This Nature Spirit series of sculptural mixed media depictions of the spirits of found objects, crystals, bones, feathers, and more that I feel drawn to create. Each one is a unique piece, and made in communion with the object itself to draw out its likeness and nature, and offer those little spirits to those who are drawn to them. This wand is a one of kind siren spirit, hand sculpted and painted, with a long lock of pink woolen hair and a necklace of real moss and moonstone. Her hair is decorated with white conical seashells, and artificial sea grass wrapped around a beautiful 2" fluorite crystal and a smaller 1 1/2" quartz crystal point, on a naturally shed deer antler handle, and it measures 9 1/2" inches long overall.

Packed up my altar tools last night to bring them up from the house and into my “Treehouse” micro-apartment/bedroom.  All were there and ready to go, except my wand.  COuld NOT find it anywhere, although the amount of moving chaos is still pretty dreadful. It was a wand of black walnut, taken from my home land. I took the opportunity for a Deep Listen and realized that I took that wand from a tree my soon-to-be-ex husband trimmed.  Aha.  Time to break ties with anything that was dependent on him, ergo time for a new wand.

I take a new wand periodically.  In my tradition the wand is the most living and changing of tools, and should be replaced as needed as life transitions, moves, and new growth happen.  As a child I took wands from the hornbeam tree by my playhouse, measuring them to match the measure of my forearm, stripping the bark while green, and sometimes carving rings or spirals into them with a pocketknife.  I liked the lightning-zigzag of the whippy pale wood. My working wand while studying under Thorn was from the grove of trees near my house at the time, a wild hybrid of pear/hawthorn that had taken over a new growth area reclaimed from the railway near the Blue River.  I made sure to keep the thorns intact, as this seemed an important characteristic of the wood and the lessons I would be learning during this phase of my life. When I moved to Nebraska, I took a Cypress wand from a tree on the property.  It was a time of falling into the Underworld. When I came here, I wanted a wand made of one of the local trees - mostly Black Walnut, Oak, and Pawpaw, with a handful of Redbud, Hophornbeam, and Sycamore.  When The Oathbreaker trimmed a Walnut, I took a wand from it. It’s clear that wand no longer serves me and I need to make a new relationship with this land and its tallest residents.  It is deep winter right now, and that makes it hard to ID and know the trees.  And I am still deep in my own winter of grief.  As I was contemplating what to use as a wand in the interim until I take a wand from the land, my eye fell on a bone (probably deer) that had been left at Samhain at my offering place when I went to retrieve a plate on which I’d given offerings. The offerings had been crackers with rich cream cheese and rose jelly, offered to the Gentry as we’d been discussing them in our witchy group.  The bone felt like a gift-for-a-gift, an acknowledgment from the fae of the land.  So it definitely feels like something the Land had willingly and intentionally given me.  And bone does come from a growing, living thing, so it’s not completely alien to how I work with wands.  It’s rare to use non-wood as a wand in my trad, and to do so must be done with consideration and discernment. Oh, it was also the Saturn-Pluto conjuction during the hour of Saturn and a full moon and one of my rare menses.  I don’t do astrological timing but several members of the coven do and so I happen to know about this as a thing.  Hmm.

Some galaxy coyote bone and quartz point wands. They have UV and glow in the dark accents.