The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/spirit-work)
“She pushes me under the water quickly, but there’s no violence to it,” writes Luke Babb in a searing encounter with the spirit world. “Still, I panic. I hold my breath, struggle against her, but this is the sort of thing she is. I am the sort of thing that breathes, and so, despite my body’s stubborn refusal, eventually my lungs pull in and I taste the water in the back of my throat.”
There are any number of quotes from Terry Pratchett’s books that moved me and shaped the way I thought of the world. But the one I always come back to, the one that shaped my magical practice – that was Granny Weatherwax.
In the Midwestern region of the United States, deep winter has arrived and settled in. Two blankets of snow are hugging the land and much of nature has slowed to a crawl or fallen silent. In the period between Yule and Imbolc, I often notice myself reflecting broadly on the gods and spirits whose influence recedes at this point in the wheel’s turning and those thoughts necessarily draw my mind to the gods and spirits in my own practice who have fallen silent. The stillness of this season seems to amplify pauses and silences in communications. The relationships that we had, have, and wish we had come into full relief in the cold stillness of winter and we feel the challenges within those relationships a little more deeply than we might in the hustle and bustle of busier seasons.