Drastic times call for Draconian measures! It seems that discipline is associated with dragons in some circles, but this post, unfortunately, has little to do with harsh Victorian punishment!

With The Hobbit part I out for all to take home, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying that Dragons like to hoard things, especially gold.

I don’t have much luck with gold, but I do have the habit of hoarding things, especially knowledge. Anything that seems useful I store away in my memory “Just in case”. Craft skills, general knowledge, specifications for various things researched for writing books, etc, all occupying my mind.

In my case it’s a shame no-one plays Trivial Pursuits any more! So what does this have to do with Dragons? Have I found arcane knowledge that lets me fly? No, but after a bout of winter chapped hands my skin is pretty scaly, and I have been known to breathe fire at those who aren’t respectful – hmmm perhaps this is about Victorian values after all?

A friend of mine had posted something on bookface the other day about how being polite is now being confused as flirtation! Its sad, but unfortunately quite true, we’re losing our ability to emphasize with others, unless we have a like button.

Now please excuse me, some knights are creeping about here somewhere, and I’m feeling peckish!

Blessings and Namaste!

My dearest reader, you will be pleased to know that my contract with the gnomes has been a complete success! I now have a system of Unity! Everything is now at peace with itself, even to the point of being able to run the program that initiated the whole Gnomic Pact Incident in the first place!

So happy with the results, I asked them if they could bring unification to the rest of the Planet, to which they replied,

“We’re Gnomes, not Elves! Elves fix things that are completely broken.”

Since the last thing I heard about the ruling Council of Elvish Elders was that they’re partying with King Arthur, I decided to leave them alone. It did cause me to wonder though, why out of all the magical beings, the main ones to linger in our technological age are The Gnomes and The Trolls! (Everyone knows that the Internet is full of Trolls!)

Spring is slowly rolling out across the land, and I’ve even seen a strange glowing orb in the sky that may indicate a fairly dry Summer ahead!

One thing that I can advise on, and which is also reflected in both The Universal Current, and the God’s cycle of rebirth, is the need to concentrate Love. Its an energy source which is both renewable and powerful, as anyone who has been without it can verify. Too often neglected or assumed, it needs validation and needs to be cast frequently, yet needs no complicated rituals!

More than a word or a look, but it is all these things and more. It is in a way it’s own Unity – an emotional and a physical bond. Sometimes we feel it from others, but forget to feel it from ourselves, and that upsets our connection to both The Universal Current and our Planet.

For those feeling lost now, for whatever reason, try to reconnect to Love, and The Current and those close to us, but more importantly ourselves, because if your only supply of this Energy is from others, then if it gets taken away, the loss is more severe.

Try it for a little while, and you’ll be pleased with the results!

Blessings and Namaste.

Hi everyone, this will be a shortish post (and the audience cheers), you see, I’m suffering from from a bit of a Mythological attack. Last night, my favourite operating system had a bit of a meltdown. What should have been a simple installation of software turned into filesystem genocide. Why it decided to instead of install 2 files, delete thousands, well, I’ll never know, but it did.

Anyway, I managed to get in via black & white screen and typing in terminal and make a deal with the Gnomes. The Gnomes said that they would give me a desktop, and to the plucky little fellows credit, they did. They even let me upgrade to the latest version of my original system. However, I thought they were being nice to help a Pagan out. Turns out they’re randy (oooh behave!) little blighters and they’ve had their wicked way with my system, leaving me with a kind of hybrid.

It works ok, don’t get me wrong, but while I was up until the early hours of the morning watching over my system as it upgraded and installed files, they waited for my eyes to close before using the pixie dust, fairy spit, cheap wine, or whatever other intoxicating substance on my system. Thing is I’m tired and haven’t yet worked out how to make this writing bigger on my screen!

So here I am with a Kind of Unity/Gnome lovechild and I don’t know yet if its Hur-Rah or Boo-Hoo, Hobbit or Goblin! So dear reader, be careful when you make deals with mythological creatures, especially late at night, a mistake can easily be made and the Virtue of your loved one can be compromised.

Blessings and Namaste

I gauge Spring by simple little things like seeing my first bee and daffodils. It just works for me, so since I have seen both these things, I declare it to be Spring! Trouble is over here in England, its still cold! In fact I have some lovely swollen toes to prove it! But this isn’t a post about my toes, and the applications mentioned in the title are not ointments!

