The Wheel at Home

This is my first blog post, and I suppose the easiest place to start is with who I am.

I’m a mum, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and very much a dog mum to my gorgeous adopted girl Chloe, who absolutely counts as one of the kids.

I work in aged care as a lifestyle assistant, which means a lot of my days are spent helping other people stay connected, involved, entertained and, hopefully, feeling a little more like themselves.

Outside of work, I’m also a bit witchy.

I don’t really know when that started. Actually, that’s probably not true. I can trace it back to primary school, when a friend and I were far more interested in ghosts and the supernatural than we probably needed to be. We read books about anything strange or unexplained, tried to set traps for ghosts and generally spent a lot of time hoping we might discover something mysterious. While other kids were reading whatever normal primary-school kids were reading, I was fascinated by things like Frankenstein, Dracula, ghost stories and anything else that seemed a little dark, strange or unexplained.

Then there were school holidays spent camping, where the friends I made there and I would do things like “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board” and whatever other slightly spooky things we could come up with. This was well before The Craft came out, I might add. When that movie eventually did come along, it certainly didn’t start the interest — it just encouraged us more.

That interest has never really gone away, although it has definitely changed as I’ve gotten older. These days I’m much more drawn to nature, the seasons, moon cycles and the little rituals and practices that can make ordinary life feel a bit more special.

I still work with herbs, crystals and colour, as plenty of witches do, and sometimes I include deities in what I’m doing too. For me, though, those things are often about helping me focus my intention rather than following one particular belief system or set way of practising. I’m very eclectic. I take bits and pieces from here, there and everywhere, keeping the things that resonate with me and leaving the things that don’t.

I don’t particularly feel the need to put a label on any of it either. I don’t call myself Pagan, and most of the time I don’t really call myself a witch. I don’t think I need to be anything in particular to enjoy the things I enjoy, practise in the way that feels right to me or change that practice as I change.

The problem with being so eclectic is that I can also end up all over the place. My brain is very good at becoming interested in seventeen different things at once and not quite so good at giving any of them some sort of order. I need a bit of structure and something to focus on, otherwise I can bounce from one thing to another and end up with a hundred ideas, half of them scribbled into random notebooks, and no real idea what I was doing with any of them.

That’s one of the reasons I follow the Wheel of the Year. Not because I feel I have to observe it in any particular religious or spiritual way, but because I genuinely love the structure it gives my year and my practice. I like noticing the seasons changing, having little traditions to look forward to, planning things around different points of the year and finding ways to acknowledge where we are in the natural cycle. Most of all, I just enjoy it. It’s fun, it gives me something to work with and it reminds me to pay attention instead of letting one month disappear into the next.

I became a mum very young, and for a long time so much of who I was became wrapped up in raising children, looking after everyone else and simply getting through those very busy years. Now that my kids are grown, I feel like I’m finding my way back to some of the parts of myself that got pushed aside along the way.

Funny enough, my kids have helped with that too. Watching them grow into adults, seeing the things they create, the way they express themselves and the things they’re passionate about has reminded me that I’m allowed to do the same. I spent so many years helping them become who they are, and somehow they’ve helped remind me who I am too.

So I’m making things again, learning things simply because I want to know them, writing, growing things, playing with herbs and crystals, celebrating the changing seasons and making more room for the things I enjoy. Some of it is useful, some of it is probably completely unnecessary, and some of it I do for no other reason than it makes me happy.

There is another side to all of this. I have some ongoing health issues, including chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, which mean that my energy and concentration aren’t always terribly reliable. Some days I can get a ridiculous amount done and other days, not so much. I also struggle with words sometimes. I can know exactly what I’m trying to say and still lose the word, forget where the sentence was going halfway through it, or have a perfectly good thought in my head that refuses to come out properly.

I want to be open about that because this site isn’t supposed to be a polished version of a perfect life. There will be good days, tired days, productive days and probably days when I wonder why on earth I decided to start a website.

I also want to be open about the fact that I sometimes use AI, particularly when I’m putting together the more informative parts of this site. I have years of notes, books, scraps of paper and notebooks full of information, and getting all of that into some sort of sensible order can be difficult when my brain isn’t cooperating. It helps me organise what I already have, research things I want to understand better and put information into a form that is actually useful. The more personal things I write here are different. Those are my stories, thoughts and experiences, even if I occasionally need a little help untangling my words.

And really, that enormous collection of information is a big part of why The Wheel at Home exists in the first place. I have notebooks everywhere. I have things I’ve written down and forgotten about, recipes and ideas I want to try, bits of information tucked away in completely illogical places and probably several versions of the same thing because I forgot I’d already written it down.

I wanted somewhere to put it all.

So this is becoming my own little online collection of the things I’m learning, making, trying and exploring as I go. There’ll be information about the Wheel of the Year and the changing seasons, herbs, crystals, colour, folklore, traditions, crafts, recipes, self-care, everyday rituals and whatever else happens to catch my interest along the way. There’ll also be the more personal side of life: the things I’m thinking about, struggling with, laughing about or trying to do a little differently.

Some of it might be useful to someone else, and some of it might only ever be useful to me. One day my kids might look through it and recognise a recipe, a tradition or some odd little thing their mum was forever talking about, and I actually really like the thought of that.

More than anything, though, I want this to be a place that reminds me to keep noticing things, to pay attention to the season I’m actually in, make things with my hands, keep learning, stay curious and make room for the things that bring me joy, even when life is busy or I’m tired or things don’t quite go to plan.

Because I don’t think magic has to be anything enormous or mysterious. Sometimes it’s growing something, making something, lighting a candle, finding an old tradition you love, noticing that the season has changed, sitting around a table with people you care about, or simply doing something that makes an ordinary day feel a little more like yours.

And I think there’s a little magic in that.