A loving and enchanting seamstress created a beautiful wedding dress just for me. Though I am already married, I was going to have another wedding ceremony. This time I wanted a dress that was uniquely mine. This seamstress was full of love and light for me. I can still see her face when she handed me the box with my gown. Her face glowed, and she told me how beautiful I was and how she admired me.

When I opened the box and saw the gown I began to cry. In its physicality I could feel her love for me. I saw that it was an ivory ball gown overlaid with delicate black lace. (As I reflect on it now, I remember that my first vision of Lady Hildegarde was in an ivory gown overlaid with delicate black lace, which makes its potential meaning all the more complicated and powerful)

I have had trouble sleeping lately. The night before last I woke up at 2 a.m. and never went back to sleep. I felt so lost and anxious. When I finally did sleep I awoke with a sense of great languor I rarely feel. I longed to have that feeling again. So yesterday I wrote a page in my journal about having a sleeping angel, someone who would guide me to a dreamlike bower where I could have the refreshing sleep of Beauty.

So when I slept, I had this dream, and when I woke, I caught the barest tail end glimpse of what "sleep" is. It was like I woke up before "sleep" had fled, and for a moment I caught the under workings of sleep. I saw in those few greatly impacting moments that sleep is much more than rest of the body. It is essential to our minds, it is where a higher power works in our minds and "resets" us to where we should be. In that moment I caught the feeling of my yesterday's self fading away, and I felt appalled by how much of "myself" had slipped away in one day, how my anxieties had corrupted me into this erroneous being.

I actually woke up at 2 a.m. again, but I was able to go back to sleep after that realization, because even though the feeling had been so intense, I truly felt and trusted in the healing power of sleep to restore me.

It was my attempt to stay awake and finish reading Moon Magic tonight, but I find I am really tired, and my mind is enough furnished, if not overly so, with enough concepts and questions as to make me feel really restless and unable to intake more.

I recognize the innate truth in this book. I have lately felt that I could not intake any of the things I have been reading lately if I had not been learning Zen Buddhism additionally. I feel like that practice enables me to recognize the truth of other practices on an unthinking level that is at the heart of spiritual work.

I have been just sitting here for what seems like hours thinking things through. The thing I reached in the book today was "the greater magic," the working on the self that is otherwise known as psychology. I found out that Dion Fortune was herself a psychologist Witches must face their innermost darkness in order to obtain a higher degree. And an alleged symbology of the upside-down pentagram is the pendant of the second-degree witch who is facing the darkness within himself.

At my most cynical moments I have faltered at myself in this magickal version of a Twelve Step Program. But I started reading Aleister Crowley's High Magick's Aid and experienced similar feelings as in my study of the Qabalah. He asserts what can be found in magickal study is exactly that which I seek, an understanding of the human life. I find myself going further and further down this path. I'm reluctant, because I know at some point I'm going to look behind me and all traces of what was before will be gone, and here will be no shore I will be able to return to, I will only be able reach the far shore, or none at all. This is because of the brevity of life. For what I have to learn to gain full understanding of this path, I will have to commit myself to it.

This path I have discovered seemingly so inadvertently is so different than the path I sought in paganism. I am already so far down it I can barely glimpse the promises that drew me into witchcraft. Dryads with bark-colored hair beneath a power-bestowing moon. The ability to conjure, raise energy and work lovingly with nature. Flowers in the hair, herbs in the pot, a cottage full of cats. This is the life of the witch.

Maybe the life of the natural witch. Or the self-realized witch. But I am not a witch. I have had successes, and I yearn for that path. I believe it is a path for those with natural abilities, however, and I have learned pretty quickly in my stumblings that I am not instinctive in that way, and that I am reaching for that same goal through long and exhaustive intellectual study.

I wish I could practice natural magick, I wish I could make beautiful things, but like the ball of yarn I untangled I find here is a whole mess in front of me, and I can't practice natural magick with an aberrant nature.

So I follow this sorcery version of a Twelve Step Program. I am angry with it tonight, that is true. I am tired of my own flaws and lack of understanding, unconditional love and giving.

Our world calls a "witch" the opposite of what that word means to me. A "witch" is a spiritual human being who works through a loving and compassionate nature to tip the scales toward good, in deeds great and small, using mystical arts. And I am beginning to agree with Crowley's assertion that there is no real difference between science and magick except the obvious connotations the terms provoke in our minds. I could just as easily have said "science" as I said "mystical arts."

I document the evidence of my successful work as benevolent gifts from a higher Power, a "foretaste of the feast to come" to completely mangle Scripture, as I may have abilities and accomplish work and feel regularly that I am entitled to approach a higher Power once I have made good in my journey to understand my life and my self.

"every individual is essentially sufficient to himself. But he is unsatisfactory to himself until he has established himself in his right relation with the Universe."

I have five months left living in the card of Death. Wow! When you put it that way, that is almost half a year.

I am glad, since I have only had a couple of months to meditate on this card. I can't believe I haven't written here in so long, because in the past couple of weeks, with so much time to myself, my faith and knowledge have grown so much. Every day I become more aware of what it means to walk in the Light and the Goddess.

