With Stones Like Bones and Earth Like Skin {September 2023}

 MIRRORING  •  LONGING  •  TIMELESSNESS 

Jo here, writing our September offering in the last few hours of August. I’m looking at the woodpile under the crow on the calendar on my wall and appreciating the wood piled outside, slowly getting stacked in our barn. We are right on time.

September’s image is a portal into a world where ‘what is’ is also, simultaneously, ‘what was’. Looking at this snail and what at first seems to be its reflection, we're really looking at two different worlds—this living age is resting on the surface, and the other world, obscured by reflections, is pointing us towards the past. There is connection here, and there is longing, too. As though the two (or more) worlds are longing for each other.

Which brings us to the words of the spell, where the earth body and the animal body reach for one another and live as one. With stones like bone and earth like skin. Am I imagining my own body as the earth? Am I imagining the earth as a body unto itself?

Yes! This month’s spell blurs and joins those questions into one.

At the start of this year, we sat beside time to make a circle. Now, as we close the third quarter of the year, we meet the snail shell and the ammonite fossil, who are both time keepers, in a way – or perhaps, keepers of timelessness.

What are these beings mirroring back to each other?

Here, we settle into holding several streams of time at once. This moment, an instant of infinite depth. A portal unto itself! And the past, an ocean of experience where every moment flows. There is no separation. We are moving toward the end of the year, and we're entering the month of spirals—a portal of non-linear time.