Spyrit Dancers' Musings On All Things Wiccan

I had to go into Vegas for three days this week to work my part-time job.  I got home on Thursday, and spent Friday recovering from the 25+ miles we walked in the three days.  It is great to be back home, in my own space again.

I noticed when I went out this morning our Mesquite trees are just starting to turn yellow.  Fall in the desert isn’t as spectulacar as the falls of my youth in Michigan, but still there none the less.  It reminds me that this is the time of the Goddess going to sleep, slumbering during the stillness of winter to arise in the spring with the new crops.  The wheel is turning, either it is the beginning of the year (for those that celebrate the year starting on Nov 1st) or getting closer to the end of the year for the rest of the world.

I’m so blessed.  I have a warm home, and a place to sleep.  A man in my life that treats me like a Goddess. A job I get to do out of my home. Two cats that love me unconditionally, and several skittish wild cats that appreciate the food I give them.  And I have great friends that accept me the way I am.  It just doesn’t get any better than this.

Goddess, help me never to forget all the wonderful blessings in my life you provide every day.

For a few months now, we have been feeding a wild cat that lives under the empty trailer next door to us.  We started feeding her when we noticed she had two kittens she was caring for.  We left dry food and water under a small tree in our backyard.  Poor thing is very skittish, and we can’t get near her.

Well the temperature has really dropped at night lately, so we bought a dog house for her, and put it on our front porch outside our big bay windows.  We put some blankets in it, and moved her dishes to the front porch.

When I got up this morning, Loki was making wild noises out the window so when I looked out I saw three baby kittens trying to eat out of the big bowl of dry food we had out there.  They were so cute!

I went and got a can of wet food, and put it on a plate and took it out.  The mom was in the yard by then, scared, and the kittens were in the dog house.  Poor things, when I showed them the food, they tried to get out the back of the dog house.

I got back in the house and got the camera, by then Mom and the one kitten that looks the most like her, were chowing down.  I worry because the kitten looks like he/she has blood on her neck, but seems to be moving ok.

Soon the other two came out.  The calico was just shaking (it is only 47 outside), but eating good.  I really need to clean my windows, you can see the water spots.

Mom was yelling at me through the window, defending the dog house when I snapped this last picture.  We have to go to a convention next week for 3 days, but when we get back, I’m going to ask the local shelter the cost of getting her and her kittens neutered.

I’m also going to save up to try and get them all to the vet and get shots for them.  If anyone would like to donate towards a “shots for my wild kittens” fund, just comment back.  Money is very tight for us, and I know its going to cost us 300 – 400$ to get shots Mom and the babies…money we just don’t have right now. 

It makes you feel good though to be able to take care of them.  I’d love to bring them inside, but since they don’t have shots, and feline lukemia is so prelevant…and we haven’t been able to get our indoor cats shots up to date, I worry about making them sick.  It just tears my heart out to see them so tiny and outside.   Not sure what happened to her other two kittens…they would be about 6 months or so old now.  I haven’t seen them around.

I think it is appropriate after a rant on health care to admit I’ve been sick for a week with a cold/flu.  Only reason I call it flu is the first few days I ran a pretty high fever (for me) and that isn’t something I normally get with a cold.

Although I’m still sniffling, I feel a LOT better, and yesterday I put in a full day’s work at my desk trying to catch up my sites.  Today, I hope to get some crafting done, and tomorrow I have to go into Vegas to work a convention.

Although I am lucky enough to have health care, with my 5k deductible, I couldn’t afford to go to the Dr. if my cold had been worse than it was.  Isn’t that a sad state of affairs?  And after reading stories on Obama’s Healthcare site, I see I’m not alone in this.

So I’m fortunate for sites like WebMD that I can research.  Extensive knowledge from past colds what helped me, and the ability to stay home and rest up to get over my illness.  Lots of ginger tea with honey and lemon.  Vitamin C tablets.   Benydril for the non-stop sneezing and runny nose, and a few doses of cough syrup when the cough got so bad I couldn’t stand it. (I really, really, REALLY hate the taste of cough syrup).

