Once again, the chaos that has become my life has swooped in and taken over. I can't find time for eating, much less for blogging. My apologies to friends and readers who have come to expect more from Blogickal and whom, I realize, I've been disappointing lately.

Today is Mabon, the Autumnal Equinox and the last of the Wiccan harvest festivals, the Witches’ version of Thanksgiving. This is a time for spiritual reflection on the past year, what it has brought to us and what have we sown and harvested in our lives. It is a time to give thanks to the God and the Goddess for what we have been able to accomplish and it is an opportunity to cut away the chaff, the useless things and situations that are keeping us from realizing our truest potential and greatest happiness. Since we are coming to the end of our Pagan year it also is a time to imagine what we hope and plan to accomplish next year. These things are our modern "harvest."

There have been some good things for which I am truly grateful. But when I look back over the past year, it's with a fair amount of pain and disappointment. Mabon finds me quite literally in a place I hadn't planned to be and at a point where I'm being forced to face the reality that one particular seed, which I've been nurturing for so long, is simply not going to reach fruition. It's difficult to explain grief for something that was only an idea, a hope, a dream, but the experience of that grief isn't any less real.

Last night my teacher, Christopher Penczak, led ritual for our community, which I missed, being headachy and exhausted. The theme for the ritual was "focusing on the seeds descending into the dark, and calling upon plant allies that are balms, banes and trees to aid us in understanding our own seed-like nature that must descend in the winter and weather the cold and ice." Descending into the dark was something I just wasn't prepared to face last night. The promise of a balm was not enough to overcome my fear of the dark.

In addition to my blog, my faith is one of the things that I've been neglecting lately, one of the losers in the conflict between what I really want to do and what I can actually accomplish with the limited personal resources I have at the moment. I have not been a good tender of seeds.

This morning I read about Dianne Sylvan's Harvest in her Seed Post #8. She too experienced a year that failed to yield everything that she had hoped. Yet she had this to say:

. . . before you lament those things left undone, those ideas gone feral, and those best-laid plans that went spectacularly awry, remember that this, too, shall pass. Both the beautiful and the harrowing pass. Success and tragedy, life and death, all pass.  Trying to hold on to any point on the Wheel won't stop it turning. Those things we harvest one year must be sown again as seed the next.  We are not owners, but conduits; we are both the weavers and the woven, but the tapestry is never finished.

All things are temporary, and there is a wonderful freedom in that thought--for all things change, and they can always change for the better, if we are willing to be more than passive observers of our own lives.

Freedom. Perhaps the most important thing that I am harvesting this year is freedom.

Christopher wrote a chant for the ritual last night:

Dark God Light God
Father and Son
Turning the Wheel
Your Time Has come
God of the Hunt
God of the Seed
With your death
we are freed

The things that we realize through great personal sacrifice and struggle are usually the ones that we come to value the most. It certainly has been hard-won and not something I asked for, but the Wheel turns whether we're ready or not and if Freedom is to be the bounty of my harvest, then I thank the Gods and Goddesses for their wisdom in knowing the blessing that I needed even if I didn't. I will go into the dark with the seed of my Freedom and think of the things that I can accomplish with it in the coming year.

Wishing you a blessed Harvest Home.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 9:09 AM