Leo Season Energy And First Harvest Rituals For August

August has a way of turning the volume up: the sun feels louder, your calendar fills faster, and you can almost sense the season tipping toward change. We lean into that feeling with a Cozy Coven Chat that blends practical modern witchcraft with seasonal living, so you can ride the late-summer wave without getting knocked over by it.

We start with real-life reflections on travel, home, and what it means when a place finally feels like it fits. From there, we talk about community magic in Our Coven, including a symbolism theme that turns into a burst of creative divination. August’s coven focus shifts to potions. 

The tarot and oracle pulls set the tone for the month: focused fire, fast movement, and the quiet hope of the Star. We connect that to the Leo New Moon for confidence and visibility, the transition into Virgo season for organization and decluttering, and a dreamy Pisces Full Moon that begs for spellwork. I also share a grounded take on Lammas or Lughnasadh as first harvest season, with a simple question you can use anywhere: what is being harvested where you live right now?

Along the way we get honest about social media, attention, “popcorn brain,” and why unplugging is not a moral flex but a real spiritual practice. There’s also a haunted-history detour to the Whaley House. Plus practical apothecary prep like four thieves vinegar and elderberry syrup for back-to-school season. If any of this hits home, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review so more witches can find a slower, steadier kind of magic.

To Join Our Coven: https://www.jennycbell.com/our-coven-community

Transcript

Welcome And August Update

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello, witches, and welcome to another Cozy Coven Chat. I am your host, Jenny Seabell, and this is for the month of August. So remember, I am a mom and I'm busy. And so once September comes around, we will go back to weekly podcasts. I hope this podcast has found you. I released it on a Friday instead of a Sunday because I wanted you to have all the information to celebrate the first harvest, also known as Lunasa or Lamas. So we're gonna get to that in a moment. I hope everybody is well. Mercury and retrograde and cancer was not for the week. I always talk about how cancer season in general always feels a little sad and goth in the middle of summer. Um, but then you throw a mercury retrograde in there and it's like wild. Um to go back to July. I actually did a we did a family vacation to San Diego. Um we ended up going to the Getty first in LA, and then we spent time at Mission Bay in San Diego. We saw family and then we came home and it was wonderful. It's the first time we've done a family vacation in a long time, and all of that, it was so cool to be at the ocean during the new moon in Cancer. Like, you can't really beat that. Um, but I'm very happy to be home, and it's funny because used to always say, like, oh, if I won the lottery, totally live in San Diego. Nothing against San Diego, but I wouldn't. I actually really love where I live. I really love the PW. I've definitely been won over by Southern Oregon. It's small, but we have cute things like museums and coffee shops and you know metaphysical shops and bookstores. But I just love just being able to get out into the natural world so quickly and easily. Like there's something so uh magical about that because I just didn't have access to untouched green spaces where I live. So I originally am from New Jersey. We had parks, and we had this one um park called Rifle Camp Park, which was kind of like wooded, and that was really fun. I spent a lot of time there, so we had that. Um, but still it's in the middle of like northern New Jersey, which is all suburbs for New York City, right? So doesn't give you that sense of like untouched wonder. And then living in California, we drive up to the different mountains and hike and this, but very populated. Um, the desert, I would spend a lot of time out in the Mojave Desert, especially with my geology club, and there's a a sacredness and a beauty to the desert that is very different from a forest. Um, and I recommend everybody, if you've never been to a desert, do that at least once in your lifetime. The sky in the desert is amazing, the ability to just see for miles and miles, um, it's beautiful, but I really do love a forest and love living here. I love that I'm a short drive away from the Redwoods or the coast, and there's also desert here in Oregon. Like it's yeah, it feels like such a special place to live. I'm near Mount Shasta, and that in itself is really cool. So, anyway, it's true that you know, like going on vacation, going on a trip, coming home, you just really appreciate home more, or you don't. And if you don't, that means something, right? Like when I lived in California, I always wanted to be away from where I lived. Um I don't feel that way anymore. So I guess for me it was a confirmation that we did the right thing by moving our family here because that was quite a leap to do during COVID, and having never lived here or even visited here. I had never even been to Oregon and we moved here. So kind of blind um going in blind, but it just felt right. Really was part of my spiritual process and awakening more and diving more into my spiritual practice, and yeah, paid off. So it was really interesting. So that's a little bit about July. Also in July, um, we had Samantha Corfield

