Tending Fire
The week before the moon turned blue, I was called to tend to you
ANNOUNCEMENTS
This Months Circle of the Cailleach meets on the Gemini dark moon, Saturday June 13th, 8pm ET USA aka Sunday June 14th 10am Melb/Syd time zone.
To Join
You can join Circle of the Cailleach with a paid subscription to The Void. You will receive a monthly invitation, and access to the replay. Replays are not posted, but sent directly to email in order to maintain a level of intimacy within the circle.
Alternatively, You are welcome to join on a casual basis by registering via the form below on a pay what you can basis.
Register for Gemini season Circle of the Cailleach
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COMBUSTION
In the lead up to the Full Blue Moon in Sagittarius, things in my personal life took a wee u turn. It became clear, that there were things that were no longer serving the path I imperfectly walk. There was a deep and old root sitting there, suspended in animation with no life force running through it. It had been sat there for a while, and I did “not have the time”- ha- to look at it. The dissonance came in unexpectedly, moving through my system like a freight train. Still I ignored it, its rot now stagnating the ground beneath me like a dank swamp.
The week leading up to the blue moon blessed us with a Mars Pluto square that set off a series of destabilizing events for me, (Mars is transiting my 4th house, Pluto my 1st) that felt like explosives had been placed in the ground beneath me and the whole fucking swamp rose up to fill my lungs with the filth so I could no longer breathe without drowning in it.
The explosion was a surface level event, but what it brought up with it ran deep.
I have not had a history of effectively moving through grief and anger. I have been learning, I have been cultivating tools when things have been stable so that I can move through events in life without the deep desire to burn the whole fucking world down with me. I met a tender space at my clavicle frequently, where the deep breaths I tried to take to still said desire kept catching. Unable to take in the full breaths I needed to feel “in control” -ha- I had no real choice but to sit with it.
My body began to guide me. I drove to the store, I began wandering what I was even doing there and walking through the aisles I was drawn in to the shelf holding the fire starters. I grabbed a huge box of them and felt immediately inspired.
TENDING FIRE
I stopped and grabbed firewood on my way home, immediately getting one started as soon as I arrived. Frantically I began gathering old plant materia in my home from altars and walls, old papers and anything else that was safely burnable and was time to go. The fire was roaring, burning high and bright in the middle of the day. I felt soothed at its chaos, at its dance across the firepit toward fuel. I went about my day feeling lighter and sat with smores that night with the kids. They stared at the fire until their eyes were red and itchy from being a little bit too close, but no eyes gazed upon screens that night and when I returned after putting the kids to bed, I felt the fire speaking to me. Tend fire. Tend fire. Letting it burn down to flameless undulating embers, I went to bed.
The next day I saw a small ember still gently dancing in the firepit. This surprised me as I am not super clued in on getting fires to last like that, but then I remembered, tend me, tend me. I decided in that moment to sit with fire everyday until the moon became full. It wasn’t really about keeping it going perfectly, I definitely had to restart from scratch most mornings, but it was a strong call coming from both my body and the spirits and elementals surrounding me. You see, when you experience moments of destabilization, collapse, shock- the veil between you and the otherworld drops fully away. It doesn’t have to be through these kinds of events that you make intimate contact, because the otherworld is all around you right now and it is entirely possible for you to tune into the subtle energies. However there is a distinct lack of separation that is tangible to me when I am feeling unheld by the material realm.
Tending fire
For grief, tend fire
For sadness, tend fire
For anger, tend fire
For hopelessness, tend fire.
Dance around the living flame in ecstatic agony.
May it bare witness
Day by day I re animated the fire, clearing all of the dry debris from the yard, clearing my home and living in the scent of burning wood as a perfume on my hair. My nervous system softened to the bracing and I deepened my breath fully into my belly. I named that what was clawing at my clavicle, fear. I let it live in me and consume the parts of me that are dominated entirely by its presence. I moved by the fire, cried by the fire, raged by the fire. and all the while I felt like I was in direct communion with the ancestral realm.
LIVING ANCESTOR
The night before the moon turned blue, I knew.
I was sitting in the presence of a living, breathing, fully animated ancestral presence that was guiding me to my resilience. It was a fierce but gentle spirit that witnessed me, and guided me fully through a difficult threshold.
As the Moon became full I sat by the fire, sensing the wind and clouds begin to shift into a storm formation above me. I knew this ceremony was coming to an end with the full moon, rain was coming. I made offerings to the land and the last of the flames.
Many peoples from many traditions around the world already know the flame of fire is a living relative. Fire evolved alongside humanity. A keeper of records, a witness of ceremony and thresholds, rites of passages and birthday cakes. We light a candle to open sacred space, we breathe our breath over it to close the space. Something I know to be true, is that when we do not have an elder in our lives to go sit with, to have words of wisdom shared with us over difficult times, while not a replacement by any means, we can sit with fire.
I have expressed through my writing, my grief at the deep fragmentation of my familial access to elders. This led me to seek out voices of elders that have inspired me on level so deep I think of them as my grandmothers, though they may never know it. But where there is a need to be witnessed and an opportunity to listen, we can do so with fire.
I write this under the flame of a candle in honour of the ceremonial week I spent with fire.