We Are Our Ancestors.

We are out ancestors; I feel them, they live inside my flesh and bone. They are me,  I am they,  They still speak in my mind.  They are encrypted in my DNA.  They are the reason that I have green eyes, that I dream of the sea and that I like to putter around the garden.  I can no more escape them then I can escape breathing.  Some times I know things with out knowing why. It is they speaking though me.  One day I expect I will go to them again. 

A few years back I was blessed to have correspondence with then one of eldest relatives. She lived in Norway. She was in her late 80s at the time. She was my grandfather’s first cousin.  As a little girl she had wanted to keep in touch with her American cousins so she learned English and wrote letters to them.  They sent letters back and the family was able to keep in touch through 3 generations.  Dagny Magnuson was her name, 

Our family was strewn throughout the United States.  My Great Grandparents had 12 children.  The two girls died as children back in Norway but the other ten, all boys, lived through ripe old age,  Their dad, my Great Grandfather died a few years after arriving.  He was bitten by a rabid dog, Story is that he tied himself to a tree to avoid attacking his own children. leaving them alone with their strong but over worked Mom and the boys pretty much raised each other.  I am told that they either grew to be extremely devout clergymen or wild young things. 

My grandfather was a wild young thing.  Free as the wind, did as he wished.  He was not so good with money or responsibilities. Oh but he did love life and the adventure of it. Years later, when my Grandmother died my Grandpa did the same; finding himself again free of responsibilities and with what little money he had left he traveled America.  He went door to door, asking the lady of the house if there where any knives or scissors to be sharpened for a small fee.   He raised the money as he went, and then back to Norway twice for visits with the family. 

Somehow, my Grandfather must have forgot to tell my Dad of how to get in touch with the family, or perhaps my Dad had forgotten it, Not thinking it was so important as he was busy making ends meet.

I wish I had known about Dagny earlier in my life.  I was in my thirties when I found out through a cousin of mine.  “You know you can still write Dagny” she said,  “Who’s Dagny?” I asked. so I was able to communicate, however briefly with a woman who had very old memories of our family and of the time and place they had lived in.   Her letters took a while to get back, and they were painstakingly written, very detailed, still maintaining the singsong inflection of Norwegian through her translation.  And hey were a window into the past that I never forgot.

I could have talked to my surviving grandmother and aunts and uncles when I was younger but I didn’t. I was too busy living life and finding my wings.  You never think those people will die.  They should still be there later, when I have more time, I will catch up with them. If I had I would have learned, these were not just some tired old stories about dead relatives no one cared about any more, I would have learned about myself.  . Talking to Dagny inspired me to learn more,  And I never regret the time I spent listening to the stories of my parents that have now passed, and what they remembered growing up and about the family and times they grew up in.

Now I am the aunt, with young nephews and nieces who think that I will live forever.  I am 45, I am truly blessed by having a husband who fits me just so in our thoughts and day to day lives.  We live a good life.  We don’t need for much.

But I have stories to tell and I have no children of my own save the cats.  Cat’s don’t particularly care about anything but a soft tummy to cuddle on and that I remember to feed then and change the litter box.  They are cat.  I am warmth, companionship, and safety to them.  They know that their ancestors were gods of course and that’s all they need to know.

.So with that said, I will tell these stories and share with you,  I will leave a window open so that these stories might not be lost and forgotten with time.

Blessed Be, Grumpy Olde Krowe

Hymn to Hecate.

Mother, Mother, of the darkest night, deepest forest, wild places

Shine your burning torch light high, Show the way

Hecate,

Hecate,

Show the way Dark Mother

Mother, Mother, keeper of the keys, of the of the underworld, sky, and lifeless seas,

Open the door so I may see what lies beyond,

Hecate,

Hecate,

Dark mother it is wisdom I seek, open the door so I may see.

Mother, Mother of twisted winding path and crossed roads,    

Walk beside me while I explore,

Hecate,

Hecate,

Dark Mother,

Be my companion as I walk along the shore

Beloved mother of ancient art,

Protrecterss of witches and women, keeper of the ghosts,

Hecate, you have my heart.

