Liminality

I was cutting back dead branches from my lovely trumpet flower, which climbs up and arches over the carport in the back garden, when a bee buzzed rather close to my ear.


"No, Sister" I told her, as if I were addressing one of my hounds. "I'm trying to help here" .

She buzzed off again on her rounds, and I thought to myself - how far I have come.

How different from the physics scholar with her nose in a book, the astronomy student with her eye to the scope.


The youngster who once would have been hard pressed to tell you what was growing outside her door ("err...it's a flower??") now tenderly removes yellow and spotted leaves from the roses, takes up weeds from around the herbs but not from the grass, moves a brick to better shelter a spiky spider's egg from predators, and converses with bees as they feast and as they fly. Not to mention that long-wavelength ongoing communication with the plant kingdom.


It may well be a part of growing older, the changes we can expect as our reproductive functions shut down and our brain chemistry shifts slightly.


Or it could be a part of the ongoing process which started more than eight years ago in a Shamanic initiation the like of which I simultaneously wouldn't urge on my direst enemy, and would recommend to my dearest friend as possibly needful.

This video , part 3 of the series, in which a Tantrist attempts to kill one of India's Skeptic Elite, had me in stitches. (Hat tip Bill).

Well, it is funny, verging on hilarious, when a magic user attempts to use his trade for a) nefarious purposes b) publicity and gets called on it.

I'm a magic user myself and I can tell you he was breaking a half-dozen rules of Craft, there. But that's as may be.

What the Skeptics may not know - although I suspect that they do know it, somewhere deep inside - is that they were matching the Tantrist with their own potent magic.

Disbelief , not purity , can be a powerful shield against wickedness. Take a look at those Skeptics seated around the bonfire hosing themselves. Most practitioners are aware that laughter is itself a hugely successful banishing spell. When evil threatens to rear its ugly head in my life - whether from 'stuck' religious folk, psychotic members of the Pagan community, or the menacing hijacker at the robots, I have found nothing as efficacious as a good belly laugh to put them to flight. I kid you not.

From the liminal spaces encountered with both my hands deep in the soil, to the murmuring of Sister Bees and plants, to the sparkle of candlelight on copper and silver on my altar, I am finding this place more surprising and intriguing than that little girl with her head stuffed full of calculus would ever have dreamed of. It's beautiful, it's numinous - and it's never rendered in black and white either.

My wish for you today is that you find something in your life which enchants, stuns, and awes you - then that you take away not an explanation for it, but a shape for it in your world. One that can be many things at once and nothing, simultaneously. That can have a material component and an other-worldly one, too. Both at once, and neither.

Pic: Said Trumpet-Flower.