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On the weekend of Vancouver Pagan Pride, one of my tradition sisters offered to touch up my new sacred tattoo that I had received about six weeks prior.  "It's really great for someone who was new, and her lines are excellent," she said, "but it's fading a little already and I want to dress it up a little, if that's okay with you."

My spirit-sister Jennica had done the tattoo - a triple moon with a blue pentagram in the center of the full one - in a cast circle as part of sacred ceremony.  It was my first tattoo ever and that meant a lot to me.  I had insisted upon this because I had been told the story of how my initiator Lord Redleaf had received the Green Man tattoo on his chest as part of ritual in a cast circle and it moved me.  I told my trad sister Amity Loyce this and let her know that it was very important to me that it remain sacred, and still done in a cast circle and empowered.  "Sure, that's fine," she said with a nod.  "I don't have any problems doing that!  I always wanted to tattoo in a cast circle . . ."

"Even though modern culture has done it's best to corrupt art into a celebrity production machine, simply another form of entertainment, designed specifically as an opiate to the downtrodden, gluttonous, and vapid, it fails because the artist knows better. Art is magic. Art is one of the rawest shamanistic forms of connection with the universal source of everything, but only if the artist is brave enough to give the audience what it needs rather than what it thinks, or has been told, it wants." --Peter Beckley

Imbolc is an introspective time of year. Many "I" words come to mind for me: introverted, inside, inquire. If you do not already opt for a solitary ritual on Brighid's special day and would like to mix things up a bit, I would keep the numbers small. An intimate gathering with a few close pals is in order.

While other paths require very little amounts of food (or none) when making offerings, Afro Latin traditions go completely overboard when it comes to feeding Deities, Spirits, and the incredibly wide range of beings that fill our altars. Usually, this is managed by a whole community so each time a Saint/Orisha/Spirit day comes, the altar rooms become loaded with plate after plate of delicacies, along with the foods that each tradition assigns to the specific Spirit.

Christmas trees are a fairly new addition to Spanish Christmas, which has less than 50 years of tradition in our country. Since the Canary Islands are located in the Northwest coast of Africa, fir trees are not native here – not that we would cut a live tree to place it on our living room anyway, so some years ago we got a plastic one, which was all we could afford at the time.

I never liked it much. Every year we would make and recycle old ornaments given away by family and friends, but it never looked like I wanted it to, and usually it ended up being put down on January 1^st, even though Christmas in Spain ends on January 6, the Three Wise Men day, which is the day when children get their presents. Last year, the tree didn't even make it out of the box, as I had hand painted a set of Nativity scene figurines (we'll talk about that on a future post) and it won without any effort against our poor, neglected plastic tree.

A doll is like an talisman, or an altar statue - its energy starts and grows with the creator, and after it is made the owner also adds his/her own energy. With enough love and energy, the doll becomes something that, no matter that I have been doing this for more than a decade, I cannot fully explain. A living thing? Something with a soul? Call it what you want, but I can tell you what she is not - an empty, inanimate thing.

I've always been a creative person and that creativity has extended past writing to painting, singing, and other artistic pursuits that I continue to pursue to this day. And as with all my other interests, I'm always looking for ways to apply my artistic skills to my magical work. I figure that the art gives me another way to express my magical talents as well as my creative vision.