Travel Reflections And Loving Home

SPEAKER_00 4:37

in our coven. She wrote Create Your Own Afterlife, which is such a cool book about basically planning your afterlife without any dogma or religion, so that you can live better now. Because a lot of people like they fear dying, death and dying, and what's gonna happen, and there's this big unknown. So it it kind of gives you that empowers you to plan it, and then you work backwards, right? Like we used to do that in teaching, lesson planning. Like, okay, if I want my students to be able to write an essay on Romeo and Juliet and you know, the themes of you know, love versus infatuation or whatever, how do I get them there? That's the that's the end product. Now let's work backwards. How do I get the students there? And so it's the same idea. It's like, okay, we create our own afterlife. How do we go back and live so that we have that afterlife? But we had her in the uh our coven not to even talk about that um because she's very, very knowledgeable, very wise. She's become a friend, and I've asked her for some advice here and there, and she's so wise on um folk magic and voodoo and hoodoo and voodoo and New Orleans history, and so she came in and talked about traditional New Orleans witchcraft, which is you know, she talked about indigenous tribes there and just a little bit of the history and then how to make magic your own. It was a beautiful chat. So July was really good. Our other thing in our coven was um we our theme was symbolism, and so a member said, Hey, you know, since we're working on symbolism, what if we all took turns giving different divination readings? Because that's symbolism, right? That's how divination works for most of us. Like we use the symbol of a card or charms or tea leaves or whatever. We're reading the symbols, and so like let's put it into practice. And so um tons of people signed up, and then she organized them into like this is your day that you're gonna offer the reading or whatever. And I got a few readings, and so people either could participate by reading for others or getting readings, and it was so cool. Like, my favorite reading that I saw that I participated in was such a unique idea. A member used um a cloth that was the like an astrological wheel, like um when you get your chart done, right? Like that kind of a wheel, and she casted charms onto there and then explained the connection between the charm and where it landed in the chart on there and what that meant for you. And it was like so spot on, but I've never seen anything like that. And I was like, you need to like do more of this. Like people would pay money to do this, so it was really beautiful, and so many people have participated. I got to see so many different styles of divination and what card decks people have, and I got to see confidence grow, like some people saying, I've never read for anybody, and that's not the end goal, right? Like you don't have to do, you don't have to turn all of the things you do magically into money, like you don't have to have a side hustle or this is gonna be

Coven Community And Divination Experiments

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my career now, but it's really fun to do for other people, and so like that's just fun. It was just some people are like, I'm never gonna do this for a living, I just want to practice it to practice it, and there's some kind of beauty in that because like if you were to have a group of people in person, that's what you would do, right? So people always ask, like, it's an online coven, how can it be a community? I just gave you that example, right? It's a real community, like you can feel it. Um, that was another thing Samantha Corfield talked about was that she could feel the energy, like the our coven energy is so beautiful and so receptive. And I'm like, yeah, that's how I feel when I do card readings for us. Like it feels good, it's a good strong energy. So super proud of where we've come. Started off really small and has just grown, and just love the initiative, feeling really, really positive about that. And so, just speaking about our coven, we will be focusing on potions. That's our theme for August. So, again, all these themes came from the coven themselves. And so, August is potions. And so, what does that mean? Uh, the very basic, right, a cup of tea or coffee is a potion. Anytime you make moon water, it's a potion. But we can get beyond that, and so I'm excited to see kind of where the conversation goes. Um, I'm gonna get to our cards and I'm gonna get to talking about Lunas Alamis and all of the moons. Um, but a couple things before I forget, I will be uh live on Facebook with Unturned Pages. Unturned Pages is a podcast, um, and I will be on there on August 23rd. So if you are on Facebook, just look for Unturned Pages and follow them, and then you'll get prompted when the live happens, and we're gonna be talking about Divergent Witchcraft. So I'm really excited. I was on last year, and it was one of the very first podcasts I ever did, and Jenny, the host, was so kind to me that I was like, I need I want to come back if you'll have me. So that was really, really nice. Um, let me go over the cards, and then we'll get over, go over the dates, and then we'll talk about Lamas Lunasa. So this time I pulled from two new card decks I got. One is from Hay House, one is from US Games. So the tarot is the Hearts Path Tarot, and I pulled the Knight of Wands, which I'm gonna put pictures on the Substack post. So if you're on Substack, you'll see a picture of the cards. So the Knight of Wands in this deck is a person, looks like a man. He's an archer, he's out in the middle of the forest. He, the sun is either setting or rising, kind of depending on your perspective. The atmosphere, the environment looks like it's in autumn. He is a flame, but not in a scary way, right? Like he's got fiery aura, and he's aiming his fiery arrow up, kind of like up beyond the forest, and there's a map on the ground. So this feels to me like determination, right? We're in Leo season, we're heading to Virgo season. So this feels like a combination of the fiery energy of Leo and how that amplifies you and gives you confidence and that inner power, and then using it to set your sights on something like you would in Virgo season. Virgo season is very organized, and so it's feeling like we're gonna use this energy, we're gonna make ourselves feel folded up, filled up with this fiery energy, this light, and then use it in some way to focus that energy. Leo season is one of my favorites. Um, so many Leos in my life. Shout out to my daughter, her birthday is August 11th. Um, so many good Leos in my life, and I just love the feeling of Leo season because you want to shine, you want to be confident, you want to get a haircut, you want to dress a little nicer. Like it just feels really good. And I love that it leads into Virgo season because it's like, okay, we were shining bright, and now we're gonna get kind of more organized, more focused. This also feels like Sagittarius energy because it is an archer in the map, right? Because Sagittarius