© Grumpy Olde Krowe, 1/18/11

Happy Birthday Dr. Martin Luther King, This one's for you.

Networking And Weaving The Web Wyrd.

Have you ever really looked at a spider’s web? 

I admit that I have always liked spiders.  When I was just a little person just starting to walk a big one hung from my porch and my very wise big sister (she was all of 4 years older therefore and authority on such things,) thought it was just the coolest thing that could have happened.  It was one of those big yellow ones commonly called writing spiders.

“If it writes your name in her web, then you’ll die!” my sister said. (She really did like me but remember she was my older sister and therefore it was her job to mess with my head at any given opportunity.)  I looked up at the web and the tight intricate weaving that was on the inside of the greater web and wondered what the spider had written, as I couldn’t actually read yet.  My mother who had overheard said that that was all nonsense and that the spider hadn’t actually written anything in her web. It was just a random pattern.  So at least this time I didn’t believe what my sister had told me but it gave me a notion to pay more attention to spiders as I tottered and later walked through life. 

I remember when I was about 5 years old, I found a big spider’s web in the early morning; all covered in dainty jewel like drops.  I gingerly touched one delicate thin white strand.  It was stronger than I had thought it to be.  It vibrated the web, loosing several jewels of water, and the spider energetically marched closer in that general direction.  Startled I caught my breath and watched the spider and it‘s web for a moment.  I noticed that it’s thin wisp like strands stretched from tree branch, to tree branch, to tree branch, to bush on long straight support threads then the inside was intricately woven from support thread to support thread radiating out from center and I thought at the time how beautiful it really was glistening there in the cool morning light.  How clever I thought; made without ever reading a book on how to do it, without the use of tools outside of its own body and its desire to create something.  I also noticed how if I looked at it focusing on just it then I saw only it, but if I focused on the trees or the landscape behind it then I saw nothing. “Amazing,” I thought, “it was almost invisible if no one was looking for it.”

Bolstered by my observations and feeling an affinity with the spider I touched another strand.  This time it was sticky and tore the web loosing most of its jewels and the spider again marched across looking for the intruder who had ripped its web, likely hoping for a meal. 

I apologized to the spider for ruining its handiwork then being the mystical, nature’s child I was I wandered off to explore the rest of the back yard still thinking of the spider and its clever web.

As I grew older, I found that a most people never noticed these small magical pieces parts of with world around them.  They were all too busy doing “stuff” and taking care of “things” to think such things as jeweled spider webs in the early morning after a spring rain.  Yet I also noted these same people had plenty of time to watch TV shows, or play games, or read comic books, or whatever else took up the crowded, cluttered rental space between their two ears. Somehow, what I saw was less then real to them. 

“Nobody else would ever think of these things but you,” I was told. I supposed that other folks knew that these things were there but they attached no  importance to them, where I on the other hand was infused with a sense of wonderment at all of it and I didn’t understand others who did not see or feel the same things. 

As I grew older, I began to notice an actual pattern in life as well.  It seemed somehow that what was thought, feared and worried over, wished for, or said aloud often enough, somehow, would actually, magically seem to come true.  Just like the spiders web, everything seemed to be connected. If I wanted a certain book then someone would sell it for a dime at a yard sale I went to with my mother.  I also noticed that when I went to school feeling insecure, I would be teased.  When I went to school feeling strong and confident, I wasn’t as much and not only that I wouldn’t care if I was.    Or if I had a question in my mind, three unrelated persons would walk up to me and without really having a reason or knowing why they were saying it would say the exact same thing that was the answer to what I had asked.

I remember when I was about 10 and someone was having a Tupperware party.  And they were playing a game using dice where you could win little prizes I would rattle the dice and declare “snake eyes” and I would get the two set of ones every time.  “Stop it” the adults would say.  I won a plastic cutting board that I still have.

I also would notice at times how I would dream dreams and they seemed to come true.  Sometimes I could close my eyes and see things.  Or I would feel things about other people I didn’t know.

            I told my mother about it and she thought it was interesting but with most people outside of the family would look at me strange and said nothing.  They did not understand and were a little freaked out by it.  “I” I began to realize was the odd one.

