New Moon Ritual: December 2024
It was night. The forest was blanketed in snow. The trees were bare. The air was still and sharp with the cold. There was a pervasive silence, the type of muffled hush you only get after heavy snowfall. The only light came from the stars in the sky, reflecting back from the frost. This was an empty world, devoid of life and motion.
New Moon Ritual: November 2024
And then we would hear them. Wolves in the distance. Their howls breaking through the false security of our camp, rousing within us the memories of what we were running from and, more importantly, what we were seeking in the first place.
In a panic we uprooted our camp, barely better off than when we stopped that first night, and continued marching on.
New Moon Ritual: October 2024
Irene Glasse, a friend and local pagan leader, speaks a lot about how spirit communicates to us using images and metaphors that will make sense to us. The more we read, take in art, or engage with other forms of media, the larger the “vocabulary” spirit has to work with as they shape messages out of sensory memory. All to say, props to whatever spirit was rooting around in there and decided to dig out a scene from the 2004 Spider-Man 2 movie with Tobey Maguire.
Behind the Scenes: New Moon Ritual
Sometimes we forget that social media is a heavily curated space. You generally see the best take, or the result of hours of editing and mixing. When witches or pagans share their experiences they tend to be the most revelatory or transcendent, or the spells that exceeded all expectations. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, mind you, I just think it can set up unrealistic expectations for others, especially folks new to witchcraft or paganism. And, when their own spells, rituals, or experiences don’t work out it can lead to a sense of defeatism.
To that end, I decided no to just skip this month’s New Moon Dream Ritual, but to share that it was a total flop. Some of that is probably due to some formulaic tweaking which did not have the intended results. Before I can talk about what I changed, however, we have to talk about what the ritual is and how it came to be.
New Moon Ritual: August 2024
Imagine reliving a “greatest hits” of the times in your life when you felt most powerless. Sounds great, right? That is how the message of this ritual started. Admittedly, I was buckling up for a long night.
New Moon Ritual: June 2024
I’m writing this morning feeling a mix of restless and well-rested. My jaw hurts from clenching it throughout the night. That’s probably because the message that came through was about fear and anxiety, and some of the way that manifested was through feeling these things very deeply at various points throughout the night.
New Moon Ritual: May 2024
To be honest, I probably should have skipped this month’s ritual. The last few weeks have been incredibly hectic and stressful, and I didn’t even realize until halfway through the day that it was the new moon. But, because of my ADHD, it’s really important to me to maintain a routine so I decided to stick with it.
New Moon Ritual: April 2024
You know that meme about the witch that forgets what day it is and then scrambles to put together their ritual with whatever is laying around the house? That wasn’t quite me for this new moon, but it was close. I totally lost track of time and didn’t realize the new moon coincided with the eclipse. Suffice it to say, this was a very interesting experience.
New Moon Ritual: March 2024
This month’s New Moon Ritual resulted in another very visual, visceral experience similar to the first ritual that resulted in this monthly endeavor. I’m a few days late in posting this because it took a while to figure the words, and even now I’m not entirely sure I’m capturing everything and doing the experience justice. I’m going to provide a brief narrative of what I experienced, followed by a few closing thoughts on what meaning I am finding. That doesn’t mean you’ll walk away from this with the same understandings.
New Moon Ritual: January 2024
Once I stopped getting in my own way, I was able to receive and process the power behind this message. For those of us in marginalized communities, especially those that don’t fit the worldview of the cis white supremacist Christian Nationalism that has roared to power, I think we sometimes forget how one of the most powerful tools of resistance we have in our arsenal is love.