FROM OUR WORKSHOP: Colorful Salt Pouches

Extended craziness and expectancy at work has got me feeling witchy ... I find myself going back to some of my witchier posts as a result.  This was originally posted on Saturday, March 3, 2007 at 11:30 p.m. during a Lunar Eclipse.  It's really a March kind of thing, but I need salt's purifying properties now.  D❤

I feel the presence of the Goddess tonight, and She is embodied in the full moon. This is a March moon, what D.J. Conway calls a Storm Moon, as in “in like a lion, out like a lamb.” This was the first lunar eclipse we’ve seen in several years, and I wonder if it promises greater storms of nature or storms of the heart. There is, no doubt, change in the air. Maybe there will be political storms, or economic ones. Regardless, and for what it’s worth, I don’t see omens or ill tidings. Rather, I see the power She wields over the universe, manifest in physical form. I get secret thrills any time something like this happens. It’s as if the Divine Mother chose to make Herself seen by changing the celestial body She resides in. First, the moon was red, blood red, the color of life-giving blood, birth, and, strangely, both love and anger. Then, She cast a great shadow upon it, so the children who have forgotten Her might remember. To me, it is a grand gesture.

In response to this, the kitchen witch in me rose up with cauldron in hand, creative juices swirling powerfully. This isn’t the Wicked Witch, an old archetype of mine, for she is quiet now. It’s not The Scarlet Witch either, for she is a metaphor. No, this is a new witch, an emerging witch, one yet unnamed. One who can’t help but respond to the air of expectancy brought on by a fabulous and colorful full moon in March.

From this expansive tide, I’ve created salt pouches that challenge the tumultuous effect of the March storm, by using color, absorption, and vibration to raise positive energy.

The Month of March

“The Roman Matronalia honored Juno Lucina, an aspect of the goddess Juno, who protected women, children and the family. Statues of the goddess were decorated with flowers, and special temple fires were lit. Girls made offerings to Juno Lucina at this time of year for happy and prosperous marriages. The status of Isis suckling her child symbolizes this goddess’s aspect as the Great Mother, the caretaker of the Earth and all life. Flowers were floated on the rivers and the boats blessed with incense.” 1

In the month of March, think of the Goddess as the Great Mother and Protector. Dare to seek out your inner child, knowing she will be protected by the greatest and most powerful mother of them all. Love your inner child totally and without restriction. Be tender, be patient. Find something that makes you laugh and let your inner child out to play. There are other March indicators, as well, such as the presence of water spirits, often very active during March storms and resultant flooding. The color green is indicative of March not only for the Irish, but for prosperity. Irish Moss and daffodils are March plants, and animals include cougar, hedgehogs and boar.

Salt

I’ve always considered salt a purifier. I’ve kept bowls of it around at work and home, on my altar, and have used it to cleanse new homes. I seek out new kinds of salt regularly. For this project, I’ve used Himalayan Crystal Salt, purchased from American BlueGreen. These people know their salt and bend over backwards to describe its chemical, esoteric, and spiritual properties. This stuff is awesome!

“The energy vibration of the translucent crystals of salt amplifiy the ethereal fluid in the etheric body and the crystalline properties in the physical body. Crystalline properties in the physical body are found in cell salts throughout the lymphatic systems, thymus gland, pineal gland, red and white corpuscles, and regenerative properties within the muscular tissue. Amplification of the body's crystalline properties increases clairvoyance, telepathy, and receptivity to healing. Our human energy field operates on similar principle of electromagnetism, therefore, the translucent salt crystal becomes an extension of our own vibrations. The energy will intermingle with our own, and when properly programmed through meditation, can liberate the mind into discovering potentially unlimited awareness. In order to gain more conscious knowledge about our emotional, intellectual and physical states, we share our energy with the crystal salt. The combination of our relatively inconsistent vibrations together with the balancing ones of the crystal, can bridge the gap between our physical, mental spiritual selves. The astrological sign of the crystal salt is Pisces, and the vibration number is one. Rediscover your inner self.” 2

Ingredients

1. Small Pouches in various colors (I purchased mine from Oriental Trading). These are the colors I’ve used, but don’t let it limit you!

· White – Protection and Divinity.
· Lavender – Friendship.
· Orange – Courage.
· Red – Love (not necessarily romantic).
· Yellow – Happiness.
· Green – Prosperity.
· Light Blue – Protection and the Goddess(light blue is the color of Mary’s mantle).

