Katie got me the rose potion when she came to see me after baby grl was born. It was so touchingly warm and sentimental without being weepy or too much. The mild, loving thoughtful ways she showed her love and caretaking for me, the initiation. So generous and warm and soft and laughy. Just right. Wild roses I have harvested for a number of years here on the slower lower. They come in bloom at a special, sacred time of year when my Home, my Place like the country roads here and island dunes, comes into full fruit and town wakes back up from its slumbering.

I also have a special closeness to rose for the years that I have been devotional to Mother Mary, and the Sacred Heart which is an esoteric Christian idea as I’ve learned it to connect to the divine masculine. Meaning, Wild Rose is heart fire essence for me, and I do healing and prayer work by her sacred flame.

So this is where my head space is when I first noticed yesterday the couple lavishes I bought myself for Harvest, back when Fall first came on, are flashing at me. Besides lovely salt and herbal bath blends, a bar of Harvest Rose soap. And I think of rose quartz, of heart work, love work, chakra work some would call it, with help of sacred feminine. There that Harvest Love was, awaiting me, and my breath took and I sorta went, ah, Samhain~

And so it is, Samhain season is here! And I enter it acknowledging my familiar Mama Rose as a dark moon glimmer glean from Maggie my OtherSide Elder, who teases her bare shoulder at me from behind the bar of soap. Oh, I think, it is dark moon, and tomorrow is the lunation that brings Samhain. Ancestor season, ohhhh Mags! Maggie painted the picture behind the soap, ohh and Maggie says hi. I go for my oil, too, off my alter, and the candle Kate brought too, I snap a pic, bc this is a moment not to miss.

This magic made real, Sacred Mundane moment of Mystery surprise. Because then today, too, in my featured memories on my future phone, is me and Mags and the other Crones as we used to call these Wise Women. Liz who had the witch store where my old office is now, besides the organic store. Mags who gathered us over Days of the Dead to do Soul cards, which come to find out was what Katie and I had been doing, vision boards, for Witches New Year all along.

Maggie passed in April a few years back. I can’t describe how special it is to realize without realizing it I’d made an Alter to her at my bath. In my bathroom in my new home on land I am only able to be on because of Mags. With my family, my newborn baby grl. Who knew!? Mags was such a generous benefactor of the Free School; my mental health and wellness npo. Her financial gift to me after passing is what empowered me to be here in this Homestead today. It was her belief in the embodiment work I’ve been doing and will continue to do.

My focus of course deconstructing sexism.

Healing the body. In which lives all the bodies of our grand bodi/es, cultural, mythological, psychological.

Familial.

Ancestral.

My education and work which are my activism, around developmental and other forms of complex trauma resultant of racism and sexism.

I dive back in, sparkly and inspired by this visit from Mags. Burn a candle for the start of Samhain tide, what I call it. The Final Harvest lunation of the year, bringing traditional and lunar Samhain. The soul or Celtic new year. In all Her Beneficent forms. As a pagan, ohhhh that this can be my most favorited magic time of the year.

So we enter Veil Tide, enter Void Space, Dark come. I look too at my darker archetypes. The Valkyrie that taught work in the what Jung called the sacred imaginal. Exploring my trauma spaces during grad school when her imagery came back to me in regressive nighttime dreams. They traipse by now in more subtle waking image, little serendipities and little paradoxes I witness, all the Time watching, being with.

It is New Moon of Final Harvest. I tend. I reflect. Being with my baby daughter, which is the easiest sweetest deal on earth. Being with me, which can be way more hard. I offer all that I am. The shadow and the pain, the memories and those memories that need breath and space in wayyy off places within. Mother Mary for the Garden arrived after the Mabon moon: a gift from Erika and her nous so Catholic and powerFull Amen. I remain stunned at the generosity of family and friends this whole last year. I burn candles have few windows of devotional time but say thanks, speak small whispered prayers all day. Different lifetimes come back to me in the months since labor. The womb shaken awake, the dormancy of stories come rushing or fleeting, nueropeptide brain screams, hormones are SO Much More than that, the stories ohhh the stories, Blessed Be.

Samhain season is here. I will work with wild rose, I will consecrate tea lights bc I don’t have it in me to unpack my relics for Harvest tide amid all the boxes and projects still untouched. My alter already full of wild crafted and some grown harvested herbs. I will make little blessed blends. Samhain season is here friends. I will give my thanks. Speak my gone elders/ancestors names.

Happy New Moon, dear friends!