My recent posts have been about changes in my environment, and sometimes my old favourite, The Universal Current. This one might not be that different! Those still reading I will try to lose with crackpot theories!

First, I’ve come to the realisation that sometimes people see Pagans as “fluffy” believing in fairies and hugging trees. Indeed, I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking that my Energy Currents are any different. The fact is I’m not fluffy, I’m spiky! I’m sarcastic, cynical, and jaded. I’ve carried burdens close to my heart and been so tightly wound up for so long that I’ve felt my Soul chip away piece by beautiful piece until my default setting was misery.

Now here’s where the coils kick in! I know that Owl is involved with music so I’m hoping that she will follow this! Electric guitars have pickups in them. A pickup is basically some magnets in a setting, with hundreds, if not thousands, of turns of wire around them. When the string is plucked, it causes a subtle shift in the field of the magnet, which is picked up by the coil of wire.

When we get coiled up tight it can impede our flow of Energy, and it attracts to us whatever is keeping us down. I have likened the Universal Current to a stream or river, which it is, but it also acts like electrical current. We can resist the current or even store up Energy like a capacitor, the danger comes from when we store up the negative energies and it impedes us from our goals.

I’ve said before how the Universal Current sends Energy Shifts to correct these imbalances or to discharge negative capacitance, but we always fall back on our default programming, especially if low self esteem is involved. This then makes a series of ever increasing Shifts to make the goal happen, all of which are probably seen as negative happenings! Eventually, the desired result occurs, and then everything changes! If the goal was a mutual one, then you achieve clarity, and although major things in life aren’t altered immediately, perspective is changed. You are everything you were before, plus a bit of what you wanted to be, and that dear reader (I’m assuming that I have one of you left) makes all the difference.

Blessings and Namaste

Consolidation is the Military Term for “Mopping Up” resistance after a heavy assault. This is the stage that I find myself in following the move of house. The Heavy Assault or “Final Push” in question was the two sheds which had been my domain for pretty much two years, and which were the last things to be moved. I say they were my domain, but due to heavy rain and lack of power, I didn’t visit them as often as I would’ve liked to. I know that I run the MINIMALISM Column on here, but lets just say it took me three days of hard work to empty these two sheds!

One of the sheds, in which my Wand-Making stores were quite happily seasoning with children’s bikes on top of them was relatively easy to empty, as it was basically only long enough to store a mountain bike in. The problem was the big shed, and I now know that there is a similarity between goldfish and spiders – both will grow to a size relative to their living environment, but only one is pleasing to look at and doesn’t frighten the excrement out of you when you move a box!

So with hands gloved lest an arachnid took a liking to my fingers, I opened the big shed….Now I remember in the Summer (or as it was here – the brightest time that it was raining!) I had to leave the shed door open because I saw that a Cat (my kind of Totem animal) had got inside. Well guess what was starting to smell funky! The shed had become a dumping ground for empty appliance boxes, and in this case the TV box had been a good litter tray for the cat to take a dump in! Nicely fossilized! After getting rid of the empty boxes (which we had saved in case we moved, but hey!) I discovered that my Spirit Animal had relieved itself in a box of sentimental trinkets and had carefully wet on a large bin liner full of other precious stuff, whilst still maintaining the structural integrity of said bag so a pocket of what I had assumed was a leak in the roof and had gone black, was in fact concentrated urine. Luckily, this did not get on me!

So after getting rid of some precious memories – I pulled back a couple of boxes to find ….. A small chest of drawers that I had forgotten about completely and of course the handles fell off the drawers as I tried to open them! All of this stuff was being transported between houses in the back of our car, and dumped in the new garage as time was running out and we had to get the keys back to the owners. Now I am finishing off the sorting out process – dumping old bills and suchlike. Putting my books in order in the various collection of shelving that I now own.

This all feels great, but can be a little overwhelming – its quite intense dealing with things that you’ve invested time and memories in. But the Energy of this place is something else and after feeling like a nomad for so long, its exciting to think that things that I have carried for so long can finally be unboxed!

May you all find this feeling too.

Blessings and Namaste

Hello, I’m Bi-Locational, for those of you that haven’t seen The Men Who Stare At Goats, its not a new personal preference! My Family is in the process of moving house, and have quite a bit of time to do so. We thought that it would lead to less stress and upheaval and more time to get things “just so”. I mentioned in my previous post of my excitement about the garage/workshop (for the one person who clicked like, I thank you!).

