Traversing the Liminal in the Liminal

I’m standing in my black pentacle top, wearing black lipstick and a line of makeup down my chin. I decide to wear my pointed witch hat, the first one I ever owned, and my face is powdered to offset the shine of the slightly warm space.

It’s just me, my drum, my laptop, and my headphones that I charge again and again.

I’m not going to play the drum. It just happens to be the right height for the camera.

There are words printed in large text taped to it so I remember all of the words of the intention.

I am alone. My kittens have been ushered out with catnip.

I take a deep breath and see my name move into the waiting room on Zoom.

I get the text: You’re on.

I do nothing because nothing on my screen changed.

The text happens again.

I start saying the words I’ve been practicing all day.

I have no idea if anyone can hear me or see me.

I start the ritual.

It’s the bodies, isn’t it? The bodies that move and shift with the drum. The way the voices come together in song or wordless chant or some guttural sound that follows the shape of the magick. I’ve missed it. I’ve missed the warmth of moving with you, of you moving with me.

Shifting to the online ritual was not what I wanted, expected, or desired. But such times call for the ingenuity of witches, of magic makers, of activists, and of poets. When the world closes down, the hunger for connection can not be quenched.

It arises in these liminal spaces of the before time and the not-sure-when-it’s-going-to-be-some-sort-of-normal time. I can feel it. Just as I felt the call to do something, anything. Maybe it was a tap on the shoulder from the godds^[1]. Maybe it was boredom. Maybe it was control.

Perhaps we could gain control by doing magick again, even in the imperfect location of Zoom. Perhaps, I whispered to myself, all of the magick, that was born out of necessity and tradition, could rise again.

(With a solid WiFi connection.)

Safety

In a world where breathing is suspect, and each sneeze distributes questions of whether I’m sick with, well, you know, safety is something that seems smaller. Harder to hold onto. But a safe container is the place of ritual, as safe as possible. Not without risk, but perhaps without as much anxiety.

Enact the password function. Send out the information to only those you know or those you think you know. After all, we often have names in one place that don’t match up to the names we have in other places.

Add your pronouns, please. And perhaps the names of the original (and ongoing) inhabitants of the land you’re on.

Be ready to kick someone out. Watch the boundaries. Notice what is said and seen. Let it support the ritual. Let the container be strong enough to hold all of the static and reverberations of unmuted voices

Strong enough to hold laughter at the strangeness of it all. That too is energy. Energy that can feed and form into a spell.

But I still watch in wonder when there are people on screen without masks. I hope they are safe. I hope they can get tested. I hope for a vaccine that will provide support and bring us back into each other’s arms.

I haven’t seen my dad in person for almost two years.

Accessibility

I had forgotten about access, I realized. At one of the first online classes, someone noted that they had never been able to come to a public ritual or class, because of their oxygen tank. They had never been to a Reclaiming event because they were not accessible.

But this online space was. Location only matters when the time zones are too early or late for some. You can be in your ritual gear or in pajamas. Or you can have the video off and wear a smile.

Access gaps arise. What about those who haven’t been using Zoom or Skype or Facebook or Facetime? How do we bridge that gap? Offer resources and grace. We’re all doing the best we can. We all have the internet connection we have.

Folks will come in and out. They will arrive exactly as they need to, want to, are able to.

We can also meet people with words. Captioning becomes possible. Sign language interpreters are always on screen at the first online Spiral Dance in 2020. Songs take on new meanings with hands and bodies moving in ways that are not word for word, but rather feeling to feeling. Translation isn’t perfect transcription. It is interpretation in that moment. In that particular moment. For many, it will not make things clearer, but it does offer a level of understanding that is not always considered.

Movement has meaning. In many ways.

Altars

Interacting with altars is a part of ritual that has seemed more vague, and more liminal. Often, folks will bring their own altar items, set up off-screen. These are holy places of focus and discernment, places of intention and support.

We are invited into homes. To view personal altars. Ones that have never been seen before. At least, not by us.

Rituals have brought in pictures of altars, transported via screen sharing. Sometimes, one of the participants is the altar, a carefully placed laptop or camera watching over. A place where one’s eye might travel to remember the godds or the elements or the dead.

Altars become the focal point with the spotlight feature on Zoom. The image taking up the full screen for a moment or many minutes. As though we are visiting and interacting, saying prayers or remembering the sacred names.

Simple or elaborate, the altars arrive and wait. They hold a space.

Intention

We have gathered here today for ritual, not the ritual you’re used to, but the ritual that is needed. It is not perfect and someone will forget to mute. Or someone will get frustrated that the music is too loud or we forgot to turn it on (that was me, recently).

