For two days I have had a nasty virus or gastric flu or pesticide poisoning from crop spray and have stayed in bed feeling sorry for myself and hoping it is just gastric flu and not some insidious carcinogenic toxic poisoning that will wipe me out when I am in my cronely prime.
I have had endless cups of mint tea with a squeeze of lemon juice and homemade chicken soup and glasses of orange juice and teapots full of grated ginger steeped in boiling water and I am still sick. My kitchen is overflowing with ripe organic tomatoes and my garden is scarlet with unpicked ripe organic tomatoes, and I cannot look a tomato in the eye. There are bowls of cling peaches to be peeled and processed, table grapes still a little tart because the grape season has just begun.
None of the spells or potions I know are much use, and I am trusting to bedrest. At least I haven’t needed to take a course of antibiotics or some other allopathic wonder drug that will have me up and about but with fanny thrush and a metallic taste in my mouth and sadly enhanced tolerance to supa drugs. I sleep for hours and wake up and drink fluids and sleep some more and read articles from the London Review of Books to find out if my mind is still there and then I have a cool bath and sleep some more.
No meditation, no yoga, no t’ai chi, no witchy empath exercises, no half-hearted rituals, no wishful magical thinking. I just lie in bed being ordinary and sick, which is a great relief. Sometimes I skim thorough 10001 pagan etc blogs and think we try to hard as magical apprentices. There is nothing to prove. Here I am just lying in bed being a sick neo-pagan witchy woman with scant respect for labels and letting the herbal knowledge and crafty instincts slip away as I rest. There’s a kind of bare attention there, taking in the sun coming through the window and some trilling from the noisiest house sparrow and my puppies beside me snoring like ancient tractors, but otherwise not much is going on at a conscious level.
At the Unconscious level sickness takes the core self down into the ruined temples and dark forests and ocean canyons, but I am not going to chase after the Inanna self as she descends through unmapped regions. I am going to stay in the day with a poem from David Harsent about a garden goddess who smells ‘veryslightly of civet’ — and of course with that phrase I am right back in the mystery and amusement and Otherliness of this here, now and forever life.
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