change
All things change
I know the Change CTCW is over, but I just tripped over this great quote from Ovid.
It’s quoted in a book I’m reading Houseof Darkness, House of Light, by Andrea Perron, a memoir of the ten years her family lived in a haunted house. At one point her mother quoted this to her:
“All things are always changing,
But nothing dies. The spirit comes and goes,
Is housed wherever it wills, shifts residence
From beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always
It keeps on living. As the pliant wax
Is stamped with new designs, and is no longer
What once it was, but changes form, and still
Is pliant wax, so do I teach that spirit
Is evermore the same, though passing always
To ever-changing bodies.”
A web search revealed this is from his Metamorphasis (book 15, lines 59-477) The Teachings of Pythagoras.
It speaks to me of how the changes we see may confuse us into thinking that what changed is different than what we think changed. Ovid (or Pythagoras) warns not to kill someone because we don’t know why his soul is in this state at present. Of course, in the book they are talking about ghosts and dealing with them. The book is so much slower paced than movies made about the incident, which makes sense since in a haunting you have sporadic incidents over a long time, and in a movie, they take the most dramatic and stuff them into a hundred minutes. If you are interested and willing to read through the development of family dynamics while living with a difficult haunting, not looking for the easy answers and jump scares, I can recommend this book. At very least, it begins and ends each chapter with wonderful quotes.
The version I found 
an image for is rather different,but also good.
Growth is Optional
That’s it for this years theme. We have tried to make Change less painful and scary. Remember to Vote to get the change you want on November 6th if you haven’t already done so.
Thanks for coming and checking on the blog.
(Next year’s theme is Getting what we need, more than what we want.)
Panel Spotlight: Tricksters and chaos magic Panel
Tricksters/chaos magic Panel:
Panelists: CoyoteSkywomn, Robert N., Thor H.
Some treat working with Tricksters like the wizarding community treated Vortemort, as a name banished to silence so as not to give it power, and admittedly, having a Trickster in your life does complicate it. Others champion the tricksters, understanding the roles they have in theirs and our world and practice. Laughter and hardship, character and pathwork, how have the tricksters helped in our lives, and what have you learned about them?
Change is Scary
OK, I’ll admit it, I chose this change image because it’s seasonal. But change is often scary, and the thing that’s hardest to change is our minds.
I’ve spent decades trying to figure out why in modern media anything with magick or ghosts is categorized as horror. My working theory is that when you are comfortable with your world, and someone challenges you to accept something that doesn’t fit into the way you think the world works, that throws everything you know into question. You feel that “well, if THAT’s real, maybe other things I don’t believe in are real too!” It can make someone feel as if the foundation of the world is not firm. It makes your assumptions false, your world unstable, and insecure.
This is why it’s so great to find a place (like CTCW) where you can talk to others who have seen the same realities and you can talk to them without fear of disbelief or ridicule. No one is going to think you’re crazy. No one is going to think you’re stupid just because you believe in things pooh poohed by the mainstream. In our experience, most people have had these experiences, seen things, heard things, smelled things, felt things,… but didn’t talk about them for fear of being rejected by friends and family. It is so liberating and relaxing to be able to share one’s experiences with others who are ready to listen and believe.
Change isn’t good or bad
Sometimes we create tools to be able to understand the changes going on around us. But we should be careful not to think of the information they give us in ways that don’t serve us. Some things benefit from acid, some from base Ph, some things don’t care, and some have a very narrow range of what allows them to thrive. This information can be critical when gardening, but not particularly in other situations.
Similarly we measure many things: the temperature, the Dow, how old we are, how many calories we eat…, all of these things have meaning, but far too often we ascribe more meaning to them than the actual measurement warrants. Change is fairly constant, and information is useful, but if we only count the length of days in the fall, we might thing our data meant eternal night was coming. We need to recognize that change is often simply part of natural fluctuation, and sometimes it’s the result of something we are doing. In that case, we can try to change what we are doing to either adapt to the change or try to make it more as we’d want it. Sometimes knowing the direction we are going sooner gives us a greater ability to make changes, that’s why many of us use divination. Collecting information, and learning how the world works is useful, whether we get it by reading a map, an X ray, satellite weather, or a dowsing rod. We can work with change when we understand what’s going on.
