I caught up with the new moon tonight. I know it was a couple days ago, that she is now a thin sliver in the sky. I didn’t see her tonight, but Venus was sharp, white, pure, like my body felt after swimming in Lake Washington today, from the beach to the piling, to the other piling, to the beach. Not that far, but far enough to feel the light and water enter my body.
Today, Forest is seven years old.
Seven years ago he was born in a hell-for-leather race to the operating room. Turns out that in this, I am like my own mother. Speed labor. I went from 0 to 2,000 in twenty minutes. They almost weren’t fast enough. He had the cord wrapped around his neck three times.
Seven years is a quarter of the orbit of Saturn. This is the origin of the phrase “the seven year itch,” according to astrologer Caroline Casey, who says that we can think of every seven years as a time to get a little bigger, come more into our own. That we need to be “repotted.”
Forest’s seventh year on earth.
My seventh year as his mom.
I think today was the best birthday yet.
It was a lose track of time day, drenched in sun and water, easy and loving and good.
And tonight, his dad came over and they built a Lord of the Rings lego set and I played music that I could hum and dance to and renewed my altars and swept out the old and waved sage smoke into every corner. They built the ruined tower of Weathertop, and I took out all the old flowers and old branches and old ways, especially the never enough time ways. That is the enemy of patience for me, that fear of time. It is the opposite of whole time, which we invoked at BC Witch Camp in 2012, when I met my love and when my world began to turn to the place I find myself now. The Fey suggested it. The fairies suggested Whole Time to us, the kind of time that is enough, is not split into pieces but is complete and can stretch and hold and live.
This is hard to remember when stuck in traffic on the way to work, or school. It is hard to believe sometimes.
But I felt it on that night, that blue moon in August of 2012, when we danced the spiral dance and sang to the heavens and called in time the healer, Whole Time, and then swam in the very very deep black lake while the stars glittered over and under and around us.
When the lego set was done, I found the section in Fellowship of the Ring about the “Attack on Weathertop” which was the name of the set. Forest wanted this as his bedtime story.
It’s kind of scary for bedtime, but I have become adept at abridging as I read, and I left out the part where, when Frodo puts on the ring, he can see through their black wrappings, and watches their skeletal hulks and gleaming swords and knives advance on him.
I left out the details. I explained that Frodo was wounded. Pierced as if by bitter cold.
2012 was the year I got divorced. Which was awesome for me. And best for Forest, in the long run. But it hurt him.
Frodo’s wound is the end of the chapter, but it is right before the part where Arwen comes and takes him to be healed, which seemed like a better send off to his dreams. So I told him that although Strider knows the magic of Kingsfoil and could keep Frodo from dying, he couldn’t heal him. But then Arwen comes, and she says that Frodo must go, he can only be healed by the magic of Rivendell. And as Forest leaned into me, I told him the magic flight of Frodo and Arwen, racing before the Nine, to the river, where Arwen turns and faces that darkness and calls the wild out of the river, and the Nine are swept to their doom.
Then, I went out into the garden.
Forest’s dad played a song on his guitar in Forest’s room and I went out into the garden to gather new branches, new greens for my altars.
I found myself in the thicket of the coastal silk tassel bush and snowberry. They are growing. They are glossy and green and the stems are so fresh they are almost liquid. They are bursting with life.
I leaned in, and in, and in. It was past twilight and I reached farther and farther in to cut at the juncture of shoot and branch. And the wind began to rise and all my skin tingled and I paused.
This is new. I never used to pause and let it in. I am a witch in full, now.
A sweet scent… roses, or the deep woods. My friend Luckey would call it a portal, this place I felt, behind leaf and under branch, a place in the dark green that I was half in and half out of and I felt the energy of the Fey there. If you have known them, you will never mistake it.
I paused and let it sink in, fill me with light and dark water. A gift? Oh…a blessing.
Choose one thing.
What? My book.. my new love…my son….
My book is an offering. My love… is already blessed.
My son. For him to know his own strength, and be rooted in it, and know how he is loved. For me to help him and hold him and for him to be whole in his new seven year size, fully arrived here.
Yes. That was right. On his seventh birthday.
My seventh birthday as his mother.