It's becoming the time when we really have to walk the walk: can we love ourselves by softening, easing off, doing less? Let's do it together. 

Moon Moment

Moon: Very last sliver of waning crescent

Next full or new moon: New moon on Dec. 13, 6:31pm EST. 

Astrological season: Mid Sagittarius season

It's time to do the hard thing: less.

I’ve made a lot of art in my lifetime - I started taking drawing classes in middle school, and in high school I was lucky enough to go to an art school where I took many drawing and painting classes. So I've racked up a pretty good collection. 

I’m making lot right now, but because it is early winter I’m in a period of gestation where the art that I’m making isn’t quite ready to be out in the world. What I’m drawing, singing, and writing is all the birthing process of deeply internal emotional healing and expression.

A trusted teacher recently reminded me that creation is not purposeful or meaningful because of the product. This helped me see clearly how I had, without noticing, turned all creative processes (drawing, music, aerials, and more) into homework. 

I gently hit the brakes and stopped making things, and didn't start again until I could trust myself to make them from a place of inspiration and self love, rather than a place of fear that my production is how I get love.

Because this is truly why I was creating things, in that moment: there was a part of me that feared that if I made things less reliably, or made things for myself instead of helping others, that people would no longer be worthy of love, and stop giving it to me.

Now, before you email me in response saying, “Of course you are deserving of love Isabel!”, I know this. I even feel this. But many of us carry fears from when we were younger, even though we have now surrounded ourselves with people who care about us for exactly who we truly are. 

And those fears are not comforted by logic or intellectual argument: they are only comforted by us listening to them, and by us shifting the way that we are with ourselves.

I do not have a new piece of original art I'm ready to share, and that is fine. 

I am still worthy. 

I am still a badass witch. 

I am still a caring, effective, powerful practitioner. 

And you are just as worthy when you are in a time of lower or no productivity. 

In the theme of leaning on what we have already created or harvested during the lean months of the winter, I’ve chosen to share with you a piece of art from a very important time in my past.

This is one of 13 illustrations that accompany my first novel. I finish writing Blackwall Hitch in 2021, and while it did not make publication at the time, it is a very important part of my creative journey and an important part of my heart.

I hope you enjoy this offering of nourishment from my personal stores, and if you would like to know more about Blackwall hitch, you can reply directly to this email and ask! I am now writing a new novel, and I always love to talk about that too.

Happy almost solstice.

I hope you are finding ways to treat yourself with ever more love and softness, ever more boundaried tenderness, as we move towards a cultural time of potential pressure and obligation. There are other ways to move through December – let’s find them together!

Elemental Magic 

I'm wrapping up this session of Elemental Magic, and preparing to start a new one in the New Year. Come and learn pleasurable, meaningful ways to create a consistently healthy, rested body and mind, without the frustration of checking other people’s boxes, through my hands-on ritual and spellcraft approach.