Witch Think

Blessed Samhain. The Witches New Year.

The question of done. All discomfort has right use and it’s not about being a better person, or lessons, or being more spiritual. Discomfort is part of being human. Discomfort takes us into the realm of the humane. The humane action is what love looks like. New Age thinking and quite a few religions and philosophers, propose we transcend the human condition to reach higher consciousness. Transcendence = out of the body. The humane resides in the body. What is the right use of the kill or be killed we carry within? Here’s a clue: the most tender, gentle, loving people know what and how to hate. They control their actions; not their feelings. Snuggle your demons. If you are serious about changing your consciousness, and the consciousness of the planet, open to the humane within and practice treating yourself humanely. Make it habit, make it sure as gravity.

Scorpio Season: The clash of otherness; yours and yours. Alongside the not so pretty is the soul call and the heart’s need for gentle, for kind. Delicious sarcasm. Rich creativity. Deep bliss. Black velvet. Relating and relationship and warmth. Again, the question of done. Who and what enhances your life and makes you feel good all over? Who makes you laugh? Who’s got your back? Mercury = communication; Scorpio = secrets. High probability of sharing uncomfortable secrets; high probability of uncomfortable secrets being revealed.

Refuse to judge self through the lens of the past. Staying stuck, holding fast to what is clearly over, is of no benefit and will suck the life out of your dreams. The dreams that are still a little out of reach but, are starting to take form in the ethers. Physical security and anchors are the feeding soil of the dream.

It is Samhain Eve as I write this. The veil is clearly thin because the dead, namely my mother, woke me this morning at 5 am. When I write it was wonderful, it was amazing, it was profound, I feel like an idiot because the words don’t even begin to convey the experience or the movie in my head that turned on. I can say I was wrapped in thick white light, I can say there were angels everywhere, seriously everywhere, just like when she was dying, and I can say we laughed hard, I could see her laughing, smelled her Chanel #5, images of the best of times bled one into the other, there were no frames, just totality. If you fall I’ll leave you, she said, when we got off the plane. I was wearing a white halter mini dress and 3 inch platform sandals. I said, if I fall I’m taking you with me, and we howled. Last time she laughed that hard she had the cancer and we were drunk out of our minds on green crème de mint. I was in a comedy group and we did a midnight show every Friday upstairs at Greene Street. I flew down from New York most every Saturday to be with her and I’d do the show to make her laugh. I’d Reiki her to. Anyway the night we were so drunk on green crème do mint, I’d put on my satin peignoir and was doing my Sunny Von Bulow in a coma character.

I miss having a live mother and father. Momma’s here now as I write this, as is my dad, I can smell the Kool cigarettes, he’s still using his cigarette holder. Uncle John, Uncle Bob, Uncle Dusty, drinking martinis and playing gin, and I can’t stop crying the tears that only a woman of a certain age can cry. Grief and loss for whole worlds long gone and never coming back. And I’m not in a place where I want to think about new worlds forming, or even forming a new world. Mind you I was in therapy for over 30 years getting over my family; at the same time, I loved them so much and I never for one minute doubted they loved me. I also never thought I’d ever be able to see the good in how I was raised; I was so focused on the damage that had been done. It was my focus, my experience of the damage, and my willingness to heal that led me to witchcraft and the right therapist.

All of the work I’ve done over the years opened the door for what happened this morning.
The Samhain season is about deep feeling; nothing superficial. Deep feeling always lands me, lands anybody, on new ground, and that ground feels good because it’s honest and there’s something familiar about it. That’s because it’s your ground, you’ve had it all along. You want your ground, you live, that’s what you do, and you practice treating self yourself humanely, till it becomes a habit and you do your art or whatever it is that makes you whole. Don’t let anyone take the wonder of being fully alive and fully in body away from you. Don’t let anyone split your being into pieces.

Blessed Samhain
Love beyond all reason. Kat x0x0x0x0
Art: Nancy Spero

I think a lot about chaos and how you can work with chaos but you cannot impose order on it. I think a lot about unity consciousness but rage, and oh baby we got rage, demands its pound of flesh. If you study history, and I do, victims inevitably become the oppressors. I am remembering my days of early feminism and women wanting it all, and what "all," meant was what a white, straight man had. I loved my tight-ass jeans, candies heels, silk shirts, and cock. I was told I was less of a feminist because of it. Later I was froze out of the Hermetic group I dearly loved for being negative. Negative in this case was crying because my mother had died and if I truly believed that life was eternal I'd know she was right there with me. My tears, it was implied, were wrong. I was not walking the talk. I went home and drank a bottle of wine. This was before sobriety and coming into my own way of thinking.

