The online home for Lisa McSherry, author and priestess
“I’ve been grieving people who aren’t dead.” A friend told me this, and it struck home with the intensity of an arrow to the gut. Living in a foreign country necessarily requires some level of grieving for one’s former life . . . let me rephrase, because that put it at a safe distance. Since […]
Autumn is such a lovely time to return our focus to our home. There is a reason so many of us have a fall cleaning time, mirroring the spring clean. We know we’re about to spend many months bundled up and away from the harsh weather outdoors. Its a reflection of the harvest time we […]
Each year I do a tarot reading to accompany my annual review and goal setting and ask what the coming year will bring.
Each year at my birthday I review the previous year, celebrate my accomplishments, and set goals for the coming year. (Here’s my post from last year.) Sometimes I adjust those goals a bit at the witches’ new year (Samhain). Over the years I’ve learned to set fewer and smaller goals to allow for new opportunities […]
This is a particularly difficult Mercury Retrograde and I’m feeling more than a little irritated and thwarted and just plain grumpy. Among other things, a major writing project and collaboration just got shut down after more than a year. In retrospect, I had my doubts about the promises made, but didn’t think it would go […]
This post is a continuation from my last post, Storms Don’t Have to Be a Crisis where I talked about the inevitability of storms within a magickal group.
In classic sociology, small groups follow a consistent pattern of forming-storming-norming-performing and finally, adjourning [1] and most, if not all, magickal groups fall into this pattern as well. For the group leader, trying to navigate your group through the storms can feel like standing in the middle of a field in a lightning storm—shocking, dangerous, […]
In the first part of this article, I talked about the first two of three steps I feel are necessary to build a long-lasting and health magickal group, defining the group’s purpose and creating connections among group members. This essay continues that with what I see as the third vital aspect: creating a group mind, […]
As a co-founder of JaguarMoon, a coven I helped manifest in May 2000, I’ve witnessed its evolution through various stages. It hasn’t always been a smooth journey, and there were moments when I questioned its longevity. Yet, here we stand, stronger than ever, as we embark on our 25th year together. You feel an urge, […]
(This piece has had a strange history. I first wrote it on spec in 2008 for a book that accepted it, but accidentally forgot to print it. It was then picked up and printed in the Summer ’08 issue of PanGaia magazine, which has since gone out of business. Weirdly, perhaps ironically, it is the […]
