Feel free to listen to this song about Trees while reading this narrative.
My husband and I stood on the grassy field between his aunt’s house and the 5 minute walk to the cozy pond that lived behind the Llama barn. We had been staying there for a little over a month, and coming back to the east coast had been a whirlwind of intentions: seeing family, seeing *anyone* during covid times, being with her through tax forms and health problems, the 2 years since we had been home weighing on us heavily, the reasons go on and on. This day, though, was the last day we were going to be there. We would be hopping on a plane back to the west coast to return to the home that we had built together the next evening, and there were a lot of feelings going around. Feelings of being glad to get home, feelings of sadness and guilt over leaving home, all mixed together.
I had not crafted or participated in any rituals while I was on this trip, against my best “sans internet or cell service intentions” to spend the whole 2 months in various parts of the forest and countryside, collecting leaves & walking through invisible doorways, ringing bells, the whole shabang. Did not happen though: we did manage to collect tons of wonderful micah, a rose quartz, and several other shiny rocks and turtle shells, but there just wasn’t quite the room socially to spread out in a way that I felt I could effectively get in touch with my spirit self in that way. Also: a side effect of hustling as a tarot reader is that in between doing readings for clients it can be hard to flex the magick muscle just a little extra for yourself.
This was our last day, however, and I had been thinking about an idea for a ritual working that could help us feel a little better about leaving. Back home, in Portland, there are two trees nearby us in a park that are our favorites. You might call them friends, you might call them something else, but we definitely have a connection to them. Which is a big deal to me: I am not a huge nature queer over here. But when I started up my new prayer book, I drew sigils of them inside, with no explanation: just an inked drawing I could place my palm on when I needed to for, well, for whatever reason. One of the trees is a bit more emotionally focused, and the other tree has two sprouting trunks that you can walk into and over, like a gateway. I am sure you can imagine the hundreds of uses for that in witchcraft. So, anyways, back to this field that my husband and I are standing on. Off to the side is a little patch of land with a wooded area, where two large trees make residence. One of them is a thick tree with some carved, wooden eyes and a nose that my husbands since passed uncle had put on. It definitely has quite the personality to it, even beyond those additions. The second is another gateway tree.
For the ritual, first while inking the sigils into my prayer book, I went to the spot of these trees the night before and traced their outlines, while ringing a bell engraved with leaves. I had with me a Rider-Waite-Smith version of the Ace of Pentacles (for the doorway imagery at the bottom of the card, I always use that card for portal sorcery), and a card from the Oracle of the Micropatterns, which I rarely use but find powerful for astral/elsewhere work. This was very meditative, and once I was done, I thanked both trees. It rained a bit, and I got just enough raindrops on the pages to make things special, but not enough to mess up my work. I finished the inking inside while spending time with his family, we often all sit around and read, do crossword puzzles, just whatever folks want, but in the same room. It is very nice.
That was all the night before, so the next day, my husband and I went to the tree, and rang the bell before entering the grove. First we went to the Face-Tree, the more emotionally driven feeling one, and asked it to collect the feelings of home and comfort and family we would be missing here, and gather it up into jars to send to the west coast for us. We placed our left palms on his sigil, rang a bell, and thanked him. Following this, we stepped over to the gateway tree, and asked it’s permission to send a tether through it, to the elsewhere, to be picked up later. My husband had tied these little bows out of some kind of corn husk a week earlier, and we used that as the tether point. Walking through it, and around it, we placed the tiny bow in the elsewhere, rang the bell, and thanked the tree. It was a very emotional experience, in that way you cry and think that the release is good, but can never be quite sure about it.
Once we got to the West Coast, we walked up the little mountain nearby that houses our two homebound trees. At our home-gateway-tree, I again opened my prayer book, and placed my palm on the sigil representing it, as my husband played his second small bow around its base. We thanked the tree. On our way down, we visited our other Tree-Friend, said hi, said we missed it. Then we went home. The point of this ritual was to draw a line: between my husband’s aunt’s farm, to the trees nearby, to the gate tree on the east coast, to the elsewhere, to the gate tree on the west coast, to the trees nearby our house, to our apartment. When we are missing home, when we are missing the feeling of being home, or of accomplishing the things we set out to do when we go home, emotional energy can transmit back and forth between these two poles: between one home and another.
Rituals are interesting because they are performance art, and performance art is interesting because it is ritual. Ritual is performance art for a different kind of audience: either the audience of all your fragmented selves that live inside each one of us, or an audience of one other person that you intimately cast the sorcery with, or an audience of spirits who exist, most of the time, just beyond our comprehension. I am a musician myself, and performing gives me validation of my peers in a social, public way: which is a feeling that I can’t get in many other situations. However, during covid times, when everything is a bit harder, that feeling is harder to get. Music gigs have mostly been cancelled, gatherings in many places are either ill-advised or against the law, and that makes that kind of emotional release difficult to attain. However, what *about* the audience within? The audience without that we barely see? Can they or we not provide that kind of energy to us when we need it most?
If you would like to play a gameboy game I made while I was away, feel free to head over here: The Lightning Over Pear Acre Road. It exists within a fictionalized, fantasy version of the Llama Farm that we were staying in over the summer. You can either play it in the web browser, or in a gameboy emulator.
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