Serenity Comes In Many Flavours

We are born to serenity. As we call serenity to us we rediscover the blessings within. Take a moment now to feed on the serenity you know is within you. If you can’t feel it, find a stone and rest your hand or body upon it, allowing the stone to touch your bare skin and impart its inner rock-ness to you. That is serenity. So simple, yet such a stretch for many of us who fly and flit about like busy, busy bees.

With serenity comes peace and release. As witches we know how to call upon the elements that feed us. As an earth sign (Virgo) with lots of earth influences in my natal chart I resonate well with rocks. As a fire sign or with a fiery chart, moon, or rising sign you may need a flame, a bonfire or a candle for serenity. As an air sign try listening to the wind through the leaves or needles of the trees. As a water sign sit by a fountain or better yet, by a brook, or by the ocean to find serenity.

To take things a step further, try meditating or sitting in ritual or ceremony with your favorite element. I like to hold my stone of choice up to my third eye or visualize it there between my eyebrows and up a bit while requesting dream guidance and wisdom.

For this article I was drawn to an unusual stone from San Benito County, California called Benitoite which I ‘spoke’ with as I channeled information relevant to our discussion about serenity. The Benitoite felt warm and open (like the desert weather we get in Southern California) and I could feel my guard coming down and my senses relax, along with my body. My eyes felt droopy and half shut but I also felt alert!

Sometimes a stone’s intensity can become too much when held up to the third eye so I intuit which hand wants to hold it (the left in this case). In cahoots with this stone I also chose a card from my Lefty Oracle Series (drawn with my non dominant left hand) which helped to facilitate this channeling. I then held the stone over the card and continued to write. I then became the snake; an excellent visualization and body exercise for you to try which will help you ground and center. Try it now by simply lying on the floor and undulating or curling up in a ball; feeling your body stretch and luxuriate in such a simple pleasure.

 It’s only now that I actually look at the card I’ve pulled and then I ask ‘Irwin’: “are you truly serene?”(‘cause you sure don’t look it). Yet sometimes we need the barrier and protection that comes fromdressing up and appearing angry, weird and strange. Like armour, our clothes, hair and piercings can frighten others away, so that we can have the serenity and alone time we desire; a self-created barrier to intimacy.

Sometimes we need to belong to no-one or nothing. We stand alone. This too brings a serenity of sorts; a misunderstood sort of serenity that, as a Gen Xer I know well. I too used to wear punk makeup and clothes with affectation and I found it empowering. People were afraid of me! I could walk around without any need to explain myself. Yes, I received stares, but also serenity – no one dared bug me. So yes, serenity does come in many flavours.

However you choose to know serenity, that’s up to you, but give it a chance, daily. It can be the basis for a whole new path of self discovery into your creative soul.

About Kathy Crabbe
Creative Soul Guide, Gen X witch, artist and creator of the Moon Musing eclass “Awaken Your Divine Feminine Soul” and the Lefty Oracle Deck. Kathy offers Soul Readings to guide you on your path.

Amongst ancient oaks and an elfin forest Kathy finds serenity in Sage, California with her husband and best friends, Abby the big dog and Djinn Djinn the little one.

Becoming Animal

I'm sharing the words of writer, David Abram from his book "Becoming Animal An Earthly Cosmology" not only for your sake, but also for mine, so I will not forget them as they are a way of thinking and realizing our place in the world. Each day as I draw from life, outside surrounded by nature, birds, wild things and hot skies, and then later on when I paint abstractly, at home with ambiguity and passion's many flavours, I struggle to find a way to be in a world quite un-accepting of the artist's way. So it's writers like Abram who guide and encourage me with their ponderings.

The computerized mind when left to its own devices, all too easily overlooks the solid things of the earth. Skilled in the rapid manipulation of symbols, it neglects the stones and the grasses that symbolize nothing other than themselves. Dazzled by its own virtual creations, the digital self forgets its dependence upon a world that it did not create, overlooking its carnal emplacement in the very world that created it.

Bodily perception provides our most intimate entry into a primary order of reality that can be disparaged or dismissed only at our peril.

An addled and anesthetized numbness is spreading rapidly throughout our species.

There are those, however, who are not frightened of grief; dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree, or their palms into the hand of yet another child who has tasted prematurely of wrenching loss, their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder that's been locked away. Suddenly we notice the sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from under the ground.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology