I didn’t expect this.

Wasn’t I sitting in the quiet of my retreat, gently what-iffing about the things I might do come Imbolc and the end of my retreat?

First, you choose your seeds and then plant them. Nurture the tender seedlings, and plant them out when ready. Repeat this every year. Isn’t the beginning of winter the season where the only things that grow are your to-do lists?

I seem to have entered a different cycle that was already in motion, and accelerating fast. Once again I am running to catch up, and timing my rhythm to jump fearlessly in, between a pair of skipping/jump ropes. Its exhilarating.

What I believe I connected with were the echos and remains of a project I began twenty-odd years ago. It must have been intertwined with the course I had abandoned around the same time. I had picked up the book again, realised that I had a month or two of the year’s work left to finish, and decided to finish it for the sake of finishing. It was a course in Wicca, and I left Wicca behind many years ago, for the path of Druidry. I’ve recently returned to magic, primarily magical herbalism.

And so I am going through the daily exercises from the course, completing the odd exercises I had skipped because life was too much that day. I’m up to a series designed for the Spring Equinox and the course was structured that you do the lesson whenever in the year that you encounter it. I had done the meditation and noted the symbol that emerged from the meditation.

Now all I had to do was draw it on the shell of two eggs, hard boil them, then soak them in food-based colouring. The ritual involved eating one egg to draw in the energies of the symbol.

The symbol had come to represent an informal school and studio I wanted to start, where the lessons served to reintegrate students with the natural world. I wrote a business plan and then shelved it as my caregiving and career responsibilities consumed me.

Dreams hibernate but they never die. This is how I launched out of my retreat and ran full tilt into YouTube and Athena the Crafty Witch.

P.S. I made a devilled egg of it and it was delicious.