Seasons of Moon and Flame. Danielle Dulsky

not? No wide-eyed babe enters the world with ease, covered in sweet-smelling perfumes, laughing and gleeful at the amusement of its mother’s labor. This world is met for the first time with guttural screams, hot breath, and much, much blood. This world is met with primal eruption, with helplessness, and with an enduring trust that all is as it must be. We meet the spring with tender hearts thawing, with fragile roots seeking that particular nourishment they need from those who have come before.

      To the Season of Tender Roots, farewell for now. We shall meet again next year, I a wiser Witch and you a growing garden tended well by the oldest gods.

       CHAPTER 2

       Season of the Elders’ Altar

       Heart Healing

      The bounty of midspring restores our faith in ourselves, in our magick, in our place in this great and numinous story. Even so, there is a subtle melancholy to this second spring moon, an ache that persists despite these long-stretching days and our grand plans to not waste the warmth. This second moon of spring is a moon of challenge, and — though it emerges in many forms — the challenge we are faced with now, the challenge our inner hags want us to meet head-on and meet well, is to not leak our wild power, not to mistake separateness for sovereignty. In These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Bayo Akomolafe writes: “The inside and the outside are not easily divided.” We are part of all. All is part of us. We ourselves cannot be perfectly unflawed and unmarred within a wounded world.

       Hag Lesson #12

      We can be fully sovereign and still be healing.

      Those garden-tending crones teach us of balance, of old ways rooted in living slowly even on these brilliant mornings when the dawn comes early, when it seems we are drenched in the dews of infinite possibility.

      We assure ourselves, day by day, that our time is well spent, that our art matters, and that, for all our grand technologies, we remain slow-moving creatures on a beauteous planet. In this chapter, the Garden Hag takes us to visit the Elders’ Altar, a holy place where the best secrets are kept, and we are tasked with the fortification of our magick, with binding our spells to activism, with asking the hard questions about soul-deep experience and what it means to continually unlearn what we once called truth. Meet this moon with a brave heart and a poet’s tongue, and surely it will be your wildest season yet.

      Long May the Balefires Burn

       A Bitter Beltane Prophecy

      Tonight, these flames are kept alight by the sheer will of those rare, hopeful wild hearts who understand the meaning of rebellion. Numbered are the days of the corrupt powermongers who boast trust in a far-removed, vengeful sky god but believe in nothing. Their cog-and-gear hearts pump oversugared neon light through their veins by day and poison ink onto their tongues by night, leaving them riddled with the disease of moving much but doing little, planning it all but saving no one, speaking incessantly but sharing not one meaningful truth worth repeating. The cages are unlocked, the children are free, the walls are crumbling, the lives of these monsters are short, but long may the balefires burn.

       Sunrise Reflection: Calling in the Stubborn Dreamers

      Beneath the first moon of spring, you bound your cosmic eggs to seed memories of sensate mind and feeling flesh, to the prayers of your forebears, and to the budding greens of a well-kept garden. Now, as this mighty moon dawns, bind your cosmic eggs to one more force. Ask yourself: How are my dream visions seated within the grander, global community? What meaning do my dreams have for the world of the future, for the legacy I leave behind? Be a stubborn dreamer now, an outlaw with a bleeding heart. If, in your vision, you are joyously dancing, feeling unapologetic and wild in a way, perhaps, your grandmother never could, and you have bound this vision to a memory of you swaying softly to music last autumn, swelling with a similar lightness and liberation in your belly, and have left wildflowers for the ancestors beneath a tree as a humble offering, then now, my love, now you must connect even more intimately to the cosmic fabric. What does your openhearted dancing mean for others? Who are you dancing for? In your Book of Moon and Flame, reflect on these questions by the light of dawn, asking yourself how this vision of you is a conversation with the universe about how you hope the children of the future will live.

       Beltane Celebration: A Fire of Demand

      There comes a time when our longing, our subtler kinship with the mysteries, is simply not potent enough. At Beltane, we call in our fiercest fire magick, demanding that the world be rid of those long-standing obstacles to freedom. We condemn inequity, and we put it in the fire. We call out racism and white supremacy, and we put it in the fire. We shred the policies that fail to protect our precious planet, and we put them in the fire. We breathe contempt at misogyny in all its forms, and we give it to the flames. We do all of this in our spellwork, yes, and then we move beyond symbolic action and we vote, we donate, we march, and we make ourselves uncomfortable. We burn, so we can heal. We resist performing, and instead we act upon our worlds with as much zeal as our wild minds and feeling flesh can muster.

      The fire element belongs to Beltane, to those heathen bonfire celebrations of both revelry and battle. On this holy day, the cross-quarter day precisely nested between the spring equinox and summer solstice and often celebrated on May 1 in the Northern Hemisphere, we must consider the bridge between the romance of this Pagan celebration and the pressing need to make change in our wounded world. Gather wood, and set a fire to burn, be it a humble one in a burn bowl or a great pyre by the sea.^* Adorn yourself, if you like, painting your face with butterfly wings and gracing skin with glitter; then begin tossing into the flames sticks or twigs you’ve named as those things, those insidious forces, that do not belong in this world. Toss it all into the fire, and watch it burn. Feel the heat of dying patriarchy on your face, then commit to taking in-the-community action in whatever way feels real and right to you, given your resources, privilege, and place.

      We can delight in our activism, and we must have joy in our Craft. Beltane is an annual invitation to both honor and harness the power of the fire element, to make good use of a more righteous rage and not become stuck in apathy or immobilized by disdain. We, as Witches, can do all of this without sacrificing the heat and hedonism of a passion-filled Beltane because we understand that, in the end, our joy is radical. We need not choose between revelry and action; we can have both. If we are to survive, if we are to love this pleasure planet as she deserves to be loved, we must have both.

       Adaptation for Families, Coven Groups, and Other Wild Circles: An Action Circle

      In adapting this ritual for wild gatherings, consider letting this Beltane ceremony be an action circle. Perhaps gather small donations to be given to a collectively agreed-upon cause; decide on a plan for moving forward, for continuing the action beyond a single evening; then set the fire to burn. Witchcraft without activism dies quickly; it has no heat, no beating heart aligned with the planet’s pulse. We cannot have joy in our Craft without the fire, and we cannot claim to be of the earth without working toward its preservation. Gather your people, strategize, act, love, and keep dancing, lest we forget what we are fighting for.

      And so it is.

       Season of the Elders’ Altar: New Moon

      Grandmother Speaks: Up and at ’Em, Lazy Bones

      You awake with senses graced by birdsong and nectar,