The Ramblings and Wanderings

Archive for August, 2009

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I have never posted a recipe! Why you may ask?

Well, I’m not the kind of girl who buys fancy kinds of mushrooms or puts mango sauce on my chicken, if you know what I mean.

So for the witch on a limited … everything … here’s dinner:

Purchase one tiny BBQ grill on clearance at the end of the season for under $15.

Purchase small bags of BBQ briquettes from the local small mountain town discount store, seems the local manufacturer is clearing stock.

Get a BBQ pan 3 for a dollar at the Safety Mart (small town grocery store)

Buy a cool looking knobby yam, extra virgin olive oil and basil at the Safety Mart.

Get a nice big grilling steak from local butcher and cut it in half to serve two.

Realize when you get home you don’t have any fire-starter.

To get coals going, build tiny kindling fire in the bottom of newly assembled BBQ grill. Then pile charcoal over the flames. This is best done on one side of the grill, confined fires burn hotter and all.

Once coals are cheerfully glowing through sheer force of will and patience, spread them evenly and attempt to slide grill into slot over them. It seems my grill will only slide into place if the coals are one deep and lay just so.

Head over to the little orchard in the front yard and find a nice stick of apple wood, then using the stick poke and prod grill into place.

Truck on into the kitchen to peel yam and cut it into rough fry shapes. Give yam peel to silly dogs who think they are starving. (If you don’t have dogs, give the peels to the compost heap or your pig)

Assemble yam fries into BBQ pan and sprinkle liberally with olive oil and basil.

Briefly consider making a steak rub from scratch, then go with the bottled steak spice because you are lazy.

Place the pan on one side of the grill and the seasoned steaks on the other.

Stir around the yam fries so they don’t burn or stick to pan and flip the steaks a couple of times.

When your patience wears thin, cut the thickest part of the thickest steak to check it.

Wait a little more.

Then serve with fresh sliced tomatoes and cucumber along with locally brewed apple cider over ice.

For dessert, use your stick to roast marshmallows over the last of the coals.

The hearthstone symbolizes the ancient hearth, as well as the very heart of a family or coven, it also helps to connect us with our ancestors and other household spirits. It can be used to symbolize hearth and fire deities as well. Any items to be blessed can be laid upon the hearthstone as you do so. This is a very useful tool indeed.

The most popular places to hide witch bottles used to be under the hearthstone or doorstep. The seventeenth century witch-bellarmines of East Anglia have mostly been found buried beneath the threshold or the hearthstone of old buildings.

It is interesting to note that in old Mexican lore the umbilical cord is to be burned in the hearth to detach the baby from unclean, antisocial prenatal influences. In this lore the hearth symbolizes the unity of those who live together and endows this unity with sacred characteristics.

There is an old Somerset tradition that says you must draw a cross on a new hearthstone before you light the first fire – but not with an elder stave.

It was at the hearth where communication with spirits and ancestors was practiced and it was on the hearthstone where food offerings were left and incense burnt.

We all require light, heat and food, shelter, well-being, and companionship, all of which are represented by the hearth.

Even though most of us do not have literal hearths anymore, we can still honour a hearth goddess, or our ancestry, and all that the hearth stands for generally, by setting up a household shrine, or by simply placing special objects in our home.

The hearthstone is interesting in that it is associated with both earth (it is a stone) and fire, arguably, air could also be tossed in there, as fire needs air to burn and smoke often is symbolic of the element of air.

The hearthstone represents the home itself, the family, the heart or love the family shares, as well as the ancestors and our future descendants. It connects all these things and more.

If the hearth is the center of the home, then the hearthstone is the very heart of the home and family.

A hearthstone can also represent the axis mundi. In some traditions this is not a world tree but a world mountain, so use that to aid in your visualizations if you wish.

Just as fire is the center of home and ritual space, the center where the spirits can come to us and join us in our rites, the hearthstone is the very foundation upon which this hallowed fire sits.

I love this theme! The Pacific Northwest background, the disorganized note book styling. Oh yes…

Everyone knows that scene in Charlotte’s Web when, Pocahontas like, Charlotte throws herself over the body of a young Wilbur about to the get the axe from her father, thus saving his life.

