Happy Solstice

Whether you are celebrating the summer or winter solstice, I hope you all have a wonderful day doing so!

My Beltane

For Beltane this year I had no idea how to celebrate it, normally I have these things planned out in advance but with all that had gone on within these couple of months I didn't really have time to plan. So in the end I stopped trying to plan and see how it all went on the day. Well it turns out it actually went really well and proved to myself that I should be trusting myself more so than I usually do.

As it is the end of the dark half of year and the light part is finally here, with the sun now shinning even more I thought it was about time I set two of my deities asleep/meditate/re-energise them selves for the next dark half of the year. And actually wake up my other two deities. (This all might sound strange but I will talk about this in another post).
So before I lit two candles which I set for my "lighter" Gods, I spoke out loud to The Cailleach and Nodens. Then as I lit the candles I again spoke out loud welcoming back Aine and Lir. After I done this I burned some incense which I made for them two and then went on to have a little talk with them.

On the afternoon of that day, me and my partner went to a couples house to see a puppy, we have been wanting a puppy for a long time and finding a house seemed the right time to get one. We were only going to see if we liked the puppy and if the puppy liked us. As soon as we saw him we knew he was for us. He is a Kelpy x Labrador, 7 weeks old and is the biggest one out of them all. We already knew what to call him, Merlin.

Imbolc

As Imbolc is about to be arriving soon, I thought I would try to do something more than a walk this year. Each festival I normally just go for a walk and look at my surroundings, see what is changing while giving respect and honouring everything near by. But this year I felt like I should get involved at lot more, so I decided to make some Imbolc oil - this can be used to anoint the candle you wish to use before lightening it, or on your temples before meditating or just simply putting a little bit of it in the oil burner.
I normally make incense for the festivals, but as I have so much incense sticks and little herbs to use I thought this time to use the oil and see what my outcome is after this festival.


I don't own that many oils either at the moment so I basically had to do with what I had. So it was basically, Rosemary, chamomile, mandarin and rose. I wanted to add healing, purification, welcoming back the sun as well as a little bit of love into the oil.
Maybe the oils are not what you expect to smell as Imbolc, but I don't really care. To me it smells uplifting, refreshing and clean, which is pretty much what I wanted for this festival - so I am pretty damn proud to manage to make an oil with the intentions I had in mind.

I think I may be sticking to my usual walk and maybe a meditation or just standing still listening to what the land around me has to say.