The Green Witch: Your Complete Guide to the Natural Magic of Herbs, Flowers, Essential Oils, and More - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2017

Make Your Home a Sacred Space
Embrace Your Own Power
Discovering the Green Witch

In the past, the hearth served as the heart of the home. It was where heat and light were created and food was prepared. Hearth magic, or hearthcraft, revolves around safety, nurturing, and protection. Most paths have a hearth and home aspect to them, but for the green witch, so much of her spiritual practice is focused on simple home-based folk practice that hearth magic figures prominently in her green practice.

Most people on the green witch path have a strong connection to their surroundings. They instinctively seek to create an environment that supports harmony, communication, and a natural flow of energy.

Your home itself—the space in which you live—can be easily overlooked as a tool in your developing spirituality. Your home is a place of strength for you, and a place to which you should be able to return in safety to recharge your batteries. If your home is disorganized and has jarring energy, you lack that base of strength from which you must operate. One of your sources of strength and energy is already cut off from you.

TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR HOME

How do you make your home a sacred space? Ultimately, it depends on you and the type of energy that best supports your daily life. Here are a few tips and tricks that will make your home the best place for a green witch to live. These tips will help you keep positive energy flowing through your home.

✵ Look at your décor. How you decorate your home says a lot about you. However, you become used to how things look and sometimes forget that you never got around to painting the landlord-white walls when you moved into your apartment or that the furniture is exactly where you put it when you were just trying to get things to fit. Look at your home with fresh and critical eyes. Do the colors of the walls still reflect who you are? What does the furniture say about you? Walk through each room. Are there places you have to struggle to get to? If you don’t want to go there because it’s too difficult (either physically or otherwise), then chances are good that the energy flow through that area gets dammed up or otherwise slowed down. Think about rearranging the positions of furniture, pictures, and knickknacks.

✵ Remove what you don’t use. If you aren’t using it, throw it out. Otherwise, it’s just occupying space and blocking energy. Sell it, pass it along to a friend, take it to a secondhand shop, or find another use for it somewhere else.

✵ Examine your iconography. Your paintings and photographs have a deep psychological effect on you. Take a look at the colors that dominate them, the people in them. How do they make you feel? Are they appropriate for the space they’re in? As much as you love your print of Munch’s The Scream, it may not be the best piece of art to hang in a place where you like to relax.

✵ Think about the purpose of each room in your home. When you decide what the theme or purpose of each room truly is, you can focus on removing the elements that disrupt the energy, and encourage the desired energy to remain. For example, if your living room holds your desk or home office, stores your home workout equipment, and is the repository for children’s toys, you can see that there’s a lot of conflicting energy there. None of it is bad; it’s just confused. Try to keep each room clearly set apart for its designated purpose, and you’ll find that the energy is a lot clearer. If a room serves a double purpose, keep things in their proper places.

✵ Keep it clean. Energy can seem dusty and muddy, the same way your physical home gets dirty. It’s also an unfortunate fact that energy turns stale and can go bad in an environment that isn’t physically clean. Housework isn’t exactly the most thrilling of pastimes, but it helps keep the energy of your home bright and smooth. Make sure everything has a place, and keep it there. Keep surfaces free of dust and clutter as best you can.

✵ Purify regularly. The spiritual equivalent of physical cleaning, purification is an excellent way to maintain a good energy vibe in your home. It’s also a good way to get rid of the bad feelings left over from an argument or the chaotic energy left after a party, and it removes the stray drifts of dead energy that pile up in corners or get trapped in badly laid-out rooms. You can find instructions on how to purify later in this chapter.

Sometimes we look around our homes and wonder how on earth we can make them a haven of tranquility and joy. Starting off with a good spring cleaning (even if it’s fall!) is always a good idea. If addressing your whole house at once is overwhelming, do it room by room. To begin, you can choose one room to serve as a spiritual sanctuary and refuge for yourself. You can also start from the heart of your home and work outward.

Your sanctuary doesn’t have to be solely devoted to you and your path; in fact, so few of us have that option that if you can pull it off, I bow to you. Most of us have to share space with members of our family and make do with carving out a little corner where we can. Even that little corner can be important for your spiritual health, however. Don’t underestimate the power of a chair covered with your favorite throw next to an end table set with a candle and a small potted plant, or a window seat with pillows covered in soft or textured fabrics in colors that soothe you. If it’s your space, you have a place where you can sit and close your eyes, draw that tranquility into your personal space, and find balance.

The heart of your home, on the other hand, can be easier to identify. Do people tend to end up in your kitchen when they come over? Does your family congregate in one specific room, even if another room was designed to be the family room? Where people gather is likely the true heart of your home. It’s not necessarily a tranquil space and usually sees a lot of comings and goings, a lot of communication and sharing. It’s the place everyone wants to be. Starting your home purification here benefits everyone who uses the space.

