I have notebooks and notes files that are filled with thoughts and poems and pieces of my life. Mostly fragments of what I think and what I think I know. And they are starting pieces or false starts. And they are things I resurrect from time to time.
It’s part of my process as I’m teaching at a Witchcamp. It sometimes starts months before camp.
Sometimes it happens in the midst of camp.
Sometimes it’s scattered and hard to read. (Mostly my handwriting, and also sometimes I have no idea what a note meant.)
But I wanted to bring a few pieces out and unpack them, bring them out into the light to see what they might have to say over a month after camp ended.
I had been reading Sappho when I couldn’t sleep. I read the translation, “If Not, Winter” by Anne Carson. I read several others I’d uploaded to my Kindle. I wanted to swim in poetry. I wanted to drop my entire body into an ocean of devotion and delight.
I wanted it to sink into my words, my heart, my actions, and my trust in moments where this would be precisely what was needed.
Maybe not by me.
Maybe by someone else.
Or maybe Aphrodite wanted to hold them and feel the weight of what I thought was important enough to write down.
It’s the writing that survives that tells a story.
NOTES from April 1 to April 8, 2023
love might free you from all your worries
make a song of your love
i am cyprian
body flow like water
i place upon you crowns of well-loved roses
you may meet your longing and never satisfy it
your thoughts turn to longing
let yourself be overcome by longing, surrender to it, belong to it
do not long for chasteness
or perfection, long for what calls your secret names
the ones you have answered in dreams
the ones you have whispered when you wanted more and could not sleep until you held them
may someone remember you in another time
Looking at it now, it reads like a poem. Some of the words are directly from the translation. Some are translations of the translation. I didn’t mark which was which.
Some arrived later in the camp, in invocations and conversations. Some arrived in whispers during rituals. Others lingered as advice from godds.
They are slippery, these pieces.
And between each word is a meaning that calls to the person who knows it.
Between each word is a glimmer, a stretch of spell.
When Aphrodite Speaks
She has been everywhere since this camp. She is in the conversations I’m having, the work I’m doing and creating, the way I’m interacting in the world. With a touch more grace, a slower step, and more measured movement.
Aphrodite asks me to know what I really want.
She asks me to look between the fragments I have kept in my life. And to look between them again. Look at what is missing and if it is really missing. Or if it doesn’t belong in that space.
And that is surrender too.
Surrendering to what is before you.
Seeing it, knowing it, and claiming what you can.
What you will.
What you can.
One of the fragments that stands out to me most in the list is - let yourself be overcome with longing. That the ache of it isn’t a problem. It’s a direction. It’s a vantage point.
It is an indicator that something lives beyond reach.
And you can sink deep into the waves of maybe, maybe not.
You can stretch out into the length of longing. Let it cover you in the way only desire can. Quickly. Completely. Insistently. Easily.
Do you take a breath anyway in this place?
Can you sit alongside desire long enough to know what happens next?
To know how you happen?
***
Fragments are everywhere. In the corners, in the windowsill. In the timepieces and calendars. In the shadows.
The space in pieces matters too.
***
What’s coming up:
May 29: Crimson Chat - Life is a Love Spell with Irisanya Moon - online
Starting July 13: Elements of Magick with Aphrodite - online, taught by Irisanya & Sequoia (email to get on the list as registration hasn’t opened yet)
Starting July 28: Aphrodite: Celebrating Her, Celebrating Ourselves - online
October 4 - 18: Galactic Goddex Goes to Greece - trip!
More Aphrodite goodness is coming…stay tuned.
And thanks for reading!