I recently attended The Morrigan’s Ravens Retreat online, which is put on by the lovely Joey Morris of Starry Eyed Supplies. It was quite a transformative and wonderful journey. Prior to this, I had never worked with The Morrigan before, and with how well the retreat went (some very profound experiences were had) and how much information I’ve gleaned from it, She will be part of my practice moving forward. Joey is an absolute fountain of knowledge, and I still have a lot of the material to work through and book recommendations to follow up with because there was just that much material provided.
This retreat was completely online, and it stretched over three months (three weeks of material and then a rest week). Joey mentioned that she hoped to one day move it from the online sphere to in-person, and I would definitely save up to attend if that ends up being the case. I don’t know when Joey will be putting it on again, but I highly recommend if you want to know more about The Morrigan, or feel called to work with Her, this is the route to go and the teacher to chose.
One thing I learned about The Morrigan was that She is a poetess, and it was a big surprise to me that when I began working with this aspect of Her, my own poetic cork unplugged. I can’t even begin to tell you about how much my Samsung Notes app on my phone just became full of fragments of poetry and bits of prose. My favourite one that I wrote was this one:
“Badb,
– Unfinished poem by Rachel Venos, 2024
Weave my grief
Into a lullaby,
So that I may
Herald my anguish
And cry my anger to the night.
Phantomess,
Draped in silk and moths’ wings,
Be witness to the changing of the guard,
For I now stand alone and
Mother’s soul rests on the wings of corvids,
Spiriting her to the Otherside.”
Williams Shakespeare I am not, but I really did like this one. It’s not finished yet, and I plan to keep working on it and post the finished result.
It feels good to be creative again. Another thing working with The Morrigan has done is force me to confront (that seems too strong a phrase – She has politely kicked me in the pants and put me in front of) my grief regarding my mom’s passing and everything that happened with my ex-pedophilic partner, David. Things I thought that I had worked through, but as always… there was a lot of residual feelings there that I had been allowing to fester.
Although I’ve been journeying with The Morrigan, I haven’t forgotten my patron goddess… Lilith has given me the nod to work on what I’m working on now, and She’s been a pillar of support.
And mentioning Lilith, I’ve actually been thinking about what parts of my practice I want to post about on here. One of the things that I plan to work on is getting more familiar and working more with Lilith’s epithets – is that something anyone would be interested in reading about? Some of them have more information on them than others, so I will probably end up combining those into one post. I’m going to tap into this creative buzz that I’ve got going on and start writing more about my practice regardless… but that’s where I might start.