As the moon gives back her light night by night, she teaches the oldest lesson of banishing: that what grows less can be made to leave entirely. Choose an evening when the horns of her are already thinning.
Some troubles cannot be argued with, only handed on: a habit that gnaws, a fear worn smooth from carrying, a name that keeps arriving unbidden. This working gathers such a thing into salt and dark water and gives it to the patient ground, which asks no questions and keeps whatever it is given.
The Working
- At dusk, fill a plain bowl with water left out beneath the sky, and stir in three pinches of salt until you can no longer feel the grains.
- Speak the trouble plainly over the water, as many times as it takes for the words to go dull in your mouth.
- Lay a single bitter herb flat upon the surface, rue or wormwood or whatever grows bitter near you, and watch the water darken beneath it.
- Pour bowl and herb together into a jar you will not miss, and seal it while the moon is still thinning.
- Carry it from the house without setting it down, and dig a hollow at the far edge of your ground, past any door or window.
- Set the jar in the dark of the earth mouth-down, cover it over, and press the soil flat with your palm.
- Walk home by a different path than the one that brought you, and do not return to that corner until the trouble is forgotten.
The Incantation
Waning moon and darkening water,
take this weight I would not carry.
Salt to hold it, herb to bind,
earth to keep what I resign.
Down and under, out and gone,
lessened as the moon grows wan.
By thinning light I set it down,
and what the ground takes, the ground will keep.
By the time the moon has emptied and begun to fill again, the buried thing will have settled into the soil like a seed that never meant to grow, and your hands will be light.