August is a doorway,
a border month*,
one foot in the clover,
one in new-fallen leaves,
a hand full of elderberries,
a pocket full of wind.
This is the odd, uneven time*
when hydrangeas suddenly bloom
and sunflowers go to seed,
and our lives are like this too
some things lavish,
some still in leaf,
some withering,
some tight-budded,
and waiting to bloom.
We may dream of great cauldrons of change
in which to steep and dream,
but have a mug of time instead,
ten minutes,
one page,
a single rose,
yet even this small space
softens something inside us.
So, we bless the first fruits,
the half‑finished, falling things,
and whisper our simplest spell:
Breathing in, we arrive.
Breathing out, we soften
and make peace.
“Hey ritual,”
we say,
“I’m returning.”
One of my favorite self-invented prompts to get one of my daily poems started when I feel like I have “nothing” to say and “nothing” to write about, is to simply write: “a ritual of returning,” at the top of my page and then start noticing what I notice and hearing what I hear and feeling what I feel. Pretty soon, I have a poem and ritual in one. My own newsletter on Substack is called Rituals of Returning, not only because this is what I do so often in writing, but because that is so much of what my work is about—the practice, process, and promise of return. Early this month, when I read the start of a new poem into my voice notes, autocorrect transformed the opening line into “Hey ritual, I’m returning!”—which made me laugh, at first, while also realizing how true it is. Isn’t that exactly what we’re doing when we come back to our practices after a long, messy day or week or month?
Hey ritual, I’m returning.
Hey circle, I’m returning.
Hey body, hey breath, hey magic—I’m returning.
We don’t need to return with everything figured out, polished and serene. We just need to return.
In July, our theme was the Cauldron of Change, and even though the calendar page has turned, I’m still very much simmering in the cauldron of being. My body and soul are both asking for more time in the cauldron—more steeping, more simmering, more brewing, more dissolving and recombining, more transformation.
What I often daydream about is an entire week (at least!) of solitude, a long retreat away from everything and everyone. What I actually got, this past Saturday, was about two hours.
And it turned out that those two hours were actually enough (for now) and I realized, maybe I don’t need a whole month in the cauldron, maybe I just need a “cauldron mug’s worth” of space to steep, a single sitting of steep-and-simmer time, enough space to soften what is rigid and bring some flavor back into my life and days.
A mug of time to cut and paste and collage.
A mug of time to make apple-pie nachos to share.
A mug of time to write tiny summer poems.
A mug of time to drink dark chocolate Teeccino from my favorite handmade cauldron mug and remember that I’m not a machine.
In a season that can be so demanding in its pace and heat, it can sometimes be easy to believe we can only savor cauldron time in days‑long retreats or perfectly silent mornings, but as August unfolds, it is reminding me that even a mugful of cauldron time can hold real, potent magic.
Near the end of this week’s live community practice, I read a piece from Jarod Anderson aloud:
“I have long dreamed of using magic to move objects with my mind. The older I get, the more I know my dream is fulfilled each time I pick up my cup. What is a body? A spell billions of years in the making. Soil and storms, the fruit of forests and phytoplankton. How well familiarity masks our magic.”
How well familiarity masks our magic.
We might think we are ordinary, and in some ways we are, but we are also walking spells—composites formed of star‑dust and soil and sea. Each breath is a spell. Each time we reach for a pen or stir a dish or type a message to a far‑away friend, we are doing what in some ways might actually seem impossible: moving matter with our minds, coaxing the invisible into visible form.
Books appear where before there was only an idea. Afghans emerge from what were tangled threads. Paintings bloom from a plain white canvas and colorful tubes. Circles form on a weekday afternoon, with people from all over the world arriving in little rectangles on the screen, bringing their own candles, cups, and cards.
If we encountered any of this for the very first time, we would be stunned with wonder, but we’re used to it, so we forget. Familiarity masks our magic.
August, with its border‑time strangeness, gives us a chance to unmask that magic again.
Sylvia Plath called August the “odd uneven time.” Tove Jansson called it a border month. And, here we are, still showing up, willing to notice that ordinary life continues right alongside the sacred, because this ordinary life is the sacred, when we remember to pay attention.
Feel free to join us every week for live community practices in the Goddess Magic Mystery School.
(*”border month” comes from Tove Jansson. “odd uneven time” comes from Sylvia Plath. Both from pieces written about August.)
