~affirmations~

my head has been a whirling mass of thoughts over the past few days, i have not been able to do anything constructive and i cannot blame my cold as that is all but gone now...in fact bret over at this guy's journey has mentioned feeling stuck~i know exactly what he means.

all i am wanting to do is sit curled up in the warm and read but i have my essay to get finished and start work for two bits of written exam work in january. in fact i am not even sat at my desk today, i have dragged my laptop to the sofa with a mug of lemon tea and here i sit, trying to get myself motivated to do my essay. i have all the major draft work done, all i need to do is start to type it out...can i do that?
no!

i have had the land in my head a lot lately and maybe i need to clear all of this out before i start on anything else.

we drove out through the forest the other day and i could not take my eyes from out of the window at the passing woods and heathland~the colors have been changing slowly over the past month and now the forest is at its most wintry...

the sun, when we see it is lower in the sky and we are less than a month from the time of the shortest day, the winter solstice, the time of the return of the sun...although i don't really celebrate the solstices or equinoxes in the same way as i do the main festivals, something always stirs within me at these times~maybe some ancient memory passed down the many, many years from my ancestors, people who were tied to the cycle of the seasons.

there are hundreds of megalithic sites scattered all around europe which were orientated to the solstices and equinoxes so it is not hard to accept that they were important to those who created them~and although we do not know exactly why they were created there is nothing to stop us searching deep inside ourselves for meaning if we feel the stirrings of something

i guess its the stirrings inside of me that are so distracting~i have been getting my green man trees oracle cards out more lately and reading through 'a tree in your pocket'

i have been having a feeling of self affirmation of who i am and what i believe growing within me~its almost as if my pagan path has taken a slightly new direction, as it has with many of us at some point, and i am secure enough with myself to accept it and go with it. its actually a nice feeling. although i have always followed a solitary path but being the human i am with human doubts, i have had the odd niggle over the years of~when i finally put a name to my beliefs~ 'not doing it right', even though my inner soul told me otherwise.

although i have my little alter here i do not have a wand, i don't create my sacred space in line with the elements as i don't work with the elements, i do not believe in the 'goddess and god' and i don't have the same affinity with the moon as some of my pagan friends have~my beliefs lie in the three realms of sea, land and sky~hence my triple spirals~realms that are always around me

~i find i am being drawn to the old church...or rather the place that existed before the old church existed within the earthworks up on the hill...a connection with the spirit of the place, the land, which considering a huge part of my maternal line has been within 40 miles of my village for at least 600 years sort of makes sense to me.

new grange 2007 solstice