You will see lots written about firsts. First loves. First kisses. First times. But rarely will you encounter someone waxing rhapsodic about lasts. But usually in order for there to be a first, there first must be some sort of last. So today, I am writing about lasts.

Lately I've been reading a lot about food, The Omnivore's Dilemma and Skinny Bitch being two particularly influential sources. Partly through their influence and partly based on a desire to return to previously adopted but partially abandoned healthy eating habits, I decided yesterday that I would eat my last sugary thing, the last fried thing (thank goddess I've already gotten in my Woodman's run for the summer!), the last pork. The last meat of any kind at a restaurant unless they can tell me exactly where it came from. The last unhealthy breakfast. Lest you think I've lost my mind and gone over the deep end - no, I'm not giving up wine, despite what Skinny Bitch enjoins. There's only so far a girl can go!

Today will be the last day of the purple, green and orange. The last day for the fairy on her perch; she'll be flying away for other things. This design has represented me well and served as the window into my musings over the last three years about becoming a witch, what that meant to me, and what I did with it. Now, though, I am a witch. I'm a woman in her early forties. A writer who wants to spread her fairy wings to take on bigger things. A change in scenery was in order to go with my change in perspective.

So I'll be writing in red. Yes red, baby, red! Sera Beak would be proud.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 8:55 AM | Comments (4)

A witch spends much of her spiritual practice in search, celebration and utilization of "in-between" spaces. Between light and shadow. Summer and Winter. This world and another. In a book that is turning out, for me, to be as much a source of delight as it is equal turns enlightenment and outrage, Michael Pollan writes:

... either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands.

Pollan is writing about Polyface Farm, whose owner, Joel Palatin, is practicing a method of farming that is a paradox in today's world of industrial farming and monocultures. It is strikingly modern in its departure from what has become the norm while it operates under the oldest principles of symbiosis.

What struck me was Pollan's observation that the in-betweens are where most of the action is. For a witch, this is not exactly revelatory, but it is it is always amusing, for me anyway, when someone who is not operating from a Pagan point of reference unintentionally hits upon an idea that we would find so familiar. It solidifies a belief in certain truths being universal, regardless of the philosophical or spiritual place from which they come.

Marveling at the aesthetic perfection of this unique farm, Pollan says that he suddenly understands a statement of Palatin's that seemed " an awkward hybrid of the economic and the spiritual" before he had experienced the farm for himself. He quotes Palatin:

One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.

Ecstasy of life indeed. Another tenet of Paganism (Barbara Ehrenreich anyone?).

I'm not sure that Michael Pollan intended An Omnivore's Dilemma to be a philosophical and spiritual treatise, but for an urban witch who sometimes struggles to find the connection to the nature my spirituality is based upon, this book has turned out to be just that.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 2:20 PM | Comments (3)