Some Things You Can Add To Your Tea, As A Witch

Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life  (via wordsnquotes)

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The 11 Satanic Laws of the Earth

1. Do not give opinions or advice unless you are asked.

2. Do not tell your troubles unless you are sure they want to hear them.

3. When in another’s lair show him respect or else do not go there.

4. If a guest in your lair annoys you, treat him cruelly and without mercy.

5. Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal.

6. Do not take that which does belong to you unless it is a burden to the other person and he cries out to be relieved.

7. Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.

8. Do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself.

9. Do not harm little children.

10. Do not kill non-human animals unless you are attacked or for your food.

11. When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him.

Source

i want my children to grow up barefoot running through the woods. I want them to know the feeling of the trees growing around them, to recognize the gurgle of a stream before they see it, to know the taste of a blackberry from a bush long before the taste of a chip. I want my children to experience the earth we came from through touch, not pictures, and video games. And I want to be right there with them through all of it.

‘The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction - not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion - until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget.

When we tell them that as tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving us of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up the chainsaw. If the maple is a her, we think twice.’

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and The Teachings of Plants

2013 Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) and Witch’s Hair (Cuscuta)

Jewelweed: we found this growing wild on our property, down by the river. A lovely, carefree native annual. It had a bigger year in 2013 than in 2014, but hopefully it will do well in 2015. There is scant and not-particularly robust research to support the tradition of using these to soothe poison ivy and other skin ailments. 

The second photo shows Witch’s Hair aka Cuscuta (the orange twining stuff), literally sucking the life out of some Jewelweed b/c it’s a true parasitic plant. It communicates with the host plant (there’s a great exchange of mRNA between the two), and ends up sucking water and nutrients, while giving nothing back in exchange. At least, not that we know of now. I’d make a wild guess that this is Cuscuta gronovii, but I really have no idea. Anyone know?

Ahhh… so that’s how that incredibly fantastic zigzag stitch is crocheted. 💡 Love it! Just imagine the possibilities! ❤

Ceremonies large and small have the power to focus attention to a way of living awake in the world. The visible became invisible, merging with the soil. It may have been a secondhand ceremony, but even through my confusion I recognized that the earth drank it up as if it were right. The land knows you, even when you are lost....

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Pumpkin Cheesecake Bars With Gingersnap Crust