Do you live in Boston? Have a dog? Love dogs? Simply after another fun, festive thing to do this weekend? Then get thee to the South End for the 1st Annual Doggie Halloween Parade and Contest:

Sponsored by DoggieDay, The Pet Shop Girls and South End Open Market, the event benefits The MSPCA Animal Care and Adoption Center. For more information and to register, click here.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)

Susan once told me that the dark of the moon was the best time to do hair removal. It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to expect that working with lunar cycles would be as beneficial for the timing of personal grooming as for anything else in life. Tonight I got my legs waxed (wedding this weekend and all). Everything came out just fine. Let's see if this waning moon waxing lasts longer than usual.

Stay tuned ladies! You may want to add depilation to your schedule of things to time by the phases of the moon each month.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 8:33 PM | Comments (0)

What is your definition of "Magic?"

The direction of will with intent to effect change.

What do you look forward to this autumn?

As with every autumn, I look forward to crisp cool days, the smell of wood smoke and the taste of pumpkin pie. I also look forward to sharing the season with new-found friends and to the spiritual significance of a season that has intuitively always been my favorite.

Does your spirituality change when seasons change? If so, how does it change for autumn?

My spirituality hasn't had much direction before now so I can't say that it has in a conscious way. That said, I've always felt a renewal of energy in autumn. Remnants of that back-to-school buzz perhaps. But there has always been a perceptible change this time of year that made me feel excited and anticipatory.

Thank you to Witches Weekly for the Q&A. Please add your answers to these questions in the Comments.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

So the countdown begins! Everyone I know is getting in the holiday spirit, decorating and busily making costumes, planning for their Samhain celebrations.

If you live in the Boston area, you should attend the Samhain Celebration led by Christopher Penczak, hosted by Unicorn Books on Saturday, October 28.

Celebrate the Celtic New Year and Festival of the Dead. On this day the veils between the worlds are said to be the thinnest. Make peace with the shadow and receive wisdom from the ancestors. Honor the Goddess and God of the Underworld. Bring a crystal or black mirror for scrying, and if you would like, a photo or memento from an ancestor. Respectful festive dress for the season encouraged, including ritual robe or magickal costume.

I'll be in San Francisco for the weekend to attend a wedding (this is the second pair of people I know who have been married for Halloween!). San Francisco does Halloween well, so I'm sure it will be fun and festive. I'll be traveling on the day itself, but back in time for witching hour. I'm hoping to get together with some friends for a private ritual since I'll miss Christopher's on Saturday.

What are you planning for the holiday?

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 9:19 AM | Comments (1)

It's that time of year. The air gets cold. The wind picks up and blows brown leaves across our paths. Pumpkins appear everywhere. The night takes on mysterious and magickal qualities and Halloween is in the air.

This year Halloween holds a special meaning for me - it follows my initiation by only ten days and will be my first as an acknowledged Witch. I've always loved Halloween. With the added significance of this one being my first celebrated Samhain, I'm feeling even more festive than usual!

Are you a design junkie like me? (and I recognize the likelihood of this being relatively low!) But really, if you are looking for a way to get creative with your Halloween greetings or decorations then you will love the Halloween-themed fonts at MyFonts.com.

So many fonts, so little time! Some are snazzy text fonts and some are festive dingbats. My favorite was Halloweenies. And it came with so many fun images to choose from I'm trying to figure out how I can use at least one each day until Samhain!

Thirteen days to Samhain and counting!

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)

Every weekday when the popular column Cheers and Jeers appears at Daily Kos, a woman who goes by the handle PhillyGal posts a picture of a cat. It's just for fun - the C&J crowd is a critter-loving bunch. Bill, the column's author, includes a puppy pic of the day in every column. Lots of people get in on the act and cute animals of all sorts get posted. When I saw this pic I couldn't wait to post it for PhillyGal.

I'm a dog person. But lately for some reason I've been drawn to cats. Which is unfortunate as I'm highly allergic to them! Getting in the witchy spirit I've been fantasizing about having a little black cat of my own. I went with a friend to see an apartment and the owners had a black cat named Inky. I wasn't allergic to her! I'm convinced that she was a spirit in animal form. I wonder if she has any siblings who would be willing to come to live with me.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 7:44 AM | Comments (1)

I told this story in a post on another blog I read when the question was asked if anyone had had any spiritual/supernatural experiences (it's not a pagan blog, so you'll have to forgive the supernatural reference). Someone commented that I must be an "A-one broadcaster" and I realized that she's right!

A few years ago, while I was living in San Francisco, I had been dating someone who I was convinced was THE ONE. I was very much in love. The day after I got back from a business trip, where I got the sickest I have ever been in my life, he broke up with me. I was devastated. I couldn't eat and lost 30 pounds in one month. My heart was shattered. Shortly after this happened, my best friend from college, who was living with me at the time, got an email from my childhood best friend and high school boyfriend. He said that he had been trying to find me and found her because she mentioned me in a post she made on an alumnae website. He asked her to forward his contact info to me. So I got in touch with him. He said he had a dream about me and the next day he knew he had to find me. We had lost touch and hadn't had any contact in over 10 years! Then, I was at a dinner party at a friend's house. One of her other guests (whose mother was a voodoo priestess in Haiti) had called her up to say that he had a vision of one of her friends and that he needed to come to the party. He described the person in his vision and she told him, that's Angela. He told me that he had a message for me; the message was that everything was going to be okay. He said I should get some green beads because he had seen me wearing them in the vision. So I bought a peridot necklace. I wore it without taking it off for a few weeks, including while I was on vacation on Nantucket. On the airplane back to San Francisco after my vacation, I met a man and we fell in love.

