Summoning Spells
Part Two:  Weaving with the Future
By Dana Gerhardt

On a full moon, a time for illuminations and revealing, I discovered a bad report card crumpled in the corner of my 7-year-old’s closet.  I considered my options.  I could scream like a mother banshee and nag him for the rest of second grade.  Or, we could have a calm, serious talk, followed-up with a good summoning spell.  It’s risky doing spells with boys.  You never know when they’ll get that glint in their eye, and your intentions will go down like an enemy bunker.  But it works more often than you’d think. 

Earlier this year, despite plenty parental intervention, the 6- to 8-year-old boys on our street squabbled constantly.  On one particularly bad day of cruel words and slammed doors, I prepared an altar with a tall black candle, a Tibetan bell, and four hematite stones.  I gathered four squabblers for a friendship summoning spell.  Fascinated with the odd assembly of objects, they performed their roles with puffed chests and nervous giggles.  But one by one, they held their stones and vowed to look after each other.  The day’s fighting ceased. 

Whether it’s candles or ribbons, setting the stage for a summoning spell is important.  I took Branden for an ice cream sundae, and calmly brought out his report card halfway through.  It knocked him off balance just enough to get his buy-in for the rest.  On lime green paper we wrote affirmations, reworking poor classroom behaviors into good ones.  We read them each morning for two weeks following the full moon, a cyclic time for reorientation.  At the new moon we cut the green affirmations into tiny pieces, mixed them in water with wildflower seeds, and planted.  By the next report card, his three bad grades had all improved.  Lifting brightly from our planting spot were three tender sweet pea vines.

Months later I got a call from his teacher about a behavior relapse.  Branden looked sweetly and suggested, “Maybe it’s because you haven’t been watering the plant.”  An inner voice growled:  “No, maybe it’s because you haven’t been watering the plant!”  But I kept the sentence in.  Why shouldn’t I water his spell?  It’s normal and nice to perform a summoning for others, calling in peace, restoring health or spirit.  And we shouldn’t let  magic be hijacked by our mundane expectations.  Spells are not acts of personal will.  Even as they carry goals and affirmations, we can’t charge forward on them, like a knight with lance-raised, to subdue the future to our bidding. 

Summoning is a more feminine activity. That it’s feminine may be why, at its worst, it can seem like nagging; but being female doesn’t necessarily make one good at it.  It is something like prayer.  We weave a container that holds a hope for the future.  With hands outstretched, we want to draw this future down, yet plenty of empty space lies between our open arms.  Waiting to receive one’s desires also means being willing to let them go.  As my friend Barbara says, it’s a readiness to be summoned too.  Our feminine receptivity is therefore specially charged:  we must relate more to the future than the past. 

Spiritual psychologist Robert Sardello suggests there are two time currents:  the more familiar one that runs into the present from the past, and another, that runs toward us from the future.  We are often deeply aware of our past, what we didn’t get, what hurt, what made us who we are.  This often leads to what we’d like to change about our present.  But an important spiritual task, says Sardello, is to find our way into the time current of the future.  At first I thought of this as, when house or apartment hunting, for example, you step into a place and instantly know it’s yours.  It’s as though all your future days living there reached out just then and touched your etheric body.  Or in that first meeting with someone whom later you'll deeply love -- in an instant you feel as though you've known them forever -- and in the future, you have.

But I’m not sure this sensing is quite what Sardello intends.  Another kind of future sensing would be to understand the future’s rich and fluid possibility and know it as a friend.  It's a recognition that this future is as interested in us as we are in it.  It depends on us.  But how can we achieve such an energetic state?  How can we put it at the heart of our summoning spells? 

Here is an experiment to try.  Before performing your spell, visualize the desired summoning as an energetic circle, or spiral, flowing clockwise from your right hand.  Clearly see, think, and feel what you are summoning.  Allow the imagined current to strengthen with your intentions.  Now turn attention to your left hand.  Here the future is flowing in, toward you.  This spiral is counter clockwise and not as clear in its content.  But its energy is vibrant, full of the unknown, full of creativity and surprise.  Steady your concentration on both spirals at once.  When it feels right, slowly bring your hands (and both energies) together, as in prayer.  Now you are ready to start your summoning spell. 

 Check in for next month for the final section:  Part Three:  Summoning "Rules"!

References:
Robert Sardello, Love and the Soul