Lesson Two: Attuning to Natural Cycles
Basics of Witchcraft
by Jeffrey Pierce
There are ways to further attune yourself to these cycles we discussed in Lesson One, to make you even more aware of the natural patterns to your day. Which brings us to...
Exercise Two: Attuning to Natural Cycles
Each morning when you awake, take a moment to notice the sunrise or the early morning sun (if you don't get up early enough to catch the transition from night to day). Stand in front of your window (or outside, if your living situation allows it) and simply experience the sunlight. Take a moment and watch how the light looks different on the world around you than it does in the afternoon. If you're up early enough to watch the sunrise, pay attention to the colors, to the different hues that are painted across the clouds. No two sunrises are the same. Each morning, you'll be blessed with a special moment alone with nature's majesty.
As you stand there, feel the sunlight on your skin. Imagine that your body is transparent, that the light shines within you, slowly filling your being. Visualize the sun's energy slowly raising your own energy level, recharging you the same way a hot shower does. When you're done connecting to the morning, take a moment and thank the sun for rising, for bringing light and life to your day. It can be a simple sentence such as, "Thank you sun, for rising and beginning a new day," or as elaborate as reciting a poem that you've written for the occasion.
At sunset (or at night) take a moment and do the same thing with the night sky. Take a moment and look at the stars; see if you can feel the moonlight and starlight the same way you felt the room around you in the example from Lesson One. Pull this energy within you, adding it to the sunlight you pulled in at dawn. When you're done, once again give thanks, anyway that you feel moved to. This exercise should be done on a continual basis. Ideally, you should do it each day, but that isn't always possible. Do your best, give yourself the leeway to forget or run out of time. You shouldn't force yourself to do this exercise - just strive to do it as often as you can. Eventually, you'll find that your days go better when you complete this exercise than when you don't.
So what in the world does welcoming each day and night do for us? Subconsciously, those of us who are on any kind of learning path - whether we're studying for school, doing research in the lab, or simply trying to understand our own lives - are constantly looking for ways to comprehend the material in front of us. On a spiritual path, we try to understand ourselves and the way we interact with life. As pagans, we take that a step farther and seek to understand how we connect with the world around us and the cycles that are present in Nature.
Exercise Two has three basic purposes, each unique and individually important.
First of all, it gives you a reference to understand the cycles of your day. This may not seem too important until you think back to
Exercise One: Learning To Listen. We weren't aware of the natural world around us because we didn't stop to look at it. By taking a few moments to simply sit and observe, we began to develop a frame of reference to connect with nature. By taking a few moments to honor the day and the night, you begin to bring order to your day. Your subconscious mind, instead of running around tired all day, coming home and vegetating in front of the television, and suddenly being thrust into bed, now has a regular division to its day. You'll find that your stress level should slowly and naturally drop, that you become more focused on the tasks before you, and that you have more energy to complete them with.
The second reason this exercise is important is because it begins to connect you to the larger cycles of the natural world. As we'll explore later in this course, both the moon and sun have very distinct cycles, both physically and on an energy level. Rather than being pulled by these cycles, you'll notice them and get in synch with them. When was the last time you instinctively knew when the moon was new? When was the last time that you thought, "You know, the flowers should be blooming any day now?" simply because you knew it was time for them to do so? Both the sun and moon have a multitude of subtle influences on our lives. We may get cranky when the hours of daylight start to shorten or feel energized on the full moon. Rather than simply stumbling into these patterns, by regularly observing them we begin to understand them and make them a part of our lives.
The third reason we do this exercise is simply to begin changing our frame of mind. The path I teach isn't one where we expect to grow simply because we deserve it. Rather, we begin to seek our natural place in the world, working with the rhythms of life rather than fighting against them. Have you noticed that we ended the first two exercises by giving thanks? It's something that will reoccur in every exercise in this course. Sometimes we will simply thank the world around us for a blessed experience. Occasionally, we will simply stop and thank ourselves for taking the steps to reach a certain point in our personal growth. To properly understand these lessons, you must move beyond the mindset that we're separate from the natural cycles around us. By giving thanks, we instinctively assume that we are receiving something from nature - which we are. By looking at our lives as receiving a multitude of blessings, we begin to understand that we aren't taking from the world, but that we are equals in life. Don't believe me? Try living without sunlight or oxygen. Try living without water. The rivers, the trees, the sky, and the sun can continue on without us, but we cannot continue on without them. And you will slowly begin to understand the inherent blessings in developing a joy in simply living. As we begin to understand that we are in an equal partnership with life, instead of simply subduing it to our will, we begin to perceive that we are part of a larger, interconnected web of existence. This might not seem important now, but later on in this course, we'll look at this web in greater detail and learn how to continue your studies from the parallels you find in the natural world around you.
There's an ancient belief that Witches don't find their power by commanding nature - those that truly find the magick on this path do so by developing a partnership, a relationship, and a friendship with the natural world around them. We'll look at this in depth a bit later on, but by welcoming the day and night on a regular basis, you can begin to embrace this perspective now - which will benefit you greatly later on in this guide.