The number one biggie though is the ability to stay home and rest.  I’ve only had that luxury the last 8 years since I’ve been completely self employed.  I remember one year I had full on pneumonia, and I was able to take only 1/2 day off work to see the dr, and worked for 6 weeks with it 7 days a week during audit season for a CPA.  I’ve had so many times in my life where I had to work no matter how sick I was, because If I missed so much as a single day of work, I couldn’t pay my bills.

I thank the Goddess every day that I get to work out of my home.  I have some part-time work I have to go into Vegas for, but even that is nice because it gets me out and around people a few times a month.  I am truly blessed and don’t take for granted this wonderful gift she has given me.   And after this past week, I realize I’m doubly blessed.

Today the Obama Administration is trying to get 100,000 phone calls to congress to pass his health care bill.  From my last peek at the numbers,  he has passed that mark, and I wonder how many calls he will have to congress by the end of the day.

I am one of those that would benefit from this bill, so I’ve been hoping all along it would get passed.  I’m self employed, with a group now of only one, and pay a lot for health insurance with a 5,000k deductible.  Something I’ve never used up in a year in the four years I’ve had the plan.

We used to have health insurance for my husband too, but after they raised his rates to $400 a month due to his age for the same plan, we had to drop it.  This is ridiculous for health insurance to be this high for someone in great health for his age.

One of the things about walking the path I walk, I explore alternative medicines.  Since I can’t afford to go to the doctor every time I’m sick, I try to take vitamins and keep healthy to prevent problems.  I’m slowly losing weight, the #1 thing I can do to prevent issues in the future.

You know, I went to a health fair recently, and there was a woman giving out information on diabetes.  This is one thing I fear, as I’ve had great aunts that had limbs amputated from complications of diabetes.  So I test my sugar occasionally, watch my diet, and my A1C, which was slowly rising the past 4 years is now going down, showing I’m doing a good job of preventing diabetes.  Yippee for me.

She congratulated me on my progress and told me she has been in the health care industry for 20 years.  The major medical insurance companies will pay for amputations, but they won’t pay for any type of diabetes prevention programs.

WTF?  There is something wrong when insurance won’t help prevent one of the leading causes of death that is PREVENTABLE? You know a change of diet, getting some exercise, losing weight, and taking some supplements will cure almost all forms of type II adult onset diabetes and they won’t pay for it?

Thank the Goddess Obama’s plan calls for preventative medicine!  We need to explore alternatives, and prevent issues rather than Doctors just pushing pills at people.

Case in point.  My cholesterol was almost 300 4 years ago.  My family has a genetic tendency to high cholesterol.  My doctor put me on a statin drug, which I took all of one week before complications and discontinued it.  This is BS, I thought.

So I went back to being a vegetarian.  I started taking policosonal and gugulipid supplements.  I can’t take niacin, I’m one of those that it raises my blood sugar, so I stuck with those two supplements, lecithin, and some omega fatty acids.  When I had my cholesterol checked again, it had dropped to 175.  All done with diet and over the counter supplements that won’t destroy your liver.

Yet will most doctors even recommend people trying these first? NOPE.  They’d rather give a drug that causes severe muscle issues in a large majority of people and over time causes liver impairment in almost everyone who takes it.

Its time we stood up for holistic healers and chiropractors.  People who treat the whole person, not just symptoms.  Help pass health care reform. We need it as a nation.

As Witches / Wiccans and Pagans….whatever name you choose, we are supposed to be closer to nature and its rhythms.  As such, what do you do to try and live a greener life to help Mother Earth?  Here are a few things that I do to try and conserve energy and reduce my carbon footprint.

1. Recycle. About a year ago, my town put in large recycle dumpsters in the WalMart parking lot.  Since then, we have cut down the amount of trash we are sending to the landfill by 2/3rds.  Think about how many plastic bottles, soda cans, newspapers, etc. you throw out in your trash.  All of that can be recycled. Check around your neighborhood, many are now offering free recycle bins for you to put your recyclables in.

2. Reuse. This goes hand in hand with recycling.  I love the large jars of marinated artichoke hearts I get from Costco.  Yum.  And when I’m finished with them, the glass jars are the perfect size to store my organic fertilizer in for my plants.  This way, I get two uses out of the container.