PHYSICAL CLEANING, SPIRITUAL PURIFICATION

The green witch has a couple of tricks up her sleeve when it comes to maintaining a healthy, happy home environment. The first is enhancing physical cleaning products with a bit of natural magic. The second is understanding that the energy in a space has to be cleaned regularly, both physically and spiritually.

The simplest way to enhance your housecleaning products is to empower them. This means filling them with extra energy associated with a particular goal. It’s easy to do.

1. First hold the container of cleaning product in your hands, or hold your hands over it, and close your eyes.

2. Take three or four deep breaths to calm and balance yourself.

3. Think of the energy with which you wish to empower the product to help you attain your goal. For example, you could focus on happiness. Try to remember how you feel when you’re happy.

4. Now try to pour that feeling into the cleaning product. Visualize the feeling welling up from your heart and flowing down your arms and out through your hands; see the product absorbing that energy.

Now when you clean with it, you’ll be using the physical product to clean, but while cleaning you will also be filling the area with the energy with which the product was empowered. You can empower your cleaning supplies with more than one energy as long as those energies support one another and aren’t at cross-purposes. For example, you can empower a furniture polish with happiness, peace, and prosperity. For the best results, choose earth-friendly organic or fair trade cleaning products that carry no toxic ingredients.

You can do a general empowerment of your supplies, or you can think about what each one is for or what it contains, and code the empowerment that way. Chapter 5 lists correspondences associated with the scents and essences of your cleaning products. You can use these correspondences to energize your cleaning implements. For example, if your product is pine scented, empower it for protection or prosperity. If your window cleaner is scented with lemon, empower it for love and joy. If your dish detergent is scented with apple, empower it for health.

When you clean, you can further visualize the energy you are calling into the space. Visualizing while you clean also helps take away the boredom and resentment we associate with removing the dust and dirt that will just build up again anyway. Think of it as green witch maintenance of your personal space.

The second dimension to keeping your space clean and bright is purification. It’s important to clean the energy of your living space because the energy of an environment affects the energy of the people functioning within it. If you’ve ever walked into a room and felt odd for no obvious reason, then you’ve been affected by the energy present in that space. While it’s true that the physical state of cleanliness affects the energy of a room, you have to clean the existing energy of a room as well. Otherwise, the negative energy will pile up, just as dust collects on a bookshelf that you neglect to clean.

Purification can be done in several ways. A classic method is to sweep the negative energy away with a broom. The witch’s broom is often seen only as a symbol, but it can also be used as a regular tool. It can, in fact, be a remarkably useful item, and it’s very easy to use.

BROOM PURIFICATION

This basic purification with a broom can be done almost anytime and anywhere. Do not use a plastic or nylon-bristled broom. Find one with real straw bristles. Craft shops and farms open to the public sometimes sell handmade brooms. (For a personal touch, you can make one yourself following the directions in Chapter 7.) You can keep the broom you use for purification for that purpose alone, or use your regular housecleaning broom to purify. Here is how you should purify with a broom:

1. Stand in the middle of the room you intend to purify. Hold the broom in your hands.

2. Take three deep, slow breaths to calm yourself.

3. Begin to make a sweeping motion, sweeping the broom from your right to your left. Don’t actually touch the floor with the broom, but swing the broom an inch or so above it. It’s energy you’re sweeping, not the floor itself.

4. Turning to your left, slowly turn in place. This is a counterclockwise direction, which is traditionally associated with breaking up and banishing negative energy. Walk in a counterclockwise spiral around the room, sweeping just above the floor as you go. As you walk and sweep, visualize the energy of the room being stirred up by the motion of your broom, and any heavy spots being broken up and restored to the regular flow. See the energy being transformed from murky to bright and sparkling.

5. Sweep the entire room, gradually widening your counterclockwise spiral until you end at the door.

6. If you wish, you may end the purification with a short statement, such as: Bright and strong flows the energy through my home. This room is purified.

Another wonderful way to purify a room is with incense. The following recipe creates a gentle incense that, when burned, releases energy associated with clearing negativity. For more detailed information on how to make and use herbal incense, see Chapter 7.

ROOM PURIFICATION INCENSE

Burn a pinch of this incense on a small self-lighting charcoal tablet (not barbecue charcoal) in a heatproof censer or dish. This recipe will make about a tablespoon of incense.

✵ 1 teaspoon of frankincense resin

✵ 1 teaspoon of copal resin

✵ Mortar and pestle (optional)

✵ 1 teaspoon of dried powdered lemon zest

✵ 3 pinches of dried lavender

✵ Small glass jar with tight-fitting lid

1. If necessary, gently grind the resins with a mortar and pestle until the pieces are in small granules. Be careful not to overgrind them, or they will become sticky.

