Dealing with the Menopause Fairy

While I was living in Western Australia living a well-developed relationship with the Menstruation Fairy, the Menopause Fairy paid me a visit. That was years ago now, and she has since developed a close, loving relationship with me.

 

In the very early nineteen-eighties, which coincided with my very early twenties (as I am a decade-baby*), I finally grew some sense, and went off the Pill, something I haven't resumed taking since. Initially, this was both a good and bad decision, as two things happened: the waves of depression that I just couldn't account for in my life stopped which was wonderful, and my supposedly monthly bleeds swung wildly for a while making planning a little difficult and one or two away-from-home incidents a little embarrassing. With time, though, it settled down into a predictable twenty-nine-and-a-half day rhythm, almost exactly the same rhythm as the lunar month.

 

Later in the eighties, though before the stock market crash in September 1987 (and wasn't that a wonderful birthday present for someone working in the Financial Sector!), I lived a life that was as clockless as possible for someone whose income depended on the stock market, and as electric-lightless as possible for someone who enjoyed reading in the evenings. I had been involved with Magical Paganism since the late seventies, and had bought my faith-ring in 1984, with a promise to myself that if I ever lost my faith and my magicality, I would take it off. It's now 2012, and I'm still wearing it and cannot even see a possibility of taking it off. It lives on my right hand when I am single and on my left hand when I am in a relationship, but it is a statement of faith more than a statement of relationship status. Being gold, it is also my Sun-God ring - my silver pentacle-ring is my Moon Goddess ring, and my copper ring is my Earth-Mother ring. Yes, my spirituality is important to me - I have many other rings, some of them lovely, but those ones are important, and they leave no room on my hands for me to wear other rings comfortably.

 

In my time of clocklessness I meditated often (and still do), and used to enjoy very much walking around outdoors in a state of meditation. Gradually, I became aware of the lengthening and shortening of the days - without a timepiece to check at sunrise and sunset! And I worked out why the 25th December is such a huge celebration rather than the 21st or 22nd: in the Southern Hemisphere where I live, that is the first day after the date of the Solstice where someone without a clock can really sense the shortening of the days. In the Northern Hemisphere where my forebears come from, it fell in winter. On the Solstice the village shamans would have conducted Fire rituals to encourage the sun to rekindle, to bring warmth and growth back to the world, then sat around watching for the first signs of the lengthening days to know whether the magic had worked. And when it had, on or around the 25th, there'd be a huge community feast with much jollity, overeating and overdrinking, to celebrate!

 

Living also without clocks or artificially induced hormonal "flats", I was at the same time becoming very aware of my body as a magical organism. Whilst most books on magic talk about active magic and passive magic as being enhanced by certain lunar phases, I found active magic, magic where I projected outwards, worked far better in the days of my menstruation, whilst passive magic, magic where I worked internally on myself, worked far better around the times of ovulation (something to do with being "sexually receptive", I think). For decades, without the deadening influence of the Pill or any other forms of hormonal contraception (and no, I have never had an unintended baby), I worked with my magic and my hormones as intertwined aspects of each other and of myself. I was internally powerful, even in times of outer powerlessness in my life.

 

Then, as I said, when I was living on the red earth of inland Western Australia, the Menopause Fairy first visited me. I liked her on sight - we already knew each other, and I had been waiting patiently for her to come calling for a few years by then.

 

Now in that region, the local people indigenous to the area, have a creation myth. I don't know all of it, but one of the elders whom I was friendly with told me some of it, probably the bits of it that I was allowed to hear as a white woman. In the beginning, everything was void. There was no land. Then one of the sky-women started menstruating, and where her blood fell, it solidified and became the rich, red earth. Everything else grows out of that life-bringing earth: trees, rocks, creeks, creatures. The salmon-gums, in particular, with their orange-red timber, are seen as a reminder of that act of creation and are especially valued. I lived on land whose spiritual/symbolic origins were in the gifts that menstruation brings. I found that thought really inspiring and I had a terrific life there, returning to the eastern coastal strip of the continent only because of my teenager's educational needs. Nothing else would have been important enough to drag me back.

 

The Menstruation Fairy announced Her first visit on a hot, dry desert-summer's day, by a sudden flush of tingling and additional heat that started with my shoulders and upper arms, and spread quickly through me. It didn't feel just like ordinary heat, though - it felt like the movement of magic in my body. I greeted Her respectfully, and made a mental note that next time I would try to direct or make use of that magic surging through my body. That day She visited me eight times, more than She has on any day since. I think I know why - we were just getting acquainted and needed time to get to know each other.

