Click here to discover theHail and Farewell, Joanna Russ. I learned a long time ago not to start one of her books in bed, as that meant that I’d always greet the dawn bleary-eyed and tired. She was an amazing writer. I hope the pens are sharp and well-dipped in the Summerlan…
Here’s Joanna Macy saying better than I did what I was trying to say yesterday about Beltane’s promise.”That’s where we come alive.” May it be so for you.
May Day is an ancient festival. For devotees of Our Mother God it is the Exaltation of the Queen of Heaven. Learn more about one of the year’s most beautiful festivals.
One of my favorite poems for high summer is Mary Oliver’s Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith, where she says:Every summerI listen and lookunder the sun’s brass and eveninto the moonlight, but I can’t hearanything, I can’t see anything –n…
How tender it is, the place in us that yearn to trust. In all of us there is an innocence core untouched by cynicism and defense strategies. From here we meet life, wide-eyed in wonder of it all. Here we know how simple it is to love. But many, after years of disappointment and betrayals, [Read More...]
The Flight of the Silver Vixen, reviewed on this site a while back, is now available in a shiny new paperback edition. It first launched as a digital-only book on Amazon Kindle.
While this action-adventure story is not primarily a spiritual book, it is written from a Deanic perspective.
Don’t expect the sort of outright preaching that you find in some “Christian literature”, but do expect a characters who, even when they are rebellious young tearaways, fundamentally believe in Our Mother God and base their lives around a Dea-centric philosophy.
The book is set in an all-feminine Aristasian-style world (two such worlds, in fact) and has a philosophical thread that will definitely resonate with readers of The Feminine Universe.
You can now order the paperback for $15 with free shipping to anywhere in the world, or get the Amazon Kindle version at only $2.99 for instant delivery to your Kindle (or to the free Kindle reader on your personal computer or iPad)
Maybe, when I die, someone could read the last minute or so of this.We have to close the distance between pushing buttons and affecting Gaia. We have to touch people./kisses Bronowski’s forelock
This Friday is Arbor Day, a day set aside in the U.S. and many other places to plant, care for, and honor trees. It comes just after Earth Day and just before Beltane. Must be something in the “air.” If you’re Pagan, this is the holiday for you! My…
We came across this article by Kristin Luce at elephantjournal.com, an important and brilliant read about how a pelvic exam can be a spiritual practice. Here is an excerpt: _________________________________________ Then I begin to touch this strength in myself, the strength to open, utterly vulnerable, into another person’s hands. To yield honestly and wholeheartedly, present [Read More...]
May it be so for you.
What Phaedra Said.Just gotta understand your shake.Picture found here.
My little cottage is surrounded by some (three-to-four-hundred-year) old oaks. They help me to ground; every day I run my roots down into the red Virginia clay where these lovely beings have been thriving since before America was America. They also c…
The truly brilliant and always-grounded Athenae has up a great weekend post asking people to discuss the most transformative trips they’ve ever taken. What a great question! One thing that amazes me is how, for most of her commenters, the important t…
Photo by the blogger. If you copy, please link back.
Thank you, Hazel Dickens. I miss those mountains, too.
Naked. Standing, eyes closed, breathing. Feeling myself in connection with the web of wyrd, at a nodal point where various strands cross. Allowing those strands to pull me, as if I am in a tide. My body begins to sway. Arms move where they will as call…
To survive this world in its cycles of decay and too-long-waited-for regeneration, you have to develop a shrewdness towards ordinary evil, and have the ability to look it in the eye and call “nonsense”. Goblins always pretend they are demons. In their nasty crabbiness, in their gnarled characters that stubbornly love to spoil, they gain glee in pretending they are more powerful than they are. A spook loves nothing more than to spook. Tell the spook, fool me once … then get out your hoe and let it know even a spade may be used as a sword. In time, one simply yawns. A furrowed brow is sufficient to dispel in a shrewd enough heart, that is wise to the spoils and tricks of the world. A good day must not be ruined even for its spooks and spoils. To become seasoned is to know no-nonsense in the face of shallow, barren cackling, and trust the more in deep guffaws o’er ale.
The raging etin rampaging through the shire must be ousted, and it hurts, but such things in truth are so seldom (even in this twilight age of encroaching ruin), while it is the petty goblins who taunt and tempt us, loving to spoil us, to ruin our fun, nag our pursuit of renaissance, who really get us down in life. A thousand bee stings rival a larger sword. Get wise to the goblins. Learn to look those taunters in the face with wilting power of squints. Thou Shalt Not Mess With Me.
It is torment which erodes. Occasional enemy to be routed, while tough, may even raise the blood, but the taunt of the everyday kills in time. One must learn to honor one’s goblins by making them honor one’s strength of endurance. Bullies and spoil-sports abound. The petty games of men, entrapped in their bogs and downward spirals of evolution, endure. The slander of cowards casts its coin on Loki’s altar. Graft exchanges gold behind cloaked hand, and smiles at the public. These things are not new. Let them be no cause for shock. Thorns and thistles ever sprinkle green fields. Weed ‘em and let them feed the compost piles.
It takes practice. You have to practice saying “nonsense” to fools and pricking snools before your heart in time believes it. You have to learn to invest your hopes and energies in harvests to come, not taunts and pricks. There’s rough, pricking things in the dirt that make you cry out, f..k! Pull out the thistle from your foot, brew up a good curse, and move on, soldier.
In time, one grows bored with idiocy. It covers over the annoyance, which in its time grew over the initial rage. Boredom and shrewd eyes are greater weapons than most think. Learn to treat nonsense as nonsense.
