just a (witchy) side blog

A friendly reminder that in the events of “Mattimeo”, Martin came storming into Matthias’s dream when he was dying from lack of oxygen and attacked a rather shocked and offended Matthias with Orlando’s Axe and basically told him that he didn’t care that he was dying, he considered Matthias to only be napping and, I quote, “A warrior who sleeps in a time of danger is no warrior, but a coward!” 

Martin: You kidnapped Gonff? Gonff?

Kidnappers: Yeah

Anyway I abandoned it to write an absolutely atrocious time travel fanfic because obviously that’s what Redwall is missing. Time travel.

Fact #2: It’s Martin who implies this.

Fact #3: As far as Martin knows, Timballisto has never been involved in a battle of any note; certainly not one where he had time to build a ballista beforehand.

Martin is fantastic at taking random stuff around him and turning it into whatever he needs at the moment. Oh, that’s a ship? Not today it isn’t. Today it’s a dam. Oh that’s a fishnet? Well right now it’s a ladder, and a trampoline. In general, he’s just really great at finding unconventional solutions to problems and weaponizing things that aren’t typically weapons. It even comes up later in Rakkety Tam where he tells Tam to weaponize his shield. It’s not hard to imagine that he remembered knocking down sandcastles or piles of rocks with Timbal’s ballistas and thought they could probably do the same thing on a larger scale with Kotir.

Matthias, on the other paw, is almost too dependent on weapons. The TV show changed this a little bit, but in the book it wasn’t Matthias who thought of countering Cluny’s tunneling efforts with boiling water or stopping the battering ram with hornets, or even of building a crossbow out of a table and a candle snuffer to take out Cluny. He spends the entire book obsessing over Martin’s Sword, and he’s not wrong to do that. It’s just a limited worldview and kind of a disadvantage.

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

You know how if you go through years and years of “best science fiction short stories”, every so often you find some short story you’ve never heard of before, but it’s just amazing and brilliant and leaves you wondering why you never read stories with that plot before? This is one of those.

Me: Ah yes… it’s ummmmmm-VERY charged water now. Mega ultra charged. Yep. All planned.

*waves around fingers*

Most symbols and ingredients in witchcraft are assigned either masculinity or femininity, but I decided to make a list of things used in magick that don’t strictly have to be binary.

(This is by no means a comprehensive list.)

~Astrology~

Gemini- Bigender. This sign can be worked with for both masculine and feminine energy.

Aquarius- Nonbinary. The sign of Aquarius is known for not conforming to the norm, and can be used for spells involving androgyny, gender clarity, and probably macaroni and cheese.

Saturn- Demigender. There’s just something about this planet that radiates the energy of “I’m not entirely this or that. And that’s entirely me.”

~Crystals~

Clear Quartz- Gender neutral. This crystal is an independent quartz that don’t need no gender.

Amethyst- Third gender/genderqueer. Amethyst is unique and expressive. This crystal is its own energy, honestly.

Rainbow Fluorite- Pangender. With a name like rainbow fluorite, what did you expect? This crystal is known for having every color that a fluorite can possibly have, so you can use it for masculine energy, feminine energy, nonbinary energy, or all of these energies combined (ULTIMATE POWERRRR).

~Herbs~

Mint- Neutrois. This herb is pretty chill, and it doesn’t really need to be masculine or feminine.

Sage- Gender Fluid. As a cleansing herb, it needs to have flexible energy, and can reach all sides of the gender energy spectrum.

So, disclaimer, I have learned exactly jack shit about energy work from anywhere other than doing it. Usually wrong several times and having to then go back and figure out why I can’t get out of bed the next day. On one hand, damn. I could have just read a guide about it. On the other, I can personally attest to some of the points I’m going to raise, so hey.

Spit-shine your favorite implement, ‘cause we’re about to get our hands dirty.

Now, the first thing you should know is that I am bad at plain energy work. Or, I was, and then I realized that I was yet again trying to do it Someone Else’s Way and just like everything else that just wasn’t working for me. So this is my way, and hopefully it’ll help someone out there who is similarly Bad At Stuff and just needed the right idea.

When I manipulate energy, I draw with it.

I’m an artist at heart so this is simply what makes the most sense for me. Simply visualizing things doesn’t do it for me. I lose track of the overall shape of what I’m doing and it all goes lopsided. Drawing, though, I can do that. I’m not much of a sculptor but I’m brilliant with a pencil (if I do say so myself), and the wand I use for warding is not really that unlike one. You don’t necessarily need a wand or anything at all but your brain, but since this is what I do, I’m going to talk about using a wand. Adapt as needed.

Let’s say for the sake of making an example that we are inside a simple cubic room with one door. In essence, I use my wand to draw the framework of the room with energy, creating a structure for it to flow through, and then I create the walls by drawing them in as well, then put an extra ‘wall’ over any physical openings.

And I literally mean draw. Think of it as a laser pointer, the ‘dot’ of which creates a ‘wire’ through which energy can flow. You can get some pretty fun circuits going this way. So if I say to draw a line, I mean physically point and draw it in your mind, right where you want it in real space. It’s like visualizing with your eyes open.

This does take a lot of energy to maintain as you’re basically building an energetic rough copy of your house, but hey. The ground is full of energy. The sky is full of energy. I, being a small little person with chronic fatigue, am not full of energy, especially compared to something as vast as an entire atmospheric system. This being the case I tie each edge to the earth and sky by ‘drawing’ the line continuing up and continuing down. That way the energy exchanging between the earth and sky will flow through the structure I’m building, powering it quite adequately.