Ideology is a mental construct. Human beings are not. Ideology used to remove and deny intrinsic humanity, feeling, plants some nasty seeds that bear ugly fruit and that fruit is framed as the universe teaching us lessons for soul growth. Bullshit. It takes courage not to collude with your own oppression; It takes courage not to collude with systems that are intrinsically cruel and keep you small. Courageous actions are examples of self-love. Courage is ofter fear with prayers. I am told by my invisible friends that unity consciousness is how we break the cycle. I said, "fucking great, more ideology," and the guides laughed. "Work on defining unity consciousness," they said, "in story." "Are you gonna pay me?" I snapped. And they laughed even harder.

I am upstate this week, in my happy place, caring for a friend's 5 year old. I have been in quarantine for a long time and I have worked during quarantine because I have to. I have to support myself. So I wear a mask, I take a carefully selected group of vitamins everyday, and I work out. I don't know anyone who's working during quarantine who doesn't have to and quite honestly I feel fortunate to have the work I do. To say I don't think about what would happen if I got sick would be a lie. To say I don't worry about getting sick would be as big a lie, and I am pissed off that my very survival, humanity's survival, is locked into a system that I/We did not create, that has been imposed on me/us and the rest of the world. Someone told me I had anger issues, which I thought was odd. I have no problem expressing my anger.

Off to buy a fan and nutmeg.
Bovina, NY
7/2/2020

Everything is in the story. Stories that change and form you are the chapters. Love and pain are equally powerful for each contain the other. There is a painter I know in Margaretville, whose work takes the skin off things, setting energy free. Chaos. Unfamiliar shapes, foreshorten, lengthen, twisting brutally, curving gently, bursting through space and time. This is what pure feeling looks like.

Paul Muad'dib says fear is a mind killer. Witches say where there’s fear there’s unacknowledged power. New Agers say fear is negative and creates your reality. New Age thinking is today’s Panglossian Optimism, and Pangloss was burned at the stake between the hors d'oeuvres and the entree. Hmmmm. Fear is part of life and we all have it. Sometimes fear stops us from doing things we need to do, and other times it stops us from doing things we have no business doing. I think the witches are right, if I’m afraid of doing something I know I need to do and want to do, but am too afraid to put myself out there, then I am shirking my responsibility and my power to impact my life. I am shirking because what if the result isn’t what I want and I get hurt. Again. I can’t stand being hurt. But hurt is part of life and living and trying anything new is probably going to hurt a little (or a lot). Scars are beautiful, they remind me that I have lived. The point is there is right use for all feelings and when you take the skin off remarkable shapes emerge. You’re in the current now, best swim with it.

A very important writer once told me alliteration was bad writing. I’ve been addicted to alliteration ever since.
Montclair, NJ
9/14/2019

The center no long holds, the tesseract is quite real. Refuse to follow Virgil through Dante’s hell - it's Dante’s hell, not yours. Deus sive Natura. Over-complication sends you right up your own asshole. Contain the paradox. Like attracts like and opposites attract. It's enough to fry the reductive brain of any New Ager. Go ahead - take a chance. Put the cruel and their ways behind you, and let yourself love those, who love beyond all reason. Find balance in the golden mean.

Alike attracts like, and opposites attract; individuation is the key. Grace resides in the opening. Change it, if it no longer serves you. Stand in the direction of a good breeze, holding your arms out. Ask for and feel the winnowing. The Angels of Air can help you with that one, or Paralda - The Elemental King of the Air. We are all modes of one substance (energy), the same substance (energy), in different form. I love that - feeling what I have in common with everyone else, and feeling that which makes me unique.

Go for essence and leave the shape it takes up to the Gods. That takes faith in the unseen. Not blind faith but faith. Faith in gravity, in the seasons, will do. Faith feeds hope.