Every farmer from here back to the first digging stick has had to see some hail. No man wields the weather that spoils the crops. Thorns of icy rime from gusts of giants throw without reason from time to time. Frey and Freya say, plant, plant again. Take up seed again and renew life. Don’t allow a single spoiled harvest to wilt your stalk. Find resilience in the soil and rise again!
These are the times that faith in growing things is tested. The blights do not come from the Gods, but the endurance to see through them is. The ruining storms do not come from the Gods, but the strange, stirring hope that defies all-swallowing despair is. The venom that sometimes floats on the wind does not come from the Gods, but the good clay that surrounds and spits out venom is. These are the days one chooses to believe in clouds or sunshine. How the clouds oft roll! But the Gods say, O small things, such small and precious things, here are beams, a bridge may be built across a chasm. It is but a footstep for them. Let them lend eyes, and what abyss was shall become a footstep for you as well.
To have faith in the harvest does not simply mean to rejoice when the feast comes. It means standing on the freshly sown soil, which to the eyes looks barren out to the hedge, and before the first green sprouts appear, smelling the aroma of the cooked grain wafting up there from the soil itself. It’s taking a vow to see the season through, and beyond that season, to see the next season through.
Winters could be harsh. One had to know how to eke bitter flour from the bark of trees in time of famine, what weeds in bad years might do for potherbs, learn the taste of squirrel and mushrooms in a stew. Sometimes the frost broke early, sometimes it broke late. One never knew, and sometimes against one’s hopes. Who knew just when this year Freya might be rescued from the hands of giants by Odr? Who knew precisely when Idunn would shine her sun again from Eastern skies? What one knew is that the days when sun never came, the days when ill wights held back the spring forever, were vanquished, if one had faith in and strengthened the Gods with cheer. For strengthening them with ours when it comes to us, they strengthen us in turn with theirs when we are bereft.
When spring came, you looked at a bad winter, and you said, I made it through. And it was callous, and it was gloom, and it was hard, cold blunt on the bone, with meager on the platter and drops alone of ale, but one felt proud, for one endured to spring. One got props for standing firm in one’s woolen hose and overalls, with scrivening eyes that looked over the frost, and skeptical throughout, kept eye on spring. The All-Holy One Above, Wise Be His Name, difficult, erudite, inscrutable, far penetrating, with stamina of mind bred by many eons of dark clouds and the light that ever broke through (with brave and with battle), kept one eye on unfolding wyrd in the world, however weary or woeful, and one eye in the deep, where deeper dreams brew wisdom beneath all frost.
The tales of capture, of Freya in the tower, Frey beneath the bite of Beli, Idunn in the talons of Thiazi, said, you are not alone. Even the Gods have known their sorrow. Even harvests and life-bestunning beauty and youth that ever springs wild have felt the longing for home in the cold that you have. What faith they held in their hearts even in despair to ever believe in the sun! So might you, so might you.
Why was a feast a feast? Not for its mirth alone, grown in the sun of hearths and giddy hearts, but for its cheer carved hard by the encroaching ice, now slowly dripping in the thaw. For cheer was chiseled out in dark days, cold days, days of gloom and even ruin. It kept the head high as the breath sighed, and took another breath in again. It frowned at hail to smile at hale in spring. Oh, then, how one whipped Lenten Winter in her thin, meager rags out the village, to welcome in Summer! For cheer and mirth are mirror sides of the same coin of feast ; the warmer one, the more the other waxes. That froth in mug was frothy more for having conquered dearth ; every harvest was a victory celebration as well. How did Thor get associated to harvests? Live in a wintery clime and see how you will toast He who vanquishes the wielders of frost! Harvest was victory, as much as it was feast!
Plant, plant again. Take up seed and renew life. Every farmer has had to compost precious crops wilted from hail. It’s a hazing rite into the endurance the Gods rear up. It gives you your sinew and grit to get through to the next harvest. Throw the bitter bones as you must, and kick the unyielding dust, but then roll in the arms of Mother Earth, and pray your gnashing tears that throws mighty execrations upon the etins, and get up. Get up and take stock of what remains, eke cheer from every drop of cheer that stands, and go to tool-shed and take out your sack of seed, and ready the oxen to draw the plough again. It will be bitter, but it shall become sweet again in time. Weeds that never fail to break through soil, and Gods whose bible lives in the land and its seasons, promise sure.
It’s an almost impossibly perfect day here on the banks of the overfull Potomac River. I’m doing work that I’m good at and that I love. My garden is taking off. My dreams keep telling me interesting things. G/Son is thriving and I’m having dinner w…
Jason Pitzl-Waters, at the Wild Hunt links to this interesting post by a Christian telling other Christians “how to talk to Pagans.” It’s not as creepy as the recent book on the same subject, but, well-intentioned as I am sure that its author is, it’s…
Richard Louv notes:For decades, our culture has struggled with two addictions: to oil and to despair. But what if our lives were as immersed in nature as in technology every day? What if we not only conserved nature, but created it where we live, work,…
Rima:Sometimes occasions just collect goodness to them, and the minutes settle themselves into the fire like sticks, tessellating into the perfection of the night, and you recognise that clear familiar joy under the stars of being outside by a fire wit…
A new article on Sri Durga (the Indian Sai Vikhe) has appeared at the Exotic India site. As usual this is an excellent piece and well worth the attention of those interested in learning more about Sai Vikhe in Indian culture.
Durga, the most highly wo…
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