May: You Are Deeply Loved
This month's image reminds us that loving and being loved are the same process. To bring your heart’s love anywhere, you first let it pass through you. For many of us, though, this process gets blocked through trauma, pain, and grief. When hard feelings get trapped in our bodies and minds, it can be difficult to access love or feel deeply held and cared for. This struggle can even seem cruel to those who know that experiences of love, holding, and care are precisely what is needed to move through pain. Loving a world with so much pain and oppression in it is exhausting. Sometimes we are too exhausted to actively love. This month's spell casts a space where we can rest in the experience of love without exertion. You don’t have to struggle with this spell, you can just surrender to it.
About the spell:
“You Are Deeply Loved” is a spell to kindle the reflexive medicine of the heart. Calling on Yarrow, Lavender, and Crow, this spell opens a space for us to experience connection and protection. Crow magic is intrinsic to our artistic practice—we even named ourselves after it—and in this calendar Crow is the keeper of the altars, a guardian who is a portal in its own right. Yarrow and Lavender magic offer boundaries and comfort. Here is what our friend, and skilled herbalist Rae Swersey from Take Care Herbals has to say about the healing properties of yarrow and lavender:
White Yarrow: Yarrow is for a trusted sense of protection. Witch folklore has yarrow hanging from doorways and placed in pockets when protection of self and magic is needed. Excellent for feeling and understanding your boundaries and helps defend against outside negative forces, psychic attacks, and environmental forces such as electromagnetic radiation. Deeply loving oneself by listening to what forces lean against our boundaries and protecting ourselves like we deserve protection.
Lavender: Allows for the cells of the body and the mind to relax on a profound yet subtle level. Eases nervous tension on a systemic level. Places a loving hand on the grand coping skill of hyper-vigilance when it is no longer needed. Excellent for burnout’s symptoms of affecting sleep, ability to be present, and overwrought nerves. Models comfort, ease and clarity.
There will always be pain, grief, and absurdity, and this spell is reminder that we get to choose how to make meaning out of all of it. This spell offers permission and encouragement to explore the experiential landscape where safety guides our path through fear—where attentiveness and trust become vehicles that move us through shadowy terrain. When everything you thought you couldn’t feel presents itself as able to be felt, we learn that sometimes it is okay to let go of thinking and feel our way through.
A Meditation for Approaching the Deep Heart:
To begin this journey into the heart, these words invite you to experience your breath. With gentle and perhaps familiar logic, these words invite you to turn your attention inward, toward the sensations of your breathing. Allowing your natural breath to move you, you can become witness to this natural process and slowly sink your awareness into the sensations of your body. Breathe into the buoyancy of your bones and exhale into gravity’s endless connection. Here, in this aware and rested state, the knowing of instruction becomes the riddle of question: What if there are no shallow hearts, but only different depths at which we travel? What would this mean? What if the heart is anchored so deep within us, that is why we all get lost and tired on our way in? Over time, navigation grows more skillful. We learn from our mistakes and mark familiar landmarks with our meaning—we make maps of our hearts from memory and lessons. But time plunges us deeper. And the deep heart is marked by a threshold where—like the alpine tree line—conditions shift, and a territory opens where logic no longer grows. Your hard-won map becomes unreadable, your memory unreliable, and feelings of disorientation may become unbearable. This quality of confusion is the experiential evidence that you are moving deeper toward an anchored core of warmth where logic melts down into presence. Here, words become ridiculous—thisness and thatness become bothness, everything and nothing make love instead of sense. If, when you meditate on your own deep heart, you wind up in shadowy terrain, remember that with patience your senses will shift. Darkness will eventually begin to glow like morning. Listen for the enigmatic messages at the edges your deepest heart, for they are singing to you of a place where loving deeply is what you are, and that is all it takes to be deeply loved.
About the painting:
Corina: I really enjoyed making a triptych of crows for this calendar—this is the second of three crow altars, all of which show different scenes taking place in the same kind of space. We knew we wanted a spirit crow hovering behind the crow in this image, and it took a long time to get that part right—everything I drew looked too ominous or too invasive, until we pared it down this far. I thought this was a good metaphor for the spell itself, too, and the ways we learn to guard our hearts from love that is invasive or destructive. Relaxing into love means being open to subtle energies, subtle forms of connection.
Jocelyn: This image reminds me of being a child. When I was little, I was drawn to ceremony without knowing that’s what that was. Making this image with my sister in my Mama’s house, I remember feeling that child-like presence to the sacredness of the world, and using it as an inspiration for the message this piece would convey. Painting it felt like communicating with old friends. Corina explained her struggle to get the spirit crow just right—making sure it didn’t end up too “ominous” or “invasive”—and I love that because it also explains how I try to be in relationship to resources and support: if I am seeking love and guidance but end up feeling burdened or overwhelmed, I know I have somehow gotten stuck along the way. This month’s image and message reminds me that allowing myself to feel deeply loved is what connects me to the most reliable, and replenish-able resources.
This month's offerings:
Get a print of You Are Deeply Loved for 15% off this month with the coupon code: LOVED
Only on our shared Etsy shop.
This month Corina is taking a break from giving readings work on new projects! Meanwhile, her deck Portable Fortitude is on sale till May 15th to celebrate its sixth printing.
Jocelyn is submitting her first article for publication this month! It will, most likely, not be published, but the submission is itself a cause for celebration, because putting voice to the things that matter most is daunting as hell. Also -- Yoga for the Obliteration of Tyranny -- will be coming back to the WNC hills this June!
