Green Witch

Last week as part of BIG, I painted this painting. (Some of this has been previously written, sorry for repitition)


It is based on a memory, or a half memory / half story. I talk when I am tired, mostly about nothing, sometimes I get repetitive. As a young child, my family was driving back from somewhere at night. I was resisting sleep. The moon was full and I started to talk.

'That's my friend Moon that is. Can you see my friend moon? I love my friend moon.' and on and on. I think I half drove my folks crazy and half amused them.

And so this I painted. My childlike me has moved from the car and is alone with a blanket in some vegetation. I am not surprised by the blue hair, after all, I am fully aware of my love affair with blue hair. I even remember how that started.

When I was putting myself back together after my breakdown, aged 21, I read a book called Stepping in to the Magic by Gill Edwards. A great book. She proposes that we have a higher self and a basic self (as best I remember) with guided meditations to meet them (amongst a lot more). I met Scrutius, the mole who is my Basic self - he searches for hidden treasure and I gave him a fantastic pair of winged pink glasses a la Dame Edna. My higher self was a blue parrot spirit called Anyol. In human form she has long wild blue hair....


I should re-read this book and redo it to. I am not sure if these are permanent features of me or if they are likely to change....

but the green skin?

The only thing I do know is that I drew a lady with green skin on my soul armour page of my soul journal and all of a sudden it is very clear that she is me. The same me as the green skinned girl.


So this week we have to explore an aspect of our previous painting. Ask a question and using painting to answer it. So I wanted to find out what this green meant to me. I filled my pallet with six different greens. I slopped it on to make a beautiful background and then painted on top in more green and this is what I got.


I knew spirals would be in as they were the first thing to pop into my head. Then a tree. But the tree wanted to be more symbolic and they also drew on celtic knotwork with entwined strands. Then, the idea of a green man but he turned out to not be a face, but a body with his green lady. They are mere suggestions in the green, crude. Then they got vegetation and more spirals and then the second lady tree and the spiral clouds.

I will take another picture once it is dry and I can move it somewhere with better light....

So what does this mean? Oh that is sooo clear to me now. Green is the colour of life, chaotic, messy, verdant life. It is the colour of my spirituality. My Goddess and her consort, amongst the trees and other plants. It is spirals and knotwork, spiraling and knotty life..... It is who I am.

I was claimed by my Goddess from the beginning. I was a witch before I was born. I am.

I should have no doubt.

I claimed the moon as friend when I was tiny. I wrote stories of Father Sun and Mother earth in my teens. The biggest signs of who I was before I even knew what a pagan was.

Soooo....

This brings a new question. I know traditionally there has been a two tier system in wicca - hereditary and non-hereditary. I always wondered about the lost hereditary witches - I wonder if I might be one of them? There is something in my family - acertain something that seems to have slid down the tree, probably from my Mum's Fathers side. And that says it all, a generation with no women born to the family. A hard time with deaths before they should have happened and a broken family.

My Mum is no witch but she has a healing touch and sometimes, with an uncomfortable look on her face, she admits to me that sometimes she knows things. With her Dad dying in her teams, a few years after he separated from her Mum, what contact would she have had with her paternal Grandma? If she had been a witch, what could she ever have said?

But it doesn't matter. I am sure I am a hereditary witch - or at least that I was in one of my witchy lives. Because that is what this painting tells. I am a past life witch. I have no idea how close to the heart of the spiral I will step in this life, but it is my choice, my Goddess walks with me but the degree to which I involve her in my life is my choice. And I choose her, just like she chose me so many lives ago.

I should believe.