Witch Wisdom for Magical Aging: Finding Your Power through the Changing Seasons - Softcover

Johnson, Cait

 
9781644114773: Witch Wisdom for Magical Aging: Finding Your Power through the Changing Seasons
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1644114771 ISBN 13: 9781644114773
Verlag: Destiny Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

• Presents four loving, feisty old witches, one for each season, who share earth-honoring wisdom, rituals, and spells to help you embrace your journey through the sacred latter half of life

• Filled with magical recipes, inspiring ceremonies, playful activities, and meaningful meditations

You are invited into the magical world of four loving, feisty old witches, one for each season, who share earth-honoring wisdom, rituals, and spells to help you embrace your journey through the sacred latter half of life.

In the season of Winter, the earthy Root Witch reminds us that bodies are made for pleasure and that Winter is made for dreaming. She offers spells, rituals, and ceremonies to reframe your perspectives on aging and promote acceptance of your changing appearance. She also shares secret recipes for a healthy, happy body, focusing on preparations that help maintain and restore hair, skin, and bone. In Spring, the airy Winged Witch offers a witchy approach to spring cleaning, both in the traditional sense and in self-understanding and relationships. She shares recipes and rituals for jettisoning the dead past, discovering your own authentic style, adding magic to your clothes, and feathering your nest so it feels like home to your spirit.

The fiery Summer Merwitch helps us to be more joyfully creative, with activities and wisdom to help overcome the obstacles that prevent us from fulfilling our creative dreams. She honors the senses, encourages us to embrace our sexuality, and gives us ways to express our fiery anger cleanly and powerfully. The watery Autumn Kitchen Witch shows us how to honor our harvests and our ancestors, how to make peace with death, and how to make every meal a celebration of life, with magical recipes and rituals that bring joy to the soul. The Kitchen Witch also explores several goddesses and wise old women from folklore who can offer templates for a rich and spiritualized maturity.

Offering practical and enjoyable ways to make aging an empowering, magical, and transformative adventure, this book of spiritual guidance will help you love yourself through the aging process.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Cait Johnson is an artist and writer who teaches workshops on the Tarot, dream work, and ritual-making. She is the author of Tarot for Every Day: Ideas and Activities for Bringing Tarot Wisdom into Your Daily Life. She lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. Cait Johnson and Maura Shaw are also the co-authors of Tarot Games: 45 Playful Ways to Explore Tarot Cards Together, published by Harper San Francisco.

Caitlín Matthews is internationally renowned for her research into the Celtic and ancestral traditions. She is the author of 36 books, including The Celtic Tradition, The Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom, and Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom. She is co-founder of the Foundation for Inspirational and Oracular Studies, which is dedicated to oral, shamanic, and sacred arts. Caitlin Matthews has a shamanic practice in Oxford, England, and teaches worldwide.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

INTRODUCTION: A Magical Invitation

Several years ago, as I sat with a group of friends comparing our jowls and saggy arms and laughing uproariously, it occurred to me that unless we die young we’re going to get older. It’s seems like a journey to a strange land that none of us have ever visited before, and we don’t have a map. But wouldn’t it be nice if we did?

Like everyone else, I hear the perpetual yawp of our culture nattering on about the Land of Aging being an ugly, dangerous place, and how we’d better spend a lot of money pronto so we won’t look like we’re well on the way. But I’m here to tell you: our culture has it all wrong. The Land of Aging can be filled with freedom and beauty, wisdom and pleasure.

If you look at our language around aging women, you’ll notice the strangest phenomenon: the word crone actually comes from “crown,” not referring to any temporal hierarchy of power, but to the deep wisdom emanating from the head. And hag comes from the Greek word hagio, meaning “holy.” How the meanings have changed!

I know in my bones that we could all use a loving guide to aging in a way that our culture has forgotten: with a sense of magic and spirit. So, welcome to Witch Wisdom for Magical Aging, a kind of Baedeker or Fodor guidebook to becoming a Crone Queen, an elder, a Wise One. This book is presided over by four kindly, wise old witches, one for each season, who will be your helpful companions on the trip. They can be bossy. They are certainly feisty. And they want you to feel loved and supported on your journey.

