Keepin' Faith Alive

If you hadn’t caught my Facebook notification on the Autumn Equinox, I was down south in the Florida Keys for a week, helping my dad and my brother repair my parent’s place in the wake of Hurricane Irma. My dad’s place is pretty sturdy, so it survived the two feet of ocean that flooded it relatively well. He was lucky. Others were not so lucky. There were people in the area who had lost everything.

The islands were covered in the wreckage of everything that the wind and waves could grab. Add a film of sea silt and organic matter, and you can get a picture of what our surroundings were like. The power was slowly being restored, and the water was running, though it was under boil advisory. Anyone who didn’t have the money to have a house built higher up had to gut their houses. Each place on my dad’s road had piles of furniture and sheetrock waiting for the town to go through and move it. It was a mess.

As I worked there, sweating in a house without any power, I mulled over how the Keys seemed to be a place where humanity didn’t really belong in the way that they are there. All fresh water is piped from the mainland. The sand for beaches is shipped in to cover the petrified reef that the islands are naturally formed from. It all feels slightly artificial. That mixed with climate change, all the work that we were doing felt a little senseless.

I talked to my teacher Adhi about the way that the trip had affected me, and she proposed that I do a fire ceremony to help transmute the grief of the people on the island, as well as for the islands themselves. As someone walking a path towards being a shaman, dealing with grief and finding ways of helping others express it are jobs that I am to take up. Along with helping a friend and her clients dealing with the grief of a big change in her business, this was the perfect time to experiment.

The first part was making the fire. Once it was going well, and I had all the kindling and wood that I would need to keep it going, I began to rattle around the perimeter of the fire, as well as smudging the space with cedar. I made offerings to the East and Air, South and Fire, West and Water, North and Earth, Below and the Planet, above and the Sky, and to the Fire and the almost Full Moon. I called in the four elements to bless the space and the work, as well as the currents of power from the Planet, the Sun, and the Moon.

I then made an offering of rue to the fire. I had been taught that rue pulls heavier energetic entities into it, so I had hoped that I would be able to use it like that to draw grief to the fire. I’m not sure if burning it cancelled that effect out, though. That part is still in experimentation. After that, I rattled, sang, and prayed. I know that this is a little less than specific, but at that point I was just following what felt right. I dug into myself to find any grief that I may be carrying about the destruction in the Keys, or my friend’s life change. After that, I sang to pull grief away from the people I was holding ceremony for to be transformed in the fire.

Fire is such a helpful tool in ceremony. It lends its own energy to the work. It can act as a portal to send away negativity, or even as a tool to transform it (such as I was trying to do in this ceremony). While such ceremonies can be done with the people you are holding the ceremony for far away (using yourself as a point of connection between the people and the fire), I find it far easier to have the people actually at the fire.

I think that I helped alleviate a little pain with the ceremony. I know that my friend seemed lighter about her life transition, and my emotions that I carried from seeing people in suffering had lightened. I hope that the ceremony helped the Islands and the people there, as well. Ceremony shouldn’t be where help ends, though.

We’ve had many tragedies around the globe recently. It’s easy to “send thoughts and prayer” (though I feel that sometimes people feel that just typing that on social media is enough), but skip the next step, which is work. As I first learned Druidic ritual, it was always emphasized that action should be taken as soon as possible after magical work to create the change that the ritual had begun. It only begins in our consciousness. The next step in the work is action.

Ceremony serves as a way to process emotions, reconnect, and inspire. These things alone cannot solely help a situation. Churches that pray for the poor, but do nothing help their situation are rightfully ridiculed. The same goes for people of a spiritual persuasion and any disaster or tragedy. Ceremony is important. So is food, clothing, water, and other necessities. Hold sacred space for those in need, but don’t forget to help, or donate to those who are in a position to help.

The Bible says “Faith without works is dead” and I must say that I agree. We are the meeting place of spirit and the material world. We must create the change we want to see. Positive thoughts aren’t enough. Even when all we can do is ceremony, bringing that ceremony into this world takes work. Change isn’t free.

I’ll be doing ceremony for Puerto Rico soon, but I will also be finding a way to donate to a group there helping out. How will you help the world about you, magically and otherwise?

Until next week

-The Green Mountain Mage