England Swings Like a Pendulum Do …

It’s hotter than Hades this evening. If only there were a way to capture all of this for when February rolls around …

I’m so tired that I can barely think straight, and the air is so sticky that the keyboard isn’t cooperating. At some point soon, I’m going to go downstairs and sleep on the bare hardwood floor in the livingroom. If that’s not cool enough, I have a tent and I’m not afraid to use it!

I’m sure you don’t really care about the weather report, Gentle Reader, but it’s difficult for me to ignore this heat and humidity. And so much has happened in the past few weeks that I truly don’t know where to begin this entry, so I’m just babbling.

First of all, I found two of my local witchy friends again. We had taken a Tarot course together a few years ago, and then lost touch. I had missed having other pointy-hat-types to talk to, so I was very pleased to run into them again. I don’t feel quite so alone. Please don’t misunderstand – I have a lot of friends who mean the world to me. But it’s different to have someone who really and truly understands, especially when there are things happening that I have difficulty understanding myself.

Once upon a time, yet in this life, I was a geology student. I studied rocks and minerals and landforms, and I loved it. I’ve loved rocks since I was old enough to drag them around, so no one was really surprised, and I still love them to this day. My mineral collection is something I really enjoy.

Well, something really weird happened recently, and I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

A week or so ago, one of my re-found friends asked me what my pendulum was like, and although I tried to describe it as being made of brass and amethyst, I figured the easiest thing to do was to take it out and take a picture of it to send via the net. So I took it out and …

The stone was no longer amethyst. It was a very dark smokey quartz. Very nearly black, in fact.

The scientific part of me, the geology student, decided that this simply wasn’t possible. I’d heard of stones going lighter if exposed to bright sunlight for a long period of time, but never anything like this. The mystical side of me was shocked to see an actual manifestation of magick. And the two sides got together and had a grand freak-out session.

The pendulum had been beside my bed, next to where I sleep. Without going into a great number of details, I had recently encountered some psychic trauma – someone had gotten inside my head when I let my guard down, and shaken everything up. It actually took a little while to recover. Well, amethyst is a healing stone that, among many other things, is said to dispel nightmares (something I’d fully expected as result of the aforementioned negative experience). Smokey quartz is said to absorb and then dissipate negativity. The stone had gone from one to the other. So the science-y part of me was thinking “it’s not possible", while the other part was marvelling at how well the stone had worked, and the physical evidence of it having done so. It was a very strange experience.

On Monday, I showed the now-very-smokey pendulum to my friend and she agreed with me, not only that it was now nowhere near purple and definitely black, but that it felt “full", as if it were much denser than it should be. It’s now buried in my flowerbed, being cleansed. I’ll dig it up at the Full Moon.

It’s very strange for me to write about this, because I’m imagining how strange it would be for someone to be reading it. I really tried not to believe it – tried to come up with some sort of logical reason. Anyone who knows me will laugh at that, because I’m most definitely ruled by my heart and not my head. But in this case, I tried.

And it was like when people I’d never met before recognized me as a natural witch. I couldn’t deny it anymore, or try to talk myself out of it once it was obvious to others who knew abut such things. And no matter how many different types of light I looked at that stone in, it had definitely changed colour. No denying that, either. Magick is real. Wow.

It has been a weird few weeks.

If I ever have the energy to tell you about the other experience, I will share sometime. I’ve blocked a lot of it out now, so there are fuzzy spots. I’m okay – perfectly fine, actually – but it was a rough experience at the time. I’m used to feeling other people’s feelings, and helping them sort them out and put them in perspective. Having my own feelings ripped open, dissected, analyzed, and then dumped back, in a total shambles, was a brand-new experience, completely unexpected, and not one I care to repeat any time soon.

But I have good friends, some who have known me to be very vulnerable in the past. Those friends helped me immensely then, and they were the ones I turned to, to put me back together. I didn’t tell them what had happened – I had no real words to explain so that they could understand – but simply being with them, in person and across the miles, healed me. I have been blessed with these people in my life – the simplest small talk is only the surface of our friendship. I’m thinking of one good friend, in particular. We understand each other on such a deep level that simply connecting, by voice or even just simultaneous thoughts, heals. I don’t know what I’d do without him.

I’m starting to get really sappy. That usually means it’s getting too late for me to think straight. Silly Piscean girl – go to bed!

Goodnight, Gentle Reader. Sweet dreams.