More Imbolc Preparations

There's so much to do. I'm reorganizing my Book of Shadows (a.k.a. Ye Olde 3-Ring Binder of the Arte) and I'm not quite sure how I want to do it. So far all I've done is just move everything into a larger binder. Things were getting a little cramped, and I've added some new sections this month. The new binder still isn't quite big enough, but my OCD won't let me split everything into two binders. In addition to the binder, I also have two composition books that I started when I bought my very first books on Wicca. One of them was my very first Book of Shadows, and the other was my journal. I discovered pretty quickly that the bound-book system didn't work for me, but by then there was too much in these journals to think about abandoning them or recopying them. So now I just keep them with the binder. I'm glad that I kept pretty good records early in my studies. I've come a really long way and it's been really helpful to be able to look back at all of that. Oh yeah, and embarrassing. Thankfully, YouTube didn't exist and no one had blogs, so all of my naivete was confined to private journals and never publicly witnessed.

I've got a ritual planned for Imbolc that's I'm excited about. It includes the kinds of things you'd expect: house cleansing, candle blessing, psyching myself up for spring, and putting out a lot of food for wild critters. I made a new source candle for my altar. I haven't used a source candle in any of my private rituals before, but the longer I'm Blue Star the more Blue Star ways of thinking become my ways of thinking. It's gotten to be downright silly for me to be working without one. Blue Star doesn't adapt well to solitary ritual, but I sure do try.

I'm also plotting a new altar to Oya. Oya is not what I would call a patron, but She and I do seem to have some sort of connection (even if it's just on my end) that I want to explore more deeply. I've had altars to Her before, but I've got the space to do something more sizable and functional now. On the surface, we definitely seem mismatched: a white Wiccan girl with an Irish and Anglo-Saxon background who feels an affinity for the sometimes very scary Yoruban goddess of wind, fire, change, cemeteries, and the marketplace. I used to have dreams about Her when I was in college and I started reading about Her soon afterwards. I took a class on modern goddess worship senior year and spent a lot of time talking to the professor, an Osun devotee fluent in native Yoruba. And also a tiny, soft-spoken white woman with a PhD in anthropology.

We can't all be devoted to European gods, after all. It just reinforces the idea that you don't choose your gods so much as They choose you.