If you don’t do this step, as I have found out, you run the risk of tying it to your own personal energy. Jesus on a jetpack, don’t do that without a good reason. Anything that hits it will be hitting you too, and the farther away you get from it the harder it will be to maintain. Personal experience speaking, here. Just. Don’t.

I am not going to tell you exactly what symbol I use to seal each wall, but after I have drawn the framework of the wall and connected it to the earth and sky at both ends, I mark it with a defensive symbol and ‘see’ the energy flowing through it and making it solid. There you go. Nice, tough wall.

Doors, windows, air vents, sinks, sometimes outlets, and especially mirrors (never forget your mirrors) also get a warding symbol, and linked to the grid. Since that’s really what you’ve built, a power grid, and the wards are like appliances linked to it. And don’t neglect to ward your floor and ceiling, otherwise you are living in a house without a roof or floor.

If you want to use physical objects as markers for the edges, go for it, though I usually don’t for a whole house. I do have quite a lot of obsidian and hematite around the bedroom, though.

But Lunar, you say. The power sources for this structure are outside of it. Any old thing could come by and cut them. Well, yes. That is possible. But that part is up to you to sort out. You’re smart, and I have complete confidence in you, and I am not about to tell you enough to let you get into my house because then my girlfriend would kick my ass and where would I be?

This is an ongoing post and I will add videos as I make them! :)

Before we get into the video resources for sensory crafts, I wanted to share some of my stimmy tips!

I am a Neurodivergent witch (depression-anxiety-ptsd-dissociation), and my main stims are sensory toys, nail biting, picking at my nails, rocking, bouncing my legs, tapping my feet, pulling/messing with my hair and pacing.

So these are just my personal tips on how to combine magic with stimming!

Enchant your stims. To do this, just give each stim an individual task. For example, when I rock back and forth I associate that with astral traveling. When I bounce my leg, I am grounding and shaking off excess energy. When I pace, I am raising energy. The potential for this is pretty much limitless, and all you have to do is tell yourself, “When I ____, it will ____.”

Use astral travel to help you cope with dissociation or anxiety. Building mindscapes, astral projecting and astral meditations have been helping me to cope with my dissociation for nearly twenty years.

Use energy work to help with anxiety and depression. Even just sitting there and breathing deeply and feeling energy flow through you can help. I like to make energy balls and then send them off with different ‘jobs’ to do (this is how I cast spells). I find that doing this and using deep breathing techniques really calms me down, helps me feel in control and helps me to feel like I have a purpose.

Use shadow work to help you confront and heal from traumas or PTSD. This one may be something you do very rarely (I usually average about one Shadow a year…at the most) because it can be VERY exhausting, but I really do always feel good afterwards and it has helped me to heal from quite a few emotional traumas.

Cultivate an emotionally and mentally rewarding witchy hobby. It could be anything from drawing sigils, growing and caring for a potted plant, collecting crystals to learning to make slime or sensory toys. Find something you enjoy that is not a very demanding task, something that can relax you and something that makes you happy.

Make small goals for yourself and reward yourself when you meet it. It can be anything. Get out of bed or take a shower or go get groceries. This isn’t necessarily a magic-related tip, but it really helps my depression.

Okay! On with the main part of the post! The hyperlinks will take you to my DIY/Stimming videos on youtube so you can make it yourself!

General Use:

Play Dough: Grounding, Creativity.

Squishy: Inspiration, Joy.

Slime: Happiness, Positive Energy.

Fluffy Slime: Adaptability, Optimism.

Clear Slime: Divination, Clarity.

Floam: Balance, Good Luck.

Sensory/Glitter Jar: Astral Travel, Meditation.

Stress Ball: Absorbs Negativity, Peace.

For Green Witches:

Gemstone Slime: Crystal Energy,Raising Energy, Amplifies Energy.

Woodland Slime: Plant Energy, Fae Work, Peace.

Nymph Sensory Jar: Earth Energy, Nymph Work, Meditation.

For Sea Witches:

Kinetic Sand: Ocean Energy, Happiness.

Lake Jar: Carrying a Body of Water’s Energy with You, Hope, Serenity.

Green Sea Glitter Jar: Sea Energy, Conservation, Environmentalism.

Fishbowl Slime: Marine Animal Energy, Mermaid Work, Divination.

Orbeez Slime: Water Energy, Grounding, Absorbs Negativity.

For Space Witches:

Galaxy Slime: Happiness, Wonder, Love.

Night Sky Floam: Astrology, Divination, Peace.

Supernova Sensory Jar: Astral Travel, Joy, Positive Energy.

Black Hole Slime:Purification, Absorbs Negative Energy, New Beginnings.

Star Confetti Slime: Hope, Positive Change, Shining Light on Situations.

For Winter Witches:

Fluffy Snow Floam: Snow Energy, Peace, Clarity.

Avalanche Slime: Cleansing, Hope, New Beginnings.

Iceberg Slime: Ice Energy, Breaking Through Obstacles, Divination.

For Storm Witches:

Thunderclap Slime: Thunderstorm Energy, Grounding Excess Energy.

Storm Calling Sensory Jar: Summon Storms,  Meditation, Raising Energy.

Tornado Slime: Wind Energy, Protection, Channeling Energy.

For Kitchen Witches:

Starburst Slime: Positive Energy, Hope, Peace.

Gummy Bear Slime: Comfort, Emotional Support, Happiness.