 

The second time She visited me that day, I noticed that for a few seconds before the heat arrived there was an indefinable sensation of "prior notice" of her visit: a sensation that I cannot describe, but which is quite distinctive. I braced myself, dropped myself quickly into trance (I can do that pretty-well instantly), and waited for the heat. I converted it into a cool, green, tingling energy, and washed myself with it, and was pleased to see some of my mental garbage flowing off me and away with the flow of magic. Yes!

 

From that day to this one, I have practiced and refined this. Every so-called "hot flush" that comes on a warm day, I grab it before it turns into heat, and transform it into some other form of magical healing, which I use either on myself, my surroundings, objects, or living creatures. It takes only a second or so - at times when this happens during conversation, for example, all that the people with me will notice (even magical people), is that I pause for a moment, then go on talking. Occasionally on very cold days, I'll allow my "hot flushes" to remain as heat - I regard it as a sort of personal central heating!

 

The Menstruation Fairy continued to visit me for a good few years after that, and I became aware that I was the rope in the middle of a magical tug-of-war between two powerful magical entities, both of whom gave me energies and strengths that I could use. Some time in the second half of last year, after a very long absence, the Menstruation Fairy paid Her very last visit. I knew before it happened that it would be Her last visit. I did all the necessary physical stuff, then did a quiet personal ritual of farewell with the limestone-fossil Cup, a lovely symbol of the womb, that a dear friend had given me for my fifty-first birthday. She was satisfied and She went away, leaving me in the warm, wrinkled hands of the Menopause Fairy.

 

Since then, completely undistracted by my menstrual cycle as a source of power, I have been using my menopausal "symptoms" (not an illness in any way!) as a source of power. And whilst the so-called hot flushes, or surges of raw magic that She gives me come more and more rarely these days, they are a blessing and a gift. I treasure them all, and I use them all. Mood swings? Nah. My "mood swings" are dependent on life-circumstances, as they should be. I suspect that if I were not utilising this raw energy that the Menopause Fairy chooses to give me, I might feel uncomfortable in my body - and I am supremely comfortable in my body - and if I were uncomfortable in my body, that might cause mood-swings. I can't see that ever happening, can you?

 

Menopause is the greatest thing that can happen to a woman. Absolutely. It completely eclipses things like orgasm, childbirth, all the other stuff that pre-menopausal women rave about. I really, really recommend welcoming the Menopause Fairy into your life, and utilising the energy that She presents to you.

 

 

 

 

 

FOOTNOTES

 

 

* Decade-baby: someone of any age born in a year ending with zero.

 

** Other resources: "In Praise of the Crone" by Dorothy Morrison, published by Llewellyn, 1999. (Note: I have known Dorothy personally from before the writing of this book, and we never discussed it before or after she wrote it).

What are Talismans?

I haven't been present much: for a fortnight or so, the software at the site wouldn't let me post (other bloggers managed, so what was going on I don't know!) and I've been incredibly busy ever since just before service seems to have been resumed.

I take part in a number of internet communities pertinent to my interests, and one of my interests - by no means the only one - is Tarot. In the last few days, I was interested to read a dialogue between Liz Hazel, creator of the charming little Whispering Tarot, and Benjamin Assisi along these lines:-

That talismanic magic is by its nature astrological magic. That magic is the art of changing reality in accordince with Will. And astrological talismans are the oldest form of magic.

Let's look at those ideas.

1) Talismanic magic is astrological magic. I don't necessarily agree. Sure, I'm a pig's snout of an astrologer and it's been decades since I did any in-depth astrological-based magical work, but I do fairly regularly do talismanic work. A talisman is any fairly portable object that has been charged with magic to a particular purpose. A shaman's touchstone is a talisman. A Wiccan's Athame is a talisman. A faether I pick up, charge, and place in the Air quarter of my Circle is a talisman. A piece of jewellery charged with intent is a talisman - none more so than a gift of jewellery intended to win the heart of someone who isn't sure of you.

Even the tattoo I recently had of one of my power animals - Wombat - is a talisman, once that I can never put down and lose, one that will never be stolen from me except in the case of an upper-arm amputation, in which case I'd probably demand that they return that patch of skin to me and allow me to cure it!

