DECEMBER: Open and Empty
We began this year with an image of snow and a spell about holding—as the year comes to a close, we end with an image of flowing water and a spell about release. There is nothing qualitative about water being either frozen or flowing. Water responds to its environment with either state, just as we do. In that sense, this is a spell for readiness, a month where we call in the kind of container and environment that allow for openness, emptying, and flow.
There’s an important tension in our lives between fullness and emptiness. They need each other, really. We are at our most free when these states are able to cycle freely. But so much can get in the way of that cycle flowing. Capitalist culture sustains itself by cultivating feelings of lack and deprivation in our inner worlds, sometimes even by co-opting self-acceptance and trying to sell us the idea that we are supposed to just love ourselves as we are and not need things or other people to reflect our goodness back to us. It is very popular to be busy, to be full, and to be doing it all alone. Busy-ness is the most socially accepted form of numbing.
Full schedules, full plates, and minds full of content do not equate to full hearts, full bellies, or full-bodied experiences. The latter rely on conditions that are safe enough to allow for openings and emptying. Much is said about being able to “flow” in a world that blocks the flowing of rivers with dams, belittles the outflowing of grief, and structures our time in ways that prevent long stretches of meandering thoughts and feelings. Even those with the luxury in their days to surrender to that flow are often caught in anxious patterns of needing to check their phone, check their email, check the news—trying to ensure, in short, that they haven’t irresponsibly drifted too far from the non-stop flow of communication and information in ways that will leave them exiled and empty.
Working With this Spell
Working with the beauty of open and empty, it’s worth considering: How do we fear emptiness—does that word conjure anxiety about lack of love or lack of meaning? How do we fetishize it? Do we seek gratification by taming our animal desires for fullness? Do we wind up very attached to practicing non-attachment? What are we holding that keeps us from flowing where we need to flow, and emptying when our body is done with whatever it’s full of?
Open and Empty is a vulnerability spell. Casting it, we call on all the beings and places that help us feel safe and strong, respected and supported. We look to those places where we hold and hold and hold and feel like we can never let go, never let be. We acknowledge this holding as a learned response to an environment that would not, could not, hold or receive whatever we were ready to be empty of. We call on the body’s intelligence and the courage of our deepest knowing to guide us into warm places where the container will hold us in our openness, so we can once again experience the innate pleasure of flow and emptying.
THIS MONTH
This is the last month of our small spells newsletter and blog! Don't fear, we're not going anywhere! A special project is in the works involving the spells we’ve cast over the past six years. And in January we’ll be launching a different and exciting way of writing about our calendar. Please stay tuned for the Beloved Stranger Fables!
Listen to the podcast for this month—it’s the solution (or final clue) to our 2021 riddle! Our podcast will continue in 2022 and take a turn as we talk about a very different calendar. Those 2022 calendars are officially zooming out our door. You can snag yours on our Etsy site.
As always, you can follow our shenanigans at @abacuscorvus on Instagram. And you can find out what each of us is up to by following @corinadross and @jocelyncorvus