The Refreshing of Waters – Adding Magic

 

“Before you can welcome something new, you need to say goodbye to something that needs release.”

Finding magic might seem like silly child’s play for adults or ‘grown-ups’. You might be thinking of playing dress up, pretending your dolls or action figures are alive, or that you’re on the search for a unicorn. We can think it’s somehow embarrassing and foolish to talk about magic. It’s something we’ve grown out of. We’re scientific now, and we can prove it! “We’re no stray saplings swaying to the tune of the wind, we’ve got our own song! And we wouldn’t be caught dead singing it, because that isn’t done!” I invite you for a moment to compare magic to some of the things the ‘all-grown-up’ persons think of as important.

Retirement

Nothing kills a blossoming idea as quickly as imagining death at its birth. Some of you have experienced this as well. The rock of reality bears down on you as soon as you lift off.

As a 29 year old teacher, I’m pressed to think of children I may never have, or a far off death that may be much sooner than thought. As a newlywed, I should be pulsating with life…but instead I feel like a shriveled Crohn! Instead of creating, I’m thinking of how my descendants will fare if I don’t set aside silly antics and milk dry my daily blessings.

Imagine the advertisement for retirement as I take you through the steps to the Death Dance Twirl:

1. Go to school, graduate with honors, work really hard in college, graduate with honors again, and maybe you’ll get a good high paying job.
2. You’ll go to work, and (as a teacher), bring home work and work some more. On the weekends and evenings you’ll work.
3. You will not get one day of rest. Saturday’s will be filled with grocery shopping, laundry (in between grading papers), and Sunday’s (for me) will be filled with Church, fellowship, and….then you’d better prepare that lesson for tomorrow, or the kids will be distracted and misbehave!
4. Repeat. Oh, and don’t spend money on anything, because you don’t have time for anything anyway, and you should be putting it in your 401(k)/403(b) so when you’re too old to keep working all day, you can have something to live off of.

 

Now, wipe that sweat off your brow dear one and calm your heart. The truth is, magic finding is simple if practiced daily. It’s for everyone. It’s not just for INFPs or NF types. We all need magic weaving our lives together with others, with nature.

Life is about relationships. Relationships with yourself, God, others, and the natural world. Sometimes I wonder if much of our happiness is due to memory loss, or positive memory loss. We seem to keep those ‘bad’ memories, however, and they’re handy to dust off to remind us that we needn’t fall into those traps again.

 

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D, writer of Women Who Run with the Wolves encourages people to write their own legends for themselves and their families. Yes, you can even filter magic into a ‘bad’ memory, or story that you tell yourself, and create a new medicine.

Often I tell the story of how I ought to be, by what others around me think. When I move to a new town, I have to find that new story if I’m looking outside of myself. But when I look within, and find that I have a story that I have to tell, that’s when it becomes magic.

Magic is in beauty, nature, ideas, and people. It’s that thing that makes us go ‘ahh, that’s who I am’. There’s a profound sense of peace and stability that washes over you. It’s where you can let go of the masks you’ve been wearing. All around you stands still in awe, because this new soul has appeared, pure and unveiled.

JUNIPER- Right, the point of this post!

Now, the picture at the top of the post is of Juniper. Recently I have used my Druid Oracle cards, which isn’t something I normally do. I’m an Orthodox Christian, and ‘depending’ on cards is something sketch for me. However, they’re a tool that I used to try and get some inspiration for an herb to focus on. As I said, I’ve been feeling like a dried up Crohn woman, near the death bed of dreams and hopes. Juniper was the card that I pulled, upright, no matter how many times I shuffled and twisted the cards. So I stuck with it.

Juniper (Aitin/juniperus communis) increases Cleansing-Pioneering-Magic. Juniper was used to cleanse many things in preparation for Summer, including people (right now it’s the beginning of Spring). It’s a hot herb (pungent) and I have christened it a new name  “The Refreshing of Waters”.

In herbalism school, I was taught that Juniper was a great UTI herb. How magical does that sound! But here’s my story for Juniper. Sometimes we get ‘bogged’ down by life, become heavy and thick, and all becomes muddled. We can’t choose a direction to go, we just pull on our galoshes and waddle through the muck with our sheer will-power. In Ayurvedic medicine, there are two ways to clear this damp bog. One, is to drain it, and the other is to flush it out baby!

Juniper can help cleanse the physical body of retained water, and since we hold onto emotions in our bodies, these waters can help ‘refresh’ and liven those areas, bringing with it the new flow of life needed to pursue our hopes and dreams. An excellent way to clear out old emotions is to use Flower Essences in water after releasing retained fluids with Juniper tea.

As an Aquarius sign, it’s not for me to retain waters, but to constantly refresh and renew them to nourish and pour out unto others. We all have certain parts of us we need to give, and we need to release those gifts before new ones can come to us.

Now go and find a little magic somewhere, imbibe it, and share it with someone else.