After Death, on my birthday, I will be living in the Empress. I was overwhelmed to learn this at first, a couple of months ago. But I have learned so much on all of my various paths of research, in fairy tales, Tarot, and the Qabalah, that I understand much better what it means to be the Empress. It means to truly assume the form of the Mother, but it's not about perfection. It's about loving others but also giving them their room and their space. This is a lesson that is sacred to me, because that is the very thing I dislike about "being a mother," but even the ancients knew about this pitfall. I am trying to practice it, even as I live in Death.

I don't feel there is much to describe about the card of Death. It's very self-explanatory. I feel I've been "saying goodbye" for a while now to people, holds over me, attitudes and vices. Admittedly it is only when I see what I can gain by letting go that I do actually let go. I think this is the secret though. Because deep in my heart I want to let go of the bad things, but without a light to seek, I cannot really do it.

Sometimes I am still overwhelmed by loneliness, despair and feelings of worthlessness. I am learning to embrace that hollow, that void. If I can't drink tea, I imagine the taste of tea, and remember the hollow within it, which is like life's hollow. I remind myself that hollow is the space through which I grow into Beauty and into the Empress. And that's not just idle sentimentalism. I experience that transformation. That darkness is like the darkness of the ground in which a seed grows. It is literally only hours or days until I find myself pushing out of that darkness and experience a world of new light. Instead of losing myself in my vices, I have found something, Faith, a word that used to make my skin crawl.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude at what the Goddess gives me when I embrace the hollow. When I consider that, the way that my life's events unfold, specifically designed to challenge me into making my spirit better, and the specific and completely not coincidental guidance I receive through Tarot, I know I have direct connections to a Divine Spirit that loves me.

There are times when that doesn't mean shit to me. Please don't misunderstand my flowery words. In those darkest times, I turn to fairy tales and childhood literature, and beautiful artwork, when nothing else will reach my craven spirit.

Across my mind flash glimpses of my green Lutheran hymnal with the gold all rubbed off. I still have it. It didn't go anywhere. My silver cross on a heavy chain that I once wore every day and loved so dearly. My grandparents. My grandfather.

A cold wind blows outside. It feels so mindless and unapologetic, almost naturalistic really. I feel, the same cold wind is going to blow on me whether I conform to the Lutheran, or Christian ways, or if I stand quite lonely in my newer beliefs. It's the same cold wind. I could be like what I begin to feel like my ancestors were like. I believe what they did was not to be religious at all and avoid the issue. That's another option as well. I don't like that option though because it feels like a lie.

On one side there is the Lutheran tract. It's cold, methodical, intellectual. Not embarrassing, ostentatious. It's like a brand I can wear when assaulted by witnessers. I can flash the cross and say it's okay, I'm one of you. And phew, avoid that whole spiel.

Then the other side is to be completely unreligious and avoidant. Just decide, consciously or no, that my mind wasn't made for religious study, and move on through life as best as I can.

Sometimes either of these paths fits me like a very comfortable shoe.

But right now, thinking of either one makes my heart bleed. It literally causes me physical pain.

I want to hurl myself into the cold existential wind that grows colder by the moment, face bitter winter head-on and say, teach me yourself. You are the void, the emptiness. You are everything. Save me.

I realize what gave me pain was last weekend seeing the illuminated manuscripts and Catholic paintings in the Meadows Museum. I had flashes of memory about what it felt like to be a believing Christian, how warm and wonderful to have a savior, and that relationship with Christ, that feeling of adoration. I guess enough glimpses of the reality behind Christianity this week put hairline cracks into that forming dream, and it broke, and it actually hurt me. I realized it's a lie. Signing on to that set of beliefs doesn't work spiritually or intellectually for me. I will always have to ignore something.

So I feel what I want to embrace right now is what's in nature right now. I want to embrace the cold, the loneliness. I don't want make-believe. I want to worship and learn from earth. Earth is truly my deity, and I know that by experiencing the cold and the void that paradoxically I am embracing my true guide, my teacher.

Lately thoughts of or workings with individual deities, spirit guides, or guardian angels have completely fled. It's been quite monotheistic for me, I think I need to be simple now as I work through this challenging season and remain true to my beliefs, my deity and teacher, the earth.

Want to record some of my thoughts about eating while on my mind.

Sitting here taking notes on the qualities of different animals, seeing an animal as sacred prevents me from being able to eat it. I don't feel that I can learn from it if I'm eating it.

Similarly I meditate on the qualities of different plants, see them as sacred, since I have experienced eating as an act of consuming spiritual energy, like putting my own energy into food, it has changed my aversion to eating certain things because I want to experience their spiritual nature.

This said I feel the salmon is a spiritual being, and I'm not sure how I feel about eating them.

Last night I dreamed that she had come back to life from the dead, and I was startled and angry, and I started saying, shouting, everything I had always wanted to say, unloading a barrage of complaint onto her, and onto them. It seemed like it helped something. I don't know why I would dream about that. I put up a wall to it long ago, and in my waking state I feel only coldness about it.

I have been re-reading The Wiccan Way. I feel like coming back to the first book I read, so approachable, and while it has so much less detail than other books, I am able to better understand the details that are there. I don't have any of the other items I need to make an appropriate altar, just an athame. You know, I really should go to an antique store and look for things. I just don't like buying new things anymore.