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It's hard, but I've adjusted to so many changes in my life. Job changes, starting a business, two high school graduations, son going to college - but doing so online. Then this hits me, my middle daughter, the one that has been nicknamed the emotional support child for so many - including me, has left for college. 

She is my artist (painted the picture above), my crafter of jewelry, may painter of cups/ornaments/bowls, and has gown into my coffee/tea date, coworker at our shop, picker-up of emergency groceries, taxi for the youngest, and often comic relief. She was the one who was never going to leave me, telling her dad and I the dreams she had of building a house right next to ours and "borrowing" our land so she could have a couple highland coo and sheep.

Some of us, like me, are not all that crafty so simplicity is key. This 3 ingredient recipe takes all the fuss and muss away so you even enjoy the process of creating your own calming balm. This concoction will not only soothe and nourish our skin but it also is very good for your soul.

Gather the following:

• 1 cup shea butter
• ½ cup almond oil
• 1/2 cup coconut oil
• 15 drops each of 2 neroli and vanilla essential oils
• Double boiler and water
• Wooden spoon and whisk
• Small Clean jars with lids, 4 ounce

Melt shea butter and coconut oil in the top of a double boiler. Remove from heat and let cool for 30 minutes. Add in the almond oil (you can substitute olive oil, jojoba oil, any organic, liquid oil that is organic.) After experimenting a good bit, I discovered that the fresh and lightly citrus scent of neroli in combination with vanilla is extremely comforting and also tremendously relaxing, It is so pleasing, you may even consider using it as a perfume. I

 Stir in almond oil and blend. When the l oils start to partially solidify, add in 15 drop each of the essential oils. Stir in, and then whip the mixture until a butter-like consistency is achieved which will only taka few minutes. If you’re like me, you immediately try it on your own skin so do indulge yourself, you earned it!

I'm preparing to receive my Reiki II attunement, and I've been thinking a lot lately about anger.

There are countless things in my life that make me angry right now. My kids drive me up the wall. My husband leaves messes in the kitchen. I don't particularly like my day job, but I haven't yet figured out how to quit it and still pay the mortgage. My back hurts a lot. Also, we're in the middle of a late capitalist apocalypse.

Good old Hinduism.

Among worshipers of Krishna, it's said that the Braj Mandal, the landscape around the holy city of Vrindavana—site of Krishna's childhood and youthful escapades with the gopis—is a physical incarnation of the god himself.

A god incarnate in a landscape. Surely there's something that any pagan can understand.

In his Vraja Bhakti Vilasa, Narayan Bhatt gets even more specific. Such-and-so a place is Krishna's nose, over here his left eye. And so on and so on.

Karhela and Kamai have the good fortune to be the god's two buttocks. (And how many times haven't I said, “That guy has the butt of a god”?)

His penis is Kurnabam. (Lucky Kurnabam.) Oddly enough, no testicles are reported, which—for a highly-sexed god like Krishna—seems pretty unlikely.

But, of all places, Krishnakshipana has the honor of being Krishna's anus.

I chose not to follow crows today,
but turned away
to follow the mist instead,
descending down a rocky hill
and into an underworld of my own making,
in which I laid aside
the pressures of pleasantness
and considered how it would feel
to lay my drive down
across the stones too
and walk away,
leaving it gasping in surrender
between a flattened cracker of frog
and finality.
I knelt beside blue chicory
with a cloak of white fog across my shoulders
feeling weary of smiling,
thin of patience,
and with only a thread of faded magic
beating feebly beneath my skin.
I pondered messages from purple asters,
gravel beneath my knees,
and resisted reaching for rosehips
through the ebbing bowers of poison ivy.
An unripe persimmon, gleaming purple-red
below the bright white sky,
rolled into my path
and as I made my way back up the hill
two vultures rose silent and hulking from the trees,
so close I heard their feathers whispering together.
I felt an ember quicken quietly
beneath my breast
and on the gliding motion of broad wings,
I was reminded that we can always
choose which way to go,
and that even thin and tattered magic
is worth
savoring.

As you may have noticed from  this blog, I treasure cinnamon incense. It brings a positive energy to your space, an appealingly sweet and spicy scent. It also brings prosperity and calm. What could be better? This may become one of your favorites, as well as it is truly easy to make.

Gather together:

How do you say “athame” in Old Witch?

“Athame”—the standard modern name for the witch's ritual knife—is a word of French origin, from Old French atamer, “to cut.”

(Variously pronounced across contemporary Witchdom, around here the word rhymes with “Hathaway.”)

As such, mythically speaking, it will have entered the vocabulary of English-speaking witchery along with the Norman Craft at some point after 1066.

So what did the Hwicce—the original Anglo-Saxon Tribe of Witches—call their ritual knives?

The dialect of Old English spoken by the Hwicce distinguished between two kinds of knife: cníf (K'NEEF), ancestral to modern “knife,” and seax, defined variously as a knife, hip-knife, short sword, dirk, or dagger.

Deriving ultimately from a proto-Indo-European root meaning “to cut”—the same root also gave rise to “scythe,” “saw,” and “sedge” (originally “sword”)—seax is also said to have given rise to the ethnonym Saxon as well: the “People of the Knife.”

Although seax fell out of general usage, it has survived to modern times with specific application as a name for a “slater's ax” used to cut (and pierce) roof-slates: variously sax, saxe, or zax.