I also save all of my packaging materials I get from items shipped to me, and reuse them when I mail out purchases from my store, Wiccan Magick Shack.  I have a paper shredder I use to shred my junk mail. (I really enjoy doing that)  I use the shredded paper to put around items in flat rate boxes (It is heavier than popcorn, so I don’t use it for non-flat rate boxes) and use some in my compost pile.

3. Switch to compact Florescent bulbs. A typical compact florescent bulb uses 75 percent less energy and lasts about 10 times longer than an incandescent bulb.  Yes, they are a bit pricey to first buy them, but they pay for themselves within 6 months.  We bit the bullet and replaced all our bulbs at once with compact florescents and our electric bill dropped $50 the following month.

4. Live in a dry climate? Buy a swamp cooler. This was our #1 savings in energy and really helped our electric bills.  We live in arid Nevada, so we bought 2 swamp coolers to cool our home with.  We can run them all summer except when we get a few humid weeks in August.  We found on average we saved $100 a month on our electric bill during the hot summer months, and kept our home cooler than we would have been able to with our AC.  Since my husband and I work out of our home, and run a lot of computers, we don’t have the luxury of turning up the temp during the day when you’d typically be gone from home for work, and this was resulting in $300+ a month electric bills.  Now, our electric bills are under $200 even in the hot summer months which has really helped our pocketbook.

5. Use passive heating to heat your home in the winter. One thing we do in the winter is open the drapes for all the windows facing south.  The warmth from the sun coming in the window will help keep those rooms warm during the day.  We are lucky as one whole side of our home faces south.  In the summer, it is shaded with grape vines that grow up lattice on our back porch.  But in the winter, when we want more sun, the leaves are gone letting in my light and heat when we need it.

6. Bring your own shopping bag. It is estimated that between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year. Of those, millions end up in the litter stream outside of landfills—estimates range from less than one to three percent of the bags. We are burying ourselves in plastic.  They are cheap to make and easy to fill and when you go to the store and get 20 of them at a time, you don’t think about how many bags are piling up each day.  If you do forget to bring your own bag (and I’m guilty of this at times, although lately I’m much better at remembering) look around your favorite store for a recycle bin.  Many are now putting a “recycle your shopping bags” bin for you to use that will reduce the staggering amounts of bags going into our landfills each year.

I hope these tips get you thinking on ways that you too can save energy and live a greener life.

A few days ago, I wrote about banishing my negative thoughts.  We had lost page ranking for terms on a doman that had a steady amount of visitors for those terms for about a year. I figured our sales would tank also, and for a day or so, it appeared that way.

But I knew my Goddess would not let me down, so I did several things.

1. I made sure to thank the Goddess every night for all that she gave me on that day.  Yes, this is left over from saying “prayers” as child, but it is a habit I’ve had for 40 years, and I feel it is not only an important step in honoring the Goddess, but keeping yourself in touch with the blessings you do have.  We lose sight of all those things.  Taking a few minutes to think back through your day and thanking for everything from a killer parking space, to the income you earned, helps me to realize how blessed by the Gods I truly am.
2. Ritual bath that I concentrated on releasing all my negative energy, then a mini dedication to the Goddess.
3. Kept doing the steps that earned us money on a daily basis.

There is an old saying about asking for help, but continuing to do the footwork. So that’s what I did.  And guess what? As usual, my fears were over nothing.  No, we haven’t gotten our page rank back for those terms.  But our sales are back up on our mundane sites where they were, this morning, they were above average.  And the fear is less.

So if you are having a rough path, ask for help from the Goddess.  Do a ritual for help.  Burn a candle, do a spell.  But keep doing the footwork, and have faith in the outcome.  Chances are, you will find like me your worries were over nothing.

The only thing constant is change.  In my mundane life, I create websites, optimize them for keywords, then sell things on them.  Well I’ve been lucky, for over a year I ranked #2 for a particular term.  I made a lot of money off that term too.

Well I noticed our sales had fallen off the last two days.  When I looked on Google, we had suddenly gone from number 2 to number 8.  I have to admit, it put me in a panic.  When you watch your visitors to this site go from 3k a day to 700 a day, and your sales drop, it hurts.

So this evening I’m working on banishing my worries and negative thoughts.  We have a lot more irons in the fire.  All of our income is not dependent on this term.  And so the Goddess closed this door, she normally opens a window that when I look back, it was for the best that I took a different path.