Since time immemorial children have returned home or woken in the morning to discover the runt pig or calf (or what have you) they had been given to raise has been or must be slaughtered. Then likely served on the family table.

When serial killer Robert Pickton was on trial he told such a story as an attempt to gain sympathy from the jury. Farmers and ranchers watching the news coverage laughed bitterly.

I come from a family with a long history of farmers and hunters, complete with many old world values.

My Dad’s side of the family have been raising cattle probably since white people started raising cattle. The fact that the farm in England where my father and his siblings had been born is now a suburb is a family joke.

My Mother’s family arrived in Canada from Scotland some time around the Highland Clearances (The oldest soldier in Prince Charles Edward’s Army at the Battle of Prestonpans in the ’45 was an 80-year-old Ferguson) but you still see men in kilts at weddings and boys still are given names like Robert and Bruce. Working with animals also runs in this side of the family, many of us breed and show dogs, work in animals rescue, work for veterinarians hospitals, own horse ranches and so forth.

As a child we used the same white nylon rope to tie logs together building rafts on the lake that was used to string up a pig or a deer thus letting the blood drain out prior to butchering. The embedded brown stains in the rope fibre didn’t bother my brothers and I in the slightest. After all, Dad did soak it in a tub of soapy water.

I know what bear tastes like, and moose and elk and bison. I’ve had roast lamb, salted deer, and even rabbit stew.

I have given animals vaccinations, de-worming medicine, changed bandages, removed porcupine quills, cleaned up vomit, sprayed antiseptic on a half wild horse, and helped the vet fill the stomachs of four poisoned dogs with charcoal.

I have jumped into disgusting ditches to pull a drowning animal out of one; I have climbed trees for cats, clambered down mountainsides in the snow to drag a hound by the scruff back up it, I have spent all night sitting on the porch calling a beloved dog home.

I’ve gone to the chicken coop to gather eggs for breakfast, I’ve chased escaped goats, been bitten by horses, had many different kinds of mammals born into my hands, I’ve made the hard decision to put a good but injured animal down.

I have battled Parvovirus, Giaridia, Kennel Cough, infections, and fevers. I have faced cancer, liver failure, and birth defects, stillborn babes, Mange, lice, fleas, broken limbs, abused animals, starved animals and animals torn up by coyotes. I have had animals bleed to death under my hands as I do everything I can to stop it. I have given CPR to a dying animal and tasted death on my lips.

I have fought many battles with death, some I have lost and some I have won.

I have also slaughtered a few and taken a life for my own purposes. Then I give a proper portion back to the land.

I am not a vegetarian. How could I be when hundreds of generations before me relied on the raising of livestock to house and feed themselves?

I have had a pet snake that died of old age be turned into a belt as a gift. I wear real leather clothes. I have bags I store my witchy stuff in that are made of goatskin and deer hide etcetera.

I have buried things and dug them back up again a year or two later. I have bleached bones on the roof of my home.

These things have always been done with an understanding of the Land and with respect and mindfulness.

For this I know:

The reason farm parents make you care for something and then kill it is to teach you to value life and also to understand the power over the other creatures, and the land itself, that we humans wield.

We humans are animals; our bodies and our selves come from this Earth as any other creature.

But we are at the top of the food chain, whether we actually eat other animals or not.

We are the Stewards of the Land. Not in the modern pompous way that thinks we own the Land can do whatever we want, but in that old fashioned, ancient way that we once all knew so well when most of us were farmers, hunters, gatherers.

I learned at a young age that:

If we don’t take proper care of our livestock they get diseases (like Mad Cow) and they die, and then we go hungry.

If we don’t rotate our crops then the land gets sucked dry and the crops will fail and we will go hungry.

If we don’t fish responsibly then we will have disease-ridden fish farms and we will go hungry.

If we tromp around in the woods like we own the place the bears will maul us.

If we pollute the water then we will have nothing to drink and we will die of thirst.

My family has been piss poor farmers likely since before Rome invaded the ancestral lands. My Grandfathers ran farms for landowners, much like their fathers and their fathers.

We do not own the Earth; we are not the Landowners.

We are just running the farm.

Its about time to update the links, to add some, remove some and maybe organize them better. If anyone sees their website (or what have you) is missing, or if you have a recommendation, or see a link doesn’t work etc. Please post a comment to this post. Thanks!