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More Circle Magic

Story + Photographs Copyright 2004 by JR Compton
All Rights Reserved. No Reproduction without permission.
E-mail J R.

Ever exploring, I ended last essay's mild, exploratory depression in a bright, circling flash of light. By then, having thoroughly expiated the down, I was more than ready for a little up.

A big up, actually.

Last new moon I was gonna do something ceremonial magicky, but I never quite got around to it, so I deep backgrounded and back-burnered considerations for most of the last month.

Knowing what I wanted made quick work of making it happen. The details, as usual, sorted themselves out as I went along.

A virtual light circle reflected
in those famed French doors

Roo had gifted me a new string of white Christmas lights, which I had not yet recognized as the drippy, icicle variety. Providing a pleasingly considerable light girth. I just thought there was a whole bunch of white lights in there. And so there were.

Those, in serial addition to the existing, sometimes burnt-out, semi-original Holy Ghost Lites (first replacement), were plenty to create a circle substantial enough to dance around, lie down, sit, crawl, scurry and drag my digital camera around in great bumping arcs along the rug in. All of which — and more — I tried at one time or another this lilting afternoon and evening into night.

No AC in here for the last several days. Nice breeze when Yo has full-house access, but I had to lock it off to keep the cat out of my magic. Not perhaps the best notion, in retrospect. But there it was.

 

First, I normalized the circle with a pole out from the central cylinder of candle. Last time I did a circle, it was more like a wobbly ellipse with snaggletoothed bites.

My nearly perfect new circle of white light fit just inside the Truckstop, slightly overlapping the big rusty red, stained and Yo-attacked partially denuded rug, neatly including most of the big wood table that, at first supported the new glass Roo jars full of my stones collection.

After dealing with the neat, threaded in-and-out lines of white wires and bright spots of white lights awhile, I realized the stones — as well as my gentle library of dragon (just the small iridescent green one) and specialized turtles — all belonged scattered among the undulations of meandering white wire.

Each of the four directions were protected, just beyond the circle, squaring it, by the middle-sized rocks, crystalline, petrified, striped and smoothed.

 

I also burned some fuse, and in great, billowing, whirling counter-clockwise wafts of smoke, banned depression, fear, negativity, carelessness and hopelessness, which we all know I do altogether too well sometimes, out from inside the circle — and out of and away from this mortal coil.

Resting a bit, then lighting the smudge anew, I clockwise clocked the circle in a slow, second-hand continuity, inviting in possibility, hope, joy, alertness, awareness, breath, conversation, stories, touching, kissing, dancing — I waltzed around the inner circle my arms around potentia, long conversations into the wee hours, affection, sex and all those other niceties of relational experience.

I additionally invited in temper, consideration, awareness, the ongoing ability to share fears, attentiveness, care, affection in the face of anger, open communications, and other seriously intelligent aspects of human closeness.

Fossil Rock, Stone, Rug and Light Collage

I lay down in the small middle of it and day- and sleep-dreamt dreams of my new life. Naturally, I photographed as much of the ritual and setting as I could remember to record. I like best me in motion or just barely visible, like in the sliver of yours truly at the five-minutes-after-noon position of the cubed composition in the daylit Virtual Circle photo.

I photographed the circle and its component lights in as many differing ways as I could imagine. I walked the camera around the outer edge of my circle, hoping for staccato irregularities in the streaks.

I shot individual lites through the bottom of each of my newest glass bowls. Captured the whole of the circle reflected in the French Doors. Streaked great arcs of it, carefully timing the quadrants. Even — as I say — dragged the camera, lens-out, around in great, gapping, bumpy arcs at something of a diagonal.

 

Drag Bumping Along the Rug

I.e., great galloping globs of glorious, light-emitting joy. Playtime for the Photography Spirits. Setting my chickens free.

Out, out, the long, delirious burning orange of firelight transversing cycles, starts, spurts, splats and stirring light and dribbling it out in joyous whoop and splash.

 

Tiny Wiggly Hand-held Arcs of Light

Longer Tripod-mounted, Multi-Second Arcs of Glowing White Streaks

Walking Looking Down at the Electric Edge

Heat + Light in the Middle
After the Wax Splash

It did not stay there — because I tripped over it, knocking it over, arcing a long splash of hot wax onto the already lumpy, bumpy, darkly discolored and stained rug, although — remarkably and happily — the long wicked, bright yellow flame did not go out thereby.

But, for a long time, the center of my circline ceremony was my gifted, hollow tin heart supporting the crystalline green malachite skull I identify with and a randomly chosen, polished pink stone, neatly in touch with each other, lighted and warmed by the more central, friendship / romance pink candle, which I put up on the altar / Truckstop Tabletop for the remainder of the ceremony, lest I kill the kindle next bump.

 

I didn't want to take the circle down, er ... up, but Yo refuses to drink water out of anything but a yellow dog bowl on the faucet end of my extra-long bath tub in the bathroom, which was sealed off from his access through the kitchen past the Truckstop for the day of mild magic and proffered prayer.

Now my newly-acquired neatness compulses me to stow all my stones back into translucent jars (to be divvied up into the latest, correct containers later), and I don't really want anyone but a select few (you) to even know I have had a glowing circle on the floor of one of my rooms.

Besides, New Moon is over, and the ritual fires need give way to hoped-for reality, whatever that might entail.

Shooting Through the Bottom of a New Roo Bowl

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