Yet all this didn’t come out of a vacuum; I had been blessed with a different sort of upbringing.  My mother’s mother had been a well meaning but extreme conservative Christian, and my grandmother tried to keep her children on the straight and narrow path by pouring on a heavy dose of guilt and shame so my mother had vowed not to same thing with us.   Therefore, I was allowed to explore, think, and grow unfettered with out any of the baggage that many kids had growing up.  I was always encouraged to think and to wonder.

And although she was a common sense practical woman, my mother was also mystical.  She had read tea leaves when she was young, and practiced laying on of hands and we almost never went to the doctor because she would heal us herself with her touch and good sense home treatments

My father was a salesman for many years. He was a fan of the classics of salesmanship literature; and he would often read them to me as a kid. He read Acers of Diamonds by Conwell Russell H, and the Greatest Salesman In The World by Og Mandino. All these wonderful books spoke of how what ever you sent out to the universe would come back to you many times over, good or bad according to your actions.  And how destiny will always somehow come to you if you are simply doing the things you should be doing.  Salesmanship I found was an almost magical tradition in itself.   

So it wasn’t an extraordinary occurrence at all that I grew up wired with magical thinking that seemingly most of the world around me simply did not have.

The funny thing is.  As I became an adult, I learned that I was right.  That “Magick” was actually the most natural thing flowing all around us.  Everyone used it; Just most people do not see it.  Just like a spiders web they are too busy looking at their own personal landscapes to see the intricate weaving and interlacing and connectedness of each other and the universe. 

Mathematics tells us that there are an unlimited number of dimensions.  In physics, the String Theory tells us that there are 10 dimensions.  The M-Theory tells us that the universe has 11 dimensions.  Quantum physics tells us that when we do a thing in one dimension it reverberates through all of them.  They join, like the spider’s web, but even more so, strong thin threads of dimensional reality linking to each other, and everything, spreading in every conceivable direction into infinity.   

It is there and alive and it vibrates as we vibrate our thoughts and deeds and actions and desires and fears trough it.  We connect to one another and to everything around us.  We push and pull the warp and weft of it to create our own designs weaving it in and out with each other as a society. 

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;” John Donne said.

Science also tells us that everything.  You, Me, the computer, My cat sitting in front of me being a pest, the house, the trees, the rocks outside are made up of teeny tiny particles called atoms = energy, meaning what seems to be solid is not so.  It is living energy vibrating with each other to create the perceptions of what we believe to be reality. 

Our brains, our bodies, operate by energy, much like the circuits and wires in electricity.  Our thoughts are energy; our bodies are energy, the configuration of the world and everything in it as we understand it is energy.    Energy moves energy. It moves in the path of least resistance. Through the different dimensions, we program it every second of our lives through our thoughts and words and desires and worries and fears.

Our thoughts and words have the power.  It creates and attracts like things into our lives.

How many people do you know that have sad, unhappy droopy thoughts that lead sad unhappy droopy lives and no matter what they seemingly do more bad unhappy things happen to them. In fact bad things seem to hunt them down, lurking in every corner ready to pounce and devour them.

Do these people actively decide to create unhappy lives for themselves?  Probably not concisely but on an unconscious level, I think they do.  Either because they have never known that they can expect better; or because they hold on to past hurts or pain without knowing that they can or should move on.  It is like an old audio tape stuck in their heads running in a loop continually giving them the negative message and they end up believing it. 

We have all heard these tapes haven’t we. How do we get out of this cycle? By first being aware of our inner dialogue and recognizing that, it is a thought pattern that can be overwritten with positive, healthy thought patterns.  It is not like flipping a switch though.  It actually takes a lot of conscious effort and hard work and patience with ourselves.  When you begin to be conscious of that tired worn out old mean spirited message you can either aloud if they are alone, or in their heads shout STOP!  Then replace those words with a more healthy supportive truth. Given enough time and practice, you end up with a completely new tape.

We also often need to go through the messy hard work of dealing with inner pain and hurt we have held on to for so long. Only then, can we move past them and finally move on from them. 

