The Water Tide Ebbs

After the Fall Equinox, the Water Tide ebbs.

The Tides of the year influence the kind of magic that will be most effective in addressing a given issue, and the magical purposes for which work is most effective.

Generally speaking, events in the flowing Tides are less responsive to active, instrumental spells than events in the ebb Tides. When a Tide flows it is a force of nature that carries the time along with it, and when this happens the Witch's best policy is divination to determine how things are moving and how best to move with them.

On the ebb tide things become more fluid and uncertain, and the Witch's power to mold them increases. Sorcery has its greatest effect at a full ebb Tide, just before a new Tide flows (the days leading up to each of the Cross-Quarter Days--Samhain, Candlemas, Beltane and Lammas).

The elemental influence of a Tide suggests the most auspicious magical aims and methods for the time. The ebbing Water tide is the best time of the year for works of healing. This influence grows from Mabon to Samhain; but when the Earth Tide flows at Samhain, it is overwhelmed by the certainties of nature and mortality.

The God at Mabon

Now the fires are burning low, and the light I have is dying.

There is more power in the bread than there is in me.

When you have eaten of it, I will be gone.

Things Fall Apart

The community college district, of course, has a hiring freeze on. Nobody who retires, gets fired, goes off the deep end or is run over by a truck can be replaced. It makes for interesting times, in the ancient Chinese sense.
The competent over-achiever who used to do all the room scheduling has retired, so now there can be no more room scheduling. Your class is probably in the same place it was last year. It works out all right for the most part, since there are no longer any new teachers or new courses. But no changes of venue are possible.
My phone doesn't work. The line has been dead since school started. I printed out and completed a work order, after a bit of hassle finding someone whose computer had access to both the Internet and a printer. Then I took it over to the mail room to place in the box for the "switchboard office," as directed at the top of the form. The mail room guy, one of the key people in the institution who still works there, said that there wasn't any box for the switchboard office because it was only one person, and now she has retired. I wondered where to put the form, and he suggested a few possibilities, none of which seemed like a sure thing to him, or sounded quite right to me. So I choose one at random, and shoved it in.

Fortunately, in the 21st century, phones are no longer essential. My students and immediate colleagues know they get better results from me on email anyway. Since somehow this dead phone line still pretends to take messages, I do worry a bit that somebody higher up, high enough to have a phone that works, will be upset if I don't return a call. Only a bit worried, though--such are the luxuries of tenure.

In the ESL department, we tell each other how fortunate it is that most of us were in the Peace Corps at one time or another. It was good training for what's going on now. Just find a good shade tree, prop up a blackboard, and start teaching something.
Over Irish coffee at the hofbrau tonight with my full moon cronies, we exchanged workday war stories. One friend said that all those alumni fundraisers who are always harassing us for more money than we've got to spare should adopt the methodology of those helpful organizations who market modest, useful gifts for people in third world countries--you can buy ducklings for somebody in Bolivia, or a goat for Nepal. Why not solicit affordable amounts to fund specific things that schools need? She'd be happy, my friend said, to donate what it costs to put in a phone line. People could fund this and that, there would be commemorative plaques on the photocopiers, maybe items funded by little trust funds in honor of departed relatives. Then I could have a cheery, operational phone message ... "Hello, you have reached Sybil Drinkwalter on the McIntyre Memorial Phone Line ..."