But I welcome folks to the ritual. With all of its history and all of its nostalgia. We’d be in a space with a large altar and we’d stumble over each other during the trance. Today will be different. We will do what we have done before. But it will be different.

Our intention is to come together. To rain down justice, rain down renewal. We will come together anyway. In this time. We didn’t think this ritual would be online too. It wasn’t online last year.

We all come with intentions.

Grounding

So, ground into yourself right now. Wherever you are, exactly as you are. Perhaps you need to drive those roots down and those branches up. Maybe you need to keep your eyes open because you’ve been on Zoom for HOURS today. Maybe you just need to look around the room you’re in, remember you’re safe in this moment, that you’re alive in this moment. That you can breathe and be, exactly as you are.

Do this in the way that serves you. You don’t have to look at the screen.

Sacred Space

I’ve cast circles around the world before. It’s true. It is said that magick is suspending disbelief, so I do. Again and again. I ask you to do this too. I ask you to think this is all possible and powerful. Because it can be. Because it is. Because we are all together and we are all hopeful that we can connect in this way too.

We create the circle together. Dozens of circles, thousands of circles across time at the Reclaiming Spiral Dance in October. And while it doesn’t quite feel the same, the more we do it, the more we can feel it. The more we trust it is there and that we have done the thing and made it happen.

We can hold each other across time and space. And a few times, the casting of the circle turns the meeting off. Kicks me out for a while.

I should have remembered to contain myself in that circle.

(Don’t worry. I got back in. Eventually. It was a witchy-as-fuck moment, though.)

Allies

I wondered if the godds would come. In my head, I often hold them as outside of space and time, but also that they are older and not used to the technology of today. But what was I thinking? They know energy. They have a better connection, one they have trusted for as long as the world has existed and before and beyond.

Do they come into the space I’m in? Yes. Are they with you too? Yes. All of our collective breaths, the ones that know what happens when the godds come, when the allies come, when the ancestors and descendants come, these breaths know. And instead of relying on the priestess to do the thing, we all have to do the thing.

We all have to call out to the godds. Some of them are new. Some of them are old friends. Some of them arrive in words, in feelings, in that tap on the back of our necks. As the shadow that our pets see. In the flickering of lights.

In the way the thunder crashed in the Spring Equinox ritual, the first one I attended online. I felt the energy of the godds come. Mighty and majestic. Nature loud and powerful, a storm in the middle of the storm that was only getting started.

I admit that I think the godds are always around. I believe them to be present, though perhaps a little standoffish when necessary. They’re godds. They do as they will. They watch. They wonder why we do the things we do and have the hesitation we have. They wonder why we can’t see the divine beings we are. Because we are.

I know the godds to hold my hand when I am shaking, even as I sit at a computer and say words I have said a hundred times. I can have a script these days. Sometimes, I do. Sometimes I realize how important it is to have something to say. People need this right now. I don’t want to screw up. I want to say the right thing.

Then the godds come and tell me that this is what needs to be said. I listen because I always do. I do because I always do. Because magick is often about getting out of the way and letting what arrives, arrive.

In all of its confusing ways. In all of the ways that make sense as soon as I let go of trying to make sense.

The Reclaiming Spiral Dance is where I feel this the most. It had live and pre-recorded sections. I was the emcee so I had to wait at my computer for my cues and didn’t get to see most of the ritual until later.

But I had a space to interact during the godds’ invocations. I felt them. I expected them to come through the screen. They didn’t. They arose from my heart and from my bones. A quiet moment on my own, sitting in my office that was cluttered with a ring light and a camera that was at the right height, with all of the blinds closed and covered to make sure everything looked okay.

All of it didn’t matter. The godds didn’t need better lighting.

I needed to be present. To allow myself to be enchanted. To remind myself that I am never alone.

The godds heard their names. Watched the bodies move and the visions travel across my screen, so many screens. The words of songs from Spiral Dance, words that have been sung and drummed for more than forty years. Words have power. Music has power.

It translates and traverses the liminal.

Of course it does.

Raising Energy

In any of the online rituals, the energy raising portion is the trick. Many of us have not succeeded in singing together or drumming without causing some strange cacophony of sound. (We’re working on it. We have time to practice, after all.)

And, to be fair, I haven’t picked up a drum all that often. It’s been a strange sort of liminal place where my drum is frozen in time. Like its shadow was left in Minnesota, at that Witchcamp that was the last in-person camp of 2020.

That drum holds magick that I want to let sleep and rest.

To build energy, it requires intention and buy-in. Everyone in the circle needs to be willing to come together to focus our efforts to create something. It might not be the earth-shattering cone of power that everyone wants (or seems to prefer). It might be a soothing release of all of our energy into the ground to restore. The ritual might need something else, because who shows up inspires what shows up.