We really do not like to deal with pain in our society do we?  We have so many clever distractions to keep from dealing with pain and hurt.  These diversions can work on the short term; but when they can keep us anesthetized, swathed in suspended animation; stuck in a comfortable but unsatisfactory place leaving us wondering why we are so unhappy.  Yet the pain and hurt is a very real part of us.  We should honor our pain and respect our need to grieve, then allowing the tears of release that leads to our healing.

I am a great believer in rituals.  They are ways for us to communicate with the higher and lower conciseness in ourselves, as well as with our ancestors and spiritual guardians however you name them.  What is more important is that they work. They can be complex or as simple as you need them to be

You have to start by getting away from all the distractions.  Turn of the computer and the TV.  Take a walk in the woods.  Or lay down on the grass and look at the sky.  Take a bubble bath, just sit still and quiet. Without forcing any thought to come forth, feel the stillness and allow.  Just allow.  It might take a little time to quiet the racing thoughts of your day, but eventually, with practice, what is inside you will bubble up to the surface.  When it does, do not judge, and allow them to flow then release.  Sometimes writing them down on paper and looking at the words written in black and white helps.  Then either burn them or crumple them up and throw them in the trash or burry them. 

Honor your feelings and accept them. Then you can heal and let your life move into the future.

How many people do we know or notice that are that lead these powerful dynamic lives. They appear bigger then life sized, almost supper human. Everything they touch seems to turn to gold, even when things start turning into adversity they turn it into good.  They create businesses, and universities, and personal wealth, using the same tools we all have, they manage change the world for the better.   To the outside world, it seems they live totally blessed lives, and even when they fall from a great height, they seem to land on their feet like a cat.

  

How do we do what they do?  Start becoming aware of our thoughts and habits, are they cluttered and without direction or are they orderly and focused.  Are we doing anything to move ourselves forward or are we waiting for some sign from the outside to know when it is ok to get up and do something about it.

Decide what you want, Put energy into it. Write it down on a sticky note and put it on hour mirror where you get ready in the morning.  Light a candle, pray, meditate, or chant.  Use your imagination and see, feel, taste, smell it.  Get up in the morning and dress for it, talk about it with others.  Work the web of connections and you will find others who support you in this.

These people, just like you and I, are creators of our own universe.  We are the spiders in the larger web. We write our intentions on it. Even if you are not aware of it, you do it, every day of your life.  We are connected to it and cannot, even if we wanted to, break away from this web. 

So what are your thoughts?  What are you putting energy into?  Is it something you really desire in your life?   What can you do to change it?  Start with your thinking, and reprogram your vibrations so that it is more inline with what you wish to manifest.

Once you begin to recognize this and start practicing it, you will be surprised how easily your thoughts and words will flow into a wellspring of blessings. 

I had a friend a few years back who decided she wanted a garden.  She spent hours planning it and talking about it to me.  Then a few days later, she called me and told me she couldn’t do it.  When I asked why she told me it cost too much, she couldn’t afford it.  Being the stubborn, rugged, individualist she tended to think that way. If she could not do it all on her own it would not be done.

She was allowing herself to get discouraged and giving up on her vision much too easily.  I admit I have done the same.  If at first what I wanted to happen, did not look or feel like I expected it to, I thought it wasn’t really happening so I gave up.

Things do not have to work like that.  When I was working on garden years ago, I was amazed how those little plants and seeds came to me. I spotted plant people everywhere I had not seen them before.  I traded with them, the garden grew and we had to expand it.  Once when I was buying bedding plants from this sweet little old lady who owned a plant store, she learned I liked violets and went over and dug them out of her own front yard and gave them to me by the fistful.  Another time a seed and garden company sent me 10 roses that I hadn’t ordered.  When we inquired about it the company the lady who was very nice told us that it had been their mistake and congratulations we just were given the gift of free roses.

I did spend some money on the garden but most of it just came to me; seemingly, out of nowhere, a gift from the universe; the web of connections.

The Heathens I hang around with told me of a very old Viking concept. called the Web of Wyrd.  The great web of reality and connectivity that exists between every living thing and the rocks and trees and sky and the Gods, and also the past and present and future and myth and legend lay one upon another, layer upon layer upon layer of converging realities that one can walk in our dreams and desires and visions.  While this is a very old belief, it speaks of the same reality map that science now tells us exists. 