In these pages, you’ll explore how to honor and care for your changing body, how to fling the “shoulds” out the window and embrace your own essential self, wearing colors and fabrics that call to you rather than blindly following the dictates of fashion. You’ll look into creating a more magical home, feathering your nest with sacred objects and mementos that reflect your passions and experiences. You’ll taste all the delicious ways to enter a more joyful relationship with food and with your sensuality. You’ll be encouraged to forge more strongly connected friendships that comfort your tender heart. You’ll meet a few powerful archetypes that light your way on the aging journey, take fun quizzes, explore rituals and guided meditations, discover nourishing recipes made with simple, easy-to-find ingredients, be inspired by poems and playful ideas--and so much more.

Witch Wisdom celebrates the Wise Woman in all of us who knows how to turn inward, who hears the voice of her deep self, who tunes out the cruel messages of our culture and ignores the siren song of advertising that promises us youthful skin and hair (for a price) because she knows that wrinkles and gray hair can be beautiful, and that connection to her own vibrant spirit is what makes her fully alive. As novelist Ursula LeGuin writes, “For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young . . . It has to do with who the person is.”

Old women are closer to the wild. We have learned so much, dreamed so much, done so much--just having weathered life past the age of 50 is an accomplishment! As we draw nearer to the mystery that is death, we become closer to Source. And having gone beyond so many of the other-pleasing concerns of younger women, we are free to embrace our magical uniqueness in a new way, living out our Crone Queen years with verve. Of course, the experience of magical aging is different at 55 than it is at 95; there are many phases of the journey, and they aren’t all easy. But they are all part of coming to terms with life, and we can embrace and celebrate this challenging and ultimately liberating time.

A friend once told a great story about watching a 90-year-old woman dancing with gusto at a wedding. “She was the most beautiful woman there,” my friend said, “because beauty is about energy, life force.”

If we yank our gaze away from the mirror--or even better, if we see true beauty when we look into it--we can devote some of our precious life force to making things better on this troubled planet. Without all the demands that beleaguered us in our middle age--young children, spouses, aging parents--we’re often free in our later years to be feisty and outspoken and passionate about our beliefs in ways we were too distracted to explore before. French woman of letters Colette said her own beloved mother entered old age “with such serenity, with the gaiety of those who have nothing more to lose and so excel at giving.”

And now a word about witches. Many of you already self-identify as a witch, but others of you may be new to the word except as it refers to the cultural image of wicked hags with warts and an evil cackle. Our culture is finally changing to embrace what witches really are: Wise Ones, healers, makers, connectors, transformers, lovers. We come in all ages, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities, although other cultures may call us bruja or mchawi or strega. Our English witch comes from the Old English “craft of the wise.”

So how do you become a witch? According to Z. Budapest, one of the grandmothers of the modern feminist witchcraft movement, all you have to do is say, “I am a witch” three times. Because, as Alice Hoffman, author of the book Practical Magic, says, there is a little witch in every woman. This book will offer you many ways to explore your own witchy magic: be sure to check out the list of Magical Helpers in the appendix at the end that will strengthen and aid you on your own particular path.

There is a place deep in our hearts where we are conscious and strong in our aging. In fact, we can imagine an entire generation of women sailing on magical brooms into our elder years with open curiosity and verve, celebrating our magic, our wisdom, and our connection to All That Is, embracing our queenly, croning selves and enjoying the hell out of the ride. Imagine how much happier you would be. Imagine how much kinder the world would be. I invite you to be a part of this revolution. I invite you to be an old witch.

From “Winter: Root Witch Wisdom from the Cave”

Come with me, my dear Crone Queens, into the season that reminds the world of our aging wisdom and power: Winter, the stripped-down bone time, the time of rest, but also the time of celebration, the time of a new year beginning. The season begins with the yuletide festival of the light’s return after days of Winter cold and darkness, but that festival is built on ancient roots and bones. And the New Year follows so quickly you can barely catch your breath.

I’m the Root Witch. I honor the earth mysteries. I know the magic of plants, and I’ll share with you some helpful, healing ways to use them. I listen to the song of stones, the song of trees. The animals and birds are my teachers. Up where you are, the Winter winds are howling, but it’s warm here in my cave down by the roots, with soft cushions and thick rugs, black cat purring on my lap, hearth fire merrily blazing. You too have a cave of safety and warmth at the very center of your being; all you need do is imagine it. It’s your source of deep knowledge, especially knowledge about your body. You know, whenever you have a problem or need to make a decision, there is one part of you that will always tell you the truth, unlike your poor, vacillating emotions, or your mind that always thinks it knows everything. The body never lies. Ask a question of it and notice what sensations arise.

The body is our foundation. We must take good care of our bodies all the time,...

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Verlag
Destiny Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1644114771
ISBN 13 
9781644114773
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
164
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande