Four Years

In a couple days it will be four years since my aunt was murdered.  It has been almost four years since I wrote this post.   FOUR.   YEARS.

Her accused murderer sits in a jail cell awaiting trial.  A trial I am quite sure he knows damn well he is unlikely win.  For a crime I am quite sure he is still running from, still blaming her for and still refusing to feel any responsibility about.

Four years of limbo, waiting for this thing to finally be over.  Four years of waiting for a "justice system" I don't even believe in to do its thing, so I can finally move on.  Four years of moving on only to be yanked back every six months to be told there is yet another delay, that he has fired his lawyer again, that he has taken us right to the edge and pulled us back and there's nothing the courts will do about it.

Four years of being reminded how little my aunt's life matters to the state.

To the court system.

To the DA.

And to her murderer.

Four years of knowing the trial won't bring me any closure.  Four years of this PROCESS of the trial preventing my closure.  Four years of wondering if this time will be different.

Four years of missing my aunt.

Three Mother's Days where I want to just celebrate my mom.  My grandmas.  My great grandmas.  My Ancestors.  My mother friends.  Three Mother's Days where I pretend that is all I'm doing.  Three Mother's Days of hiding the pain searing through me as wounds barely healed are ripped back open.

Four years of watching my family age faster in those four years than we did in the preceding ten.

Myself included.

I found my first grey hair last night.  It isn't grey so much as silver.  Bright.  Shining.  Almost glittery.  I'm not yet 30 but I don't mind that hair.  I think it's beautiful, actually.  But it is also, I think, a by-product of that aging.  An aging that has happened so quickly.  An aging brought on by pain and loss and no closure and the seemingly endless limbo of the USian court system.

Will we get to five? Six? Seven?

Will it ever be over?

Will it even mean anything in the end?

I am a prison abolitionist.  I know this system is broken.  I know it doesn't work.  As surely as I know that if he is not locked up that he will hurt more women.  Like all the other women he hurt in the past.  But because I am a prison abolitionist, I know there will be no resolution in putting him on trial. Because I am a feminist/anti-racist I have no faith my aunt's life will be treated with respect in that court room.  And I have no real faith he will be found guilty of what he did.  I have no faith that even such a conviction would mean anything to him.  I have no faith that JUSTICE means anything here.

But I stand witness to the process, because it is the last thing I can do for her.  I couldn't help her.  I couldn't save her.  I couldn't even help her cat.  And I can't rehabilitate him.  I can't make him accept what he's done.  I can't make him accountable to us or use the rest of his life trying to make sure other men don't do what he did.  All I can do is stand witness.  Face him in the only provided framework sanctioned by the state and not let him forget that we know what he did.

And I will do that.  For whatever it is worth.

And I will remember her.  Often.  I will light the candles on my altar for her.  I will remember her when the veil is thin and the dead come back to visit us.  I will remember her on Mother's Day.

I will try and live the lessons that she taught me.

It's all I can do.

Dia de los Muertos

Dia de los Muertos. 

Samhain.

All Souls Day.

So much love to the Ancestors. 

So much love to those I have known who reside on the other side of the Veil. 

I miss you on a regular basis. 

I hope I make you proud.

And thank you for your guidance.

Something to Share on Mabon

Today I found this a very worthwhile read: SouLar Bliss – Autumn Equinox Recipes, Remedies and Rituals.  Here is a sample:

The arrival of the Autumn Equinox on Saturday, September 22nd, opens up a new season in our lives and within the Earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, the Equinox welcomes the newness of Autumn and the birth of Libra season. We witness the continued beautiful metamorphosis of nature shedding its summer layers and walking into its Fall. Our ancestors used this time to give thanks for the abundance from the year and gather the resources they needed to prepare for the darker and colder months This shedding process we witness in nature is a powerful keynote for us to listen to. A call to action to bring more awareness into the different layers of our lives and our communities. What will we choose to sustain? What will we choose to shed?

