Samhain

My niece, Eliza Blair Reid, was born on Halloween night 2015 and named after my mother, Mary Elizabeth Morris Reid. I popped a bottle of champagne, lit a candle, and drew a card for her on her first night earthside. 

The Six of Cups is an exuberant expression of life force and love. In the Motherpeace image, seahorses crest a wave, their riders saluting, snakes rising from chalices in a spiral of kundalini energy. It is a card about freedom from emotional limitations and oppressive structures. It is a card about alchemical joy and happiness - a true blessing for my baby niece. I receive it like a lightning bolt. The energy feels wild and new and free from the heaviness of my ancestral lineage. I bow in gratitude that I get to be fairy godmother to this child and learn from this new life. 

The next day, on the Day of the Dead, I took my mother's basket and went on a walk around my neighborhood to gather mugwort. Mugwort is a wild and powerful plant ally that thrives on the edges and in forgotten places. She is one of my primary familiars and teachers in the plant realm. Mugwort is known for being one of the first plants to appear in areas that have been stripped, poisoned, torn apart or otherwise cleared of all life. She is like, ha ha, nice try humans, the goddess cannot be kept down. Mugwort grows from runners that form dense underground mats, similar to fungi, so it is nearly impossible to completely eradicate it from any area. Mugwort dances in vacant lots and construction zones in the city, popping up through cracks in the sidewalk and adorning crumbling walls with her buoyant, bushy, silvery stalks. Mugwort is a weed, meaning she is self-propogating and common. Her latin name is Artemis vulgaris. Artemis is the Amazonian Moon-goddess, called both the Mother of All Creatures, the Virgin, and the Huntress. She embodies the full spectrum of femininity in her ability to bring both life and death, and her sexuality a nurturer and a killer, and embodies the original meaning of the word virgin as "unto herself." Vulgaris is the Latin word for common - as Dori Midnight points out, that's common as in "of the people" not common as in "normative." Mugwort was first introduced to me by my dear friend Lindsay, who successfully cultivated a patch in her Bronx backyard several years ago. This is worth mentioning because Mugwort is notoriously difficult to cultivate, preferring in her wildness to go where she pleases. But Lindsay is a wild woman herself, and she graciously gave over much of her backyard to wildness, so the mugwort did thrive.