#ginandjack

2011, 2018,2025

And love and love and love and loveliness is to be found in all things in all reflections in all sounds even in nothingness.

Be jealous! Be envious! Be inspired! Become your version of love and love and love and loveliness

Avocado and grape seed oil fill the oil lamp with just a few drops each of sweet orange, balsam fir, and lavender oil added. I braid the wicks myself. I pour green tea mixed with pomegranate juice in one cup, water in the big goblet, and wine I made last year in a smaller cup. It's dry and pale orange in color from the skins of white grapes. The incense, "Good Earth" was bought, from my favorite local witch shop, but mixed into the warmth of it is the dried pine resin I gathered from the "four sisters," the European Black Pines in my neighborhood brought over by immigrants years ago.

I feel like the Semi-Homemade lady, and not just because she liked to tipple. But because every devotion or votive offering is, well, semi-homemade. I have invested so much time and money into brewing, a devotion all its own, but one that is very slow and patient. I get my local honey from a witchy friend, but everything else is typically store bought. It's great when I can pick my own fruit for my homemade wines and meads and ciders, but even when I can, I don't own those orchards or grow those fruits.

I don't have the depth of supplies to always be making incense. I enjoy doing it, but I also buy local. I support my community. I love the act of recipe building and getting into the stuff with my hands, but my local witch shop makes great self-igniting incense without using salt peter or powdered charcoal. It's worth my time to get it already made.

And that oil lamp I love that feel so traditional?I'm not about to start pressing my own oil! While the luxury of making my own alcohol is not lost on me; I'm not about to buy a $300 still to distill my own essential oils! Even if I bought the thing, where am I getting the bulk herbs or woods? I'm a suburbanite!

(NOTHING HAS CHANGED ON TUMBLR, I've come back almost a decade later, and folks are still fighting about what offerings are "good enough." I'm not here to gatekeep. I can afford to make wine. If all you can afford to do is digital collage work, do that! If all you can do is pray and read the hymns off of websites, thats still a lot of your energy going into devotion!This is not a brag post, I do have a point I'm trying to make.)

I'm getting away from myself a little. More than the acceptance of things being semi-homemade or entirely fabricated by others and collated: it's the acceptance of that necessity. It's necessary to the lives we lead, but also, as people. No one has the time to constantly be in worship headspace. Let alone connected. No one can do it and function at their jobs. In some communities, they call it being burnt by the witch fire or the divine light. You can't be a conflagration all the time. Your brain literally can't function in a space of non-dualism without dissociation. But you can be devoted, and worshipful, and mindful. It's tiny peaks and great big valleys, surprising connections and moments of flow, of epiphany, or mystic non-dualism or whatever. It's sometimes thunder and sometimes a lover's whisper, but it can't be 24/7. You can't be "on" all the time.

But.

You can spend time braiding cord for an oil lamp. You can spend time carefully harvesting pine resin and letting it dry for a few months. And maybe I can afford several pounds of honey for mead, but if you can't a bottle of Welch's is good! You (read: me) can budget to buy yourself a new work shirt and also pick up a discounted shelf because it makes a perfect niche. You can suffuse your world with little devotions because when you do, it makes the moments where you're touching the Mystery more frequent, easier, more natural. You can open the way to the numinous in little acts, little ways.

People will find a way to play on/prey on any miniscule thing. I recommend overstock stores like Marshalls if you have them out your way

They’re here. The problem is the same residents who are annoyingly using fashion as power plays also trawl those same stores. I’m going to have to punch up above my usual budget and/or completely change up where I go shopping. (For once, nationwide availability is working against me.)

It’s a blessing in disguise, really. It’s not about the cost of the clothes/adornments. It’s about what I have been allowing myself to settle for. The fashionistas would lose their wigs and their teeth if they knew the blouses I get the most compliments for were $3 each and came from a store in a part of town they warn their grandchildren to avoid because of “those people”. It’s amusing to hear them complain about an $85 blouse falling apart the moment it was exposed to water for the first time, but the $12.99 blouses I bought two years ago still look new (because I take care of my shit).

It’s just one part amusing as hell and many parts annoying as hell, that of all the things folks are zeroing in on for coattail riding, it’s earrings. And a $39 pair at that. If I heard one more person claim to know all about me because they not only recognize where my earrings came from but that they have a pair as well, I’m going to scream.

But here’s the blessing of it. I have been refraining from buying “nice things” for myself because of self-esteem issues. I could afford a “nice pair” of earrings. I only need one pair that fits my aesthetic to wear anywhere. I just haven’t because I didn’t feel like I deserve to.

But, you know... fuck ‘em. I’m not going to pigeonhole myself because someone might talk shit about me and my aesthetic. They’re gonna do that anyway. This whole thing about the earrings just serves to remind me that I have to dress for myself, and that I need to be comfortable with myself, and if that means reaching outside of my comfort zone, then I better start warming up.

53. 5 things that make me happy

My friends, for one! 

Scuba diving and the underwater realm in general 

Art!

airplanes :D

That's just kink