May in October: A Pandemic Navel Gaze

 Two years. No festivals. It's enough to make a girl weep.

Okay, call me frivolous and silly if you like. I prefer to see myself as a chaotic magician in need of charging my skills through joyous and unusual festivities.

Words matter, right?

Anyway, it's been quite awhile since I had the opportunity to charge my chaotic magic, but I did so in spades over the weekend. 

For two decades, Spoutwood Farm hosted Fairy Festivals. The final one was in 2018, and we moved to a venue near Baltimore in 2019. Here's a nice photo from that shindig:

EXHIBIT A: THEN

If you are in on this kind of magic, you see the power here. If you're not, wow! Look at that sky!

Well, the pandemic descended, and all revels were cancelled in 2020. Then 2021 hove into sight, and the revels were cancelled again. Not that I blame anybody. No one wants to go cavort in a field with their best friends and wind up with a novel coronavirus as a souvenir.

Over the summer, one of the chief revelers from the Fairy Festival arranged an event called "Lesstival" that would be open to those who volunteered their time to previous large festivals. And this one would be back at Spoutwood!

And so, with vaccine cards in hand, a few of us arrived at Spoutwood, donned our outlandish garb, and indulged in chaotic magic. I used the opportunity to re-charge my working wand, using Spoutwood energy. And now my wand is flat-out humming with power!

Spoutwood Farm is a beautiful location in the piedmont hills of York County, PA. It did get quite trampled during the many festivals there, and eventually the fair outgrew the farm. Now, three and a half years out from the last gathering there, the farm has transformed. The vines are thicker, the trees are larger, and the wooded areas are entirely the realm of the fae again. Just don't go in there, okay? It's lush and alluring. How very fairy.

So a few of us gathered at Spoutwood. We had music, and a Burning Man bonfire, and we danced a Maypole. Yes, a Maypole in October! 

EXHIBIT B: NOW

If you look real close, that's me by the tree, contemplating the long, strange trip that led to a Maypole dance in October. 

Wow! Since we were adults, led by the owner of Spoutwood Farm, we actually wrapped that Maypole with panache! And had fun doing it. I came away from this mini-festival chock-a-block with chaos.

The best part of this festival was it had a nice long morning of downtime while all the tipplers nursed their hangovers. So I was able to take a charming drive through rural PA (complete with Amish buggies) and find a new waterfall for my collection! Look at this lovely falls!

EXHIBIT C: MILL CREEK FALLS, YORK COUNTY, PA

Easy walk, not crowded, fantastic water symphony. And fool's gold in the rocks.

This was my weekend, soaking up some mayhem in the land of the fairies. It was so refreshing!

Gettin It Done without Amazon

 Howdy again, and welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where patience is a virtue and the small business rules! I'm Anne Johnson, and I'm not paying for frivolous space travel for billionaires. Period, end of sentence.

This post begins with my fear of Coronavirus as the school year loomed last fall. I was lucky enough to discover a book called Backwoods Witchcraft by Jake Richards. This excellent work has all kinds of spells and conjures and amulets in it, and from the author's expertise I learned that copper items help to guard from illness. So I bought a beautiful copper bracelet with mountains on it, which I received a few weeks before school began. 

I've been wearing the bracelet constantly, and it has protected me from Covid. I know because my supervisor at school caught the virus and got terribly ill. This was before the vaccine.

If you have ever owned anything made of copper, you know it's hard keeping that shiny, minty fresh exterior. It's also such a bendable metal that it can lose its shape. So here I am, 12 months in with this bracelet, and it needed to be adjusted.

I took it to my splendid friend of long standing, Muin, who works with metal in fantastic ways. It was the work, literally, of 20 seconds for him to knock the shape back into my bracelet. And then he gave me tips on how to polish it and keep it minty fresh. Turns out I need Wright's copper polish, which I can pick up at the local hardware store. I also need stuff called Renaissance Wax. (One can also use beeswax, but who can resist a product called "Renaissance Wax?") Muin applied some polish, and then some of this magical Ren Wax, and my bracelet looks better than it did when it arrived in the mail.

You might think that something so esoteric as Renaissance Wax would be hard to find outside the evil Amazon Empire. But no! I clicked into the first web site that wasn't Amazon and found a real he-man's paradise of a small business down in Texas.

If you had asked me four weeks ago, I would have said, "Pandemic be over" (famous words of a friend of The Fair). But it's not, and even if I'm vaccinated, I still see a chance of serious illness. So I am going to continue to wear my amulet bracelet. It's just going to look and fit better.

All the links in this post lead to the products described at web sites that are not Amazon. Full disclosure, I did buy Backwoods Witchcraft from Amazon, but I could have done my due diligence. Honestly I would like to drive to Tennessee and purchase Jake Richards's books right from his hands, but that's not possible.

"Renaissance Wax." What a great product to put through the "Anywhere but Amazon" test! Got it, gettin' it, thanks Texas!

Keep the author of "The Gods Are Bored" in your magic the next few weeks. Big events are on the horizon. I will tell all as things unfold.

How Do I Do a Magic Spell against Donald Trump?

 Hello and welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" My name is Anne, and today I'm going to be talking to all of you who put this question into a Google search and found me here in my throne room. Not gonna beat around the bush here: If you can't imagine another four years of Donald Trump, you can help defeat him. You can do magic, beautiful you!

Before you doubters say, "How is one little person going to shift the tide of an election?" This is akin to saying, "How come people who do magic don't win the lottery?" You can't beat Trump all on your own. But you can add to the spirit and magical currents already out there. You're not alone in wanting him to lose, and you're not alone in working magic toward that end.

You don't need to know anything and everything about magic to practice it. I'll keep specifically to this topic: using magic against Donald Trump.

First, protect yourself! Don't do magic aimed at killing him! You just want him out of office, not off the planet. I personally don't believe that hexing people in extreme ways has a karmic backlash, but I think that level of spell isn't necessary here. You want him gone, not dead.

And it's so simple.

Magic is all about symbolism. It's about taking an everyday object and charging it to stand for more than itself.

The easiest spell you can do to thwart Donald Trump is a freezer spell. You will need:

1. A Ziploc freezer bag, and

2. A piece of Trump gear -- baseball cap, t-shirt, campaign literature, or even just a picture of him.

Directions:

1. Cut the object into strips using a scissors. As you do, say, "Scattered forces win no wars."

2. Put the strips in the freezer bag and place the bag on the bottom shelf of a freezer, preferably underneath some really cold stuff. Say, "I freeze the support for Donald Trump."

It's that easy.

Now, maybe you live in a household full of Trump faithful who might find your spell in the freezer and ask you to explain yourself. In that case, hide a few strips at a time in your pockets or a backpack. Whenever you pass a trash can, throw one of the strips into it, saying, "Scattered forces win no wars." Do this until all of your strips are gone. Don't put them all into the same trash can! You want to scatter them.

I'm not encouraging you to buy Trump merchandise at a retail price. And be really careful about stealing it from your pro-Trump buddies. You want to make sure no one misses it! I got my MAGA t-shirt at the thrift store for two bucks. It has been in the freezer for over a year.

Some magic spells are incredibly complicated, but as I said, you don't have to be a PhD to take part in a righteous battle for the soul of America. You just need to want to do it, like so many of your fellow citizens.

So, go do magic, beautiful you! Add your intentions to the wide and deep spiritual ocean that stands opposed to this dangerous despot and his cronies.