Fieldstone

H is for Hedge

So let's talk about hedges, in the context of hedgewitchery (if that's a word). The hedge, of the English type, being the border between the cultivated, civilized land, and the forest, the wildwood. And so a metaphor for the Veil, the barrier between this world and the Other, that which is crossed on a journey of a shamanic type.

Except I don't live in England. I live in New England. We don't have hedges like that, old thorny hedgerows planted as living fences, to mark boundaries, keep the sheep in, and provide home for hedgehogs; what we have here are stone walls. Old, tumbled-down, New England fieldstone walls, more than a few of which date to colonial times, though of course it is simple enough to build new ones (and I've built a few myself). They, too, mark the boundary, in many cases, between the cultivated field (or mown lawn) and the woods; and they, too, are a haven for wildlife and wild plants, especially in my yard blackberry brambles.

Three sides of my property are marked by fieldstone walls, dating to who-knows-when; the house itself, a colonial probably circa 1745, has a fieldstone foundation. And six fireplaces, though I don't mean to brag; but it's a lucky, lucky house for a Witch, and I know it.

Old fieldstone walls criss-cross the woods around here, woods that were once fields but have since been reclaimed by forest; driving around, especially in the winter when the leaves are off the trees, one can see the old property lines, the old boundaries now lost, the walls now little more than piles of rocks more or less in a line.

I have not tried, so far, to imagine or See the barrier crossed in a journey as a fieldstone wall. But it is a good metaphor, a local metaphor, one that speaks of this land, this very specific place, this bit of Earth I tend, my home; and so I wonder if I might picture it so. I would think it would be profoundly centering and grounding, and root me here. I shall have to give it a try.

I Is For Initiation

I should warn you, I suppose: my opinions can be pretty strong. That is one of the reasons I founded this new blog.

I joined the Pagan Blog Project back in January, and have been following along on that my public blog; but I got to a point where the stuff I want to talk about wasn't right for that place. I want to talk about darker, angrier, rootier stuff; also I really need to be able to swear like a fucking pirate, which just wasn't appropriate there, or maybe didn't feel appropriate there. So many restrictions there, ones that I placed upon myself, and don't now know how to find my way out of. But I will have freedom.

So I thought I would continue the posts over here, mostly. So here is my opinion on initiation.

I don't like it. It squicks me right the fuck out, as a matter of fact.

I mean, fair enough, I'm not a joiner; a hermit and artist and ISFP where the I (introverted tendencies) consistently pins out at ninety-eight (sometimes literally one hundred) percent can hardly be expected to be; but it's not just that. I am a feminist, also, and a radical one at that (radical meaning 'root', and yes, it's related to 'radish'), and so, I understand that consent is sacrosanct.

Part of that of course is having a pair of personality-disordered parents; my mother being somewhere on the spectrum for narcissistic personality disorder, and my father pinned way into the red for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The both of them, pretty much, in their own separately fucked-up ways, have little concept that the rest of the world is not part of themselves; and so there wasn't really much hope that they understood proper boundaries. And consent, true consent, must be built on a foundation of strong boundaries. Because consent must include being able to freely say no.

And that's the thing with initiation. Besides the fact that I simply can't shake the feeling of it being just a form of hazing, of doing something unpleasant and frankly bullying to someone to make them part of a club, which they then perpetuate by inflicting on new members, it goes against consent. Because if you can't tell me what you are going to do to me, then I cannot consent to it. It is that simple.

First Step

So here I am, starting my sixth blog. This one, however, I'm doing (semi-) anonymously. I am dying to be able to talk about this sort of thing, the witchy, the liminal, the well, if not shamanic, shamanish; but my public blog, the one with my real legal name on it, the one that goes with my professional Goddess art site, does not quite feel safe. And I have to feel safe, I do, having a background of abuse and neglect. I can't have my family (I use that term strictly in the biological sense) finding it. I'm already nervous enough having shared my experiences with my daimon, my him as I imagine I will simply call him here too, on that public blog. I am, at forty-three, only now starting to work out what that abuse I experienced as a child has done to me, though I know it's nasty. And since I am not yet at a place where I can just say of my family fuck 'em, anonymity (semi- or otherwise) seems a good thing.

So here I am Hazel, a name I've known for years would be my crone-name, though, again, I'm only forty-three. But I'm in the process of a change, a big one, and I've often joked, mostly seriously, that I feel as if I'm going straight from maiden to crone. It's also a nice plant-ish name, and one thing I've finally started getting into is the witchy side of herbs, though I've been a gardener for years.

This blog, then, will be about exploring the path of the hedgewitch, for me. It will be a place for me to think out loud, though, really, that's all a blog ever really is; and I should say straight up front that I am no expert. I am mostly at the beginning of this path. It is calling me, I guess, or, rather, has been calling me; by the time I stumbled upon the word, and started reading about the practice, it was less a feeling of Oh wouldn't that be wonderful and interesting! and more Holy shit there's a name for what I've been doing?

I suppose then that I should define the term hedgewitch. I am using it to mean witchcraft with a traditional bent and a strong shamanic element, meaning, part of the practice involves trancework and communing with spirits, and which therefore, is basically animist. Some define the practice as primarily concerned with herbs and the Green, as a subset of the sort of green witch path; while that is a part of it, certainly, in my mind it is darker and thornier, more bone-deep, blood and black earth and the scream of the rabbit as the fox kills it to live.

I mean, that may be high talk; I don't imagine I am going to grow out of being a coward any time soon. But this world deserves my open eyes, I think.

And so I will look, and See what I can.