I truly love Nora Ephron. I couldn’t have survived my teens and early twenties without her. Her movies are magic. Her feminist ideals are inspiring. Her writing is beyond honest. I am completely unwilling to admit that she’s gone.
Tomorrow, I will light a candle and watch her movies and cry. Tonight, I’m in total denial.
My heart hurts.
I’m dreaming of autumn in this summer heat…
Aloha Readers!
Here are some amaaazing things I’ve been reading and watching and being:
FINALLY a Frida Kahlo hair tutorial! Where has this been all my life?
Another post from Justina’s blog in which she makes an awesome Moroccan style fort in her living room. I’m in unrequited blog-love with Justina.
Portraits of girls and their bedrooms. Reminds me of my teenage days. My Mom let me paint toucans and stars and flowers all over my bedroom walls because she’s awesome.
Have you read the Chaos Muppet/Order Muppet article yet? It answers the all-important life question: what kind of muppet are you?
Rookie Mag is one of my favourite place on the interwebs. This article about the correlation between teenage girls’ budding sexuality and witchcraft in pop culture is super fascinating.
Ever wonder what different religions believe about the afterlife? Now you know.
Witchy things to do with dirt you find around town.
Salvador Dali’s zodiac paintings.
Who Needs Feminism? is an amazing blog where women send in captions photos explaining why feminism is important to them.
Think crystal healing is a bunch of bullshit? This article explains how and why they can heal in a relatable, easy to understand language.
Voila! Links to keep you busy all the day and night!
Don’t forget to visit the Shop, follow me on Twitter or check out any of the other links over there on sidebar —->
Did you wake up early and watch the sunrise? Are you planning a bonfire for later tonight? What are your Litha plans?
The New Moon energy from yesterday is still present, so make wishes and plan for the future!
Here’s a blog post I wrote last year about Litha.
An article on Litha folklore.
Litha spell work ideas.
Have a magical sabbat!
Love kittens? Prove it by following me on Twitter!
Check out the Shop and all the other fun links over on the sidebar ——>
Ray Bradbury lived an incredible life and has just embarked on the greatest adventure of all. He will be remembered every time a writer sits down at their laptop or a Pagan lights a Samhain candle or a monster crosses the screen of a small-town movie theatre.
My favourite Bradbury quotations:
“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
“I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
“The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.”
“The ability to “fantasize” is the ability to survive. It’s wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it…. The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane…. We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.”
“Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”
On every full moon, rituals take place on hilltops, beaches, in open fields and in ordinary houses. Writers, teachers, nurses, computer programmers, artists,lawyers, poets, plumbers, and auto mechanics — women and men from many backgrounds come together to celebrate the mysteries of the Triple Goddess of the Dance of Life. The religion they practise is called Witchcraft.
STARHAWK, Spiral Dance
Here’s a great article on the eclipse.
It’s in the sign of Sagittarius, so philosophize don’t analyze!
Today’s the birthday of tragic and beautiful Marilyn Monroe.
Everybody has their favourite version of Marilyn. Mine is the unglamorous Marilyn who reads books and plays in seaweed:
My favourite Marilyn quote:
“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
Image from here and a good tutorial as well.
Want a really quick, uber witchy project?
Take an orange.
Cut it in half.
Peel orange halves; keep the peel in one piece.
This requires tricky thumb maneuvering.
Pull out fruit pieces.
Avoid pulling out the white, wick-looking piece of pulp that holds the fruit to the peel in the middle:
Fill orange halves with olive oil.
I’m assuming other oils work as well, but I’ve always used olive oil.
I also like to add essential oils, like lavender.
Coat the “wick” in olive oil.
Light it up.
It’ll take few tries before the “wick” catches fire.
I made one of these candles yesterday and it burned for 8 hours.
8 freaking hours!
The earth is amazing.
The End.
