Blue Moon / Imbolc wishes

One of our family traditions for Imbolc (February 2) is to write wishes on slips of paper and put them into a wish jar for the year. First, we pull out last year's wishes to see if any of them have come true, and then we drop in new ones. It's surprising how sometimes the wildest wishes do manifest themselves in some way.

We make a point of going beyond "realistic wishes." When you wish, wish in full. This is what wishes are for and it matters. Imbolc is a special time for wishes and for prophesy. The full moon is also a magical time for wishes and a blue moon may have particular potency. 

This year I have decided to spread my pleasant wishes as far as possible. Here are my wishes for you. Feel free to share them and wish the same to your friends and loved one's. 

• I wish you a clear night sky to view this super blue moon. 
• I wish you a bright dawn full of hope and promise.
• I wish you comfort and shelter in rough weather and the freedom to roam in fine weather
• I wish you lively consciousness, a resilient body, the love of acceptance and surety of purpose.

And I also have wishes for the world at this turning:: 

• I wish everyone could simultaneously wake up full of hope and compassion one morning, so that no one's small gesture of kindness would be rebuffed and the sense of hope would just keep going.
• I wish all the pundits and news anchors would decide to speak honestly from their hearts and deepest convictions. 
• I wish the people who run big corporations would suddenly all stop and consider the future of their own descendants and decide to tackle climate change seriously with us right now.
• I wish that human leaders should be held accountable to law and the democratic will of the people this year. 
• I wish for all humans to become aware of our close connection to plants, animals, the land, the air and the water around us, so that we make decisions that will give us the life we actually want.
• I wish for all people to be free from addictions as well as from the dissonance between beliefs and actions.
• I wish all the lonely and outcast people could find each other and become the biggest, most accepting and most joyful tribe on earth. 

You may laugh at my unrealistic wishes. But they are real, not just platitudes. This is the breath of hope.

Celtic Witchcraft - A Pagan book review

The book Celtic Witchcraft by Mabh Savage is a delightful little surprise. I had three books to review this week and I took this one last because I wasn’t sure what I’d find. I am a Celtic inspired Pagan but witchcraft isn’t my focus. I’ve seen far too many cookbook style spell books that seemed to do more to mock my beliefs than to further them. 

But I’m a sucker for new information, so I went for it in the end and was very pleasantly surprised. This is no spell cookbook. It is a clearly organized, yet readable exploration of the philosophy and symbols of Celtic witchcraft. It’s focus is spiritual and symbolic depth in one narrow field.

As a result there are only really a handful of specific “spells” described in the book, but the information and concepts are there that will allow those with enough experience to come up with their own and to judge the authenticity of spells from other sources. 

It's a relatively short and readable book in the Pagan Portals style, not an exhaustive academic source by any means but very useful for defining Celtic witchcraft.