None of these things have to be astrological in nature or use.

2) Magic is the art of changing reality in accordance with Will. A working-definition of magic that I have been using for decades is that Magic is the art and science of changing the way coincidence happens such that it goes your way so frequently that it is statistically impossible. Weather that should have happened yesterday that is now happening today, I'm looking squarely at you! (Okay, so I've never been good at timing).

and 3) Astrological talismans are the oldest form of Magic. I think talismans and talismanic magic are far older than astrology. I think they go back to the dawn of animal consciousness. When you foster an orphaned macropod, perhaps a wallaby, and but it into a warm knitted bag, the wallaby knows perfectly well that the bag is not its mother's pouch, but it it a talisman of the safety and nurturing that the macropod would have found in nature in its mother's pouch - and some foster-carers deliberately charge it magically to be so. When you see a pet, perhaps a cat, taking a liking to a particular corner or soft toy, that is primitive talismanic magic. When they then lose interest in it and fixate on something else, it has served its magical purpose for them, whether that is a purpose of reassurance, healing or something else, and they are now looking for a different energy and a different magical outcome in another place or object, another talisman.

Wedding-rings are the ultimate and most widespread of human talismans, although the majority of people who give them don't know how to charge them properly and the majority of people who receive and wear tham don't realise it.

Talismans are everywhere, and only a minority of them are at all astrological in nature.

Giving Back

There is a lot of talk in the community generally and the spiritual community in particular, about giving back.

Our parents tell us - and we in turn tell our children - that it's not enough to expect the community to support us, we need to work, we need to give something back.

The environmental lobby tells us that the environment cannot support multiple billions of people, and we need to lessen our demands and give something back.

We tell each other that if we expect others to help us out and do us favours, we must be prepared in return to either do them favours when they ask, or at least pass it on and do other people favours. And we tell each other that if you borrow something, you must return it.

Some of us are told - or tell our children - that giving to charity is important.

All these things are based on keeping the larger community and the structure which supports it in balance at the very least.

But then, what happens when we move into an explicitly spiritual context? The major religions tell us to pray, to ask things of their various gods, even if the thing we are meant to ask for is forgiveness for being born human, something which these gods, you would think, had banked on. Spiritually we ask. We ask for worldly power or success in our spiritual life, or for spiritual power and success. What Judeo-Christian is happy to pray to go to hell to make more room in heaven for others, after all?

And we Pagans are just as bad. The vast majority of Pagans that I know - or know of - with a few select exceptions, begin and/or end our rites by "grounding", expecting the earth-mother to give us energy, strength and healing. If we do healing rites, we take the imbalance out of the person and give it to the earth to deal with without a second thought, or expect earth, the sun, the universe or whatever, to supply a limitless stream of healing energy to our client through us. There isn't often an effort to set up a two-way flow.

An example: in recent times (recent in my personal language, is quite a flexible concept!) I asked two shamans I know and trust to investigate the Otherworldly connections of an issue I had. Both of them were gracious enough to do so, and to report back to me. Both of them used animal-helpers and spirit-helpers as a part of what they did for me. And both of them were pleased (and, I think, a little surprised) when I thanked them, and offered to feed the physical analogues of their spirit-helpers in the flesh. The most recent example, for instance, involved a spirit-crow, and afterwards I kept smelly little tidbits on me for a few days until I came close enough to the next physical crow, whereupon I gave them something they thought was delicious as a thank-you to their spiritual equivalent.

Recently in my last three or four solo rituals, I have had a turn-around. I still see the Earth Goddess as powerful and unbounded - but where has my sense of right-doing been, all these decades? So I've embarked on a series of rituals designed not to take universal energy and focus it for my own ends (selfish or unselfish), but I've taken to concentrating my personal energy, and making offerings back to the Earth, my most frequently used deity, as a thanks and a blessing for the energies I have in the past used. And I intend to continue to do this.

And I'm finding it extraordinarily satisfying! In fact, I'm finding a lot of giving satisfying, at the moment. For example, I read Tarot for money. Recently a person rang me and asked what I charged, I told her, she said she was the organiser of sheltered housing for disadvantaged people, and she was organising a fund-raising weekend, and would I like to read for them. At all times she was negotiating on the basis of my getting rewarded for my time whilst her fund-raising drive also got something out of it, but specifically because she didn't ask me to donate my time for free, I ended up suggesting that. And so on a weekend in a few months, I'll give them a day of my time and effort. No, it won't make me more prosperous, but it has already made me feel much more positive and that will increase when I'm actually doing it.