August Theme Potions And Announcements

SPEAKER_00 12:07

is like the wanderer. Um, but yeah, it really feels like we're past Mercury in retrograde, the notes have shifted to Aquarius and Leo. We have all this kind of energy building up. And for me, the full moon at the end of July almost felt like an eclipse. It really felt like a shifting, a change is coming, but big time reset energy. Like it really felt like, okay, let's reset, let's take stock of everything, let's manifest. Like kind of interesting because Lamas, which we're or Lunasa, which we're gonna talk about in a moment, can be seen as the first harvest or kind of like the last push of summer energy. And it really, this moon really felt like last push. Like, let's clarify some things, let's get ready to get some goals achieved, right? The other cards, also from the Hearts Bath Tarot, is the chariot. And this one, there's another sun, either sunrise or sunset. And the chariot is got two horses, a black and a white horse with the crescent moons on their forehead. Um, and they are pulling a man in a cart near a river. And so chariot energy is fast moving energy, change, um, usually for the better. It's usually good change. I use the chariot card when I'm like gonna do a travel spell because it's travel energy. So for some of us, it could be travel, physical, um, because we also have in the wands card, he's got a map, and so there's this energy of like traveling, but it could be in so many ways. It could be like physically traveling, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Um there's this quickness to August, is what I'm seeing. There's a quickness, there's a focus, there's a fiery energy, there's change. Yeah. And then the last card from that tarot deck, Heart's Path Tarot, is the star. And in this one, we have this beautiful woman who like water is dripping from her dress into what looks like could be a lake or a river or an ocean, body water, and her legs are in the water, she's sitting on the edge. Um, there's a dove, and there's a big star in the sky, and then seven other stars around her, and there's like hills, and it's very peaceful. And I often think of the star as like the wish card, like the lucky wish come true card. So