Have a new appreciation for those who get what you’re up to; at the same time, don’t give a rat’s ass what anybody thinks. When the voices, you-should-be-doing-more, start up, aim lasers at 'em and burn them out. They're not your voices anyway. They're interjects, meaning they belong to either your mother, or your father, or education, or church, or any other social institution that is hell bent on keeping you cut to size and manageable. Refuse to tolerate even a whisper of the intolerable. Compassion is NOT about letting people walk all over you.

Priority determines the use of substance (energy) Shifting priorities allows for new use(s). The center no longer holds, the paradigms are changing; all is grounded movement. Eat baked apples, and cheese omelets, and start taking vitamin C.

9/30/19
Saugerties, NY

Dance the hurting knot. The numinous shape of wholeness defies the easily, definable good. Free form, form free, the two-faced janus, and the sweet release of the utterly absurd. Kat Manaan

"We are all dancing in patterns that make oceans move, mountains fall and rise again, and love bloom in all heart. the heart of the earth is blooming now." Stephanie DeGrandis

Fire in the belly, in the heart, shatters old tectonic plates of being. Lava flows through the cracks, forming new land. Pele dances and happy goats munch hydrangeas. Non-sensical shapes make no sense, make perfect sense; rising, shaping. Taking their first breaths, breathing new, odd connections; strange beauty dancing, re-defining, new tensions explore unexplored paths between the layers. The delicious push pull of pure creativity. Art for art's sake; love for love's sake. Perfect time to say fuck you, fuck this, and mean it. Come hard into focus.

Trust self. Trust your dreams, your judgment, your instincts and intuition. Eat strawberries, pick roses, and take a spoonful of honey a day.

Saugerties, NY
6/14/2019

Watch out for passive aggressive behavior and mixed messages. If it's you being passive aggressive and sending mixed messages, stop it. Not wanting to hurt someone hurts them more, so pull the band-aid off fast. If it's you receiving the mixed messages and all kinds of passive aggressive behavior, stop trying to make sense of it and walk the fuck away. I find it very disturbing that the craft is trending, and people are doing spells for what a phone call will accomplish. If 98% of your spell work is about protecting/defending/and/or/making someone see your point of view, then you're missing the point. Change or die.

There is no split between spirit and flesh in the craft; one feeds the other, and one without the other is imbalanced. Any opposite without its other is imbalanced. We are taught to believe that spirit is better than flesh, but we are both spirit and flesh. In this way we are set up from the get go to be at war with ourselves. The human contains the humane, without the human there can be no humane. Debilitate, devalue the human and atrocity is the result. Sacred work strengthens the humane. if something is not humane then it's not spiritual. Healthy ego serves the humane. Healthy ego takes care of self and soul and gravitates towards others who do the same. The work of the witch is NOT about getting rid of ego - you can't do shit without ego.

The sky is on fire with spring and the desire for something radically new is taking hold. Essence begins to find shape. Think new kinds of discipline to set yourself free and laughing so hard tears roll down your cheeks. Trust in fun, trust in the whispers of coming love, trust in the destruction of what no longer works, what no longer matters. If you're having a hard time letting something go, get a big pillow, say you're a dead horse, and beat it for awhile. Know the tender in the day and the tender in the night. Feel the tender in you - sweet vulnerability. Watch a toddler learning to walk. Love beyond all reason but take no shit.

Odd dreams, shattering dreams, changing the internal. Sculpting away the extraneous. Your will, your hands, your body, your mind, your heart, reshaping life’s externals. There is no there, but there is an enjoyable, reasonable facsimile — a sense of completion, perhaps exhausted, perhaps joyous, perhaps WTF. A dance of opposites rather than a singular feeling. Take pride in the strurm and drang of the process; your process would no doubt have killed a lesser person. Look in the mirror, pound your chest, and say: “All right me!”

Mental energy. Leave me alone, energy. Love love me do energy. And the worms are crawling out the earth. Experience life through the skin. Feel to know. Capable. Capabilities. Details. Arrows of sane find their bullseye. Old sorrows may rear up and bite you. Write it, paint it, dance it, scream it, get it out of your body. Grace reveals a new template. Are you open to new possibilities? Can you imagine the best? Work your will by your desire. Desire breaks open the gate. When you're ready it will take you through.