2. Add all the ingredients to the jar, cap it, and shake until the ingredients are well blended.

3. Hold the jar in your hands and visualize a sparkling light forming around it. This sparkling light is purifying energy to empower the incense. Visualize the sparkling light being absorbed into the blend of resins and herbs.

4. Label and date the jar. To use the incense, light a charcoal tablet and place it within the censer as instructed in Chapter 7. Take a pinch of the purification incense and sprinkle it on top of the charcoal. Place the censer in the middle of the room and allow the purifying energy to fill the room as the smoke releases it.

USING THE FOUR ELEMENTS INSIDE THE HOME

Being surrounded by nature may be the first thing that pops to mind when you think of the path of a green witch, but as you have seen, what’s inside a green witch’s home is just as important as what’s outside. Many of us who live in an urban environment do not have access to wild areas. The modern green witch needs to figure out how to connect to green energy without being surrounded by nature. This can be easily accomplished in the home. Every green witch is different, and as the practice is informal, there is no prescribed way to decorate your personal space. Depending on your personal tastes and preferences, your home may look extremely different from the home of another green witch. One of the easiest ways to bring the energy of the natural world into your home is to introduce plants into your space.

By surrounding yourself with items of personal significance and choosing colors and décor for your home that reflect your goal of harmony and balance, you reinforce your home as your place of power. Although most green witches have one or more rooms or nooks or crannies in or around the house specifically designated as sacred locations where they work or commune with nature and the divine, your entire home can become sacred space. The hearth (the “heart” of the home) is always a focus for the home of the green witch, whether it’s the kitchen or another room where the family gathers. This is rarely a convenient place for practical worship. Although green witchcraft is certainly not a ceremonial path and not laden with formal ritual, a central area through which you can touch the divine can make your spiritual journey more grounded. Shrines are ideal for this purpose.

The green witch acknowledges that the energy of the divine manifests within the natural world. The basic metaphysical building blocks of the natural world are the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. By working with these elements, you can strengthen your connection to the natural world, and this can be done inside or outside. If you don’t have access to forests and fields, you can work with the four elements indoors and balance your connection to the natural world through them.

ELEMENT SHRINES

An element shrine is a place where you can connect with one element or all four. For example, if you build a water shrine, you can include a crystal goblet of water, a small water fountain, shells, river stones, and pictures of waterfalls, rainstorms, or calm lakes. You may place a soft blue scarf under these objects and perhaps add a clear quartz crystal or two to represent ice. A fire shrine may be a collection of candles in reds and golds on a crimson cloth, perhaps with a small copper or brass figurine of a lion or a dragon. The important thing is to think about what the element means to you and to gather a small selection of items that evoke the feeling that element inspires in you. It is important to remember that a shrine is not an altar. An altar is a place of focus consecrated to the spiritual use of the green witch. It is used as a place to hold tools and equipment during a spell or ritual, and a place to work on charms and witch crafts. An altar can be permanent or temporary. Many witches set up a temporary altar each time they wish to work. As shrines may be used to honor deities or elements, the altar is not required for this purpose, and thus can be considered more of a workspace. Many green witches use whatever surface they wish as an altar, perhaps using the same cloth to spread over various surfaces each time they set up their altar. In this case, the cloth itself becomes the altar, carrying the energy associated with repeated spiritual workings.

Green witches follow their intuition, and so may not perform rituals or work spells in the same place each time, choosing the location according to what feels right for their purpose. For the green witch, this means that a workbench or a craft table may sometimes serve as an altar.

The practicality of the green witch determines where she works, and very often these sorts of tasks are undertaken in a variety of different places. Potions and salves may be created in the kitchen, while the creation of a protective wreath may take place in the garage. You may choose to formally consecrate your temporary altar each time you set it up, or not, as the mundane is sacred to the green witch. A simple blessing with the four elements can serve to consecrate the surface you have chosen to use as an altar. (See the Elemental Blessing in Chapter 7.) As a green witch, you may also consider using a stone or stump as a permanent outdoor altar in a corner of your yard or balcony, if you have one.

A shrine, however, is a place to honor something or someone or to leave offerings, a place where you can collect things of personal significance and various energies to weave together an energy that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. A shrine creates a location for a certain kind of energy. The wonderful thing about a shrine is that no one has to know what it is. It can be as simple as a photograph, a candle, a seashell, and a colored ribbon grouped together on a shelf. You know why those particular things are together; anyone else looking at them will likely think that it’s simply a decorative arrangement. What’s important is that the energy produced by combining these objects accomplishes the goal you envision for it.