Shamans, mystics and dreamers, and visionaries have known about this. We started it when  began to tell stories to one another as we snuggled together against the dark cold night. Looking into those strange lights that shown in the sky. 

Arthur C. Clark said that, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

We have built with our words and thoughts, our hands, and the strength of our backs a dynamic complex society that makes this web of interconnected existence that is seemingly limitless and almost instantiations.  The endless wealth of knowledge and the connections to one another that we have at within arms reach with our computers gives us access to anything or anyone anywhere we would ever desire to reach.   We created machines that can move us in hours what used to take days and months to travel.  Because of our machines, we have access to a greater variety of foods then our ancestors could only have dreamed of; making it so that if we are work at it we can live healthier longer lives.   We have more magick available then we ever have before.

We, You, I, all of us create that thing called magick.

Our ancestors knew of this magick. So now, we know, and all of us; and it is our responsibility to create for ourselves our best lives possible.

Blessings, Grumpy Olde Krowe

(This article is dedicated to Poppy, who gave me the gift of understanding and affirmation, and encouraged me to live my life out loud.  Thanks Pop.)

Witch and Womanhood.

Words have power.  The word Witch evokes strong images wired into our collective conciseness. 

The image of the black dressed hag with hooked nose, and spidery hands, and long stringy silver hair, stirring her cauldron of mysterious brew or riding her broom through the dark still night   Always she has her black cat at her side and often a raven or an owl as a companion.

You know this image don’t you?  You were told about her as a child.  You have seen her in your dreams. You feel you almost know her as an eccentric old aunt that no one really likes to talk about.

Also there is the dark raven haired enchantress who lives to lure unsuspecting men to her lair and ultimately to their destruction. 

Are there any such creatures roaming about? Do they actually exist?  Or are they just creatures created centuries ago to keep little children from roaming too far into the woods or from talking to strange and unsavory persons? Or where they created as a warning to little girls to keep them well behaved and well mannered and not to get too uppity and presumptuous in their thinking.  After all, you a mere female; act like one!   

Women who do not fit into societies neat little cubby holes of expectations often have the word WITCH hissed behind their backs if not to their faces.  This is unfortunate.  Why would we not want women to live to their highest potential?  Does it not do everyone a disservice if she does not speak and stand strong in her convictions?

I think so.  Yet, the word witch seams to be an archetype of wild, defiant, and unbridled womanhood.  She who does not obey and dares to follow her own destiny and doesn’t care to ask your opinion on it and will spit in your face and shred you to pieces if you dare try to stop her.   She may even turn you into a pig, or make you impotent if she feels frisky that day.

 In my mind I always was one.

I used to hear the call of the moon and wanted to dance under the stars.    I wanted to be the creature of the wilds and woods.

I drew pictures of witches even when it wasn’t Halloween, I cried when the Wicked Witch of the West melted. 

I developed strong opinions, dared to tell people. I modeled my life around it.

I became that woman that people hissed about.

I felt beaten down, condemned, 

For a while I have forgotten its value in my life, that word witch.  I tried to fit in and conform.  Then it called me back.  It was the lost part that I had missed and very much needed. And those people I loved around me also needed that part of me.

Witch is an archetype that I like. It is necessary that it never be lost   It is what I shall be.  Free of the constraints of perceived limitations. I will become my truest self, and I will only grow stronger. 

Dare it.  Shake up the world a little, bark back, stand strong.  Don't let them run over you.  And when they hiss that word at you, you tell them.  Yes you’re right and don't you ever forget it.

Blessings, Grumpy  Olde Krowe.

one smart guy!

"Consider frequently the connection of all things in the universe and their relation to one another. For things are somehow implicated with one another, and all in a way friendly to one another."

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make of it”

 ~ Marcus Aurelius

Me Myself and I.

Hi, I’m Grumpy Olde Krowe

I was curious even as a child. My poor big sister wanted someone to play with her and while I would for a bit, she would look around for me and find me up in some tree.

Nature called to me like an old friend and I felt so close to her that I felt that if I reached out my hand I could touch the face of the divine.