This is a ripe moment to uncover the patterns that make up our foundation and breath new light into them. Another opportunity to recalibrate and reflect back to ourselves what we are grateful for, what needs to shift and where we need to grow. Here we can find new compasses or fix old ones, with an intention to specify and affirm the direction we want our lives to move in. We can choose to act in ways that either accept or disrupt self depricating programming, either sourced from us or from the oppressive factors around us that beg to silence us.

Happy Solstice!

For my area of the world the winter solstice is tonight, according to my Google-fu at 9:30 pm PST.  The candles are lit and the house is about to be swept.  So Happy Yule, everyone!  If the light returns after tonight then it will do so earlier and earlier from now on.  Stand watch, and welcome the Sun!!

SF Bay Area Free Event: Rebel Shamans - Women Confront Empire

From: Suppressed Histories

March 18, 2pm:

Priestesses, diviners and medicine women stand out as leaders of aboriginal liberation movements against conquest, empire, and cultural colonization. This visual presentation looks at how Indigenous and African Diasporic women draw on their cultural traditions to resist colonization --and how, by virtue of who they are and where they stand in the social order, their personal access to direct, transformative power makes the spiritual political. Nehanda Nyakasikana, Kimpa Vita


Berkeley City College, Room 431
2050 Center St. Berkeley CA 94704 (1 block E of BART)

Free! (Donations welcome) All are welcome. Wheelchair accessible.
Heritage posters, art prints, magnets and notecards will be for sale.

An online Remembrance Ritual for Samhain from The Jaded Hippy

As the witching hour draws close here on the West coast I just want to wish everyone a happy Samhain and a happy Halloween. I hope you all had a lovely day and kept yourselves safe.

Welcome to the Ancestors.  Welcome to the Spirits of the Honored Dead.  Welcome to those we have Lost; we think of you often.  Walk amongst us once again.   An offering of incense and brightly burning candles welcome you home, even if just for a visit.

We remember you.

And in that remembrance you live always.

Jonathan

Gloria

Robin

Neioma

Rena

Marilou

And those who went before, whose names I never knew, whose blood flows in my veins or spirit flows through my family, my life.

I remember.

Image: Two wick flames in the dark burn in a twisting, melting candle of red.

Ritual within Gaelic Polytheism

There is a lot of interesting information at the link about all sorts of Gaelic rituals, but since Lughnasadh is almost upon us, I thought I would highlight this portion:

Lá Lúnasa (Lúghnasadh) / Lùnastal / Laa Luanys — 1 August

In Ireland: Picking the first fruits – bilberries being traditional; horses purified by being driven through water; ritualized faction-fighting between males; boys giving girls garlands of flowers; decorating the hearth with flowers.

In Scotland: Cutting of the first sheaf at sunrise while turning sunwise and chanting the iolach buana (reaping paean); making protective charms of rowan and red thread; saining (performing a protective warding) the house and those in it; ritualized faction-fighting between males; garland making; decorating the home with seasonal flowers.

In Isle of Man: Visiting high hills or sacred wells; a young woman reaper would ceremonially cut the last corn and bind it with wild flowers and ribbon into a babban ny mhellea (harvest baby); rush-plaiting.

(via Gaol Naofa)

Spirit Rising: Fundraiser for 13 Indigenous Grandmothers

DATE: August 21, 2010

TIME: 11am -6pm

LOCATION: Golden Gate park, Music Concourse Bandshell,

San Francisco, CA

CONTACT: 831.420.2700

contact@surethingproductions.com

Native Drumming & Dance

Prayers for the Waters

Spirit Walk of Peace

Internationally Acclaimed Artists and Speakers

Honoring Filmmaker Carole Hart "For the next 7 Generations"

A circle will be created within our event that marks the 4 directions to honor the Grandmothers that come to us from around the world.

