Ecstatic Agendas

After a fat handful of seasons at the foot of the old volcano, my household has pulled roots and migrated slightly southward. The new home lies closer to a smallish riparian system and so, once again, we are river people, if only ever so slightly.

The home provides us more canopy cover than the old – an important consideration in these hot dry times. The land has been tended well and boasts a great variety of flora. I am thankful for the opportunity to assume stewardship and as I sit looking out the window at a flowy floral vine my eye is drawn to a host of bees sampling the heady nectar therein. 

The first time I came here, I brought a bottle of spring water. I stood at the threshold of the property. I splashed a bit on the walkway and over the plants at the gate. I spoke softly to the land, the growing things, the spirits of past, present and future, and announced my intention to dwell here. I requested presence of mind, deftness and humility in my tilling and harvesting. I prayed to that which dwells: that I be accepted as a peer, a caretaker, and a student of the place.

The home we are leaving was smaller, more sub/urbanized, and often necessitated the shrinking of ideas to fit the space. Nonetheless it cradled me as I grew immensely in fruitful and unexpected ways. It provided shelter during the covid pandemic as well as my own personal journey through injury, incapacitation, and renewal. In the rooms and yard space I cultivated a spiritual practice that ferried me from the ruins of youth into a sense of maturity as an artisan and occultist.

Likewise, I believe my presence there over seven years benefited the ecosystem of birds, mammals, pollinators, flowers, weeds, and other rooting things both embodied and ethereal. I hope now, as we pass the property on to the next human inhabitants, that this conscientious engagement with locus will continue to flourish and mutate, and that our humble and sometimes clumsy working of the site will inspire those people, whoever they are, to shape it with love and intentionality.

The processes of change are unceasing. Those things we treasure, trade, gift or cast aside become the pattern of a life’s outline. When the time finally came to begin moving into the new house, I started with my statuette of Thoth (originally crafted three-ish years ago for use in the Astrapsoukos Spell); I held it before me as I entered, facing forward, and placed it in the home before all else. Thoth is of the moon and its changeability. He is also of the underworld, and aids the sungod on his night journey. He is again god of scribes, magic, medicine, and often “Lord of Time”, within which we all are compelled to flow. 

The lesson he emphasizes tonight is to speak with grace and move with intention through your relationships, weaving the pattern of your life with care and clarity, that it may be a strong thread that honors the tapestry as a whole.

Gods Bless us, every one.

Jason Triefenbach, HFHR-MSGPF

Jason Triefenbach is an artist, writer, and non-denominational minister with a garden and a lifelong interest in lurking around the Occult/ Paranormal shelves in bookstores worldwide. As Sun Duel they record and sometimes perform music with a variety of friends and loved ones. Jason has been self-publishing zines and pamphlets since the early 1990s, beginning with a sloppy collage broadsheet Licking the Toe Jam, and culminating thus far in the limited edition perfect-bound paperback Barbarous Tongues: a Journal of Arts and Esoterica.