I had a dream some time very early in the year where I was doing a spell in my home library/ritual space (which is a project in progress still) along with a small circle of other witches. It wasn’t a ritual, and it wasn’t just my coven mates – this was basically tandem spellwork where we were all doing the same spell separately but at the same time in the same space. Each for our own selves, but with shared energy, if that makes sense.

I very rarely have meaningful dreams – most of mine are nonsensical mashups of random things which have recently happened in real life – so when I do have a meaningful one it’s incredibly obvious. This one was obviously one of those. I’d been planning and slowly working on the library for a couple of years, but it was always meant for just me and maybe occasionally for coven rituals, although we usually go outside for those. Doing spells with others in that space was never part of the plan.

But I came out of the dream really clearly understanding the purpose of what we were doing – not the spell itself so much, but the gathering. The powerful part of the dream wasn’t articulated in the dream itself, but it was tangible. I could FEEL why I’d apparently gathered this group together to do a pretty simple spell.

Whenever I’ve planned and written rituals for a group, I’ve made a point to make them palatable for a broader audience in the sense that I leave out things I would do in my own practice but which I know might not be everyone’s vibe. And because of circumstances in my formative years, I’m kind of touchy about people seeing into my own personal processes (not just witchy stuff, literally anything I’m working on or ways I’ve developed to do things just for myself), so there’s a difference between my personal spellwork style and what I tend to write when I’m creating a group ritual.

But what happened in the dream was my own spellwork. It wasn’t created for the group, it was really more like me planning my own spell to do, and then inviting some people to do it with me.

And the more I thought about that possibility, the more I knew this was something I needed to do for my own practice. I have a bad habit of procrastinating even with magic, so doing this would mean I’d have to plan ahead and set a timeline. I’ve been getting out more and trying to make more real friends (not just acquaintances) in the local pagan community, and this would push me to reach out to those who have the right magical vibe to be invited into my home to do magic with. It would be an exercise in opening up and showing my personal spells to others. And I know it would be a good opportunity for some of the more solitary witches I know – an opportunity that I didn’t have early on but would have absolutely benefitted from.

So I started with Imbolc and mapped out spell types for each of the sabbats and cross quarters so that over the course of a year it would cover a full range of types of spells – protection, blessing, invocation, healing, hexing, etc. And I invited my coven and a couple of other witchy friends over to do the spells with me.

And it’s been one of the best things I’ve done in my practice.

Highly recommend.

The zines I’ve been making with the elemental spells are the actual instructions from the spells we’ve done. And the only time so far that the spell has not gone to plan was at the summer solstice – fortunately it was the one time nobody else could make it on the scheduled day because the logistics of the spell itself did NOT work as envisioned and I spent a good half hour trying to get the damn thing to properly catch fire and stay lit. Such is magic. But otherwise it’s been very much like what I saw in my dream – and someday I’ll actually be able to gather everyone together in the library instead of around my kitchen table.

In fact, it’s going so well that for the next spell gathering on Lughnasadh, I’ve invited a handful of new people to join us.

So if there’s one thing that I want people to get out of me sharing this it’s that it really does fall to each of us to reach out and create the communities and friend groups we want to be part of. I think a lot of us sit around wishing there were more ways to connect with other like minded people, but we either wait for someone else to create those opportunities for us, or we try to create our own in the wrong ways. I’ve been organizing a meetup for over a decade and not really made many lasting witchy relationships or found an existing group of people actively practicing in a way that I vibe with. But it turns out there are actually plenty of people to create those things with – we’ve just all been waiting for something to happen. So I had to be the thing to happen.

And yeah, it’s a leap. But it’s worth it.