I have been planning my full moon in Aquarius manifestation work for a few days now but I'm not talking about it really to anyone.  Not my style necessarily :) but the best magic, I'm learning, is the kind you hold quietly deep inside your heart.  

Last night I stood in the moonlight and spoke my intention and then put all my crystals out to soak up the energy of the almost full Aquarian moon.  Today those stones are all over my alter along with the other items I have been gathering.  It's going to be a wonderful evening.

Wishing everyone all the blessings of this beautiful blue Aquarian moon!

Just wanted to let everyone know that I'm going to be offline for several weeks due to tenosynovitis (inflamed tendon) of my right hand : (  So aside from the occasional social media post (being handled by a friend) I won't be communicating electronically at all.

Not being able to write or type for an extended period is a bit daunting and I can't help wondering how I will manage.  I hope I will benefit from the electronic and paper hiatus.  I hope I'll  enjoy all the wonderful mostly hands free things that I love (like reading and researching) and get deeper into activites that I don't get to do as much as I'd like - like meditating and psychic development and dream work and astral projection and sitting in the garden and watching the sky. 

So on one hand I'm looking forward to the break and on the other I'm panicking.

I'm panicking because I'm a writer and I love writing.  I love typing.  I love blogging.  I love writing copy.  I love early morning longhand journaling.  I love penciling in notes, very neatly, in the margins of books.  I love notebooks and journals and paper.  I love making lists and checking things off as I navigate the day.  I have dozens of places to write and hundreds of things to write about.  

Being disconnected from all of that will be strange but maybe it will liberating as well.

How will I hold up?  Your guess is as good as mine but I will let you know hopefully sometime in August!

I celebrated the Solstice with some wonderful friends in one of the loveliest settings you could imagine. The weather was questionable to begin with, but we were thrilled to see the overcast morning turn into a beautiful sunny afternoon with just the right amount of wind.  Between the solstice fire and the pond was a wide expanse of green, where dogs played and humans exchanged tarot card readings and friendship.

As part of our solstice ceremony, each of us was given the opportunity to place an offering in the fire. Mine was mugwort and sage donated by a dear friend, a handful of rose petals from my garden, a fortune cookie message I found resonant on a half-forgotten difficult day and a hand written commitment to the things I mean to accomplish between this solstice and the next.  Standing before the fire I released all the fear and insecurity I could muster and prepared myself for the new energy to come. 

The rain held out until our gathering was about to close, then fell full-force, dousing our fire and rushing our goodbyes.  Thinking about the day later in the evening, it occurred to me that each of the elements had been especially well-represented. This, I thought, has meaning.

Committed to my new journey and direction, I had approached this solstice as a student, reading about the old ways and the Wiccan connection between the Summer Solstice and the journey of the god.  But I didn't want to approach Midsummer in terms of a single element or the masculinity of the solstice sun and in the end I didn't. Instead I experienced the living dance of wind and fire, the steady containment of the earth, the falling, clearing curtain of rain, and the sacred alchemy of fire and water.

This Memorial Day Weekend we watched a wonderful movie called Above and Beyond.  It was about the fighter pilot volunteers - some Jewish, some not - who flew for Israel in its 1948 war for independence. These were men who survived World War II and then continued to serve, risking both their lives and their American citizenship to so.  A truly amazing story!

To give you an idea of what I write in my journal, here is an excerpt from last weekend's journal entry. 

It's not great writing. But it is the kind of writing I could only do with pen and paper because, for me, typing out my inner thoughts just isn't the same. We are more likely to read as we type. Which makes us more likely to edit or censor. 

That doesn't happen with typing fiction necessarily, but it does happen, for me anyway, with nonfiction.

Fast, sloppy stream of consciousness writing makes it possible for me to reach a place I don't get to with other writing. Sometimes, this place is peaceful. Other times, it is sad. But I almost always feel better after I've been there.

To me, the music is key and Celtic music moves me like no other.  

One of the songs I listened to (a Celtic version of St. Hildegard Von Bingen's O Frondens Virga (Oh, Flowering Stem) by Nóirín Ní Riain:

I am in the last weeks of the Practical Astral Projection Intensive offered by famed astral projectionist and author of Astral Dynamics: The Complete Book of Out-of-Body Experiences Robert Bruce. 

We had been asked to observe our hypnagogic imagery (visions that come to us when we're in between sleep and wakefulness) at night before we went to sleep. So on this particular night I was observing the darkness behind my closed lids when I begin to feel a lot of vibration / pins and needles over my whole body but especially in my hands which were clasped over my stomach. 

Vibrations are a known precursor to astral projection or out of body experience and a sign the course has taught us to look for. In the beginning of the course (and at periods throughout my life) I found the vibrations a little overwhelming but at the time of this event we were several weeks into the class and I had learned how to relax into them. And so I just let myself experience the sensation. 

As relaxed I began to feel my vibrating hands lifting slowly but steadily up into the air. I knew my flesh and bone hands weren't lifting because I was motionless and relaxed (and not making any effort to move) but I really couldn't feel them - I was aware of my vibrating floating hands, instead. Or, to be more precise - as I remember it, they were still vibrating, but I am quite sure that these vibrating (or energetic hands) were floating. 

 I didn't try to force anything else into happening and then the hypnagogic imagery came back and I saw a desk - possibly my own but with different items on it (I think) - from the perspective of the person sitting at it. I have a vague memory that it had interesting things on it - possibly a crystal ball which I do have but not on my desk. I also had a sense of a room beyond that but it seemed dark.

Unlike my usual clear and bright hypnagogic imagery this visual was muted and dim but there was detail and it seemed fairly real. Also, I noticed that it was 'to scale' whereas most of my hypnagogic images seem quite small - for reasons I don't really understand. 

Seeing the desk seemed to signal the end of the experience - possibly because, as I recall, my hands were no longer vibrating - so I turned over and jotted down what happened in my dream journal.  And was too excited to go back to sleep for some time!

Spring is less of a revelation this year than it has been in others. The mild winter was perhaps too kind to Pennsylvania. There was no snow to speak of. No long stretches of low temperatures.

I have always been a fan of seasons. To me, each has its own energy and winter has the energy of air. It is a time for realism and clear thought. At some point over the course of the season, I stop and take stock of things and I didn't do that this year. I'm not sure why but I suspect that in the absense of hard wind and frozen ground, I may have missed my trigger but maybe that's okay.

If winter holds the energy of introspection, spring hold that of action. And there is a fast paced decisiveness to action - a rapidly unfolding plan which makes us think upon our feet and rise above our situation. I am blogging very briefly this week, taking advantage of that amazing energy!