of why I’ve been light on the other things is that now I am fully vaccinated, I have been catching up on things that needed in-person visits. Like an eye appointment, where I have tipped from “glasses sometime in the future” to “glasses, yep.”

(I am delighted to finally have the last checkbox on my stereotypical librarian checklist ticked off. Cat, yes. Hair in bun, yes. Sensible shoes, yes. Cardigan, yes (even if mine are mostly geeky choices from Svaha) And now glasses!

I saw the optician on the 10th, and picked them up on Saturday afternoon (the 17th) so I’ve only been wearing them for two and a half days, but so far so good! Because I spend 90% of my time on a computer, we went for computer specific glasses, and I’ll be getting some distance frames (with either transition lenses or clip on sunglasses) later this summer when my FSA account rolls over.

The one thing I’m currently finding weird is that when I’m on the laptop in the living room, I’m used to looking up and being aimed at my shrine space, which is now modestly blurry (because it’s well out of the range of the glasses focal point…) This may or may not provoke me to do some actual sitting in front of the shrine practice more regularly, we’ll see.

(Right now, I’m trying “don’t put on my glasses for my morning devotional stuff”. I don’t need them to be able to function, more for “eyestrain is no fun”)

Other than that, I’m taking vacation this week, doing a lot of work on my authorial wiki, and doing some planning for the May-July quarter of the year. Whee! (This is how you can tell that I’m a Virgo Sun and a Capricorn rising, I suspect… Besides my love of spreadsheets.)

New pages and posts on Seeking:

• My series on yearly and regular planning (four parts, that link takes you to the first, which links to the other three and gives context.)
• What’s a coven? People use the term in different ways.
• Seeking a coven in the time of Covid
• What kind of witch am I?

Coven

Fairly quiet, on the whole. I didn’t schedule anything between our solstice ritual on the 19th and January 2nd, both because I was taking some time off to do other things, and because various people have kids and other bits of their life to coordinate.

• January 2nd: We’d planned on a rune discussion, but ended up with just two of us there, and had a chat about some other witchy things instead. Dedicant class in the afternoon, talking about ritual theory.
• January 9th: Dedicant class, talking about mythology and deity.

This weekend, we’ve got another rune discussion scheduled, and another Dedicant class (tools and altars, and I need to figure out some of how to share that usefully virtually: I have photos of most of the relevant stuff I took a few years ago.)

There were also several longer emails in here – some Dedicant questions (yay!), plus the one described below in the “world at large” section.

Witchy

I spent most of my vacation time working on writing related projects (the kind of thing where I needed to load a book into my brain, not disrupt it for the better part of ten days, and redraft substantial chunks of it) which meant I didn’t get as much else done as I was hoping.

One of the things I’m really liking about my planning adjustments for this year (which comes out of working through the HB90 material) is that I sat down and figured out when I needed to do the prep work in advance of some scheduled things, put it in my to-do list and calendar, and now I don’t have to worry I’m missing something.

So, this week, I sent out email about our Imbolc ritual plans, and Sunday afternoon I spent time on the “work through Nigel Pearson’s Walking The Tides: Seasonal Rhythms and Traditional Lore in Natural Craft” project I’m working on this year month by month. I’ve done December, January, and now February, putting notes into the private wiki that I use for this kind of thing.

I also did some work on the stuff in the Upcoming Plans section.

In sadder news, there have been two deaths in my larger communities, one of whom was my confirmation sponsor, back when I was in my teens and Catholic. (She was a fantastic example of how being deeply religious doesn’t have to take a single form, and how to be curious and engaged about the world and finding meaning.)

The world at large

The world at large is complicated, demanding, and distressing in all sorts of ways right now. After January 6th, I sent email to our coven email list with a few things that I’ve found helpful (my page on coping in hard times, as well as some thoughtful comments and advice from Bri Saussy.)

