Yule!

... and it's really dark out there. Longest night of the year, and the New Moon. Pretty cool coincidence.

Yule celebrates the return or rebirth of the Sun. The days will start to get longer. Winter is half over.

The new moon is a beginning of another cycle. The moon grows in fullness and brightness. All things increase in energy as this new year increases in energy and opportunity. The ancient calendar makes more and more sense to me. The Roman calendar has no basis in nature or any feeling to it. It's all arbitrary and invented. Government mandated President's birthdays? Mother's Day was a product of a greeting card company! Labor day? Please help me out here!

The High Holidays or quarters of the year are easy to find. Winter Solstice, Vernal Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox--they're on your modern calendars. The cross quarter days are trickier, but just as fun. Draw a circle and mark out the quarters of the year and label them. Now, find a point half-way in-between those points and you've found the cross-quarter days. We still celebrate some of them.

Why doesn't everyone feel that excitement in the night of Hallow e'en? For children, it is all encompassing. As adults, do we lose touch with some of those feelings? Do we lose the ability to sense that building of natural cyclical energy?

My foray into Wicca

I had a flash of inspiration to create an ecommerce site on Yahoo! Small Business Hosting. Basically, the site lets people read about charms and talismans and gemstones. Each page allows the visitor to add the item to their custom mojo bag and then pay with a credit card. (http://www.custommojo.com). I wrote the whole thing myself and developed the checkout procedure in PERL. It appears to work, but I am yet to close a sale.

In the process of doing the research about the charms, I kept coming across articles about Wicca, which attracted my attention. I felt like a lot of what I was reading rung true with me and seemed to make a lot of sense--mostly the rede and the three-fold law.

The Rede or main rule of wicca is: "An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will". I think that's important. Don't hurt anyone, including yourself. Wicca is not about hurting people or causing harm. It's really about helping people where you can. Learning the craft only give you more ways to help!

Three-Fold Law, or Law of Return as it is also called, is perhaps one of the more controversial aspects of Wiccan ethics. The basic premise is that anything we do comes back to us in the end, often to a greater degree (such as three-fold). If we do good, then good will be retuned and if we cause harm, we put ourselves in danger of harm.

My first opportunity to observe this was last night at the grocery store. The cashier was distracted while making my change of $16 and thought they had given me a $1 and a $5 dollar bill. He tried to give me another $10 and I showed him I already had $15. Being the good Witch I am, I told him he only owed me a dollar.

Now, I sit patiently for my $30 to magically come to me!