And I look at online ritual as a place of learning. Where we can break down the parts of building energy into steps that are often experienced and followed.

I can tell folks that we will sing together. Well, I will sing and you will follow. I will not hear you, but you will hear me, with all of the dryness of my throat and missed notes. You will hear the vulnerability of falling off the beat or getting into a rhythm that makes sense only to me.

Yet, we can sing together. I can not hear you. I can feel you. I can trust you and know you and hold that as a perfect collaboration. Because I have no other proof that it is not.

I can tell you that I will sing until I can not sing. Until my words become sounds and I invite you to join in too. I invite you to move into wordlessness. I invite you to make this magick in the way that you can.

In the way that you will. In the way that we do.

And for a moment, I break all of the expectations, as often happens when we’re face to face. I unmute everyone at a Brigid ritual and I hear all of the noises and sounds that arrive as they are. Off key, on key. In waves, in ripples. In whispers.

I can feel you thinking that you don’t want to stop because you still hear someone else. You don’t want to leave anyone behind.

So you don’t.

And the tone continues until it feels like it’s been forever.

In this liminal space, perhaps it has been that long.

Or just a minute.

I believe we can look at each other during this. We can bring our intentions together. We can have that impossibly personal moment by seeing that we’re not alone.

Even when we’re in separate rooms. At different screens. On different notes.

The Dance of Unmet Hands

At the Spiral Dance, the best part is the dance. You get to dance with hundreds, if not a thousand people. You get to see the eyes of so many beloveds as you pass them, in and out, a movement that is often slow and then frenetic, still and then stretched. It is exciting and collective. It works in ways I do not understand. It breaks and it comes together again.

But online… dancing is the photos that people sent of their faces, streaming across the screen. It is me dancing in my office, pretending to hold a friend’s hand because we lost a dear mentor this year. And if we had been together, we would have danced and sung through tears.

The screen lit up with images of swirling and spiraling with the music so many know: Let it begin with each step we take and let it begin with each change we make and let it begin with each chain we break and let it begin every time we awake….

And it does. It begins. It drops into the many dances I’ve been in as a participant, an organizer, a ritualist, and a witch. I remember all of the locations I’ve traveled to, all of the faces I’d see, all of the altars and the hidden snacks in the bleachers, all of it.

I drop in and allow the dance to dance me. I move my body. I move my heart. I move the bones that ache with grief over so many things lost this year. And so much lost in a lifetime that has been long enough to contain love and loss.

The dance comes to an energetic lift with pictures of the Statue of Liberty and other images that inform the spellworking. Raining down justice and raining down renewal.

Until we are done and things begin to fade away.

What is done is undone.

And I tell everyone goodbye and thanks.

It is midafternoon in California. The ritual often doesn’t end until midnight.

I close my laptop and step into the Witches’ New Year. I clean up. I eat. Alone.

I don’t have to drive home. It’s just done.

Connection

For me, it’s not that online rituals and classes aren’t powerful. I’ve seen things happen that I’m not sure could or would happen in person. There is a sense of more kindness online. More engagement. More comfort. More connection.

But the endings are the hard bit for me.

I miss the goodbyes. I miss the hugs. I miss the knowing that this powerful experience will be one we’ll talk about in a week when we meet over coffee or head out for a walk.

We don’t do that now. Well, I do talk to folks on the phone or on Zoom, but… I miss the touch point at the end. The part that gives a little of my magick to you. A drop of my sweat. A bit of my energy. A moment of hey-you-were-here-with-me. A small I love you.

I’ve used ‘we’ in this essay because I’m talking to you and to us. I’m talking to those for whom ritual is not only the everyday, but it’s the every moment. I’m referencing the collective ‘we’ because I feel it more strongly.

But I do not know everyone’s experiences. I want to. But I don’t.

So, as with any ritual I help priestess, I offer you this: Meet magick and ritual where it makes sense to you. Move away from my words and my meaning. Let this be a shore from which you dive into the water or walk back into the grass.

This is only one interpretation.

With every ritual, there is risk. With every ritual, there is a tension between what has been done and what might be revealed. We never really know.

We only know what is here.

(And for me, that’s why I return, again and again.)

Like so many before, we come together. We gather with what we have. We make the best use of our tools and our bodies. We move and breathe and build something that will never look the same again.

Ritual is not the presence of bodies. Though it can be. Though it has been. Though it will be again.

Ritual is stepping into the mystery. Where anything, anything can happen. Between expectation and anticipation, we take each other’s hand.