But it’s not as if I have all the answers (far from it), and I’m also very aware this year that while I’ve thought a lot about “what can I offer to people in my coven as a priestess”, doing significant pastoral support (in the way clergy in other religions do) is … not entirely in my scope.

Finding the line between being supportive, sharing helpful things, encouraging people to figure out what’s helping them, and getting myself into a situation where I don’t have the resources to maintain it is tricky (because I also have a day job that hasn’t stopped, chronic health foo, all the usual life maintenance stuff, and so on.)

And it’s not like I didn’t spend more time than I likely should have watching/reading/listening to news. (The line between ‘getting new information that might be actually important’ and ‘doomscrolling’ is more obvious at some times than others.)

Upcoming plans

I announced the following over on my Patreon and mailing list on January 3rd. Subscribe to the mailing list for updates about the project! (Though I’ll also mention it here in the monthly updates…)

I am likely going to be moving the mailing list to Substack in the next month or so. It has some additional tools – like being able to do comments and discussion – that I think would be neat.

Here’s what I’ve announced: (taken from the Patreon post)

Conversations with several friends and acquaintances (plus watching a lot of people struggle with this in the various Paganish spaces I read) has led me to sort out a new project, focused on how to learn (and research about) Pagan, witchy, and magical topics. 

It will focus on:

• How to figure out some things about how you learn best
• Some tips for planning time (and energy) to keep you moving forward
• Why religious and magical research is different from what you learned in school…
• … and how you can do it differently, with less frustration and stress
• A research process that adapts to a wide range of needs and topics
• Different approaches to keep track of what you’ve learned
• Help with common issues – how do you deal with contradictory sources, issues of cultural assumption and appropriation, concerns about trying something new.
• Advice for how to incorporate meditation, ritual, and divination as part of your learning and research process.

It doesn’t have a fancy name yet (my draft file is called “Pagan Learning”. Very inventive, I know.) 

It’s also a large project: my outline has at least 60 subsections, and I keep adding more pieces. It’s going to take me a while to write, edit, and share. 

Format: 
I’ll be sharing it via an online course platform (probably Teachable). The first segment, on how to figure out how you learn well, will be free, so you can get a sense of how the structure works for you. I’m hoping to have that up by the end of March at the latest. Watch this space for details. 

The rest of the segments will be available for a moderate fee.

(I’m thinking in the realm of $20-25 for the whole thing, about the price of a full-length print book, and I expect you’ll be able to get specific segments for a small amount of money, like $5. There’ll be discount codes for anyone on the Patreon or my mailing list.) 

For right now, it will involve text-based information, with screenshots, worksheets, and other supporting material as makes sense for the topic. I’m open to adding some video or audio down the road, but they’ll involve some additional tools on my end (and time to make sure everything’s fully accessible), so let’s start with the text. 

The current outline has 9 segments. Once I get the first one up, I’ll have a better idea of the timeline for the rest. 

Additional options: 
Once I have 3 segments up, I’ll be adjusting my Patreon levels to include access to the course for anyone who backs the Patreon at a modest level. I’m thinking about setting up a Discord for talking about anything and everything related to Paganish research and learning (which, really, covers a lot of topics) as a perk.  

I’ll also be sharing additional content on Patreon once I get going. This will include comments on specific books relevant to the project, maybe some bibliographies, that kind of thing. I’m also open to suggestions if there are things you’re interested in seeing here. (It’ll be a month or two before that starts up, and I’ll tell you before I get rolling.) 

When I get everything done I will look at doing a book version (hey, I’m set up for self-publishing…) 

Related: 
I have plans to do a separate course on planning and productivity from a witchy point of view (see my recent posts to get a sense of how I do that)

Not so much ‘how do you schedule your witchy work’ (other people do that well and I’ll tell you about them too!) but ‘how do you set up a system that is in tune with and supports your religious and magical practice and values’. 

I hope to have this piece out in October, to help you get ready for 2022. 

If you have any questions, comments, ideas, things you hope I cover, the contact form is over here for those.