Its been raining in my part of the world for – lets see now, as long as I can remember, probably about 6 months. Rivers are swelling, ground is washing away, what this means to me is that the fence is falling down in our garden, and the stuff that I’d put in the shed for a “couple of days until I can sort it out” has gone wet/rusty/mildew. In fact the bottom of the shed has sunk about an inch away from the walls, letting some EVIL arachnids and box/paper hungry snails to invade. This has obviously caused me some misery points. On the plus side some old sensitive paperwork has been eaten and passed out through Nature’s Shredders – The Snail!

The excitement  of the garage in the new place though, (which I now liken to the phenomena of tattooing a lover’s name onto your body) has now been replaced – after storing some of my canvasses for my market stall in it, and the next day the rolling crates they were in were sitting in water. How did I react to this? I was devastated – my dream of having a workshop again after nearly 20 years was shattered! The sleepless nights spent thinking about details and discussing our options, and the stress of the move itself had taken its toll on me!

This is how the Deities have their fun with me – “Let’s do X and see how he does!”

The thing about moving is that however prepared you think you may be – there is always something you don’t have in one place when you need it. “Can you pass me my screwdriver?” “where did you leave it?” “Oh, its in the other house on the window sill!”. I’ve also been looking through the Fridge/Freezer, and slowly using up stuff to empty it for it’s eventual move. Jars of gherkins (dill pickles, I think in the US), chutneys, etc. (Surely the point of pickling things was so they DIDN’T have to be in a fridge?) judging by the contents of the freezer, I have the whole Atlantic’s fish catch in there!

So I’m in the midst of packing crates and newspaper again – but still writing – How’s that for dedication?

Blessings and Namaste

Sorry to disappoint the Die Hard fans, but this isn’t a post about John McClain. So no welcome to the party pal! This is about having your own place in Time and Space which is totally dedicated to the things you want to achieve.

As Pagans, we cast circles (when we can be bothered, if a lot of us are honest!) as a sacred space for our work, but what a lot of us neglect, or just don’t have is a place in our everyday lives to do the things that we need to do in.

Superman has his Fortress of Solitude, Batman, his Batcave, Patrick Jane his Memory Palace, and when you look at all these characters you realise that they’ve all had to work hard to get these places. Now after so many years, it looks like I might finally get a place with a workshop! Yes, moving is a lot of upheaval but at the end of this one is a bigger living space with storage and a garage! In England that’s pretty rare these days!

The garage is going to be outfitted as a workshop where I can finally make all the objects that are cluttering up my brain cells! As long as my body can keep up with my imagination’s demands it’s going to be fantastic! This is going to be my Enclave of Sarcasm! Watch this space….

For those who already have a place like this, then you know exact what I mean! In the meantime, Blessings and Namaste

Welcome to The New Year, please wipe your feet and leave your shoes by the door. This is a residential area, so please keep the noise down! New Year is a strange time for me, my life totally changed around this time 5 years ago  – sparking off a series of events both positive and negative, a real Energy Shift Storm. It hit a lot of people and I hope that 2013 is not so harsh on people, but as 13 is a number associated with Witches and Covens, I’m sure we’ll do alright!

In the last 5 years, I have become a Piscetarian (or a Vegetarian that eats fish, if you prefer) and given up alcohol. These can be big things to do and achieve. The amount of animal products used in the food industry is atrocious. Most sweets have gelatin in them, as do some deserts, cheeses, and medicine capsules. Alcohol, likewise can be difficult to avoid, especially at this time of year!

I didn’t eat a lot of meat before I changed my diet – I stuck mainly to chicken, pork and fish. BSE or mad cow disease had forever put me off of beef!

As for alcohol, throughout the 90′s I had been in a gigging band. I was the driver, so after driving across London, I would have a quick spirit and mixer, then spend the rest of the night on lemonades! I saw a lot of New Years from on a stage, whilst being completely sober.

Most of the 00′s New Years I spent in fancy dress! Bideford town in Devon has one of the best events for all to attend! Everyone in fancy dress, entertainment laid on, fireworks, you name it and for me it was in walking distance! Walking meant that I could have a little drink. One year someone mixed my drinks and after a week of feeling ill, I gave up alcohol.

So there you have it a Sober Pagan in Wassailing Season! I can’t be the only one though! New Year’s Blessings to you all!

Namaste.

