|
About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
|
Daily Cascade
Since my old blog "Everyday Canvas "  became overfilled, here's a new one. This new blog item will continue answering prompts, the same as the old one.
Cool water cascading to low ground
To spread good will and hope all around.
November 12, 2025 at 4:26pm November 12, 2025 at 4:26pm
| |
Prompt:
Autumn is considered The Season Of The Witch. What are your thoughts on this?
------
Surely, there is Halloween, but I'm not going to touch that at this point because I yakked enough about Halloween in October. Actually, a witch is a very wise woman. Never mind the far-out stories of witches eating kids.
True, the witch is connected to death in some way, but where would we be without the necessary ritual of death? How would we treat our loved ones' remains after they die? Which, I believe the witch, or the idea of her, has to do the with the concept of the thinning veil between life and death. But it isn't the macabre I'm trying to write in this entry. I'm trying to aim at a witch's know-how in handling change, especially when light turns into dark.
This is where autumn comes in when daylight and darkness tip toward the night. Didn't we just have the daylight savings time reversed and the day gets darker an hour earlier? This increases the dusk and the shadows, as the borderline between the light airy seasons and cold darker ones. Therefore, the fading sun and the encroaching cold feel supernatural, suggesting that what holds reality together is somewhat loosened.
Witches, as such, are the masters who walk the line between stuff , for example, between the wild and the civilized, the light and the dark, the known and the unknown, and life and death. Before modern medicine and the grocery chains we now cannot do without, the wise woman or witch played a central role in the survival of a village. Autumn, then, was a brutal time but also a necessary period of preparation for survival. It demanded the witch's know-how of nature's offerings and its decay. So the witch became a manager of the harvest with her knowledge of alchemy and preservation.
Medicinal weeds, roots, and pulling them out of the earth just in time before the frost set in, and turning perishable food into edibles like jams, salted meats, preserved vegetables must have seemed like like a form of deep magic to those who enjoyed witches' efforts to keep villages and people alive. This must be why the scent of woodsmoke and fire became the witch's elements. That we humans have the knack of attaching the negative to anything positive must have also been applied to the well-meaning witches, as the result.
So, haphazardly, we look inward, while blaming the witches for all the good they do, and attach a spiritual darkness to them. By the way, anytime, people look inward facing their own personal shadows, they end up blaming someone or something outside of them. So the poor, helpful witch becomes the scapegoat and is accused of performing dark magic.
I, therefore, tend to believe that a witch's magic, no matter how dark or light, has served humankind for centuries. Especially in Autumn, a time defined by shadows, transitions, and most importantly, practical know-how. From my point of view, the witch does not only live through autumn but she is its most powerful priestess. I can vouch for that for some of the best people I like and admire are our very own  WdC witches, and you have to admit, they do deserve my high esteem of them.
|
© Copyright 2025 Joy (UN: joycag at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
Joy has granted InkSpot.Com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
|
...
Comment • View 3 comments 