Grandmothers in Attendance:

Grandmother Flordemayo and

Grandmother Agnes Pilgrim

www.grandmotherscouncil.com

FREE Music/Event in the park

c/o of the always lovely Cecelia at Anishinaabekwe

Listening to the natural world...

An incredibly important idea for Westerners to take to heart!

The other difference I want to mention—and essentially every traditional indigenous person with whom I have ever spoken has said that it is the fundamental difference between western and indigenous peoples—is that even the most open Westerners view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to something real. I asked American Indian writer Vine Deloria about this, and he said, “I think the primary thing is that Indians experience and relate to a living universe, whereas Western people, especially science, reduce things to objects, whether they’re living or not. The implications of this are immense. If you see the world around you as made up of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, not only is it inevitable that you will destroy the world by attempting to control it, but perceiving the world as lifeless robs you of the richness, beauty, and wisdom of participating in the larger pattern of life.” That brings to mind a great line by a Canadian lumberman: “When I look at trees I see dollar bills.” If when you look at trees, you see dollar bills, you’ll treat them one way. If when you look at trees, you see trees, you’ll treat them differently. If when you look at this particular tree you see this particular tree, you’ll treat it differently still. The same is true for salmon, and, of course, for women: if when I look at women I see objects, I’m going to treat them one way. If when I look at women I see women, I’ll treat them differently. And if when I look at this particular woman I see this particular woman, I’ll treat her differently still.

Here’s where people usually ask, “Okay, so how do I listen to the natural world?” When people ask me this, I always begin by asking them if they have ever made love. If so, I ask whether the other person always had to say, “put this here,” or “do that now,” or did they sometimes read their lover’s body, listen to the unspoken language of the flesh? Having established that one can communicate without words, I then ask if they have ever had any nonhuman friends (a.k.a. pets). If so, how did the dog or cat let you know that her food dish was empty? I used to have a dog friend who would look at me, look at the food dish, look at me, look at the food dish, until finally the message would get across to me.

How do we hear the rest of the natural world? Unsurprisingly enough, the answer is: by listening. That’s not easy, given that we have been told for several thousand years that these others are silent. But the fact that we cannot easily hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t speaking, and does not mean they have nothing to say. I’ve had people respond to my suggestion that they listen to the natural world by going outside for five minutes and then returning to say they didn’t hear anything. But how can you expect to learn any new language (remember, most nonhumans don’t speak English) in such a short time? Learning to listen to our nonhuman neighbors takes effort, humility, and patience.

(via Fierce...Flawless...) (Read the whole article HERE)

Pagan Census

via The Wild Hunt

Pagan scholar Helen Berger, co-author of “Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States”, has announced that she and fellow researchers James R. Lewis and Henrik Bogdan are revisiting the Pagan Census project. The Pagan Census was first initiated nearly twenty years ago, and compiled data from thousands of modern Pagans to give a fascinating snapshot of our communities during Paganism’s meteoric rise in the 1990s. Now, in an age of blogs and instant communications, an update is underway to compare and contrast just how much we’ve changed.

So, to all my pagan readers: go and make your voices heard! :)

Happy Summer Solstice!

The longest day of the year, celebrate the sun today if you can readers, I will be!

A Pagan Reflection on Dr. George Tiller's Murder

There are many thoughts which swirl around in my head about Tiller's murder, both feminist and pagan, and yet I am still too distracted by my own grief around my aunt's murder to articulate my thoughts very well. Thankfully, Jason from The Wild Hunt stepped up to do what I could not.

An excerpt:

I agree with Starhawk when she says that pregnancy and birth is a profound and holy mystery. That it is an encounter with goddess (or The Goddess), where weighty decisions concerning life and death are made, and that outside attempts to legislate or control a woman’s pregnancy and birth is to deny her “deepest spiritual self”. Sometimes, in the crux of that holy moment, a potential life is rejected. We may not always agree with or like this situation, but the sacred power of choice can’t be denied, lest we deny a woman’s moral agency in the matter of birth. Throughout recorded history husbands, rulers, family, religious leaders, and various laws have tried to regulate and control that agency, but despite this, women have found ways to choose the time and manner of bearing children.
[...]

