Ukranian/Romanian beeswax healing ritual and folklore.

Don’t you just love it when those unexpected things happen that feel just right, that are so perfect you know in your bones that there could have been no other way?

About a month ago an unexpected package came in the post marked from my grandmother who lives in Toronto. As I tore into the large envelope I hoped with all my heart that it was what I have been wanting for years now.

The package was full of photos, letters, and information about the Romanian/Ukrainian and Irish family on my fathers side.

When I was a little girl I had the great fortune to meet my great grandfather, a Ukrainian man who immigrated from Romania in the 1900′s to Canada. He met my Irish grandmother and together they had two children.

The story does not end there though, because you see my grandmother was married to another man when she met him, a Mason with whom she already had two sons with. It may sound all very romantic, but the letters show a whole real side to the story that I had never heard before, and which made me cry.

In the photo above, {the one with the two woman standing in a garden} you can see my great grandmother and her sister {Paraska and Bella Cetuchuk}, woman who have both now taken their place of honor as my ancestors.

My great grandmother{the older of the two women} if I look closely, shares an essence with my father, I can see it in her face, the way she holds her jaw and in her eyes. I see these things in myself as well and this makes me feel close to her.

This is a great comfort to me as I have been researching and longing to know more about my family for as long as I can remember. This intensified when I began a shamanic apprenticeship in 2007 and really started working with the spirits and my ancestors.

When I first began beekeeping my shamanic journeys were full of messages and information about how the women in my family kept bees in the walls of their homes and secret information about how they used the honey as medicine and for fertility.

Later as I started to dig and do research I realized that this was in fact what  was done in the past, and somehow this seemed to validate what I was experiencing with my bees and the information that I was being given shamanically. It helped me to carry on even-though beekeeping can be intense and tricky in the city.

Several months ago I wrote about the beekeepers task of refining any beeswax they may have gathered in the summer, and so this is what I began to do this past fall, making sure that my shamanic connection to the bees was there and listening to what I was being told to do with the wax.

And then once again it happened, as I was doing some research on the internet a link to an article that turned out to be a book that I was able to order appeared called The Word and Wax.

A Medical Folk Ritual Among Ukrainians in Alberta. Which is a book that explores medical folk ritual of wax pouring used by immigrants of the Ukrainian community in Alberta to drive away fear and curing minor ailments. “The ceremony is of the magico-religious and oral-incantational genre of folk medicine.”

This intrigued me right away  because of my work with beekeeping and beeswax, and I knew that I wanted to read and learn how to do this form of healing and divination.

Shortly after that another remarkable thing happened, knowing that I would need an enamel pot to melt the wax in I started looking into where I would buy one specially for this work, and of course low and behold as I was moving one of my friends I spied a white enamel pot at the bottom of a giveaway box.

When I pulled it out and asked her if I could have it, she got a bit misty eyed and said that she would love for me to have it since she was reluctant to part with it knowing it was a good pot but not having the room for it in her new home.

Later that night I pulled out my new pot and turned it over, I saw that on the bottom it read “Made in Romania” which told me that this was exactly the same kind of pots that they would have used, and now I owned one!

Knowing what I know about messing around with incantations and spirits I decided to take it easy the first time I tried out, calling on my guides to keep me safe and asking for any information I might need from my ancestors who knew about this tradition. I also realized after speaking to my shamanic teacher  that pulling fears out of people sounded quite a lot like shamanic extraction and this work would need to be taken seriously, and done properly.

The divination part of working with the wax, I found interesting because the practitioner pours the wax into a bowl of cool water over the persons head and then reads the bumps that form on the underside of the wax, much like tea leaf readings. I found this to be very intuitive, informative and fun, although I have recently come to realize that any kind of divination{Tarot, Runes etc..} requires a safe spirit that you know to do the work, otherwise you are essentially inviting anything in.

The Romanian’s believed in a ‘lower’ mythology (that was older in origin than the pagan belief in ‘higher’ gods), which involved ancestral-clan images and an animistic world view that populated how they understood nature with spirits. This tradition managed to survive until recent times. Water, fire, and eggs were held in the highest esteem by Ukrainian sorcerers as was lightning and thunder storms.

What I found particularly interesting was all the names they have for shamans, witches and sorcerers, there must have been close to 50 that I counted in my book and then more I found on-line, my favorite was the word pasichnyk which means bee-keeper, who protects bees.

Because my work with the bees has always been both spiritual and environmental in nature I am always interested in aspects of how beekeeping played out in myth and folklore, there is a wealth of information here and I am already delving into the Irish history and folklore surrounding beekeepers from this area of the world as well.

For now though I am preparing for a day of making mead with my dear friend Sarah Witch of Forest Grove. I shall post photos about our day and the story here as well as we have great plans for magic and mischief while making our mead.

To end my post I will leave a few beautiful photos of beehives in Romania I found on-line…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spring gardening and another giveaway!

This spring has brought with it a flurry of creating, and preparing for the immense gardening plans I have, and my new pre-occupation with Biodynamic beekeeping, gardening and mead making!

