A Spell of Returning Wonder

The Circumnavigation of the Coven

Dear Readers,

This week I’m sharing a spell I was invited to summon and incant for a class on Heka, Mū Hawaiian magic hosted by Ke’oni Hanalei of Pohala Hawaiian Botanicals. A replay of the three part class can be purchased by clicking on the link I just posted. It will take you to the Pohala site where a world of wonder that has transformed my being to the bone, and beyond, going back through my ancestors into deep time when we all knew we were related and lived accordingly, awaits you.

Heka is practical magic. Although I am a mystic and it comes to me naturally, all humans have the potential to learn the art of affecting the material world at will through the direction of consciousness by accessing a tool we take for granted-language.

I have a lot more to share on Heka and how we can make again, something holy of the word through spells coming in future posts, and some new offerings on the art of incantation in workshop form debuting in 2023. (Along with the publication of my book, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. I better get busy!) If you find this interesting, make sure you subscribe so you get the info when I announce the workshops.

Subscription button is at bottom of this letter and if anyone would like to work with me before that on creating a spell to establish and circumnavigate your own poai (coven) before that, please reach out at waveofchange@gmail.com or reply to this email.

A Spell of Returning Wonder

This is a spell to call back the winged horses and dragons

soaring over mountaintops on the backdraft of their own fire.

This is a spell to remember the source of whale song

and the secret language of ringing water.

This is a spell that howls, an invitation to run with the pack

along star trails, to hunt our story’s source and find it

falling through the next black hole. This is a spell to

carry us through, electric, many-tentacled, these words

teach us to touch with all our senses and let go, touch

and let go, touch and let go, these words the children of air

summoned in bone cathedrals, merged with blood

refreshing our organs in tones of red and blue, away

and toward the heart beats steady, hold to it

when the moon pulls. All is flux. The next world

is quickening, our focus will be the shape it forms around.

Soon we will be called to bear down.

We invoke courage for the unknown birth,

sacrifice fear. Pulse pulse. We are the prophets we dreamed would come.

Behold the seven revelations of blue unsealed

by the whale’s breach: midnight, indigo, lapis,

ultramarine, azure, turquoise, aqua-each hue

a tone that lifts us skyward and receives us

when gravity allows us the grace

of surrender, received by the white spray

and a boom that rattles undersea mountains.

Lies we sacrifice, snakes hissing in corners,

abandonments large and small. We invoke

our innocence and step into the river,

accept the blessing of water offered from the holy man’s palms.

We invoke the wave and the particle, the lightning bolt

and the rod that channels the current.

We invoke the winds as they are needed by their names:

‘Ae ‘ae kukio, ‘Eka, Ho’olapa, ‘A‘ala honua,

sacrifice our guilt we forgot the names of our holy relations,

make room for new winds to touch us when we walk by the shore.

We invoke the slow wall of lava building itself

through flow, down the mauna she comes, relentless,

chiming like broken glass as she cools and hardens.

In the new land so recently inside Earth’s womb we see

we are one mirror. Stagnation is banished.

We see through deception and forgive ourselves.

When our enemies find us, we invoke our inner waters,

drink deep from our own wells, sacrifice the deserts

where we died before we could make it across the border.

Roots down like the saguaro, our arms reach triumphant to the sun.

Where there were enemies, we see only brothers and sisters

walking across enemy lines with bandages, bread and

lamentations, both sides have killed.

We banish the other.

We invoke the memory our daily choices birth infinite worlds,

recommit to first love, calling the hummingbird

down from the sun at dawn to drink from the red hibiscus,

koki’o we cry, purify the blood of our ancestors with your red petals

so we can banish shame once and for all and accept our own brilliance,

return as long as we must to the children we abandoned in forests

where the light never touches ground until they can find

their own way out.

All apathy is banished now. We invoke the night heron’s focus

watching minnows pool around its yellow legs at dusk,

stride forth and pierce the water, gulp and swallow whole

the life that will sustain us. We eat and are eaten in return.

Greed is banished.

When the sky weeps, each one of us becomes the rainbow.

Our surrender transforms us into colors we could never have imagined

in the dark genesis of Earth’s womb. We invoke the movement

of our prayer, the dust of a comet painting a moonless sky gold

or a milkweed pod split by an early nor’easter that lifts winged seeds

above the surf break to feed butterflies so far out

they don’t remember the green leaf, the chrysalis, the caterpillar.

We banish the fears of our ancestors, and those we learned

just yesterday, invoke the future through our safety in this moment now.

And when the comet has passed and the butterfly landed

in the pine forests of Mexico, we begin to tell the new story

in words anointed by all we’ve earned through our libations:

tears, sweat and blood, made holy by grief,

we praise and Creation glows.

aloha mā  aloha mā  aloha mā

Generosity, we invoke your flaming heart and offer up our

poisoned thoughts to the obsidian altar. The black mirror

absorbs the sun, hands us a knife to carve new forms

out of the dark.

And if by now you haven’t heard the hooves of the winged horse strike

the sacred mountain, poetry spring forth in a rush of shining water,

if you haven’t heard the whale’s deep song, the wolf’s howling cantos,

banish the ghosts that plug your ears from hearing the truth of now-

we are almost complete, one more wail for our losses and

the wonder-we are reborn.

Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash

Kō aloha la ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light

Jen