Photo (CC) courtesy of James Jordan
Three nights.
Three nights of waiting, building power under the dark moon. I have done my preparation. I have cleared the space in the waning light. I have drawn the circle around myself in salt and stone, strength and love. The borders of my life are bare. I have released the old attachments that will no longer serve. I have made peace with the yammering beasts and bitches, buried them in the dirt beneath the forest floor, given them to the earth to hold and keep and break open and transform. I have felt the night air cool on my naked skin. Now, I have three long nights of waiting to begin.
This is the moment when it all could fail. I feel my eagerness building in me, the power rising evening by evening as the sun sinks beneath a deepening horizon. My days are mundane, full of chores and chatter. But after sunset, my mind wanders in silence, darting ahead like a hound on some strange new scent, my body’s soul straining to follow. How to know when to act. I hold myself back, waiting for that time. There is tension in the waiting, and if I am careful and attentive, I will ride that tension hard. When the time comes, I will ride it across the threshold.
But not yet. If I act too soon, or wait too long, the power will not be enough to carry me. I will have missed the cresting momentum and the work will be that much harder, only a steady tedious pressure in place of the rising surge.
So for now, under the dark moon, I wait. The dreams build in intensity — light, thunder, serpents, ocean waves, strange words spoken to the stars, sigils carved into the soil, a journey into the earth…
Each morning, I stand before my altar and make offerings to the gods and spirits who come and go in my life, rising like tides at times to lift me from the shore and set me in some new, wild, unknown place. To begin again. Each new day I make my offerings, gently, quietly, murmuring my awens. Gift of water, gift of oil, gift of herb and dried petals and small stones. May I walk with wisdom. May I know the gods of myself and my people. May I join the interweaving dance of death and life with humility and joy, my gratitude like stones placed carefully in a sacred cairn to mark the way.
The days are bright and full of movement. Three nights more of waiting. I sit in vigil. I still my body, reign in my mind. I can feel the tension in me like muscles bunched, ready to release the power, ready to ride the tension hard and high, to carry the call of my soul-yearning to the depths of heaven.
The borders of my life are bare and open. I am waiting to begin. Beneath the dark of the hidden moon, I wait for the new sliver of fragile light to appear, a slip in the dark, a glimpse between the veils.
For three nights, I wait.
Alison Leigh Lilly 