This all came about after I finally had a goodly amount of time to spend with one of dear friends who is now Biodynamic farming that I realized how in keeping Biodynmic rhythms are working with the land and bees to my own philosophy. It did not hurt that her descriptions of it sounded like mostly making large batches of witches potions during the full moon to pour into the garden either!

Below is my spring offering/giveaway, the colors are full of rich greens which reminds me of spring.  The piece is is all cryscolla and turquoise, and will be shipped anywhere in the world to whomever wins it!

The rules are super easy, you can either leave a comment below, or pop on over to my facebook page and hit the “Like” button of this photo, leave a comment or “share” the photo, spread the word far and wide, that I am having a giveaway and everyone can play!

 

 

Priestessing life

Recently I was talking to a good friend about an exciting project I am working on, and what it means to be a priestess, she wondered how it translates into my everyday life, which I thought was a great question, and I thought  about it long after the conversation was over…..

Since my life is dedicated to the divine feminine, {which also includes a balancing act with the divine male} priestessing is what I do everyday. As a woman I  am very aware that I carry the divine essence of  woman inside me at all times and this spills out into everything I do as a mother, wife, artist, priestess etc…

This constant inner knowing has not been something that has come easy for me, because  although I knew it in my head for a long time, it was through many tough life lessons that I was finally able to come to an inner heart centered understanding of what truly embodying, and being true to myself is all about, and this in turn enables me to embody the divine feminine.

Recently I posted a quote over at our Moon Mysteries Facebook Page that got great responses from woman, and I would like to share it again here because it seems to sum up the essence of what we as women all carry within us, the essence of the divine feminine:

“Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever have form in her ovaries when she is a four-month-old fetus. This means that the sacred egg that developed into the person you are now, formed in your mother’s ovary when she was growing in the womb of her mother. Each of us, male and female, spent five months in the womb of our grandmother, rocking to the pulse of our grandmother’s blood. And our mother spent five months rocking to the pulse of her grandmother’s blood, and her mother pulsed to the beat of her grandmother’s blood. Back through the pulse of all the mothers and all the grandmothers, through the beat of the blood that we all share, this sound can return us to the pre-conscious state, to the inner structure of the mind, to the power and the source of who and what we actually are: the pulsing field of all consciousness existing everywhere, within everything, beyond past, present, or future.” By Layne Redmond

As an artist I see everything I do within my family as an opportunity to be creative, from making dinner and baking, to setting up my home in as many creative and beautiful ways as possible.  I am aware that my daughter and son are watching me and learn as much from what I do not say, as from what I tell them with words. This is part of that divine pulse that we all feel and partly, I am sure why I am so  called to make drums!

This is also where motherhood as a spiritual practice becomes just as important as my shamanic work and dedications to the spirit world.

I have learned a valuable lesson over the years as a shamanic witch, and that is how important my family is to my spirit work. For you see family grounds me deeply and keeps me here, as my tendencies are to drift over the hedge and into other worlds, but doing this too much, for too long is unhealthy and can make a person crazy faster then the wink of an eye.

I find that the deeper and deeper I go into my spirit work, the more it can’t help but show up here, in my sacred jewelry and in my priestess work, perhaps those of you who have read a post or two here over the years have noticed, or wondered just how deep my spirit work goes?

This has been something that I have kept very private for well over a decade, but now I am being asked to share and to speak more openly about. So it is with great care, and a little bit of excitement in my belly that you may have noticed a few things beginning to change in my posts and offerings.

In the meantime, here in Vancouver the rain continues on just as the spring makes it’s own quiet way into the buds on the trees and the growing daffodils of which a small clump popped unexpectedly up right in front of my outdoor altar/shrine to my complete surprise and delight!

The kids are home for March break and we have been spending long quiet days reading, staying up late, baking, and drinking tea, and crafting spring themed things for the Equinox tomorrow!

The best of  last week was a birthday gift that one of my dearest friends gave me, which was a gift certificate to a local fabric shop that also has sewing lessons, so Zahra and I have been learning how to sew! Our first mission was to make her the cutest little skirt, made from the best fabric with Amanata mushrooms all over it! Zahra chose it herself to my complete delight!

You see I have wanted to not only be able to sew things for myself, but I have been dreaming of all the cute things I could sew my kids, unfortunately the stage when they were tiny and would allow me to dress them in whatever my heart desired has passed, but my other dream was to teach them how to sew for themselves, Zubin seems only mildly interested because he can’t imagine what he could sew for himself that would be cool.

Zahra on the other hand already has at least 10 projects in mind for herself, and it is my secret hope that she will grow into one of those teenagers that makes herself awesome clothing that you just can’t get at at a store.

*sigh* Have I said it enough that letting go is the biggest part of parenting! I have to laugh at myself here, because it is so easy to forget that it is in the simple moments, the quiet ones that no one sees that true magic happens, and letting go is so hard, but when I remember to do it, when I remember that the single biggest part of the motherhood journey is letting go, I not only am able to do it with my kids, but also in my life and this is, in it’s most humble form, the life of a modern day priestess.