The Gravity of Heaven

These days have been stifling. Yesterday afternoon I go on the only walk I’ve taken during daylight hours. It is raining a bit, and I come back in and the clouds begin to clear. I knew that before the hour passed. the pleasant but wet 70 degree weather would skyrocket back to the heat we’d been living in, and it is around 90 degrees in the nighttime. In the Midwest we do not have the blessing of deserts which take the heat away every night so we can have a fresh start. The heat and the humidity accumulate like a hothouse.

During the esbat, the days are so hot that by the time the moon is out, I want nothing but a shower and a lie down. But, at last, I slip on shoes at two in the morning and go out to see the full moon and be in the actual air that I had not experienced the whole day. I am surprised that the air has cooled, information I would not have known, and I am surprised by the breeze and how connected I feel by it, not just to it, but by it, linked to myself and all that’s going on in me, linked to the world about me. The moon is hidden for most of the time while I chant and pray, and it is only in the end that she reveals her bright white face.

            For the witch, the Moon has a special place. It isn’t that the moon is a little sun. IUt isn’t at all.. If the magic of the moon is that it reflects the light of the sun, then the second magic which we rarely speak of is that ir reflects the magic of the earth. The moon is a mirror of us, a planetoid that had been pulled into our orbit, and circles us as we circle the sun. Witches become witches by being outside, by being in the world and feeling the pulse of nature. Our power is not different than the growing power in the trees and flowers, than the animal power of the birds and the beasts. The power in the witch is that which moves in the water and the wind. As witches we are grounded when we are grounded in the reality of the earth. We are pulled in by the gravity of the ground beneath our feet. The Esbat is so important, and the moon matters because it is then we are reminded of the gravity of heaven which grounds us as well. Earth and heaven, the witch is of both. We are pulled by the moon, as is the sea, as is the earth, and the moon is pulled by the earth, the two pulling each other, one circles the other in an unending dance, and all the time the earth circling the sun, the sun the galaxy, the greatest Spiral Castle we know, all of us pulled to each other and pulling. This is the power of the moon which we enter into at the Esbat.