Category: Monthly Witch Please Column
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Ostara Unfurling
Her glossed lips parted and a tender sigh escaped. The mid-morning light illuminated her face from the subway window. The mysterious stranger couldn’t hide her blush as her lover reached in for another kiss as he stroked her cheek. As we pulled into Canal Street, the young lover said, “more, later,” and dashed off. It…
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Heart of Purification
In the belly of February we lie, existing in a liminal space where sighs of spring and the waxing light blossoms in-between snowflakes. Like goddesses in mythology, our bodies are stretching, awakening limbs, muscles, senses and hearts from underneath the layers of winter’s necessary hibernation. In ancient Roman times, February marked Februalia or Februa,…
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The Hermit’s Reckoning
Every morning I forget how it is. I watch the smoke mount In great strides above the city. I belong to no one. Then I remember my shoes, How I have to put them on, How bending over to tie them up I will look into the earth. -Poem by Charles Simic As I…
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Waves of Eclipses
“I am always under direct inspiration. I know just what to do and give instant obedience to my intuitive leads.” According to Florence Scovel Shinn, a turn of the century metaphysical author of affirmations, your word is truly your wand. Witches, seekers and spiritualists alike know the inherent power of words when invoking spells, mantras,…
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Wax Tales of Love
With Beltane (the fire festival welcoming summer in its blazing, sensual glory) around the corner, the most common topic asked by tarot clients and seekers alike is about love magic. As a Libra who most definitely wears rose-tinted glasses, I fully believe in love as life’s most renewable resource one can give and receive.…
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Seeds of Love On The Spring Equinox
“A cold spring, the violet was flawed on the lawn. For two weeks or more the trees hesitated; the little leaves waited. One day in a chill white blast of sunshine, on the side of one a calf was born.” — “A Cold Spring” by Elizabeth Bishop Springtime always evokes the poet in me and…
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Eve of Imbolc
Many of my friends celebrate New Year’s as a perfunctory holiday or as “amateur night,” because the calendar year is a creation of modern times. Pagans and Witches alike view Samhain or Halloween as the “Witches New Year,” despite varying opinions. For me, the new year actually takes flight on the eve of Imbolc (February…
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Father Time
As an enthusiast of the art of comics, one that I’ve kept taped to various incarnations of vision boards is, of all things, a Christian Jack Chick-inked pamphlet, “Hi, There!” featuring a winking grim reaper, scythe in hand waiting around the corner for a wise-cracking construction worker who is shocked to meet his maker. When I…
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Hey, Jupiter
For my one-year wedding anniversary I escaped to Woodstock and experienced the starry night sky: a cabin surrounded by woods complete with sherbet colored sunrises and falling leaves. For a brief moment, frenetic city life and work-centered commitments were on pause and for two days only pleasure mattered. I breathed in air scented with beeswax…
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Will-o’-the-Wisps & Samhain Season
“The candles are lighted, the hearthstones are swept, the fires glow red. We shall welcome them out of the night, our home-coming dead.” ~ Hallow-E’en 1917 by Winifred M. Letts The Celtic celebration of Samhain, popularly known as All Hallow’s Eve, is the high holy day of witchcraft, which marked the Celtic new year and…
CAT CABRAL 