This week has been business planning more than altar work, if I'm honest. Not much candle burning. A lot of thinking, structuring, figuring things out.
Back in June I started reworking how the COVN gathers. What we've been doing has largely been ritual meditation, which is beautiful, but it puts the emphasis on the meditation part more than the collective part. Guided, individual, everyone in their own experience even while technically together.
What I'm shifting toward is something closer to what a traditional coven actually is. Group working. Shared collective energy. People showing up not just to receive guidance but to build something together, in real time, as a unified working body.
Modern witchcraft, especially the written and online versions most of us grew up learning from, is heavily solitary. Understandably so. A lot of us came to this path because we had to, because there wasn't a coven waiting for us, because we found our practice alone in a bedroom with a library book and figured it out from there. Solitary practice is real and valid and for a lot of witches it's the whole path. I'm not discounting that.
But I think something got lost along the way, and it's not just a witchcraft problem. It's a human one.
We are, as a culture, remarkably disconnected from collective ritual. From gathering with other people for the express purpose of doing something together that none of us could do alone. Most of what passes for community now happens through a screen, asynchronously, each of us alone in our own rooms even while technically connected. We've lost so much of the shared, embodied, real-time experience of working alongside other people toward something bigger than any one of us.
That loss isn't unique to witches. It's everywhere. And I think it's part of why so many people feel isolated even when they're constantly connected.
So this coming full moon, on July 29th, the COVN is gathering for exactly this kind of work. Not individual meditation. Collective ritual with a collective purpose. Fortifying ourselves, then directing that fortified energy outward toward the Earth and toward the people actively protecting sacred land right now. A group working, built and held together.
This is the direction I want to keep building in. Less solitary guidance, more shared craft. The kind of community that witchcraft has always had at its roots, before so much of it went solitary out of necessity.
If that's something you've been missing too, whether in your practice or just in your life, the COVN is where I'm building it. Details are on Patreon.
Patreon.com/c/cerissa
Until next time.
Cerissa