goddessing

It started three and a half years ago at Samhain, with Health: a year-long focus, intention, practice to improve my health. One year stretched into two as my magic, prayers, and daily life -- conscious and unconscious -- tended to the needs of my body: physical health. In the midst of that, my beloved heart-child's death added an urgency: Survive this.

My health, ultimately, did not improve, though I did live through that year of statistically greater risk of mortality that comes to those who survive the suicide of a loved one.

At Samhain a year and a half ago, still working on improving my health and having given up the demanding routines of fifteen years of Goddess schooling and the community and ritual organizing work with the inevitable full calendar of meetings and activities that come with, I moved on to Hearth. I focused on my home life, cooking, my relationship, housekeeping. And I continued to work on my health, which was getting worse and worse.

In the hearth year, a major remodeling project fell apart on us, a major project to declutter and simplify got started and then interrupted, a territorial/hormonal struggle that had been developing betweeen two of our cats escalated and we had to segregate them, turning the household upside down as we began the creation of what is still in the process of becoming a Cat Sanctuary in the large bonus room/den off the garage. Meanwhile, my health continued to deteriorate despite continuing efforts to improve it, specifically the introduction of more and more vitamins and supplements to my diet and the addition of a semi-weekly routine of baking my own whole-grain bread.

Failed magic?

Or a long, slow working out of a complicated set of life issues intricately interwoven like the lines in a Celtic or Buddhist knotwork?

In the latter half of the Hearth year, a friend volunteered to teach me a health practice which ultimately moved me beyond the lingering remnants of depression over the loss of my precious nephew and gave me the energy to take my health-working to the next level, which led to the diagnosis of celiac disease.

With the diagnosis and its cure, eating gluten-free, I am recovering my health. My joints are less inflamed and I move around more easily. My digestion is improving, though there are still obstacles to overcome. Last week and the week before I experienced gluten contamination and, in each case, a three-day episode of all the gory celiac symptoms. I identified the first week's culprit -- an old cutting board I hadn't used in awhile. Clearly it had microparticles of wheat on it from all those precious loaves of bread sliced with love for my health and my hearth. Last week's culprit? I believe it was the cumin I used in my black bean soup.

It's odd, for someone who could call herself a hearth-witch, to have dangers lurking in the kitchen. But isn't that how it goes? When we explore the numinous, danger lurks. Protection magic: throw out all cutting boards and wooden spoons; dump all powdered spices and replace them with those guaranteed not to be stabilized with wheat flour; make another round through the fridge, the cabinets, the larder and remove the remaining foodstuffs that have, or might have, some hidden traces of gluten in them. Begin again.

Though I started my Heart year this past Samhain, I can see that the two years I gave to Health should be repreated for Hearth, then Heart, then Earth -- the four stations of this extended magical journey†. I could back away from Heart and officially start it next Samhain, but this suite of foci is so clearly a case of entertwined realities with magical and mundane workings outside the bounds of calendrical time that I'll just keep going, knowing that this year as I begin the Heart work I am still deeply involved in the work of Hearth and Hearth.

Indeed, in December as I got the diagnosis of celiac I also got bad news in terms of my Hearth life, or perhaps I should say the kind of news that is both bad and good, depending on perspective. My friend Rojo who had been helping me with housekeeping and personal living tasks weekly for ten years did some kind of gymnastics in her sleep and suffered a bulging disk in her neck. She's in the course of a long cure and lifestyle change which will bring good things to her, but in the meantime she can no longer clean her own house, much less mine. So this year with its added load of cooking and dish-washing thanks to the celiac cure also sees the added load of responsibility for housekeeping-without-help, something I would have deemed impossible before the influx of gluten-free energy and mobility.

And while the added burden of solo housekeeping has completely overthrown habits of living and added stress to homelife, it has also brought my beloved and me into new routines of partnership and a deeper experience of hearth, and of heart.

† Magical journey -- thanks to my writing-group partners Carol and Kat for this expression and concept; I look forward to each of their books about this approach to spiritual life and practice, pioneered by Carol for over two decades and practiced by the two of them in partnership for a number of years.

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