Virgo season helps us harvest the seeds of change... if we heed the messengers 🌾
On seeds, spirit messages, and listening to our daemons.
Inside: A discourse on how art, imagination, magic, seeds, plants, and ancestors all weave together; and about how our magic really does create a path for us out of the messes we are in; and how if you practice magic, you begin to receive messages that are undeniably clear. Here’s an essay on how to listen to these messages.
On the New Moon in Virgo I made an altar for my daemon. I gave offerings of two grains: barley and amaranth.
Virgo is the goddess of the harvest, who bundles, winnows, sorts, separates, grinds, and bakes the grain that nourishes us.
I offered barley because it’s a classic offering of nourishment for the spirits. And amaranth, because it’s native to the region I live in and I intuited that it would be a welcome way to show the spirits of the land here my good intentions.
Fast forward to this past Sunday…
…I went to a brilliant opening called From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. A show featuring BIPOC artists and their relationship to the land curated by Irene Tsatsos. (HIGHLY recommend!!)
As soon as I walked in, I had a strong feeling that something important would happen there. In the very first gallery, I felt a fog dissipate in my thinking.
A problem about how to focus my dissertation topic - vexing me since I began my PhD program last year – resolved itself. Suddenly I saw it. Imagination is the thread through which I can pull the whole project together!
A path through the dark woods had appeared, stitched into view by the weavers of fate.
Next, I was surprised and delighted to discover that a collective from Guatemala called Seed Travels (Malaqatel Ija, Semillas Viajeras) was giving a workshop at the Armory that very day on…
…amaranth!
Seed Travels began by saying that only by the generosity of the plant spirit of amaranth had they been able to present their workshop. Amaranth had commissioned them, paid for their flight from Guatemala.
Amaranth had created their entire way of life.
They gave a prayer of gratitude to the plant and to their ancestors who had nourished, protected, and cared for it. Thanking them for keeping their traditions alive over centuries of colonization and ecocide.
They reminded us that everything that the Maya people had been through, the plant amaranth had been through with them. Amaranth is a companion, a medicine, a food, and a teacher.
They showed us how to harvest the seeds of the plant by massaging its blossoms and then pouring the seeds from bowl to bowl to let the wind take the chaff.
Amaranth is traditionally prepared communally. The people place the cut plant at the center of a blanket, with the harvesters, children, and the elders around the edges.
While they work the seeds, the elders – the abuelas and abuelos – teach the younger generations the stories and medicines of their people.
In this way, the amaranth plant founds the relationships in their community: between people and land, between the generations, and between the living and the ancestral realms.
At the end of the ceremonial workshop, they offered each participant a packet so that they could gather the seeds and plant them in their own gardens.
The Seed Travels collective said they hoped to plant the amaranth seeds in our hearts as well, to share the relationship building blessings of the sacred amaranth with people around the world.
Tears welled in my eyes throughout the entire ceremony. (Yes, I was that white lady, sigh), because…
…I had put the amaranth on my altar, and here the plant was showing up in my life less than two weeks later, already teaching me so much.
Amaranth wove webs of reciprocity into my mind, saying, “this is where all healing and bounty in the world comes from.”
Plants remind us that when we make an effort to care for the world in body and spirit, that care ebbs and flows in all directions.
Virgo, the harvest deity reminds us, “Care is how we create abundance. The more we are in service, the stronger we are.”
Spirit, imagination, storytelling, culture, seeds, art, imagination, soil, people, and plants are not separate.
All of our stories and bodies are woven together. Caring for all our relations (in the Native sense), creates a path through the woods for all of us.
What I want you to know, dear readers, is that YOUR stories, the myths of YOUR ancestors, the lands they lived on, the crises and the bloodshed going on throughout the world today, all are woven together into the same mysterious tapestry that makes up the multiverse.
Our magic reweaves the warp and weft of the web that binds us together.
Building my altar for my daemon allowed me to see these connections. Had I not built it, the connections would’ve been there, but I would not have had access to them.
The enchantment of connection is all around us. Our rituals are the bridge that carries us to the Otherworld, which is invisible to most, yet inseparable from the reality all around us.
Our rituals are alive, dear initiates. They participate with us. Myths are alive, stories are alive, just as earth and water are alive. Rituals aren’t something we do alone.
We perform our rituals in concert, in chorus with all beloved consciousnesses of our world.
By the power of our collective rituals, we lost beings, drifting with all the other ghosts, are calling forth a path through the wasteland. By the power of our collective rituals, a path will emerge.
By the power of our collective rituals, the Black Dogs that chase us through the wasteland become the allies that guard us. Hecate’s dogs will lead us to a world of possibilities, a place where all beings thrive.
Our rituals are powered by the oil of our imagination, our awen (àshe, a'ho), the divine substance of inspiration, moves through us when we make the time for magic.
Magic allows us to see opportunities that we never thought possible, and that in fact WERE NOT POSSIBLE until we all came together to create them.
Our next Full Moon ceremony is on Tuesday the 17th of September at 6pm PST. A full super moon lunar eclipse in Pisces.
Under the banners of the Virgo Sun, the Pisces moon is the Mystic Moon, a porthole for strengthening our direct connection with the Great Mystery.
I hope you can join us.
All my love until then,
Amanda