There’s some people out there that think the 21st December is World’s End (Not to be confused with Disney and Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean). If that’s true then this post is going to be wasted! The “Truth” has already come out that it was all invented by some hippies on “recreational” substances. There is proof that the Mayans looked for continuance of existence rather than the end of it, but I digress, this post is about the biggest waste of resources…..our Energy.

It is said that we live in an Entropic Universe, that is to say, everything we do leads to an inevitable conclusion with a resultant waste of energy, for example, an ice cube in a drink at room temperature is going to melt as the warmer temperatures act on the colder ones. I will say there’s not a lot we can do about that one – the ice turns to water and is drunk along with whatever liquid it was cooling, so you could actually have the perspective of that the ice cube was only retaining a shape and temperature for convenience. An ice cube though (other than the actor/rapper) has no concept of Spirituality.

As Pagans, we pray for purpose with meaning, not an undirected collection of voices saying things because they happen to be in a book. The World is full of Energies that are lingering and decaying due to misdirection or lack of thought creating apathy. Occasionally, an Energy Shift or The Universal Current tries to redirect this to positive effect, but during a moment of quiet reflection, another means of recycling this energy presented itself to me – as we eat to replenish our bodies, we are neglecting to concentrate and visualise this nourishment being used in positive ways in our surroundings. We sit and eat when we are depressed or unhappy about what is happening in our lives- what if that is our Etheric or Energy Body saying “Ok, give me some energy and tell me what you want to do with it!”

I KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING IS HARD TO DO! But try for a week or so, to direct the energies as you are eating through meditation or visualisation into things that can help you in your day to day life. Also at the point of eating, you are also making a connection to the vast banks of untapped Energies trapped in the Ether, try to link in with that too, improve your life and those around you. Fight the Apathy, give Entropy something to think about! Sub-atomic particles are proved in sciences to change as they are being thought about or looked at!

But again….if the World is about to end this has all been a waste. If the Vorgons are here…..

I’ll be safe though, Elvis is bringing his UFO past my house after picking up the Loch Ness Monster!

Blessings and Namaste

Hey everyone, did you know that we have a Solstice coming up? I’m not sure but I think it may be called Yule, oh, and there’s something about lumberjacks, no, sorry, logs. Right, got the compulsory mentions out of the way – so now down to business!

There are certain times of the year (and in life in general), when we ask for things, whether it is from another person or from the Energies that support and nourish us. Whether we do this by prayer/ritual/mantra or by simply asking, we set into motion a series of events, with cause and effect for each. Now for the analogy part (sorry, can’t get a mind map or powerpoint presentation to work on here!);

Your child asks for a drink – a reasonable request 99.99% of the time, but this is that 0.01% when it isn’t because you are up a ladder fixing a light, or you’re unblocking the drain, or any number of things that the child can see you are already preoccupied and can’t immediately attend their wishes. You say “hold on a moment” but the child wasn’t a child at all, it was one of those klaxons/atomic devices that burst into life and/or starts running to do the task themselves. The problem is, you realise that you are going to have to do it anyway, your mind is already calculating as the crying/screaming/whining/abuse-shouting starts the consequences of the child running off to do it themselves – at the very least a trail of milk/juice/water all the way from the refrigerator to the counter (and if they were trying to be helpful, back again.). So you grasp the nettle, and stop what you’re doing to do something that has become a problem, but shouldn’t have been.

This is where the analogy starts to make sense – when we start asking for things, its usually when we become desperate, and we get upset when things aren’t sorted immediately. So whats the alternative? Mantras can be done in advance, there are mantras for everything – Love, Business, World Peace, etc. The thing is, if we are concentrating on the thing that we want most and chanting a Mantra or performing Rituals, it opens up possibilities that we may not be ready for. For example, you want a new job because you’re deeply unhappy or need more money, but you don’t have time to look for anything else, so you do a ritual or mantra, next thing is you lose your job, which is what you wanted to happen, but then your resolve is challenged. You now have the time to look, and choices to be made, but you mettle is being tested – are you or were you really ready for what you were asking for? If you were suddenly given all the tools you needed to do what you always dreamed of, would you be ready to do it without a comfort zone. Would you pass your own test?

As I have already said, we are approaching an important day of power – The Winter Solstice, The Birth of Male Energies. This energy is there for us all, if we are ready, prepared, and motivated to use it.

Blessings and Namaste.