A Witch's Path

I was up yesterday morning before sunrise as is my habit on watering days.  Given the native dryness of the Prairie, the excessive heat of the season, the draught and the wind that follows it, I have needed to water every other or every two days.

I walked the circle from north to east to south to west thanking the quadrants, the elements and the Goddess for the luxuriant beauty they have brought into this world and my life.  You see, I am only a caretaker.

I entered the western quadrant as the sky began to shed the darkness one shade at a time.   There I observed an isolated bank of ashen cloud gliding ever so slowly off the Rockies toward the eastern Planes.  I knew then that there would be no rain.  For a little while I enjoyed my coffee sweetened by the cool morning air and the song of waking birds in the trees all around.  When I went to turn on the hose I glanced again at the sky in the western quadrant.  There looking down on me was the moon that is featured here.  The cloud bank was gone as if burned away by a blazing sun.  I took this to be an omen of a long hoped for beginning of better days to come for the planet and its inhabitants.

No matter how many great men and women who will change the course of history walk below her, the moon’s course remains unchanged.  No matter how many fools look up at her believing that she exists only to please them and that her sole manifestation is what they can perceive with their limited minds, the moon will continue to embrace her sister earth with white-silver magic long after all fools are dust.

As a follower of the Great Goddess I believe that the phases of the moon are analogous to the changing times of a woman’s life.  The waxing Maiden moon is the moon of hope.  The full Mother moon is pregnant with and birthing the possibilities born of that hope.  The waning Crone moon is the moon of transition as the change brought about by possibilities becoming reality enters our consciousness.  The time of the dark moon when the Great Crone is preeminent is the gestational period of hope.  Then Hecate, Queen of the Witches, leads us into the unconscious to confront our Shadow where we learn the difference between what we need and what we want.  In full procession of this wisdom we offer it to the waxing moon as hope, and the cycle begins again.

This is one unfolding truth along my Witch’s path.