Rituals for the New Moon Tonight

On nights of the new moon, I like to go out to the woods, especially on a clear night.  I love to hike through the cool night air and listen to the crickets and the frogs and the owls.  The owls are usually silent, though.  I like when the sun is down but there's a bit of light and I can see the silhouettes of the bats.  I've already missed them tonight.

On tonight's walk, I will take with me a little black bag.  I have a little project I've been working on in it.  A little jar full of burial dirt, little critter bones, hair, bugs and earthy salt.  I see it as more than the sum of its parts.  I put work into gathering all those ingredients.  I charged them with my will.  They have great meaning to me.  And power, because I gave it to them, and because of some ancient forgotten tethers between this world and the others, life and death, waking and dreaming, the profane and the divine.  It's my little jar of death.

But at the same time, it's not all that.  It is a little glass jar of creepy gross things that I have no real business to possess.  Yet I do.  I will also have in my bag a little copper dish.  My conductive metal saucer that I use for to change profanity into divinity.

As for divination, I think I'll take the bag of little trinkets, of little found things.  Garbage until it became important to me.  I used to cast rune stones, but I don't really do that anymore.  I think better about my own things.  I know what the button means, and the smooth river pebble means, and the rabbit baculum means, and so on.  I can read into it and remember it better than the Nordic runes.

I will take this bag of things to a place in the woods behind my home where two overgrown trails cross.  I've been there many times and yet I always feel a little lost.  At this forgotten crossroads I reopen that shallow hole in the center.  It's familiar to be in this shadowy liminal space between here and there.  Almost dream like.

I'll look down into that dark, earthen hole, much like the one in the sky where the moon usually is.  I'll place my glass jar of death inside.  Then I cover it and pat down the soft earth, like a little grave.

Then, I'll set the copper dish of water atop it and fill it with water.  Maybe from the creek or I bring it from home if I have a mind to drink it.  Tonight I intend to bleed in it a little and look into it and see the black and empty sky reflected in it, like a little golden portal to the void.  And think about death and rot and the way things fall apart until my mind is empty.

I will cast my little trinkets on my black linen cloth and read their meaning by where they fall on my stitched white patterns.  I will lean back and stare into the darkling sky and feel like I'm being lost in smoke or fog.

I'm going to stay out there until just before the sky begins to lighten.  Then I am going to bottle the water, and dig up the jar and put them back into that black bag.  I'll take them home and squirrel them away where I know they won't see the sunlight.  Then I'll sleep through the morning.

The sun has gone down now, so I'm off.  I hope everyone else has a good night as well.