Note: I do not avoid using the color black because I believe it absorbs negative energy. The way I see it, if Krishna’s skin was black, it’s good enough for me.

2. Salt (sea salt or other) – I’ve used a pure, natural and vibrational crystal salt that absorbs the energy of the full moon, the energy of the Ancient Mother, the Goddess, and releases it through the color of the pouches. Any salt will do this, but the Himlayan Crystal Salt truly resonates to me.

3. Lavender (the herb) – for healing
4. A Scarf or Throw (see more below)
5. Plastic Bags (moisture proof)
6. A Full Moon (not all full moons feel the same to me,but this one really called me out!)

Directions

1. Fill your pouches with the salt product you’ve chosen. The crystal salt I used was available in coarse cut, granulated, and actual rocks, so I put a combination of all three in each pouch (with the exception of the white pouches, which hold only white granulated salt). As you fill the pouches, focus on the Goddess, feel Her looking down on you from her watchtower in the sky. Focus on the month’s attributes, and as you handle each pouch, focus on its color’s symbolism. Focus Mother’s love from the full moon through your heart and fine tune it with your intent. Let your intent be the specific purpose of each pouch of salt.

2. Wrap the salt-filled pouches in a favorite scarf, throw or wrap. Let the wrap be emblazed with symbols that resonate to you. A moon, sun, hearts or pentacles are all symbols of the Goddess. Perhaps the wrap is just your favorite color and makes you feel good. Use your intuition! I add a sprig of lavender for healing and good intent, but feel free to put in other small favorites objects that have special spiritual meaning. You’ve created a super-infused wrapped package, kind of like a spiritual burrito.

3. Put your package in a plastic bag that is big enough to keep out moisture. Seal it carefully.

4. Place the package, sealed in plastic, outside, where it baths in the light of the full moon over night.

5. The next morning, bring your package into the home knowing it has bathed in the loving light of the Great Goddess. The salt has fully absorbed Her cosmic energy, and will readily emit that energy through the color of each pouch.

If you’d like to bring more happiness into your life, place a yellow pouch under your pillow at night. For prosperity, use green. Pouches can be placed on your altar or other sacred space, or they can be used as a gift for someone special. Whatever you choose to do with them, even if it’s simply putting them on a knic-knac shelf, know that they are kissed by the Divine Mother herself.

End Notes

1. MOON MAGICK, by D.J. Conway, © 1995 by Llewellyn Publications, p. 62.

2. American Blue Green LLC, Copyright © 2004-2005 All rights reserved, http://www.himalayancrystalsalt.com/

Thinking About Jen

When Jen was a baby, each time she cried, something cut off her oxygen supply until she choked. Nobody knew what was happening. It was her grandmother that figured it out, and so she had surgery to move the main blood vessel that was wrapped a-typically around her larynx. This experience was telling, really, as to the challenged life my friend, Jen McGrorey, would lead.

I’ve known Jen since the mid-90’s. I interviewed her at PwC before she was hired. We were all still in the Bank of America Building then, and I had that office in the back of Word Processing. It was before Leslie’s Mom passed away in 1995. Back then, Jen was a short little 4x4, as chubby as she was tall. She smoked like a chimney, always had her face in a book, surrounded herself with cool comic book toys, and wielded that acerbic sense of humor like a weapon. She always seemed to be in my orbit, and I in hers.

In 1996, when I was pregnant with Elizabeth, Jen and her husband were trying to get pregnant, too. Oddly, it wasn’t easy for either of us. I went through a year of fertility treatment, as did she. The day Leslie and I went for our ultrasound to hear we had a girl on the way, I didn’t know it, but Jenny was in the other room at the very same time in the very same department of the very same hospital in San Francisco. It was an experience she described to me on more than one occasion. She said she was so happy for us. Jen was not pregnant, and in fact, later on had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured and ruined her chances of having another baby. She cherished her first son, Anthony. Jen was always in pain even then, but you’d never know it. She had a plate in her neck, was severely asthmatic, diabetic, and at one point walking down the street in San Francisco, fell through a grate in the sidewalk and did severe damage to her right leg.

It was one thing after another for what seemed like her entire life.

