Bringing olden ways to modern days,
For Wiccans,
Witches,
Pagans,
And all who honor a nature-based path.
This is Desert Magic with Crow Moon.
Merry Meet,
And welcome once again to another episode of Desert Magic.
Coming to you from the beautiful and magical desert of southern Arizona,
My name is Crow Moon,
And I'm your host.
There are so many things that I look forward to in the month of October that it would be beyond challenging for me to list all of them.
But if I were to make such a list and categorize it so that there was a top ten tier,
Ranking high would be visiting one of the local pumpkin stands that is close to where I live.
This is more than just a place where one goes to purchase just a few pumpkins and return home as quickly as possible.
The pumpkin stand is an experience,
And basically an event.
I could go on and on for hours about that alone,
But I will not.
I'll just say that it's probably one of the few places where I go shopping that I feel as though I might actually lose control of my spending.
This is due,
In part,
To my love of pumpkins,
But also because of the positive energy and magic of that place.
Just as I gather the pumpkins I need,
And so many others that I just want,
There's always one more that jumps out at me before I can get up to the register.
Last year,
One such pumpkin was a rather small one,
Probably of the Jack Belittle variety,
And this particular pumpkin was purple.
Not a deep purple,
But purple enough to call it purple.
No surprise,
It came home with me.
One could easily make the case that my level of pumpkin purchasing each year is on the excessive side.
Having said that,
I do use every one of them beyond just for decorations,
And in doing so,
I,
Over the course of a month,
Remove and dry the seeds from each of them.
Most of the seeds I roast and eat,
And of those,
There are some that I share with my bird friends.
Some go into a jar for my magical workings throughout the year.
So last year,
When it came to the purple pumpkin,
I,
Of course,
Saved the seeds.
And as I was drying those seeds,
All I could think about was the uniqueness of that pumpkin.
So I decided that I was going to plant a few of them in my garden to see if they might actually grow well.
I did so the following March,
And lo and behold,
Each one of them began to spring up.
I garden each year,
But I've never grown pumpkins before,
So I am certainly not an authority on raising them.
But,
From the looks of things alone,
It appears that I am soon to be overrun with purple pumpkins.
My point in sharing this,
Beyond the fact that I just enjoy telling stories,
Is that as soon as I saw the purple pumpkins beginning to grow,
The first place my mind went to was the wheel of the year.
When I first started learning about Wicca,
It was my discovery of the great wheel that flipped the switch for me.
It was as if,
For the first time in my existence,
I had an explanation for everything that I had sensed,
Felt,
And known my entire life.
The wheel demystified everything for me,
And because of the great wheel,
I was able to see time in a non-linear perspective.
I finally understood that life never ends,
But rather continues on.
The purple pumpkin I brought home with me in October is no longer sitting on my kitchen table,
But it is still very much alive.
It lives just a few feet away from its former position,
Now growing so prolifically that I am in need of a trellis.
What I perhaps enjoy most about the wheel of the year is that it is tangible,
Relatable,
And accurate.
It is undeniable.
It is,
In and of itself,
A book of wisdom,
One which demonstrates its lessons without requiring interpretation.
One such lesson I ponder each year as I'm in the process of drying mounds of pumpkin seeds.
Even the smallest pumpkin contains a very large amount of seeds.
If you've ever gathered seeds from a pumpkin,
Or any fruit or vegetable,
You've likely noticed this and have,
At least for a short moment,
Had your attention called to the fact that life is designed to continue on.
This concept is much easier for us to accept when it comes to seeds,
Not so much when it comes to humankind.
But if we take any sort of emotional connections out of the mix,
We will eventually realize that there is fundamentally no difference.
Life never ends.
And even though we perceive some things to fade away,
They are never gone forever.
Life never ends.
The wheel of the year was the catalyst for my understanding of this,
But its message took hold even more firmly with me once I began raising a small garden.
We can read or watch videos online about the magic of growing something from seeds,
But it's not until we actually put this into practice ourselves that we are able to fully grasp this.
The wheel of the year is tangible.
Even if you're only able to do so with a plastic cup placed beside a window,
Grow something.
Grow something and reconnect with the childhood enthusiasm we felt during a third-grade science project that has become all but forgotten through adulting.
The great wheel was speaking to us then just as it is speaking to us now,
And its message for us has not changed.
In this way,
The wheel of the year is very much relatable.
The wheel of the year is also accurate.
Perhaps an even better word would be reliable or dependable.
The great wheel continues to turn each year,
With or without intervention,
And without seeking permission.
It's not designed to stop,
Nor is it even capable of doing so.
When plants are reborn,
So to speak,
Each year from seeds,
It is a natural occurrence,
Having nothing to do with merit.
In the context of more mainstream spiritualities,
This might be viewed as the plant's afterlife,
And if it happens to sprout up in a place that might be considered to be prime real estate,
It is not because of a supreme being assigning it to that place based on its virtue or worth or anything.
It sprouts up simply because this is the natural progression of things.
In this context,
It might be accurate to also describe the wheel of the year as fair,
Or at least unbiased.
I think for many,
This is probably a great source of comfort,
If not relief.
It is not at all uncommon for those of us who live in the desert to see a cactus spring forth from a rock formation in a location that is by all ways of conventional thinking not optimal.
Life is,
By design,
Ongoing.
Reincarnation is not at all a new concept.
Many spiritualities have,
Since the beginning of time,
Acknowledged that life never truly ends.
In fact,
Positions against the idea of reincarnation are relatively new in the grand scheme of things,
Looking at the history of the world as a whole.
As the new religion began to expand throughout the world,
The natural continuance of life became defined as basically the afterlife,
In which one is,
After their current life,
Assigned to a place to spend all of eternity based upon their ability or inability to believe something and or their actions.
Nature and the great wheel prove to us that this is simply not the case.
It is contrary to what we see all around us,
What continues to go on all around us.
All around us each day,
We see not only what is,
But what is yet to come.
Yet,
To many who found Wicca after having been raised to think otherwise,
This concept can be quite challenging.
I wish that I had awakened to this long before I actually did,
But now that my awareness is where it needed to be all along,
I am able to recognize that there are purple pumpkins everywhere.
And although its color is atypical,
The message of the purple pumpkin is a story of that which is very naturally occurring.
If you have no interest at all in growing anything from seeds,
At the very least,
I invite you to take a mindful pause the next time you cut into a summer melon or a pumpkin in autumn.
As you do so,
And you observe the massive amount of seeds it contains,
Take joy in the realization that life is unending.
Until next time,
The crow flies from me to thee,
To send the message,
Blessed be.