Making money is one thing. We all need money. We need to pay for accommodation, food, power. When our clothes fall apart, we need to pay for new ones, or the material to make them ourselves. And I had a decade when I was on a very generous income indeed. I wasn't worried about money. Brand-new cars and expenditure on luxuries happened. And I was happy. Well - I was entirely free of the financial worries I was to have later in life. Nowdays, my income is much smaller than it used to be, but these days, I am much more inclined to share what I have, buy meals for friends, help out someone on the bus who doesn't have enough change, give my spare coins to every charity-collector I pass. And I can honestly say that with lesser money and an ethic of giving, I am a lot happier than I was with more money and the ethic of saving that had been taught to me in childhood.

And this works in my spiritual life, too. Magic, contemplation and worship is less about what I can get out of it - and even aiming for spiritual growth is ultimately selfish - but more about what I can give back to the deities, on however small a scale. One individual human can, logically, make no difference at all to a deity large enough that the entire universe fits into one cell of their "body", but if I continue, I am less of a drain on the spiritual organism that sustains me. And if I can spark one more person to behave likewise, and they spread the idea to another, a ripple effect will, in time, pass through the community, even if it takes thousands upon thousands of years to become significant.

I think that is well worthwhile, don't you?

An Unusual Battleground

("Magic is the art and science of making coincidence go your way more often than is statistically possible at all.")

I've never been a huge person for movies or TV. The last time I went to the cinema was ten or twelve years ago, with a child for their amusement. It's been months since I put on a DVD, and I never hire them - the few that are worth watching, are worth owning.

And I've never been a huge computer gamer, either. A year or so ago a friend of mine who also isn't very much of a gamer either introduced me to a particular computer game, I won't bother naming it here. I quite liked it for all the reasons most gamers wouldn't like it: it didn't present a lifelike representational image on screen at any time. Instead, it presented words and numbers, and you had to construct the "landscape" of the game within your own mind.

For that reason, I found it actually more potent than more lifelike, impressive games I've sampled then abandoned, because it engaged my own creativity and visualisation more fully, and therefore was more satisfying.

Magic and self-development are both about personal engagement, visualisation, constructing thoughtforms and solidifying the flexibility of your own inner landscape. So was this game. I played with it casually, as a pleasant time-waster for a while, enjoying how I created a given world that existed nowhere else but in my mind, not even in the game, as a response to the game.

Then a contact of mine found themselves in magical and emotional trouble, struggling with their inner demons so to speak. I did all the usual things, emotional support, providing a safe space to talk, all that sort of thing. Then it occurred to me: this person was struggling with their inner landscape and "negative forces" within it. I was toying with an inner landscape and the negative forces within that.

Perhaps I could, through the magical focus of my mind, link the inner world of that particular game, formed and forged by the strength of my mind, with the inner world of his mind. Perhaps the battles they were fighting - and losing - and the battleground they were being fought on, could become the battles that I fought and so often won. After all, they was fighting with thoughtforms and visualisations, and I was fighting - more successfully - with thoughtforms and visualisations. Inner Space, we all know is infinitely flexible.

So the day after I had that idea and thought about it for a while, I entered the game and hefted my imaginery weapons for real. As I had so many times before, I looked at a screen with lines of coloured writing and numbers on it, and in my head they became fleshed-out opponents and allies. Only now I was championing a real person's cause against real forces of negativity. I felt my mind power up. I felt real force - although my fingers didn't hit the keyboard any harder. I felt my focus narrow and intensity, and I felt it seek out my enemy, a real (if intangible) one this time.

And I fought until I ran out of turns. Later, I fought again. And again. In less than a week, I felt a definite moment when everything seemed to pull in the direction I wanted it to go. By this stage the person was out of touch with me, but we met up a fortnight later. By then I was merely playing the game again - it had stopped being a battleground. And when we met their colour was better, they were more relaxed, they felt they had their inner world more in control. I was delighted for them, and congratulated them - the battle they themselves had undergone couldn't be emphasised enough over that period of time. And when I asked, the time I felt everything shift in the inner world of the game that had become a battleground, was about the time they felt everything shift in the inner world of their own mind.