When Jen was initially diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and treated, she fell off the map at work into 6 months of leave. The intense chemotherapy at it’s worst almost killed her and then forced her into early onset menopause. She emerged from that experience with severe depression. She used to visit me in my office a few times a week to share her feelings. One day she told me she and her husband drove by a cemetery and she found herself wishing she were in it. She and I navigated our way through that predicament together and she got the help she needed to keep on keeping on. The good news is that her lymphoma went into remission and, over time, she felt better.

When my family and I decided to leave California and move to Connecticut, the hardest part was telling Jen. At that point, she had visited Ammachi in San Ramon once, and discovered her love of the Divine Mother. For those of you who don’t know, Ammachi is a living Hindu saint, also called The Hugging Saint, and is considered a living incarnation of the divine mother by her “children”. I’ve been to see Ammachi many times, and have experienced her hug, and can testify that it is a profound spiritual experience. As Jen struggled with her recovery, however, she projected much of her need for the goddess on to me. This was something I was acutely aware and very respectful of. In fact, it was something I’d done years ago to another friend with disastrous results. It was an immense responsibility true, but I understood the delicacy of it. Telling Jen we were leaving was difficult, but we kept in very close contact over the phone and through email.

I was in close contact with Jen when she made the decision to have gastric by-pass surgery. We spent hours on the phone talking about her difficulties at work. In fact, it was shortly after I left PwC that I understood the firm announced a(nother) series of layoffs in administration, specifically the department Jen worked in, and then ironically, only let Jen go.

Just when her insurance costs reached an all time high.

Thereafter, Jen discovered she needed a full hysterectomy. At least I think that’s how the timeline went. It is hard to tell what happened when. The economy was descending into the toilet at the same time the real estate market was crashing, and my family and I were miserable in Connecticut, but Jen had bigger problems. She’d been layed off from work, was a huge insurance risk, and had endured a series of major surgeries in a short time period.

In 2008, Jen’s lymphoma re-emerged and she made the decision to undergo bone marrow and stem cell transplantation (read more at this link). It was a high risk procedure at UCSF that would take almost a year, eradicate her immune system, and hopefully jump start it again. It wasn’t the needles that worried Jen the most, almost she despised them, and it wasn’t the pain. She hated the thought of being isolated. At one point, she would have no immunities and would be unable to interact with other people. They talked about keeping her in the hospital, but through the process, she was able to go home, where her dogs waited mournfully for her. She lost all her hair, again, was sick and weak, again, but in the end, the non-Hodgkin’s went back into remission.

About a year ago, Elizabeth, Leslie and I met Jen at The Olive Garden. Parking was easy, which meant Jen didn’t have to walk far, and there was a room in the back where we could eat without being part of a crowd. I hadn’t seen Jen in over a year, and she looked like a different person. She was so tiny, and with no facial hair, she looked new born. She seemed chilly the whole time, too. She only ate a tiny bit, which was all she could ever eat. Less than twenty minutes into lunch, she had Leslie laughing so hard I thought she would pee right there in the chair. And she and Elizabeth were deeply into analyzing her iPhone, which Elizabeth drooled over with no inhibition.

Jen is dying.

About six months ago, Jen’s immune system failed. The transplanted marrow stopped working. Shortly thereafter, she developed a fungal infection in the lungs, part of chronic lung damage caused by intensive chemo. She was in and out of the hospital once per month from July 2009 forward. Each time she was admitted, she stayed a little longer and got a little weaker. The last time she went in, after contracting H1N1, they kept her in pulmonary ICU. That was over a month ago.

About a week and a half ago, her son called me. It was Wednesday. Jen suddenly had to be intubated. The inside of her lungs had become like broken glass, and only the tiniest portion of one lung was working. She wasn’t oxygenating. The doctor’s sought a last ditch effort at healing, and to do it she needed to be fully sedated. The last thing Jen wanted to see before she went under was the ultrasound picture of her grandbaby, Anthony’s unborn child, which was taken just the day before.

Leslie, Elizabeth and I went to see Jen that evening. Her family was there, all of them. Her husband, tired and sad, never left her bedside and kept stroking her forehead. Her mother seemed heartbroken. It was so poignant knowing that her mother watched her beloved child fade from this world; yet at the same time, there was a brand new baby being created in the womb of Anthony’s wife. The circle of life was right there, right in my face, and it was dizzying.