In the years since abortion was politicized, we’ve grown used to inflammatory rhetoric like “baby-killer”, “genocide”, “murderer”, and “butcher” being used to describe doctors who perform abortions. Then those same groups who paint the doctors as genocidal tyrants are “shocked” when someone takes them seriously. After all, who wouldn’t want to kill Hitler, right? Not realizing the complex ethical and emotional decisions behind each and every one of these controversial procedures.

“My wife and I spent a week in Dr. Tiller’s care after we learned our 21 week fetus had a severe defect incompatible with life. The laws in our state prevented us from ending the pregnancy there, and Dr. Tiller was one of maybe three choices in the whole nation at that gestational age. My wife just called with the news of his murder, weeping. I can’t really come up with some profound political statement just now, so let me just list some memories of Dr. Tiller. I remember him firmly stating that he regarded the abortion debate in the US to be about the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction … I remember being puzzled about a T-shirt he was wearing, which said “Happy Birthday Jennifer from team Tiller!” or something similar. Turns out it commemorated the birthday of a fifteen year old girl who was raped, became pregnant, and came to Tiller for an abortion. As luck would have it, she was in the clinic the same week as her birthday. So the clinic threw her a party. The walls of the clinic reception and waiting room are literally covered with letters from patients thanking him. Some were heartbreaking - obviously young and/or poorly educated people thanking Dr. Tiller for being there when they had no other options, explaining their family, church etc. had abandoned them.”

Now this man has been eliminated. Murdered, assassinated, snuffed-out, because he had been labeled a murderer and a Nazi by anti-abortion groups looking to inflame their followers, and cable television hacks looking to boost their ratings share.

[...]

I yearn for a post-Christian America because I yearn for a country where no one group feels privileged and empowered enough to interfere with the lives and medical decisions of women.

Earth Day Spell

c/o Magic Happens Every Day

Well, I missed Earth Hour, but Earth Day is coming up next month, and that's just as good of a time to use this spell, so tuck it away till then!

You will need: one green candle
Sacred Well Earth Oil, or Love oil, or Protection Oil
(or your favorite earthy scent, like oakmoss or vetiver)
one small fluorite stone, or clear quartz crystal point

Step One: Turn off all lights and non-necessary electronics - it's Earth Hour, that's the whole idea! Light some candles to see by.

Step Two: Using a knife or a nail, carve the words "I love Mother Earth" or "Nature is our Mother" or "gratitude" or "conservation" or whatever inspires you.

Step Three: Bless your candle and your stone with your Earth oil. If you like, bless yourself as well!

Step Four: Light your green candle.

Step Five: Charge your stone in the light of the candle by repeating "What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. I live in balance with the Earth." 3 times or more. Picture the stone "broadcasting" the message of mindfulness to everyone in your community and to our world leaders.

Put your candle in a safe place, and let it burn down. Carry your stone with you, or keep it on your altar. This spell is also great for Earth Day, April 22. Why not do it twice?
(For more info on Earth Day see: http://www.earthday.net/)

Happy Imbolc!

Or Saint Brigid's Day, whatever your inclination.



Jason at The Wild Hunt has a nice selection of quotes and stuff!

Happy Yule!

I'm at my mother's house, spending time with family. But I want to wish everyone a happy Yule, merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, Solstice, Kwanza, Diwali, and any other holidays I might not be familiar with. Mostly I just hope people take some time out to feel happy and be with people they care about. There's not enough of that in this world.



Sweet gorgeous moment, we pray with you
There is a heartbeat in the faraway night
pulling her dress away from her slippered feet
There it is - the burning star set on the hill
The precious light uncurling from the Mother
The holy secret, the hush, the breath of newness
The night falls away, rolling over in joy
May we keep these songs we learn in the dawning
May we sing them as the crocuses unfold in light
May we cry out at the fullness of the hush and the humming of our bodies
May we be full and never full of You, Holy Holy
The light gilds the bare trees and we are dancing in it
May it always be so.