Tarot And Oracle Messages For August

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it's always a positive for me. So I'm looking at three very positive cards. I'm looking at the wands. This knight of wands is focused on a lot of times we associate the wands with career, but if you don't have a career, you know, you don't you wouldn't work outside of the home, could be something else, like a hobby or a passion. So there's a focus on that. There is movement, change, or travel with the chariot, and then the star is just this contemplation, this completion of a wish or dream that's coming true, right? That whole wish upon a star. So really positive. And then I picked two from um let me find the book. Hang on. Okay, here it is. I wanted to make sure I got it right. The Morbid Mirror Oracle Guidebook, and this is also from um this is from US Games. This is this author, I think it's Sunny Graves or Sony Graves. She made the Happy Halloween tarot, which became like a favorite of mine, and then she just put out this Oracle deck, and I'm obsessed. And so if you like Halloween, Sam, Sawin, fall, oracle type themes, you need it. I don't say that very often. The cards are black, and then they have like a metallic shimmer to them, and they are just so beautiful. There's so many cards, there's like over 70 cards. The book is really well done. So the one I pulled for us is The Art of Being. It says, just being born makes you worthy of being here. Let yourself just be. And it's a skeleton like admiring a butterfly. And then the other one is ghosts and hauntings. Start living the life of your dreams at once in any capacity that you possibly can. And it's just all these happy ghosts, including a cat in a heart. So with these two, it's like let yourself rest because the energy of the tarot is kind of busy and kind of like you're not gonna rest. Um, and then the ghosts and hauntings is about living your dreams, and that's the energy I was getting at the end of July. It was like time to check in with all the manifestations and dreams and keep going. And then we have the star card, which is dreams come true, wishes come true. So definitely gonna be a busy month, definitely feeling the energy coming through. Don't forget to let yourself just be sometimes, and then definitely let yourself live your dreams in some way, right? Whatever that means to you. So I love that. Okay, so those are our cards. Our new moon is on August 12th, and that's gonna be a Leo new moon, which again I just talked about how I love Leo season. Leo new moons are great for checking in on your own confidence, your own place in the world, your own sense of power. Um, very simple activity would be to get a strength card from the tarot, which has the lovely lion. Um, take that card, add a candle, and journal about what does it mean to be in your strength, your power, your light? Where are you letting yourself be seen? Where are you not letting yourself be seen? Right, just really thinking about shining. And we have the star card. And then Virgo season begins uh August 22nd, and that's always like back to school energy. Like it's like let's get organized, let's clean, let's clear clear out the old and the clutter and get everything just so. And I love that because that energy leads into Libra season, which is all about beautifying. So we clean and we cleanse and then we beautify. That's what I'm actually writing about in my third book, is that kind of transition. And then August 28th is a full moon in Pisces. Mmm, like yummy, dreamy Pisces, right? Pisces is the mystic of the zodiac. We got dream energy and spiritual curiosity. That's a great day for like literally any kind of spell. Full moon in Pisces is just like let's be magical. Let's do it. And then, yeah, so I really, really love that for all of us. So those are great things going on. Let's take a moment and talk

New Moon Leo Then Pisces Full Moon

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about Lamas, Lunasa. I actually don't like either one of those. My third book is about um that I'm writing is about like living seasonally and monthly. It's a month-to-month guide and living magic. So it's like basically like you build a foundation with divergent witchcraft. You're a witch. You get you understand some basics. Well, how do you live it day to day? How do you live the practice? So that's what this book is. And in this book, I talk about you know just that, right? Like living and using and kind of looking at the Sabbath seasonally, which I talk about on this podcast. Like to me, Lamas Lunasa is not just August 1st. It's like all the way until Maybon or Autumn Equinox. Like it's this whole slice of the year. Because especially with these cross-quarter days, they're not really in sync with like an equinox or a solstice. They're kind of like in they're in the middle, right? So this holiday I just like to call first harvest because I don't I don't worship Lou. And then Lamas, I'm unclear where that name came from. So I just think first harvest. And you know, if you go to farmers markets or you get a CSA or whatever, you'll start to see like some things are finally being harvested. For me, this time of year is always about peaches. And I will refrain from singing the song from Mario. I almost did, I almost slipped into little Jack Black right now, but I'm not gonna do that. Umly because like copyright, right? Um, but this time of year, this will be they said our third or fourth year, going to this local peach farm to get peaches. So every year around this time of year, the peaches are ripe. They also have flowers, and we just went, we got like 20 pounds of peaches and 10 beautiful zinnias. It was like $23. Like so nice. And all the people there are nice, and it's just like family farm. And so for me, I used to always associate this time of year with corn because it's kind of tradition, make cornbread and you know, those kinds of things. But now my first harvest is always about peaches. So I'll be making a peach cobbler on that day, and um my son's trying to convince my husband to make a peach ice cream to go with it, which