My relationship with Jen was much like a mentorship, but through it she was ever a good friend. She supported my art, even when I was squeamish about launching it. She always asked how my family was, and never forgot birthdays. You would think that after all she had suffered, she would have every excuse to be bitter, yet she never was. She and I are both daughters of the Goddess, and share a deep love of the Divine Mother. When Jen went to see Ammachi, however, I don’t think she got the answer she needed. She asked why? Why the cancer? Why me? I don’t know that Jen had a chance to come to terms with having a chronic illness before she was sedated, either.

Watching Jen there in the hospital bed, on the precipice of eternity, disturbs me. I know she signed up for the treatment she endured, and I know she was afraid to die, but I have a hard time seeing the humanity in sedation and intubation for what seems like experimental purposes. Her family has been on an emotional roller coaster, a death watch, for over a week. I can only imagine how exhausted they must feel, even though Leslie and I went through a bit of it ourselves when her mother died in 1995, and even though I know it’s the right thing to do. Then again, if I ever have cancer, wouldn’t I be thankful for that kind of courage should it benefit my circumstances?

I am a daughter of the Goddess. That is where the heart of my spirituality lies. I believe in reincarnation, as well. There are some that believe we actually pick our lives to learn certain karmic lessons. That rings true to me, but I can’t help but wonder what soul would willingly pick a lifetime of suffering, the kind of life that Jen lives with courage and determination. Indeed, where there is faith in our lives, suffering brings us closer to God. But still … no matter what the reason, or what the faith, it is difficult to watch Jen laying there in the hospital bed with the inevitable end of her suffering drawn out for any reason.

Today Jen’s family met with the doctors. They tried their last ditch treatments this week and have nothing left to do. Jen remains intubated and sedated, but her blood pressure is falling. She has perhaps days to live before crossing over.

So much of this leaves me with unanswered questions, but I do know this: When Jen dies, she will pass into the warmest embrace ever. The embrace of the Divine Mother who loves her unconditionally, unfailingly, and forever and who will bear her aloft to the next adventure whatever and wherever that is.

Perhaps she will watch over us all …

… an angel, at long last.

Go with the Goddess, my dear friend.

I will miss you when you’re gone.

FROM OUR WORKSHOP: Kali Ma

Click on the image to get a closer look.

Kali Ma © September 19, 2009 by Donna L. Faber (all rights reserved) is part of my series on divinity. It is done on Strathmore Bristol 300 Series Vellum with Staedler pigment liner pens, Prismacolor premiere markers, and good old fashioned Crayola Pip-Squeaks borrowed from my daughter. She’s been cut out and will be mounted on a colorful background and then framed.

This piece has been waiting to emerge since before we moved out of our rental.

Kali, also known as Kalika, is a Hindu goddess associated with eternal energy. Despite Her fierce appearance and the symbolic imagery provoked by the items She holds and surrounds Herself with (each of which has a specific meaning), Kali is considered a benevolent Mother Goddess whose greatest wish is to see her children freed from their delusions (the way we lie to ourselves). The manners in which She frees us be may the cause of some debate, as Her methods are often intense and shocking; it is Kali Ma’s blood red-rimmed eyes we see piercing the all-consuming blackness of our darkest hours. She can be perceived as terrifying or loving, which depends on our understanding of Her role in our lives. When we experience spiritual or emotional blockage and Durga, Saraswati, Shiva and Lord Krishna turn their backs on us, it is Kali who steps up to plate. In Her inimitable way, She blasts the blockage right out of our systems.

And yes, sometimes it is quite uncomfortable.

Remember, the Goddess takes many forms so that Her children may find one they can relate to.

The last few months have been crazy for my family and I. We’ve dealt with various bits of economic and real estate uncertainty, including merger related weirdness at work that had me spinning more than I thought. I finally feel like I’m settling down, feeling at home in the new place, and less threatened at work. Doing this piece was like a meditation to me, helping me get centered to better understand my priorities and where my focus should be. Kali Ma helped clear my emotional clutter.

È lo scopo del Kali nella nostra vita.

Don’t let Kali Ma scare you.

I hope you enjoy this piece.

Love,
D~

EMERGING ART: Kali Ma Almost Done!

It's almost done.

I'm going to let this sit overnight and look at it with new eyes in the morning. Then, after details, she gets cut out and mounted on a different color, textured paper. This piece has been inspired. I've felt most driven to get it done ... quickly. And when working on it, my mind is quiet, serene, and very focussed.