A Solstice Prayer.

Protecting the Life of Barack Obama

Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 8:23 AM
To: PaganProtectionLeague@yahoo.com
Subject: Protecting the Life of Barack Obama

To Our Pagan Community,

We have been made aware that a clear and present danger hangs over the head of Sen. Barack Obama. Unfortunately, we still live a country where many are taught to hate and fear others based on nothing more than the hue of their skin. Our community mobilizes all the time to send healing and protection to others, and we hope you will join us in a multi-faith magickal effort to keep Barack Obama--and his family--safe from harm as he transitions into the role of our President.

This is not a campaign to tell you who to vote for. This is about protecting the life of another human being. We live in a society which has been taught to solve its problems with violence and murder. The gravity of this issue was brought to our attention by a Christian man who will be praying to his God, in his way, along with us. We request that the Pagan community, and others who care about life, join us in rituals, spells, and prayers of protection during three separate 24 hour periods:

1) Election night. Sen. Obama will be exposed to danger as he accepts his Presidential role. The majority of assassination attempts worldwide have occurred within thirty minutes of completing a public speech.

2) Yule/Midwinter. For those of us who are Pagan, we know that this is a time of new beginnings, a perfect time to add protection to the man who will be in the White House within the following month. (Our non-Pagan friends may wish to work together at Christmas, Kwanzaa, or Twelfth Night.)

3) Inauguration Day (January 20). Sen. Obama will take the oath of office on the portico of the Capitol Building in front of as many as 250,000+ people. He will then take a car or will walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in his own inaugural parade to the White House. There he and his family will sit outdoors and watch the rest of the parade.

Please use all your networking resources to pass along this request to as many Pagans and Pagan organizations as you can. After that, the momentum will build on its own. Leave no one out! Do not leave out Christians, Jews, or others who may wish to join this effort, assisting us by connecting with the face of the creator they worship. This is not a political issue, it is a value-of-a-single-human-life issue. If the racism situation were reversed, many of us would offer the same lifesaving energy to Sen. McCain.

And, when all this is complete, maybe we should start sending love and healing to those people living in blind hatred who created a need for this sort of mobilization in the first place. With love to all and harm to none,


Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, author and artist
Headmaster, Grey School of Wizardry
Primate, Church of All Worlds

Edain McCoy, author, teacher,
student and Concerned Citizen

Link

Feliz Dia de los Muertos

Para mi abuela Glo.



I wish I could show you a picture of my altar, but I can't find the cord that connects my camera to my computer for upload. Needless to say I have been burning incense every night for the last three nights and have a small food offering in my goddess bowl/incense holder pictured here. Also pictured are my smudging wands, two rune stones my husband and I received at my first public Samhain and the bowl of crystals and stones which our wedding guests held and infused with well wishes during our ceremony.

Each corner is dedicated to the Element roughly coordinated to the direction they inhabit, and at the back I have a white goddess candle with an essential oil blend for Spirit and a black god candle with a blend for Protection, as well as a green and gold mask my husband bought me for our anniversary. On the front but out of the picture I have a small gold plated tree of life with my birthstone dotted in the branches (peridot), and a small silver box inherited de mi abuela which contains a cross she got from her grandmother I believe, a rose petal from her passing on ceremony and a small angel with a peridot on her (also grandma's birthstone). I also have in the middle, stone sun and a moon which I inherited from her and a wood rosary I got when we met her brother in Mexico.

Wake the Dead

I read this incredible piece and just had to share it!