All magicians (except conjurers) will tell you that it is the power of mental force that effects magical change on the inner planes. What this particular experience taught me, though, was that symbolic landscapes created for pure entertainment could be re-forged into symbolic landscapes to symbolise the great battles between good and evil, death and life, health and disease, madness and Mind. It's all about mental discipline.

Tired. I spent the night in an occultly friend's bedroom, and as a matter of course she had Magickal Seals on it. In my case, they took the form of the Pointer Sisters' two smash-hits "Fire" and "He's So Shy". I couldn't just hear the songs - I could see the dark shapes of them (glo-mesh and sequins, but still dark) chasing each other up walls and round and round in circles on the ceiling. On the floor, they bounced from piece to piece of furniture - they never touched the floor, which was tiled in something like white marble. Now I know what material to built my entire house out of, if I want it to be Pointer-Sisters-proof.

Six hours of it. Not just being forced to listen to the songs, but to see them - the songs themselves, not the band - scampering about. I next meet the girl tomorrow, in all likelihood. I'll be bringing weapons - I have revenge to wreak.

A Random Memory

I was talking on another forum, and a friend of mine showed me a picture of the drill-rig next to her house, which she thought was impressive because it was twenty-seven tonnes and taller (but a lot thinner) than a two-storey house. 

It brought to mind this memory: 

When I was driving across the continent once, one of the two trips I did alone, I had to pull completely off the highway and park gingerly in the saltbush to allow passage of an oncoming vehicle carrying something that not only covered the entire highway from gutter to gutter, but overhung the saltbush on either side by several metres. I think we were in South Australia close to the New South Wales border (By "close", I obviously mean within half a day's hard drive, give or take). We were already on the eastern end of the Nullarbor Plain, which at a good speed and doing 12-14 hour days, takes a little less than a day and a half to cross.

I happened to have the CB radio on at the time, and I'd been chatting with the guy driving the pilot-car before they came over the horizon so I knew to look for suitable spots to pull over. I spent the time rehydrating, getting out and stretching my legs, then getting back in again. Well, you have to, really. And as it chugged past I looked up with awe at their mechanical cargo and said: "What do you call that thing that you're carrying?" (To my eyes it was an enormous and completely incomprehensible machine, the size of four or five houses).

Another voice, obviously the driver of the rig itself, drawled laconically: "It's the biggest Tonka-toy in the world, love. Wanna play?"

I love the bush, I really do. Why the hell did I ever let anyone persuade me to come back to suburbia? Where am I ever going to have random conversations like that around here?

About twenty minutes later, the next oncoming vehicle came along, a guy in a three-part road train probably about thirty-five to forty-five metres long and with each component probably eighty tonnes. Those road trains have serious engines, and while the guy with the Tonka-toy and his paid escort (I love calling them that!) were crawling along at around 40 kilometres per hour, this truck was barrelling along at the speed limit, which would have been 100 kilometres per hour in that part of the country.

I gave him a call, too - well, it would have been rude not to. I told him about the mother-of-all-wide-loads ahead of him crawling along at a snail's pace, and suggested that he might want to pull over and have one of his compulsory rest-stops to give the rig a chance to pass the town (well, more accurately, the fuel-stop) of Nullarbor, after which I knew and he would have known that the land got a bit flatter and the saltbush got a bit lower, and he would have been able to pull his truck off the road and get around the rig with a degree of safety in some places.

He was really quite grateful to have the information, and you could hear the pleasure in his voice that I told him (my car looked like a city car, and city people don't think to keep people informed), and you could hear him already rescheduling his time in his mind as he spoke to me. As he went screaming past me in the opposite direction (I was doing about 140 and he was doing about 100, our approaching-speed was notably fast) he said goodbye and thanked me again. I said to him: "Remember me to the guys: tell them that the tonka-toy woman said hello". I enjoyed his laughter - he thought my comment was about the size of my car.

Now, their CB radios were a ways stronger in transmitting-power than mine, and I had an excellent aerial for reception, and a while later, in amongst a heap of static, I heard him calling the pilot-vehicle. The pilot-vehicle was too far away for me to pick up his half of the conversation, but the truckie said something like "Remember the tonka-toy woman? She said hello." Then silence and static, followed by a  warm, friendly laugh.

City-slickers really underestimate the humanity and overestimate the oafishness of bushies and road-train drivers. I really like them - far better than most suburban people. They have a sense of the reality of the world. You can't help but drop into trance and learn about different levels of reality when you drive dead-straight roads for hours at a time into mirages; you can't help but be decent.