In these times of economic hardship, I know I’m not alone in financial worries.  So I’ll be getting out my green candle, dressing it with some fast money oil, and burning it on my altar for a few days.  I’ll be doing some other rituals for prosperity also.  With time, things will turn around…I have faith.  And who knows? Could have been a glitch in Google that the spider couldn’t access the site when it came by last, and next week, we will be right back up again.

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After I wrote this, I went and looked when the site was Cached by Google.  Come to find out, it was a few hours after my server got hit with a TON of traffic, more B/W then I normally push through.  It looks like it really could just have been a spider hiccup, which makes me feel much better.

Wiccan Magick Shack, my online store, had an outdated version of my shopping cart script, so I updated the script.  Unfortunately, that meant I lost all my customization I had done to the design of the shop.  So I’ve changed the design three or four times, and I think I finally have it the way I want it now.

Now its just getting all my new items loaded up on it.  That is never ending.

One of my mundane jobs is I work conventions in Vegas a few days a month, and Monday and Tues of this week, I’m back again in Vegas.  I’ll be available only limited amounts of time on my store, twitter, and here.  Have a great day all, the weather is perfect here, the moon is waning and all is right in the world.

Isn’t it amazing sometimes how the Goddess works in our lives?  Last month, I took a stick and a string and scribed a circle in my back yard to have my full moon ritual in.  Yesterday, I realized we had rocks from a neighbor who moved away in a pile and I decided they would be great to put around the outside of the circle for the ritual.  These rocks were lovingly found by my neighbors over many years and since they were unable to take them when they left, they wanted us to have them.

So we took the wheel barrow, and hauled the rocks over yesterday.  I had just enough rocks to put them end for end touching, around a circle I drew, without thinking that some day, I’d put these rocks around the edge.  And 4 of the rocks were larger than the rest, and flat on top that I used a compass and set my 4 cardinal points.

Now that the weather is cooler, I’ll be working this next month to further improve my outdoor ritual space.  After having conducted full moon rituals indoors for years, it feels wonderful to do them outdoors.  I want to level the ground and eventually get broken flagstone to put on the floor of the circle.  We have a local rock yard that sells us broken chunks for very cheap, and they make great flagstone tiles.  We used a lot of them around our little pond we have in the back yard.  Eventually, I’ll have my circle set so my small mesquite tree is in my north point just outside my circle, and my pond is at my west point, just outside my circle, so I’ll have physical representations of the elements at those points.  I want to get a fire pit for the south too some day which would be great.  East, well there is always wind and wind chimes.   (which were quite loud outside our window last night, as it was pretty windy).

I’ve asked my husband to take a picture of me in my ritual circle after I construct it.  I’ve always been curious, would you catch anything on film of the circle we construct in the world between the worlds?  Wouldn’t that be cool?  I can feel it, and the energy I put into it, rather strongly.  Even sitting where I had my ritual last month, I can still feel postive energy there that has soaked into the ground.  I know over time, it will get even more apparent.  Although he is not Wiccan, he supports me in my endevors, which I appreciate.  I know others have to practice in secret because they have family members that just wouldn’t understand or approve.  He might not understand all the aspects, but he feels anything positive for my life I do is all good.  For a Christian, that is a wonderfully open attitude, and I appreciate it.

So how about everyone else, what are you doing for your full moon ritual?  Do you construct a circle, hold it outdoors, or indoors? (I used to construct the circle in my office, which over the past years is the happiest place for me to be in the house).  Do you have family that you have to practice in secret, or are they ok with your choice? I have always wished I had a partner that was also a Wiccan, but that hasn’t manifested in this lifetime.  I’d love to hear from you.

Ok, this is what I get for filming the new blog top yesterday, and to make it look realistic, I opened a can of sugar free rockstar and put it in the picture.

Unfortunately, it was 5pm, and me and caffeine after about noon don’t agree.  I think I got about 3 hours of sleep last night, and figure I will crash soon.  Today I’m sipping caffeine free tea, as I want to take a nap before working on a full moon ritual.  Full moon is early tomorrow morning, and depending upon my wakefulness, I’ll either celebrate it very early tomorrow morning (at the 2am time) or early tomorrow evening (when it is still in full moon phase).