It's a time of straddling and blurring lines, of the constant presence of mortality. Fertility crosses into decay, and we gather a harvest, of sunlight, of sustenance, of memory. Identity blurs and stretches and we take our false faces on and off, swirled all around by falling leaves made remarkable as they flash sunset colors in their dying moments. We take stock of a summer and autumn gasping their last and prepare for the season of cold and dark and deprivation, unpacking the quilts and sweaters in the top of the closet, drawing thick curtains, looking inward. We take a long, lonesome stairway down into the anterooms of the Land of the Dead, lighting lanterns, wary of whispering spirits long ignored. Some of us erect altars to those we've lost, offering them some of the food and memories we've gathered, celebrating them in steady flames and bright colors against the increasing outdoor gray.

There's a magic to it, here as the curtains go down on the twilit remains of the day. Looking over what's ripe and what's rotten, we take in what will keep us warm and full as best we can. We look back because looking back is a necessary step in going forward. Without that harvest, we will never leave the time of masks, the place of skulls. We will never be able to move through the hallways of the living until we look at what is dying, what is dead. Without this pause at the moment of gathering darkness, when we gather our own close to us, we remain forever in that place of whispers and illusions.
There is plenty in this hour of the dead to appreciate, plenty to live for. We can put on faces that are often truer than the ones we had before, even in their transparency, be other than what we were, explode into behavior we would never feel free to enact in the sunlight. We can embrace mystery, letting shadows and bright decoration go dancing arm-in-arm. Nonetheless, it's simply not human to live forever in the liminal. It's not a place: it's the blurred line between here and there, now and then, alive and dead.

There's only one sort of creature who can live long in that borderland. Monsters are alive and well here, half-obscured, given their only chance to roam the streets unmolested. This hour of the dead is the only time we welcome monsters into our homes and neighborhoods. For once, they're celebrated, and their uncanny presence causes forbidden thrills.
It's the end of the evening, the moment of the dead, when the lines between worlds grow blurry. And monsters run free.
In order to move on into the night, we have to look them in the eye. We have to hold our monsters close. We have to acknowledge our dead. We have to look back.

There's an old story you've probably heard, but let's look back at it. Once upon a time, a God made a new being, split it into halves, and called them Lilith and Adam. That God insisted that they follow an order: that, though equals made of the same substance, one submit beneath the other. And she refused. The dialogue is simple:
"But I made you. Do what I say."
"No."
And she refused to participate in a system that marked her as less, and moved away to another place, there to couple in unthinkable ways with forbidden partners, there to set up her own way of being, there to become a mother of monsters. But there was a price, because that God had already replaced her with a newer, less proud woman, there to be a mother, too. And all Lilith's children would be taking a world they were not promised from Eve's children, you see, by simply living. The monsters would be taking human land and human food and human work away. They would suck the very blood from human infants. Teeming and multitudinous, they could not be trusted simply to thrive harmlessly, and so they were condemned. The children of the outside, of the otherworld, of pride and wrong attractions and unacceptable sex, the children part this and part that, were condemned to death. No matter how many came to this world each day, hundreds of Lilith's monster children were condemned to die daily so that the children of Eve, the planned children, the race that behaved and stayed in the lines, could thrive instead. And their mother, the defiant first woman , was doomed to an infinite and never-ending bereavement, screeching cold vengeance in the wilderness.

Generations have heard this story told as a warning, that the Mother of Monsters and her children were out there to take anyone who stepped outside the lines, outside the city, outside the rules. This is their time, the place of outsiders and border-riders, the hour of the dead. The monsters have their dead, too, after all. They loom close at our shoulders in this one moment of the year we invite them in. Some of us, given that warning as we stand on the brink of the dark, look out on our history and our dead, and we recognize that when we are systematically stamped out for competing with real people, when we are pushed out and starved and hunted for living unavoidably outside those lines, when our place at the blurring between here and there, us and them, merits a death sentence over and over...maybe we didn't have the mother we thought we did. Maybe we were simply listening to an unreliable authority who told us we belonged underneath, and needlessly complied. Maybe when the Mother of Monsters comes to breathe down our necks, the right response is take me.

