Tattoo you

Here is a lovely pentacle tattoo, by Traci Hancock. I can imagine a smaller version on my upper arm, perhaps with ivy crawling up to the shoulder.

The symbolism of the pentacle is very meaningful to me. I wish it were more esoteric, so I could wear it without having to explain myself. Then again, it can take courage to wear a pentacle. Where I live and work, there is less concern that I'll be taken for a Satanist and more concern that I'll be taken for a flake.

I also love snake imagery. Here is a nice, tribal-looking snake by Chris Conn. I can imagine something like this on my back, too, with the spiral at my sacrum and the snake winding up my spine.

It's midnight - rambling ahead

Lugh and I are both suffering from restlessness tonight. He spent a long time licking my feet and nosing various parts of my body while I lay on the bed. Energy work, I believe. He laid a paw on my left ankle for a while. The energy in my left leg and foot is sluggish; I've had nerve damage there. The last few days I've consciously been working with that energy. Lugh decided to help out.

Lugh was named for a healing god, which might have been foresight or might have been projection on my part.

Today was my first rough day at work; I've been in my new job nearly seven weeks. I just kept making all these little mistakes, little oversights. It felt like Mercury was already in retrograde, although it doesn't really move thus for another week.

Adonis and I are signed up for Starwood. This will be his first year and my second. Who else will be there? Bloggers Deborah Lipp and Isaac Bonewits will be. Are any of you going? Bring yummy food, rain gear, costume wear, sunscreen and bug dope, and beer (but buy your mead there).

I've wanted a tattoo since Starwood last year. Can you believe I have virgin skin? If there had been a tattoo artist there, I probably would've gotten one. Maybe this year. Not that I can decide what or where. I imagine something like this - but where? Here is a nice site with Celtic and Pagan designs. And this fellow called Sage does lovely work. (Incidentally, if you google "pagan+tattoo," you pretty quickly come up with sites debating whether it's ok for Christians to get tattoos and white supremacy sites. Yikes!)

Happy Solstice!

From Joanna Powell Colbert's Gaian Tarot

Guarding the mysteries

I once circled with a witch who, with a fierce, quiet power, explained how important it was for her to be a guardian of the mysteries - not in the sense of keeping secrets from people, but in the sense of practicing, sustaining, and defending her faith.

The mysteries aren't mysteries because they're secrets; they're mysteries because they can't be grasped only with the intellect, which means they can't be merely reported. They have to be experienced, and the experience defies clinical description. You won't get it from someone telling you what happened. Really, you had to be there.

And so it was this past weekend, when hosting the graduation and ordination of the third- and fourth-year classes became an initiation for me and my class. Something deep within and around me has shifted and changed. I know that later words will come, words that can do some justice to the change. The shift will be integrated into the narrative of my life; I'll be able to tell the story. But it won't be the whole story. The whole story can only be inscribed in and by my life, my body, my actions, my ecology.