By Fire Well and Tree

 As what has become usual, my yuletide observances have been derailed by illness.  This time, it's a third dance with Covid.   In year's past I've done an 'omen for the year' by choosing a rune on each of the twelve days of Yule, starting with Solstice Eve, and ending twelve nights later.  You can see examples of prior years  2023 ,  2021 ,  2020 , ... starting as early as  2017 .  At least as far as what I archived here.  I'd have to dig into  my old Livejournal account  to see about earlier... I'm not sure where I got the idea for a rune pull a day. I do somewhat dimly remember recognizing the twelve days and then twelve months of a year is convenient coincidence, and combining that with the use of divination during liminal times, made it a good idea.  Sometimes I post it, and then don't go back to it. Other times I do, and I notice my interpretation changes, as is correct. I always say readings are a snapshot, what...

Sep. 26 If you were to create a comic book character that embodies your pagan practice what would they be like? Hrm... I think first of the characters I like.  Wonder Woman, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch.  You can add Isis in there from the Saturday morning show, "The Secrets of Isis."  I think what i liked most about her was how she talked TO and, as I would now come to call it, allow Isis to possess her.  She was a priestess of Isis before I even knew that was a thing, or had the vocabulary to talk about it.  Wonder Woman was similar, at least in the TV show. The Greek Gods were real and Wonder Woman could talk to them. The others are a bit more practical, and are not afraid to dip a toe into the 'forbidden worlds' if necessary.   So my character would talk to gods and spirits, and would use whatever was available to her to accomplish her goal.     

 I am doing the "Fall Witchy Blogging Challenge" put up by friend Magpie over at  her blog, Parlor Games and Pentagrams .  I typically suck at these kinds of things, but I figured why the heck not? So hear I am, technically on Day 4 and just getting started, so I am going to be efficient and lump 1-4 together and really attempt to do better. No, seriously. Sep. 22 Fall Equinox how are you celebrating. Sep. 23 New Moon, embracing the coming dark half of the year. I am going to smoosh these together.   Normally I have multiple celebrations for all the high days.  My spouse and I usually lead the rite at the  shop .  In years past there is also the celebration with my  grove , and then I have my own home observation, which I have detailed here before. I know the Neopagan calendar calls it Mabon. This year people on the socials have been extra vocal about the name, which, if I were doing a reconstructed Welsh thing might matter to me. But I ackno...

It is August here in Central Ohio, which means it is hot.  Many people are commenting on this, as if it had never happened before. Ironically it is COOLER than it was in June, which was definitely unusual, but become normal. If only we knew what was causing this?  The reason people are noticing and commenting is that they are in general out "in it."  Summer in Ohio brings a ton of weekend gatherings, fairs, and festivals, and they increase to critical mass in the late Summer/early Fall. I have spent nearly the entire summer (beginning Memorial Day weekend) bouncing between my house in suburbia, a tent in southeastern Ohio, or day-long weekend festivals at parks, or a small cabin in western NY.  The season will be over mid-October and I'll spend the rest of the year planning for 2025. I am not sure why I love these so much.  Although if I can ramble for a few lines, I am going to consider that it touches something deep within, forgotten by most, but as I am not t...

Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/books-in-black-wooden-book-shelf-159711/ I am not sure why I stopped posting... I think I was getting towards where I started the astrology/moon stuff, and thought "Why would I just keep posting the same thing over and over? People can use the labels to look for stuff in they want."  BUT... then I had no idea what I'd even talk about.   And I still don't really, but I am inspired today by a discussion I had this week.  We are starting "newby meetups" at  The Shop .  For some reason there's a huge gap of basic knowledge of Neopaganism.  Part of that, I think, is social media related.  But when I first became interested and then involved, the Internet was barely out of its Bitnet pre-cursor, and the World Wide Web hadn't even been invented. And while that seems like stone-age time technology-wise, it really was only 30 years ago.  So there were two ways to learn.  One, find someone who knew st...

Photo by ZCH: https://www.pexels.com/photo/planet-mercury-in-full-shot-photography-12498795/ I know, people say that a lot...so... Okay firstly, retrograde is a real thing, astronomically.  You can find a more technical, but still accessible, explanation  here .  If you think about cars going around in several lanes of traffic, going the same speed and starting out parallel, eventually the the car in the shortest lane (usually the inside track) will get ahead of the car in the longer lane. It can  appear  then that as the first car passes the second, the second is actually going backwards.  If we think about planets in our solar system, they are all doing the same thing, and sometimes they pass each other. When Earth "passes" a planet during its orbit, that other planet is said to be retrograde.  Looking at them in the sky, the planet appears to move backward.    How often a planet becomes retrograde relative to Earth depends on not only it...