First Harvest Season And Local Food

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honestly, why not? And I'll probably make some other kind of I'm more concerned about dessert. More excited for dessert. I'll make some other kind of dinner that I'll try to be like more seasonally minded, um, but definitely making peach cobbler. So I encourage you with these holidays, especially these harvest holidays, which are start now, right? Lunas Salamis, then we go to Maybon, Autumn Equinox, and Sawin. What is actually being harvested where you live? Like what's actually going on? And if you go, well, I live where there isn't anything. Okay, like in your state or in your part of the world. Like maybe you don't have any farms near you, but okay, what are you seeing at the farmers market? What's being brought in? At this time. And then how can you work with that and celebrate? Because that's you tuning into your local season instead of like an arbitrary universal season. So, like forever I lived in the Mojave Desert. And so it's like, really, in the desert, it doesn't feel like seasons. Like it really, we would get snow because we were a high desert. And so, you know, obviously it gets super hot in the summer. But really, it just felt like kind of two seasons. Felt like summer and winter. Like you don't really feel a spring or a fall. Um, you could drive to see the poppies, but that's honestly been a little bit ruined by Instagram. Like many things. I have like such an interesting relationship with social media. You know, you find me through social media, and for that I'm grateful for everybody that finds me on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. I'm like, yes. Like, thank you, social media, Substack. That's how I reach people. Um but then there's like such a negative side, which is like people oversharing, people being wellness influencers or other kind of influencers that are just kind of icky and yeah, it's rough. It's rough. I often think about I like to hang my phone up, right? Like you would. Do you remember for those of you that remember when you had um like wireless phones, right? You still needed to charge them. Like in the early, late 90s, early 2000s, you still had to like hang it up because you know you'd talk to your friend, at least I would, teenager, talk for a couple hours and then the phone's beeping. Oh my god, my phone's gonna die, I gotta get on the landline that's like attached to the wall. So I like to think about that. I've been doing that. So I've been like hanging up my phone. Like, okay, I don't need it at night. Um, this actually my dental hygienist was telling me about something called popcorn brain. And she's like, it's this idea that we can no longer hold attention. And let me just go back. So let me go back to college. I had a professor who was like, um, there's a study done with our generation at the time, because she was in her 40s, and you know, this is I was not, I was like 19 or 20, um, and loved her class. I took, I think I took like four classes with her because I just really liked her. But she's like, there's a study done that your generation, when it's like traditional commercial time, gets fidgety or like loses interest because you've been trained by the television. And now people are starting to think that we're being trained by social media, right? That we have a hard time retaining attention, and they call it popcorn brain. So it's like you're watching TV, but you also have your phone and you're going back and forth. And a lot of people do that. And so basically, I'm trying not to do that. I'm trying to like hang my phone up at times so that it's just like not near me, and I'm focusing on whatever task I am doing, right? Instead of being like multitasking. Because we all know multitasking is not for everybody, and it's you're not always doing your best when you're multitasking. And so that's something I've been thinking about. I've also been thinking about how a lot of people aren't reading. Um, and just so you know, as a former English teacher and literature major, I 100% count audiobooks as reading. So don't ever be like, oh yeah, I don't really read, I listen to audiobooks. No, you're reading. You're actually retaining sometimes more through audiobooks. Because when we read, we naturally skip over words. When you listen to audiobooks, you're hearing perfect grammar a lot of times. It's actually better for your vocabulary. So there's a lot of benefits to audiobooks, and don't ever say that you don't

