How to Become a Witch by Amber K. (best fiction novels TXT) 📕

It’s true for us too. Natural sunlight helps our bodies produce vitamin D. When breathing fresh air, we avoid inhaling household chemicals, gases from plastics, and airborne germs. When moonlight floods our bedrooms, we attune to natural lunar sleep cycles. Working and playing outdoors stretches our muscles and conditions our bodies.

Yes, there are natural hazards: sunburn, hypothermia, allergens, poisonous plants, snakes, and bugs, plus the occasional blizzard, earthquake, or tsunami. But probably many Witches would rather face sunlight and snakes than the traffic, crime, and pollution of any major city. We (the authors) live in the country. We have a coyote pack that runs our land, and diamondback rattlesnakes close at hand, and the occasional tarantula and scorpion. We have high-altitude sunshine, an arid climate, and flash floods, lightning storms, and gale-force winds in season. Guess what? Still alive, still kickin’, wouldn’t trade it for anyplace else. Partly because our environment is mostly free of artificial radiation, chemicals, pollutants, and the like. Partly because it’s constantly, magnificently, awesomely beautiful. And partly because we live with the land and have come to a relationship with it, and we work to keep it healthy, even as it keeps us so.

Nature As Teacher

Learning happens in classrooms or from books and the Internet, right? Well, sort of. But so much of that is thirdhand knowledge, gathered by other people from the experiences of still others and packaged as factoids for us to memorize.

Firsthand knowledge from personal experience is real, and it not only fills the head but climbs into our bodies, our guts. What we do and touch and smell helps us understand reality and stays with us. This is why great teachers love field trips, because they want their students to smell the sawdust at a lumber mill or discover a beetle creeping through the grass, not sit passively and look at pictures or read letters that together make up words that symbolize real things.

That’s why nature is such a great teacher. It’s real. What do Witches learn from nature? As we just said, you have to experience it for yourself. Though we can’t put it in words, not really, maybe we can give you a glimpse:

From a frosty winter’s night, at the dark of the moon, we learn the power of silence, stillness, and cold.

From a rounded chunk of golden sandstone, drowsing in a canyon under the desert sun, we learn patience and restfulness.

From the yellow stare of a coyote padding across a forest road, we learn self-sufficiency and the will to survive.

From a red-tailed hawk circling high in a cerulean sky, riding thermal drafts between looming stone formations, we learn freedom.

From an ant wrestling a grain of sand out of its anthill, we learn persistence and the power of tiny things.

From a gnarled and ancient juniper leaning on the edge of a bluff, half its roots exposed over the precipice, we learn to love life.

From a trio of fox cubs tumbling and playing in front of their den under a mossy tree, we learn joy.

From the changing patterns of light and shadow that move across an ancient red-rock mesa, we learn of constant change and enduring strength.

From the feathery patterns of white cirrus clouds high above the earth, we learn peace.

We can learn so many more things—sudden insights and deep wisdoms—but most of them are unique to one person at one special place at one moment in time. That person is you, and the place is somewhere outdoors, and the time is for you to choose.

Nature As Power Source for Magick

Some kinds of magick work directly with the elements and powers of nature. For example: energy to fuel a magickal spell can be drawn from the generalized field that permeates all things, but it can also be a more specialized “flavor” of power drawn from wind and air currents, sunlight, the currents and tides of the sea, or from lines of power deep within the earth. These are common sources of energy; an adept might also draw from lines of magnetic force, moonlight, or even starlight for certain special magicks.

Natural materials such as wood, stone, metal, or herbs have their own special properties and are used in amulets, talismans, and ritual tools. Rowan for protection, willow for flexibility, oak for strength. Amethyst for moderation and sobriety, turquoise for joy and emotional uplift, lapis lazuli for strengthening psychic sensitivity. Copper for love, iron for action, silver for change. Valerian to calm, mugwort for magick, and peppermint for alertness.

Animal spirits can be guides, protectors, teachers, totems, or allies. When incarnate, some serve as familiars to Witches, as psychic sensitives, or as guides in healing or divination work. Familiars can be cats, dogs, owls, ravens, toads, mice, ferrets, or other creatures. You can dance your power animal and gain some of its strengths, or communicate with animals psychically. Some Witches can mindshift, or “ride along,” in the consciousness of an animal, sensing all that it experiences. To mindshift, take a deep breath and exhale, ground and center, and imagine the animal. Remember all you know about it, then see it in front of you. Ask if you may join minds with it for a while; tell it you mean no harm and will simply follow where it leads. Then gently extend your mind to meet its mind, and allow yourself to be carried along, seeing what it sees, feeling what it feels, smelling what it smells. When it’s time, thank it and return to your own body and mind. Write about your experience in your Book of Shadows.

Plant devas, the collective spirits of each plant species, can also host our consciousness but are especially expert at guiding us in our work with gardens, orchards, vineyards, and farms. They are the spiritual gateways to the kingdom that provides us with beauty, food, medicinal plants, soil retention, carbon removal and oxygen production, materials for building and crafts and clothing, shade, and more. Even the plants normally dismissed as weeds have valuable gifts for us