So in addition to working and pre-writing and thinking about a book or piece on the 8 virtues of Witchcraft I have been toying for months with a writing fragment and story idea… here  in the spirit of Imbolc’s creativity and of modern February’s spirit of love is a story fragment…

Awakening Aphrodite

By Geoffrey Stewart (c) 2008

“There were sounds, floating out over the oceans waves. Sounds of songs and laughter and drums and bells and sistrum’s and many other instruments; their joyous noise intermingling with the throbbing surf as the moonlight glittered upon the surface of the waves. Within the ocean the tidal ebb and flow would have seemed to be keeping a rhythm with the music, had anyone been there to see its dance. In the depths of the ocean something stirred, sensuously and slowly. A ripple of seaweed and a curve of wave-borne driftwood, a shimmer of sea-shells, rich sediment and glittering particles of sand, all pulsing in tune with the ebb and flow of the oceans rhythms, and those of the singers on the shore.

Nature’s most powerful forces sometimes take their own time, however, so the full moon was much lower in the Western sky when things really began to happen. No one was there to observe the first miracle, at least none who could fully understand its meaning.

Her footsteps, quickly disappearing in the oceans tides upon the seabed led from the place of Her awakening towards the shore. She strode beautiful and powerful and primal through the waters and as She neared the surface She rose Her lithe arms up and with Her fingertips parted the waves and, catching hold of them, pulled Herself up into the air to stride atop the oceanic waves for the last several yards to the shore. She sighed deeply, deeply drinking in the night air, the scent of the sea, smoke from a smoldering bed of driftwood coals on the shore, and hints of delightful if foreign flowers greeted her. She lifted Her eyes, which had been contemplating the ripples of the water beneath Her feet, and smiled up at the night sky.

The stars redoubled their twinkling in joyous response to Her. Sea birds cried welcome, and swans swam forward to do Her honor. The sea creatures who had given Her an honor guard fell away, except for the dolphins who chose to linger at the edge of the two worlds of air and sea. She smiled and shook some of the water out of Her golden hair.

As Her feet touched the shore there was a subtle stirring as the sea grass and scrub on the dunes rippled as if in a wind, as this sensuous tickle made it’s way inexorably from sea to shining sea as the natural world shivered, oh so slightly, at Her touch. People then abed rolled over in their sleep, smiling to themselves as their dreaming minds turned to thoughts of love and peace and beauty. Those who were awake at this limnal time between the latest of the night and the earliest of the morning sighed, and smiled, and felt a momentary yet encompassing sense of joy and inspiration. Lovers asleep abed snuggled close to one another, and those not asleep, well, they kissed and felt a moment of transformative love and life changing awareness and sensuality, and then they more than kissed.

Musicians played and children smiled and laughed, even in their sleep, and every dove and pigeon cooed and took flight.

She walked along the shore, delighting in the sensual ebb and flow of the water over Her feet and the sand. She came to a stop at a spot where a burnt out driftwood camp fire lay, out of reach of the high-tide erasing. Here they had gathered, She knew. Here they had sung Her ancient songs in a modern foreign tongue, not that it was a bad language, it had its rhythms and possibilities but it was not Greek. Drums with little cymbals, and sistrums, and wooden …flutes…no… recorders… they were called recorders…. These and those strange boxes that played the music… how sad that people should have to rely on those rather than being able to at the very least pound out a rhythm or pipe out a tune… at least some of them had the dance. She was glad of that… there was always the dance. She smiled to herself at that and birds across the continent stirred and burst into flight and into song.

She stretches Her lithe, strong, arms out over the ocean and begins to make a beckoning motion with Her hands. Slowly, against the direction of the wind, from over the waves the smoke that had been born from the fire traced its way back over the waves and began to gather itself back into the blackened driftwood. The burnt out grey coals began to rekindle and the fire began to burn backwards into itself as driftwood and bits of incense began to reform themselves in the flames.

She smiled as the pleasing scents of the incense drifted by Her on their way back towards the fire to rebuild themselves into flowers and chunks of resin.“