Popcorn Brain Digital Detox And Reading

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read when you listen to audiobooks. That's a very um, it's like elitist, it's gatekeepy. I don't like it. So embrace it, you know. Listening to the audiobook. So if you listen to the audiobooks, you know how to pronounce everything, right? Those of us just reading these romanticies with no audio, we're just saying everything wrong. Like, you know, we don't know how to pronounce anybody's names. You do, so you have an advantage. Um, yeah, so that's the other thing is people aren't really reading, is partly because of the internet, right? Of social media. People read headlines, they don't read whole articles, or they read one or two slides, and then you reshare it, and then you go, wait, slide five was actually kind of creepy. I shouldn't have shared it. Um so I guess in general, you know, this podcast was started because I felt a need to slow down. And I guess I feel that even more now with the way social media is just snowballing, and now you have AI on there, and the algorithms are getting more creepy because of AI and you have all of that embedded. It's just I think it's really important to consciously unplug yourself for a certain amount of time every day, um, and then retrain your brain to slow down, right? If you're not reading a book, because you don't have time, I get that. You gotta still try to read maybe once a week. You know, our brains need it. And it's not and reading on like social media and scrolling isn't isn't doing anything for our brains, right? It's not. So I think, you know, even getting a book like a day book, where you're just like you read a little bit of it each week, right? That's a great way. If you're not like, I don't have time to read a novel or this or that. Getting a book on witchcraft that you've been wanting to read and only reading like a section at a time, getting one of those Llewellyn almanacs, which by the way, I am in, let me grab it, Llewellyn's 2027 Sabbath's almanac. And I wrote the section, Introduction and the Ritual for Imbulk. So uh I did Beltane last time, and this time I did In Bulk. I keep picking the uh cross-quarter days because I feel like they don't get as much love as everything else. Um, and I'm in there with some other fun authors. It's a really cool cover this year. It's like a woman wearing like uh either a fox or a wolf mask. I don't know. It's fun. And then if you haven't been uh watching or listening to Belief Being and Beyond with Granddaughter Crow and I, it's a good time. We are uh evolving. We keep connecting and meeting, and we okay, how can we do this better? How can we do this better? Um, meeting a lot of interesting people. We're trying to bring a diversity of guests so it's not like always the same kind of guest. We're really trying to be mindful of that. We're doing um, we just did our first like solo, just the two of us show in July, where we talked about spiritual protection. And then we're trying to do these round tables where we bring experts to a topic that's interesting. So we did one on AI, we did one on divination, we'll be doing one in August. We took a break in July because I was on vacation, and that's when we did the solo one, just the two of us. Um, but that's been a beautiful experience. I miss um, I miss those days where we could just like when you were in college or you could go to meetings in person or you could tune in to like PBS and just see a group of experts, like a panel, talk about something. Like, that's what's fun about cons, right? If you go to Comic Con or any kind of con, they'll often have these panel talks, and it's like that's so fun because they the people interact with each other, and it's like, okay, these are all experts in this field, and they talk about things, and it's just this really fun dialogue to listen to. Um something I would teach my students when I was a teacher. We did Socratic seminar, where we would read an article, they would mark it up, you know, highlight it, ask questions, and then we'd sit in a circle, no desks, and I would start off by asking a question, and then my goal was to not talk for the rest of the 45 minutes, just for the students to go around and discuss something in an intelligent and academic manner. And it was beautiful to watch because these are like middle schoolers or freshmen, that's predominantly what I taught, talking like professors and saying really interesting things. And it's good for us to practice that and have that see that in person, to watch it, to practice it. Um, I wish more of us had those opportunities. So we're trying to bring that, and that's been really cool. I've met some really cool people through the show, um, especially Deborah Blake, I mean Living Legend, when we met and she told me, she's like, we look like we could be related. I was like, oh my god. I was like fangirling, it was it was pretty cool. So I'm living the dream, in other words. Let's talk a little bit about August and August energy and like what it means tuning in. So for where me for me where I live, my plants are blooming, they're flourishing, or they're on the decline. It's like all kinds of things. So right now my elderberries are ripening, um, my lavender's done, my uh some some flowers are having their second bloom, which they would have had their first bloom in like May, and they're having their second bloom. And so for me, this is a great time of year to collect things to dry and to make smoke bundles. I have a step-by-step in our coven, but you know, basically collecting herbs that are not toxic and bundling them up in a cotton thread to use for cleansing and cleaning and clearing energy. These also make really great gifts. People really

