Setting the ancestor table a week early
Samhain is a week out and I've already started the ancestor altar, because if I wait I'll be doing it at 11pm on the 31st with a flashlight again.
This year: Nan's reading glasses, a tin of the butterscotch she always kept in her coat pocket, my uncle's terrible fishing hat, and a photo of a friend from my old coven who crossed in spring. One white candle in a deep glass holder on a ceramic plate, well away from the curtains (lesson learned in 2011).
For the night itself I'm planning a dumb supper: one empty chair, that plate served first, and the whole meal eaten in silence. If you've never done one, it's stranger and gentler than it sounds.
Scrying season
This is the time of year I get out the black mirror. It's an old picture frame with the glass painted black on the back, nothing fancy, made during my first year in coven.
One candle behind me, never in front (you want the glass dark, not reflecting a flame), the cat banished to the bedroom, and twenty minutes of soft-focused looking. Most nights: nothing but my own tired face. Some nights the glass clouds over like breath on a window, and images come the way dream images do.
Last night it was a staircase going down and a hand holding a lantern. I'm not interpreting it yet. It's written in the book, and I'll sit with it until the sabbat.
Practical note: candle on a heatproof plate, well away from curtains and cat tails. The veil is thin this time of year. So are old curtains.
One stone every sabbat, twenty-two years
When I was initiated, my High Priestess gave me one piece of advice I've actually kept: at every sabbat, wherever you are, pick up a stone. Not a special one. Whatever's at your feet.
Twenty-two years later it's a big glass jar on my altar, mostly hidden by cat hair. Gravel from a festival car park. A slate chip from Wales. A crumb of concrete from the hospital car park, the Samhain I spent in a waiting room. A perfect white pebble from the beach, the year my mother died.
Samhain is a week away. I'll add one more, and before that I'll tip the whole jar out on the kitchen table and remember every single one. It's my book of shadows, in stone.
A prayer for the darkening half
Wrote this for my altar as the nights draw in. Sharing in case it's useful to anyone heading toward Samhain:
Old Mother of the turning year,
keeper of the seed beneath the frost,
I give you what is finished.
Hold it while it rests.
Teach me to be quiet in the dark
and to trust the slow return of light.
Blessed be.
New moon, old habits
Dark moon tonight, so I cast a quick circle in the kitchen and did the most basic working I know, the one I used to teach every new seeker in my old coven.
On one slip of paper, the thing I'm done carrying (doomscrolling in bed; I'm 47, I know better). On the other, what grows in its place (actual books before sleep). The first slip burned in the little cast-iron cauldron, set on a stone tile with the window cracked and a glass of water within reach. The second I folded around a single marigold seed and pressed into a pot on the sill.
No fancy timing beyond the moon, no rare herbs. The new moon is a blank page. You just have to be willing to write on it.