The online home for Lisa McSherry, author and priestess
You hear it all the time, from everyone you know: “I’m so stressed.” “I feel overwhelmed.” “I can’t get caught up.” Stress is the defining characteristic of the 21st century, and sometimes it seems impossible to manage, which creates more stress — I call it the negative feedback loop of DOOM. When we are stressed […]
In just a few days most people will celebrate a new year. Some large number of people will also make promises about things they will do to make changes in their life. I am not one of them.
I am more than a little wary of people who decide how things are and never revisit those decisions.
I started this post in late October, long before the recent US election, although what you will read has been revised. Nonetheless, apparently I was prescient.
JaguarMoon started (allll the waaaaaay back in 2000) as a typical hierarchical* coven. I was the High Priestess and although three other people founded the coven along with me, they all felt they were not ready to Lead. In all honesty, neither was I, but Deity Called and I answered. Over the years the other […]
“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 […]
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, […]