Almanacs Panels And Other Show Updates

SPEAKER_00 32:27

like them for Christmas time or Yule or whatever you celebrate, right? Those are really fun. This is a good time of year um to collect, like I said, go look for fruit picking. So we used to do apple picking every year in California. Now we do peach picking. So looking for you pick farms, this is a good time of year. Um to either reflect on the year so far and start to do the first harvest things, or to do that last push I talked about. I really feel like with this energy this year, it feels like last push energy, but you do you, right? You might be looking at this time of year as like a harvest. You're like, okay, this is first harvest. What am I grateful for? What am I harvesting in my life? And what am I releasing? And that kind of paves the way for the autumn equinox. Or you might be like, okay, let me look over these goals, manifestations. What's left, and how can I get there? Got the rest of the year, how can I get there? And there's no wrong path. Um, I do have a lot of information on the holidays in our coven, but also on Insight Timer, I have a chat about Lamas Lunasa as well as a meditation. And we also have the Lionsgate portal, um, and I have a meditation on that as well. And this is the idea that the star Sirius lines up with the sun, and that this was supposedly a significant time in ancient Egypt, and it's all connected with Sekmet, who's the lion headed goddess, and people call it the Lionsgate Portal because it's 8-8. Anytime in the New Age community, when numbers line up, like 11-11, they call them portals. This is the only one that I feel really deeply connected with. This time of year feels very magical to me. And really, like from the end of July till basically the end of Leo season, just feels extra magical. And that that could be because I'm so connected with different Leos, could be this portal energy, could be just the Lunasa Lamas energy. But this just feels ripe with magic to me. And I know everybody talks about that with Sawin, and I definitely feel a thinning of the veils at that time, but this feels different. This feels like a sense of power, like that. If you you could really tap into the Earth's power and the solar power and the power of Sirius. So if you're interested in that kind of thing, like I said, it's gonna I have the meditation on the inside timer on YouTube and in our coven. And the thing is with portals and new age things, you can do it. You can do all. You just because you're a witch doesn't mean you can't like do other things. You don't have to be strict on yourself. Um, you know, a lot of witches, folk magic, especially, is very Catholic. You don't have to give that up, right? You can just kind of do your own thing. In fact, uh, funny story. So I went to San Diego, mainly did like things we want. We went to the Getty in LA, we did the San Diego Zoo, of course, which is like amazing. We did uh like all the Mission Bay kind of fun things, not

Seasonal Harvest Practices And Lionsgate

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Sea World. I refused to go there. Um, but we you know kind of just did the San Diego stuff, fish tacos, all that. The one thing I wanted to do is like I really wanted to go to Old Town because there's always like cool things from Mexico there, there's good candy there. It's very touristy, but I like it. And I wanted to see the Whaley House because I've never seen it. So the Whaley House is named uh the most haunted house in America. That seems to come from the Travel Channel, did some kind of like collection at one point, they earned that title and they kept it. And so the story of the Whaley House is this there was um a gallows in San Diego, and the last person to be hanged there was Yankee Jim. And Yankee Jim was a petty thief. He, I forget where he's from. He's uh he immigrated. The name Yankee Jim was like kind of ironic. He's a tall guy, he tried to steal a boat, and um, it's just like a petty thing. He got caught, and then he goes to jail. Now, while he's there, they're starting to talk about how they're gonna kill him, put him on, you know, bring him possibly to the gallows for stealing a boat, and he thinks the whole thing's a joke, like they're scaring him straight. Like he can't believe this could be real. And it's partly because they were trying to say that he's a pirate and that he was a terrorist because it was their only boat for the whole area, and he was gonna leave them all stranded. The whole court thing gets like out of control. Uh, supposedly the judge was drinking, and the two of the jury members were the people he just tried to steal the boat from. Anyway, he gets sentenced to death for and failing to steal a boat. And he goes to the gallows, but he's extra tall, and they don't account for this, so it takes over 40 minutes for him to strangle to death, like instead of him breaking his neck. It's a slow death. And Thomas Whaley is there, and he sees all this go down, and he still decides to buy that land, which I find strange. He builds his very nice house there. He has these archways put into the house, which is where the gallows stood. And it's a very pretty Victorian home. Um, but he supposedly haunts Yankee Jim haunts, Thomas Whaley haunts. Uh, they had a baby die of scarlet fever, the baby haunts there. Um, his daughter Violet, she took her own life, uh, she haunts the Whaley house, plus other possible spirits from the gallows prior to Yankee Jim. Um and so I took my family, they have a special collection right now of uh 1800 dolls. I did not tell them that part because they're not fans, but they had that, which I thought was really cool. They have uh the courthouse and the jail cell there, they have an old vaudeville theater there. Um you get to walk all around the house. You they have a lot of artifacts because they did some kind of archaeological dig and they you know found things like maybelline, eyelash, um, mascara, and nail polish bottles, like basically like the Whaley's trash. Um and they put some of that in there and preserved it. And we definitely felt strange at the top of the stairs. So we kind of looking, we're outside, we get the tour, we're inside looking around. Dining room felt a little weird. Found out like uh I think a sister-in-law or something like haunts the dining room area. We get to the top of the stairs, and I just felt dizzy and like breathing kind of weird, and my daughter's like, My heart's racing, my son's like, I feel nauseous, and so then we later found out that Thomas and his daughter are known to haunt kind of the stairs, so it's pretty cool. We went in the day, um, just so it wouldn't be as scary for everybody. And then afterwards, this is a really beautiful church there that has like a great statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and so I talked took everybody into the church and we used the holy water to cleanse ourselves, which is very like witch, you know, like let me take you to haunted house. We did our spiritual protections before the haunted house, and I'm like, let's also go to a church and use the holy water because why not? Um, and it was a funny like church. I haven't been to a Catholic church like this before. I'm sure this is very common now, but it had like battery-operated candles with like a switch. So you say the prayer and you just touch the switch, and there's the candle. And we got excited because Saint Anthony was there, and we call on Tony often to help us find lost items in the house. So I told my daughter, I'm like, hey, it's your guy, it's Tony. Like she uses this Tony prayer all the time. So let's let's give him thanks. So we did that. Um, there's a great gift shop where I got some cool saint cards. I got a Saint Nicholas Saint medallion, which I'll be using in charm readings to talk about Christmas and gift giving, like such a cool symbol. And then we walked around. We, of course, got good Mexican food to eat and candy from the candy shop. And yeah, but I I loved doing that. Like it was my first time. I've done ghost towns with my kids before. Um my daughter did a haunted ghost tour with my husband, um, because my son was too young at the time, and I was like, I'm gonna give this to you because you know it's normally my thing I get to do, so he got to do with her, and it's just fun. So if you you see things like that, like it's fun for us. Um I talked about this on Belief Being and Beyond, but I'm never afraid of stuff like that. Like instead, it's just confirmation that everything I believe is real. That's how I look at it. I never feel fear. So yeah, back to August. I yeah, think of kind of that you know, the garden is starting to become done, things are being harvested and ripened, and then