It's time to look back. It's time to embrace the monster as a lineage of the defiant oppressed made powerful, suffering heavy losses but never, ever backing down.
It's time to remember our dead. And it's long past time to refuse their place, and our place, underneath. The authority that condemns us to die for our defiance of rules we never made is not an authority worth listening to, and we do not honor those who fell before us by rolling over below our so-called betters and taking it.
Once a year, the dead rise from below and speak. We ought to learn from their example.

Happy Samhain!

To all of my readers whether you know what Samhain is or not! :)

As part of my own personal ritual tonight, I did two tarot readings, one general and one very specific. Both came up with results saying Obama is going to win. Not only win, but win through a true expression of people voting on what really matters, on what we consider sacred and important. Additionally, these energies appear to carry over, I got a lot of hits about regenerative energy, rebirth, prosperity, birthing, beginnings... Given what we already know about the next four years I'm thinking that the message is even through the turbulence if we stay true to ourselves, pay attention to the details and the big picture, and take care of each other... We're going to come out ok. Even better than before.

Alright then. Bring it on!

To any who are magically inclined

There are a number of things I want to talk about. Problems at the polls (yes, already), Nathan Fillion and the appalling short that is the first "PG Porn" offering, my new school project on Mich Fest, the disaster that was my first experience using ben wa balls, the changing state of homelessness in Canada...just to a name a few. But I'm going to share the below with you because I would rather, right now, concentrate on making good happen in the world.

From CAYA Coven I bring you; Election day spell.

Election Day Spell by Iris and Rabbit

We aren’t going to try to tell you what to choose on Election Day. We hope we don’t need to :)

Instead, we have written a spell that creates intention for the best possible outcome in all initiatives, and the highest possible good for this country, state, county, and city. You may want to use this spell with a seven-day candle, and start it on Tues the 28th, the new moon. Or you may decide to do this spell with a three- or one-day candle, leading up to Election Day. We invite you to snag this and post it on your blog/list/chat as well. Please remember to include a link to this blog, if you don’t mind. And feel free to adapt and add your own magic as well.

You will need:
-a seven-, three-, or one-day blue candle
-a High John the Conqueror root
-a cinnamon stick
-a Justice tarot card from your deck…
…or else a 3 of Diamonds (the hard worker) from a regular deck
-a sample ballot (this is usually available for free at most public libraries and post offices, or you might check your local government website)
-a dollar bill
-a piece of string
-cinnamon, lemon, frankincense, and/or dragon’s blood oils (optional)
-frankincense tears and a charcoal, or else frankincense incense
-a pen

Begin by lighting the incense. Pass the dollar bill through the smoke three times. Then, write on the dollar bill, “This does not determine my vote.” Wrap the bill around the cinnamon stick and tie it with the string, in 9 knots. This will ensure that our voting process is neither bought nor swindled for monetary purposes by any representative of any party or constituency. Keep this bundle near the candle as it’s going.

Fill out the sample ballot with your choices of votes. Think carefully about each vote you place, and after you place your check mark, say out loud, ‘So mote it be.”

When you have finished filling out your sample ballot, place it on your altar. On top of it, place the Justice card or 3 of Diamonds. On top of that, place the candle.

Light the candle, and then anoint your High John the Conqueror root with the oil mixture, or else pass it through the candle flame three times. (Please don’t do both, because the oils are flammable.) Set it on top of the ballot at the base of the candle.

Chant the following daily until Election Day (or make up a suitable chant of your own.)
“By the power of three times three
As I do will, so mote it be,
With good toward all and harm to none
Civic duty will be done.
Transformation, both great and small
With liberty and justice for all.”

On Election Day, take your sample ballot with you to the polls and copy your votes from it. Touch it to whatever paper or screen where you vote to transfer the power of your intention. Tap the table, booth, or floor three times before you leave to seal the deal.

Blessed be!