I believe without any doubt that when my heart was broken so badly I was sending some sort of cry for help out into the universe. My old friend Steve picked up on it because we had been so close. And Garrett picked up on it because he had the ability to and we were connected through my friend. I also believe that we all have the ability to psychically connect when we need to and if we can tap into that energy within ourselves.

Something finally clicked in my head about what my teacher, Christopher Penczak, had been saying about how even the thoughts we have are powerful and can have consequences for us. I realized that if I have the kind of power to broadcast to people far away from me - and whom I've never met! - then imagine what I'm broadcasting through my thoughts to the people in my every day life!

Whenever I'm unhappy in a job - and unfortunately this has been true more than once - I have a tendency to be very vocal to anyone who will listen about whatever the source of my unhappiness is. A coworker, a boss, etc. I've been very fortunate to always have a job, but in the last couple of years I've been struggling to find something that would truly make me happy.

When this lightbulb moment about broadcasting came to me, I realized how much negativity I've been manifesting by letting my negative feelings about work get control over me. I'd been stewing in it and broadcasting it to the world! No wonder I was having a difficult time finding a job that would make me happy!

Christopher taught us to neutralize these kinds of thoughts:

Telling ourselves that we must take responsibility for our actions is one thing, but doing it on a daily basis is quite another, particularly if we were not raised in an environment that encouraged such behavior. We all carry around little programs that influence us, the instructions based on our learned behaviors. One way of combating these programs is through our use of affirmation. Another way is to actively deprogram and reprogram ourselves through neutralization.

We can never take back anything we say. If you are ever in a heated argument, you know this. Once it is out of your mouth, it is into the universe for all to hear and react to, as in the Principle of Cause and Effect. The only way we can stop the damage of our words, in a metaphysical sense at least, is to neutralize all harmful words, intentions, and energy. Neutralization is a mental process whereby we consciously send a thought out to ground and cleanse our previous actions. It is as easy as saying "I neutralize that," or imagining an X over any image you hold in your mind. I used to think that neutralization was exclusive to witchcraft, but I have found that reiki masters, shamans, and tarot readers often use this technique as well.

from The Inner Temple of Witchcraft by Christopher Penczak

Recently, I've had some great fortune with a new job and some new freelance work. I put a lot of energy into getting this work, but I'm sure than my realization that I was manifesting negative things through my negative thoughts and words had something to do with it too. I stopped bitching about a boss I didn't like and I felt a lot less negative. I made room for good job energy to come in because I wasn't constantly surrounding myself with bad.

Every day I'm trying to be more mindful of what I think and say. And I'm taking Christopher's advice to follow anything I regret with "I neutralize that."

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 7:33 AM | Comments (0)

Blogickal went live today! We're still working out a few kinks in our code, so please post comments here if you encounter anything weird. Be sure to tell us what operating system and browser you are using so we can test in the appropriate environment.

You'll notice a few things were posted before today. This content was created while we were building and testing the site but there is plenty of good stuff to see.

I was on a bit of a Tarot tear: there's Advanced Tarot by Susan Levitt and the fun quiz Which Tarot Card Are You? With Samhain coming, you might appreciate a bit of comparative new year with L'shanah Tovah.

Be sure to read About Blogickal and check out our generous Contributors and avail yourself of their capable teaching and services.

And most importantly, I hope you will continue to read, comment and enjoy!

Blessed be,
Nixie

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 8:20 PM | Comments (0)

I am the Star card.

The Star is the light of hope. Shining in the night, sending light into darkness, the stars provide direction to sailors and are a field on which to dream. Humanity used to look up at the sky and desire to be there, to find out what it all meant, and now we have been a distance into space and have elementary ideas of the makeup of all the different stars. This kind of achievement adds further fuel to our hopes. The eternal, slow-moving stars that will be long shining past the end of our own existence provide hope of immortality, and the vast space they suggest and the very mystery they hold provide us with excitement and knowledge yet to be discovered.

Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 8:36 PM | Comments (0)

Timing: Perform on the New Moon

For this spell you will need nine red carnations. Place your red carnations in a clear vase of water. Add 4 drops of red food coloring to the water. Cup your hands around the flowers and inhale deeply the scent of the carnations.

Say:

Flowers red I see you.
Touch you.
Smell you.
Bring me love as tangible as you.

This is the spell as I found it at The Cauldron. Read more to hear how I modified it.

to be continued

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 7:15 AM | Comments (0)

Yesterday's sunset marked the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. I emailed a friend to wish him l'shanah tovah (for a good year) and sent him the following meditation that I had found in a Rosh Hashanah thread at Street Prophets:

May this Rosh Hashanah, birthday of the world, be our day of rebirth into life and peace, safety and serenity, as the new year begins.

As the new year begins, let us begin again the art of dreaming, and begin again to weave the blanket of peace that will clothe us in harmony.

With our own new year, Samhain, coming soon and thoughts turning to the cycles of life, the message of rebirth into life and peace, safety and serenity is powerful and appropriate. On a personal level, the thought that we should begin again the art of dreaming really resonated and reminded me that we should never stop dreaming for those things that will make us happy and at peace.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)