Whaley House Hauntings And Holy Water Cleanse

SPEAKER_00 41:57

I also think about back to school energy. So, what does back to school energy mean? That means like looking at your apothecary. Okay, like currently I'm making four thieves vinegar, which I've actually prefer to fire cider, but to each their own. Um, and so getting like my vinegars made, getting some tinctures set up, making sure I have things like um cherry bark, because that's the best thing for a sore throat, maybe making some honey with garlic, like just getting the apothecary ready, because I don't want to have to deal with that when I'm already sick, right? We want to get all that stuff ready. I also like to do things like make some things and put them in the freezer for just in case. Just in case we all feel sick, I have a freezer meal. Um right now I'm harvesting. We harvested peaches, so there's peaches in the freezer. I got my first batch of elderberries that ripened in the freezer, which I'll be making syrup with. So that's back to school energy. Back to school energy is also cleaning, decluttering, um, buying office supplies, buying journal supplies. If you that's what you like to do, this time of year everything's cheapest. So it's the time of year to get stickers and planners and you know, do that little refresh for yourself, even if you're not in school, right? And um if you have kids, back to school energy is real, like you're really doing all that and getting all that ready. But it's a good refresh, and that totally goes in with the Virgo season. But yeah, I hope that August is beautiful for you. I'll be talking with you all soon. Um, definitely check out Belief Being and Beyond, my other podcast. Check out Unturned Pages on August 23rd. Um if you haven't read Divergent Witchcraft, if you haven't heard the news, it's on audio. So please give it a read there, right? Because that counts as reading, um, and it's everywhere you could find audio. Love the voice actor, she did a great job reading. Um, and I'll be doing a giveaway pretty soon, too. So that'll be in September. Plan on giving away some audiobook copies because I think that's how most people read now, and that's okay, right? Like, that's okay. Like, make peace with that. Um, yeah, I kind of went over a few general questions for the moons, but let's kind of focus on llamas lunasa energy. So what are you currently harvesting? What are you hoping to harvest in the future? What does back to school mean to you? And what is Leo season inspiring you to do? Right? So step into that Leo energy, the lion, all of that. What is it inspiring you to do? I hope you have a wonderful August.

Apothecary Prep Closing Questions

SPEAKER_00 44:48

Talk to you soon. Blessed be.