When I was a toddler and playing on the living room floor my mother leaned over the arm of the couch and made a face at me. “Eehehehehe! I’m a witch!” now she did stuff like that to all of us kids and grandkids.  She liked to shake us up a little bit. I think she thought it was good for us. But at the age of two or three, it registered into my thoughts as, “my mothers a witch so I must be a witch as well.”  And for years in the back of my mind I waited to learn more from her.

She didn’t actually consider herself a witch; she thought she was a Lutheran.   However, you know, she was a whole lot more than that. 

Growing up we played tip table, and guessing games and we would send someone out of the room and agree on a thing they should do and then bring them back in.  We would all concentrate on what we needed them to do and you know what? Every time they would walk over and do the very thing we wanted them to do.

When I was in my early teens she handed me a book on Edgar Cayce and told me that while she believed in Jesus, that she knew that there was something else out there and she encouraged me to go search for it.

At School I would search every book I could that could have given me answers, from religion to psychology to myths and history   I searched and wondered even more.

When I was 14 years old I said a prayer, “I wish to learn true wisdom.”  I went into deep meditation, an old man walked up to me, he had long white hair and a ling white beard tinged with gray.  He dressed in medieval clothing.  He handed me a chalice. 

“Drink this” I did, it tasted of nothing in particular.  He took it again.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Lucifer,” he replied.

Of course that scared the living day lights out of me.  I did all the things I could think of, pray, go to church, read the bible so I wouldn’t end up in hell.

Nothing really bad ever happened to me.  I coasted along through my teens and into my 20s. 

At Church I tried to stay focused on what was going on and being said.  Some of it was nice, but frankly it never filled the hole I had for knowledge.  I kept on waiting for the real thing to happen.  It never did.

When I was in my 20s I had a failed marriage and got a divorce.  Then I had another failed relationship.  And while the men had been a**holes, I didn’t really feel that I could exclusively put the blame on them.  I had been the one who picked such men to begin with.  That was my bad.

Something wasn’t right, something wasn’t working for me.

Then it struck me.  I wasn’t living an authentic life.  I was being what everyone expected me to be without ever really questioning who I was.  And I thought back, when I was I the most happy and you know what?  I remember that girl who use to climb trees years and years ago.  That I decided was who I was and that whatever it was my true religion.  I started out in my quest.

Thinking back to my prayer as a girl, I had given the request and had been answered.  What exactly had that meant?

Lucifer, I had figured out later, while being the boogie man of the Christian church was also the snake in the tree of life who encouraged Eve to eat the apple in the first place.  And when she did her eyes were open.  The name Lucifer itself means light-bearer. And If Lucifer wanted to step up and help me with it then who was I to argue. He was the perfect metaphor for what I had really wanted.
 

 A life time of wonderment of the world around me and an unending curiosity was something worth striving towards. I can't believe that any God or Goddess who loved us would want anything else but our pure joy of learning about the universe in all it's mysteries.


About that time my Dad who was retired went back to college and we would talk at length about all that he was learning and he encouraged me to search even deeper into all that drew me.  I had a parter in my wonderment.

It was years later when I found Wicca, 

I liked to write stories.  Once when I was working on one where one of the characters read tarot cards.  I didn’t know anything about it so I asked a friend who knew something about them.  He brought me his deck and was gracious enough to let me borrow them over the weekend.

The minute he put them in my hand, I knew, these for whatever reason made sense to me.  I had to learn.  I got a deck and carried it with me everywhere.  And I studied and I read and I looked things up on line. 

Then low and behold I stumbled onto Wicca, “Thank you Christian Day and Sandra Mariah Power for your wonderful website!” Salem Tarot, look it up. It talked about the same sort of things I remembered feeling as a child! 

Wow, that’s what I am.  I’m a witch.  I knew had known it way back when I was still walking around it diapers. How funny was that?

So that’s what I am

Since then I have dedicated my life to learning the grandmother ways and the craft of the wise.  For 20+  years now I have studied, experimented, meditated and talked with others trying to learn everything I could

It is a glorious Journey.

And I am here now to talk about what I have learned.

Blessed Be, Grumpy Olde Krowe.