This is Potato, my witch-cat. She’s not a familiar, not the receptacle for a helper spirit. She is a fully participating member of our coven, though she hasn’t taken the coven class yet.
Potato came to Samhain. She noshed with us beforehand as we noshed. She sat by the scrying mirrors as we scried. She took part in the divination.
This Samhain, we had a visitor who brought with her a pendulum and divination cloth that said, yes, no, maybe, and don’t want to answer.
Spirits and ghosts visit this time of year. I do think the veil between this world and the otherworld is thin now. Ancestors hang in the eaves, eavesdropping. The Snoqualmie tribe, on whose land I live, also traditionally thought ancestors came back this time of year.
This is my backyard a couple days ago, on a misty afternoon. I live in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, in Washington state, and often the bowl of the valley below my house fills with mist early and late. I’m on the edge of a wilderness, and my backyard looks like it!
This is one of my muses, sitting on top of some things I wrote at two different pagan events to inspire myself: “You are a Celtic witch” (because whatever my practice, that is my heritage), and a now very faded list: “To keep going; to have faith; to step forward into all I can become; to have patience with myself; to love myself and my work as it is and as it grows; to let go all that stands in the way.”