An element shrine doesn’t have to be in a place generally associated with that element. For example, you don’t have to put an earth shrine outside, or a water shrine in the bathroom, or a fire shrine in your kitchen. Experiment with having four separate shrines in four different places. You can try building the earth shrine in the northern part of your house, the air shrine to the east, the fire to the south, and the water to the west, which is how they’re usually associated with directions in various traditions of Western occultism. Or think about the kinds of energy you feel in various areas within your home, and site a shrine accordingly even if it’s not in one of the traditional directions. If you have a room where a lot of thinking and communicating take place, try setting an air shrine there. If you have a room where everyone relaxes and feels at peace after a long day, try setting up an earth or water shrine there. Make sure to have one shrine for each element so that your home remains balanced.

If some part of your home is lacking in a certain type of energy, you can set up a shrine to an appropriate element to balance that lack. If there’s a room where people tend to lose their tempers or energy runs too high, there may be an excess of fire energy that arises from its décor or as a result of how the energy flows through it. Try setting up an earth shrine or a water shrine to balance out the fire energy with stability or tranquility.

You can also experiment with creating a single shrine to all four elements. Place this shrine where it feels right to you. This may be near your own personal sanctuary, near the door so that it is the first thing you see when you enter and the last before you leave, or near the center of your home. In a shrine to all four elements, you don’t need to collect multiple representations of a single element. Instead, choose one or two objects to symbolize each element and group them in an arrangement that pleases you and feels right. Shrines are fluid things; you can add objects as you feel drawn to them, or remove objects when you feel they no longer serve their purpose. On a shrine to all four elements have at least one item to represent each element at all times. Traditionally, a small dish of salt or sand holds the energy of earth, a candle holds the energies of fire, a small dish or glass of water holds water energy, and a stick of incense or feather or a fresh flower holds the energies of air. If you’re worried about salt or water being knocked over, try a small potted plant or a stone for earth and a shell for water. Light the candle and the incense only when you are in the room. Doing this once a day for a few minutes can help you collect your thoughts and your energies. It gives you a moment of peace to commune with these four basic building blocks of nature.

THEMED SHRINES

By creating shrines in different places, with each shrine focused on a different energy, you can create “vortices” of specific energies that can balance out a surplus or lack of those energies in your home. Think about creating a shrine to one or more of the basic areas upon which the green witch focuses. If you wish to bring more prosperity and health into your home, for example, why not create a shrine with objects that represent abundance and health to you?

Make a Sacred Outdoor Space

If you are fortunate enough to be an urban green witch with a bit of green space behind or in front of your home, there are a few things you can do with this space to make it vibrant and more sacred.

If you own or rent land, then you may consider creating a small outdoor sacred space in which you can relax, rebalance, and reconnect with the natural world. While most people who hear the words “outdoor sacred space” envision a large circle, perhaps with standing stones and a full, flourishing garden, the green witch knows that sacred space requires nothing so elaborate. A small corner, a garden bench, or even a single stone set into a small flower bed can serve as your sacred space. You may dream of turning your entire backyard into a temple, but, in reality, your yard is more likely to be taken up by a play area for children, a toolshed, a pool, or storage. Perhaps you share your green space with others; this will also limit your activities and access. In practical terms, establishing outdoor sacred space can be an even bigger challenge than creating an indoor sacred space. If you find it a chore to keep your indoor space tidy, then an outdoor space will be no different. An entire backyard dedicated as sacred space means that you’ll have to keep that entire space neat, clean, healthy, and well maintained.

Sacred space doesn’t have to be obvious. It can be a small area that only you recognize as being dedicated to your spirituality. You can choose a set of plants that symbolize your practice and plant them together. You can place a stone among the plants, or a small all-weather statue, or a trellis upon which you can hang a tiny set of wind chimes. Choose anything that has meaning to you. Your small corner of outdoor sacred space should offer you a place to sit or stand to pause and clear your mind, to touch Spirit, and to rebalance yourself.

You may also find inspiration in sacred places found in nature. Areas such as streams, pools, and lakes are sometimes seen as sacred, for water is often associated with the otherworld. Perhaps a small fountain or other water feature appeals to you and can become your own sacred space. Single trees and groves have also been traditionally seen as sacred. You can plant a special tree or bush in your sacred space. Mountains are commonly held to be sacred. While building a mountain or even an earth mound is highly impractical (if not impossible), you might want to represent a mountain with one or more standing stones in any size of your choosing. Even “planting” a small 12-inch stone into the ground with intention can declare a space sacred.

The modern green witch in the urban setting can sometimes feel lost. Other options are always available. Visit your city parks or public gardens to find a place that feels comfortable and calm to you, a place where you can achieve reconnection and rebalancing. Set up a container garden on your balcony (see Chapter 6 for tips and ideas on green witch container gardening in the city). Carefully selected houseplants can also furnish you with a connection to a sacred space with the feeling of outdoors.