By Fire Well and Tree

One of the things I've discovered in doing this, is that many ancient calendars don't really line up. This isn't really something I didn't know before, but it's challenging my assumptions of time keeping by the natural world. For example, the Anglo-Saxon  Blōtmonath,  the month of blood sacrifices, follows  Winterfylleth  (see previous post about this stuff). But,  Ærra Geola means  "the Month before Yule."  If I keep using my "months start at new moon" structure (which I fully admit is my mostly-made-up thing) it will only be  Ærra Geola  for 2 days before Yule begins on 12/20.  I am super interested to see where this goes for the rest of the year. Anyway, here we are now.  This new moon begins the Gaulish month of Samonios, which means "cold month" and it is not hard to see why it has that name.  Even before the month began we were treated to a nice blast of freezing temperatures and snow flurries down here.  The northern part of the

 We had a fantastic trick or treat on Halloween. The house decorations have never looked better: Spooooky! After we took everything down (to save it from possible "tricks" should our neighborhood bribes not have been accepted) and we finally got some dinner, I decided to do a reading for the coming year. The intention was for it to be a very generic, community-in-general based reading, but as with many, I can certainly find some personal insight. Maybe you can too? The reading was with the combined  Druid Animal  and  Plant Oracles . There are probably copywrite issues that won't let me post the picture of each card, but you can do an Internet search for them with your favorite search engine. Keynote:  Horse  (Each) – The Goddess/The land/Travel The "theme" of the year is a time of travel or journeying, either physically or spiritually.  The Goddess brings us the energy from both land and sun for this work.  For community a time to look at where we are going and