Happy Samhain, folks!!!
How are you celebrating this year?
Me, lately I've been too overextended (and frozen and overwhelmed... pre-election despair, anyone?? 🗳️😰) to plan something that aligns with the precise holiday.
At least, not a ceremony that's open to community. Something much more personal, D A R K, and mystical. For behind closed doors. (My unique home location means I get zero trick-or-treaters each year, so... solitude is kind of written into the script.)
I can tell you: I have been YEARNING for the year's descent. For the return of darkness. 🌑
Praising the falling leaves, the cooling temperatures, the autumn rituals 🍂... and fixating on the slow decrease of sunlight with each day, the cascading darkness 🌘... symbolizing the passing away of the actuals, and the potentials, of this past year. Symbolizing the death of all our best hopes, dreams and efforts. 🪦
But in the bigger context of a cycle of celestial renewal each year. 🌀🍀
I'm here for it.
Lately I've been welcoming witnessing the huge crags of my inner artifice that are ready to calve off and shatter, to dissolve themselves to death. I've been reflecting much on what is Ready To Die. And, when we don't avoid death, but allow death to flow when it is ready... the glorious, tender space freed up for what must then come into LIVING.
So, in honor of my love for this descending dark season, I'm offering a NEW workshop-AND-ceremony gathering to our community. This one designed to encourage communing with the darkest, dankest, gnarliest of witch hags...
BABA YAGA!
If you're not familiar with Baba Yaga, I cannot urge you strongly enough to pick up Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book, Women Who Run With the Wolves. In essence, Baba Yaga is an ancient myth about a powerful hag, an elder "wild woman" who lives in the woods surrounded by fearsome familiars, and who can destroy mere humans on a whim.
Fractal Praxis' "Approaching Baba Yaga" recounts the tale of a luckless young woman, guided only by her intuition (and her mother's spirit), forced to seek out Baba Yaga to bring home fire for her hearth.
The workshop guides through each step in the process of approaching this dangerous wild witch, and then completing her arduous assignments, so as to be judged worthy to receive from her.
This myth helps guide us how to conquer fear, become more mature and spiritual selves, and shine brilliantly as sovereign beings in the world.
Encoded in the epic myth of innocent Vasalisa's sojourn to find Baba Yaga, in the middle of the treacherous forest are teachings for coming into right relationship with our wild, wise, ferocious inner power: our Intuition.
That ageless elder within us, who thrives in the shadows and subconscious, and must be approached with great purpose and humility... to avoid being unceremoniously struck down on the spot... ⚡
🧙♀️ Pray that you earn your elder witch's grace... and in return, may She share life-changing guidance with you!
Intuition is actually PRIMAL INTELLIGENCE flowing through us 🌊 at any given moment. It is the most integral form of intelligence, the result of a holistic synthesis from ALL our complex ways of knowing.
Learning to tap into this power, and building an allegiance with it, is ESSENTIAL for liberating ourselves into sense-making, healing FORCES in this world. Raging like rivers, reclaiming the land once crushed under ignorant dams, may we reclaim and remake a movement of HYPERNATURAL people, skillfully and scintillatingly linked to what makes them whole, hale, wild and human.
I call it in. ✨ 🖤
Please join us for Approaching Baba Yaga.
This event is offered by donation on a sliding scale, $13-33. It is for anyone looking to deepen their personal relationship, practice, and rigor regarding ritual. It's not just for womxn or elders, it's for all people of all ages, genders, identities!
Best of all, this 2-hour in-depth workshop-ritual hybrid is to be held ONLINE. 💻Making it accessible to tune in and practice holy ritual from the sanctity of your own home. 🕯️
And. Perhaps greatest of all. This is a truly opportune time to join the Fractal Praxis Embodiers Circle! Embodier members get FREE entry to the epic ritual/workshop of Approaching Baba Yaga, not to mention we're launching a RITUAL-BASED IN-PERSON monthly meetup group in November ❗...and, they also get to so much more too.
Come along for the ride... 🎢🪄
And, woo, bring a friend! Please send this email along to anyone you think might be stimulated by these offerings!
By the way, I actually have a LOT to say about this election... or, more accurately, about the complexity of patterns coalescing in it. 💬 About community organizing, sacred activism, rigorous cooperativism, liberation praxis... about living through times of great revealing, aka apocalypse.
(Bonus material drop! ☔ Followers of this newsletter might enjoy my essay series, Transmuting the Trumpocalypse, written shortly after the talisman that IS Trump came to power in 2016. [Side note: Holy cannoli, that was eight years ago 🤯])
I've been too silent for too long, trying to organize not only my unruly overflow of thoughts, but also the desired and appropriate channels for publishing them. 📹 As a one-witch operation, this is a tall order, and yet I keep tackling this trouble area, keep trying my luck. 🃏
🔮 ...I foresee the pieces falling into place for this now. In the near future. Starting shortly after the election. I'll proffer a response and a stake and a speaking... regardless of whatever our fates shall be, there's much to illuminate, to invite reflection on... to train to.
Wishing each of you the sacred, genuine safety that only comes from reckoning, reckoning, reckoning with the truth.
We will weather this storm if we train to stick together... and, if we train to be guided by only our most whole/true selves.
Sending you much love and fortitude,
C.
