Scrapbook of Shadows

I continued adding to my little BOS today. I really like how it's developing. Here are a few sample photos. Sorry about the blurriness; the light quality in my living room could stand to be improved.

First, my book blessing pages. On the left, I glued a tag one of my mom's friends made me a long time ago. I wrote a short incantation on it invoking the elements to protect and guard my book. The right page is occupied by an "ancient Egyptian" blessing used on the show Babylon 5 which always resonated with me: "God be between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk." Cursory research is inconclusive on whether or not the blessing actually is Egyptian or if the show's writers simply made it up, but some sites anyway cite it as being from the 18th dynasty of Egypt. Authentically Egyptian or not, I find the words to be powerful ones.

On the next two pages is a prayer to Athena which I found here. As I am currently developing a relationship with Her, it seemed appropriate to include a prayer to Her first thing. I also glued in a tiger lily petal, and a sunflower petal, both from our garden.

Long-time readers may remember the posts regarding the Celtic tree months I did several years ago. I collected a lot of information, but it never made its way into my working BOS. Today, I dug up those posts and summarized their contents. I also took some leaves belonging to the trees under discussion and pasted them in. The birch leaf was wide enough that I created a foldable insert for it so that it would not cover up my writing. I also used a crayon to do some leaf rubbings on the right page, but the thickness of the paper stopped that from working very well. The tree month section spanned several pages, but those aren't finished yet, as I'll be adding more as I come across trees of the right varieties. 

Seven new pages today! That's pretty good, I think, and I like how they're looking!

August 15th, 2015

There was a visitor at one of our sunflowers this morning.

He's a little hard to see, but there's a goldfinch in the middle of the picture, picking seeds out of the flower. He sat there for quite some time, enjoying his breakfast.

Later, we had some excitement - we went to the beach today!

I only found out we were going late last night, so it was a bit of a surprise, but the weather was perfect. The drive up took about an hour, after which we stopped for a quick lunch break before heading to the beach itself.

A lot of the lake shore had eroded since last year, which was unexpected, but it did give us a rather different view of the rocks than we were used to. I spent several hours hunting along the beach for neat finds.

These were a couple of the specimens I found. I didn't keep them all, but they made for a good photo. I found beach glass, some kind of purplish Quartz or Chalcedony, Unakite, a rock with a honeycomb of crystals, white Quartz, some glittery pink stone, fossils, and a rock with a green mineral inside it. 

I also found this - the wing of a Luna Moth! I'm sad that the moth was injured, but it was still really interesting to see, especially on a beach.

Later, I stumbled across some really high quality fossils. I'm not totally sure what this one is - some kind of marine creature, I believe, and probably a sponge or a coral.

We went for ice cream afterward, and now I'm sitting at home, enjoying some YouTube videos on altar design and similar. Hope everyone else is enjoying these last days of summer vacation!

Blue Moon 2015

What a weekend it has been! A blue moon, Lughnasadh, and Fairy Fest, all overlapping one another!

Destiny came over on Friday and we got all our costume things sorted for Fest. We also did an Esbat ritual to celebrate the blue moon, which was her first time doing an Esbat as well. I won't get into all the details, but we got dressed up in some robes of mine and some pieces of magickal jewelry - a pentacle and Tangerine Quartz necklace for me, and a silver wolf necklace for her.

My phone doesn't have a front-facing camera, so my selfies always turn out a little blurry-looking. I thought this was a cute pre-ritual picture, though.

We enjoyed a nice ceremony where we did some spellwork to further our long-term goals, and then afterwards we took leftover cookies and juice outside for offerings, standing under the moon for a while. It had what looked to us like a blue halo around it, and was very bright over the neighboring houses.

As always, my camera-phone utterly failed to do the phenomenon justice, but the pure Goddess energy was really spectacular.

The next morning, we had to be up quite early for Fairy Fest. Lughnasadh dawned bright and clear this year, and for once we had an actual harvest to honor - our tomato crop has delivered in droves now that my dad and brother built them a planter box. 

As you can see, the tomato on the left was bigger than my hand. We've also had bowls full of cherry tomatoes, and as of yesterday several more large heirlooms have come into ripeness.

I took this photo of a (very short) sunflower soaking up the morning rays after I paused a moment outside to set down a bit of toast in offering. Destiny and I enjoyed the light for a bit, and then it was off to Fairy Fest!