By Fire Well and Tree

  Day 1:  Offerings to the Fro Ing and Frea, and the corn dolly from my garden.   You can't see it, but the green and yellow candles ARE lit, just super small flames (wick problems).I got Yarrow as an omen. The crystal grid is basically a calendar, with the stone for Haelig (Mabon) on the top (and for the first quarter moon on the inner circle).  The new corn dolly is under the black tulle, kind of. Yay, it's here! As of Saturday (9/23) at 2:50 in the morning Even though my favorite 'slice' of the pie that makes up the Wheel of the Year is now over, officially, I don't dislike autumn.  There's all sorts of secular things I love about this time of year: football, pumpkin spice lattes (don't hate), finishing up the harvest of my garden and cleaning it up for the winter, watching the leaves change color... I swear it's like Mother Earth is putting on her own chunky cardigan. Also I love chunky cardigans. I also love that it's still warm enough to be out...

Borage  Hello!! Post festival droop is a real thing. I had wanted to do a review of the latest  festival I attended, Sirius Rising, but I jumped right into a surprise party planning and execution, and juggling family and misdirection, and haven't had a chance to really GROUND back in to the mundane.  I'll be heading to another one next week, so I need to get some stuff off the blog-plate. First, we moved into both a new calendar month and a new spot on the wheel of the year, at the same time.  The rune pulled at Yule for August was Ingwaz which is about the best rune you could pull for the beginning of the harvest!  Literally the name of an Anglo-Saxon deity, and associated also with Freyr, this rune can sometimes be about fertility but also about the frith and fellowship that comes with the harvest. This is the time for fairs, and I'll do another post some day comparing ancient and modern fairs, but both are about larger communities coming together, to meet, to...

  Photo by Simon Berger: https://www.pexels.com/photo/purple-flowers-in-bloom-1353126/ Yay!  The sun is at her peak, and there were some days even in the cooler-than-I-wanted-it-to-be Spring that part of me  doubted we'd get here.  But here we are! A couple of notes. One of the names assigned to this holiday is Liða, sometimes spelled Litha.  I have never known many people locally to call it that (usually Midsummer or Summer Solstice). But if you're going to call it by the Anglo-Saxon name, PLEASE pronounce it correctly!  The "i" is a long e sound (so ee). The ð is called a 'thorn' and it is a hard-Th sound, like "that."  (It's kind of like saying my name with a weird lisp on the 's' really).  I may have talked about midsummer before (sorry to repeat), but it falls between the planting season and the harvesting season. So, really, there's not much to DO besides just maintenance.  If my memory serves, this may have been prime time for ...

A wide purple clover path through lightly wooded area Whether you call it Ostara or not, the vernal equinox has come (a few days ago. And I'm sorry this is late, but thank Covid.) Again, I am blessed to be living where all four seasons tend to correspond to the calendar, more or less, so the 8 Sabbats match up pretty well.  Being a part of the local pagan community means that I have two rites planned, one of which I'm leading (pending  negative Covid test, of course).   Equinoxes have the theme of balance for me, always. Light and dark are mostly even, or as close as one can get.  Per timeanddate.com, we got 12 hours and 8 minutes of daylight on the equinox itself (March 20).  We had EXACTLY 12 hours on March 17.   Why is three days early? I originally thought it was the imperfections of our modern calendar.  But I also had to look it up too. Stepping back a little bit, many of you probably already know the word “equinox” comes from “aequus” ...

If you are one of the two or three people who read my stuff, you'll know already that I don't find calendar dates to be particularly useful for anything besides making sure folks are on the same page to do stuff.  As far as the natural world, and the spirituality I find there, I prefer to let nature tell me stuff.   Of course, if I had the time to devote the equivalent of a full-time job to studying these things, I wouldn't need to avail myself of Googling stuff, although I definitely appreciate the  astrology website I use.   (Really wish I paid attention in geometry class...if I'd have only known...) The solstice and equinoxes, moon going from dark to full and back again.... none of that cares about the date on a page.   BUT, the cross quarter days are a little harder, so I look to my land. We haven't had much of a midwinter thaw. We got lots of cold and snow around Yule, and then we've been somewhat consistently in the 40s-ish.  MAYBE we dipped...

Photo by Riccardo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ice-river-photography-300857/ GOOD NEWS!  I found a web page (two actually) that has reconstructed an Anglo-Saxon calendar. The good news is that I wasn't far off with my own haphazard timing of things.   This  is the one I'm using. The other one is only off by a day, and seems to be depending upon whether they are starting it when the moon is dark, or just the first sliver.  Either way, I can now assign those brains cells to other things. For our month names.. The Anglo-Saxon month is Solmōnaþ, which seems to be "mud month" or "month of hearth cakes."  Commentators I read seemed to think these hearth cakes were mud-like so that would be the two names?  From the Gauls, it is Rivros (Riuros), which is "cold month," and the Almanac terms the full moon for this month "Snow Moon."   I sense a theme.... Kondratiev's next line from the Song of Amergin is "I am a lake on a plain."  He...

 I remembered to do this! And now I've remembered to share it! I used the Druid Oracle.  These are TWO sets of cards designed to work together.  The Druid Animal Oracle I am more familiar with. The Druid Plant Oracle complements it, and I'm less familiar with it. Normally, I take pictures, but as there are likely copywrite issues there, I will kindly request that you Internet search.  They also have a phone app, but I did use the physical cards.  I drew 9 cards from each deck.  There is one for each high day to reveal the energies (animal) and insights (plants) at play starting on that high day through to the next.  The ninth cards are sort of a keynote or theme of the whole year. (I do this type of thing often. Sometimes it's interesting to compare the Samhain card themes with the Yule Rune spread for the year, and then my own Tarot horoscope thread... but that's kind of crazy obsessive too, so I don't know if I can recommend it. So, with out further ...

***These are copies of postings to our ADF folks, of a home devotional system one can do on the Twelve Days of Yule.  There are ideas for both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. I'll try to keep up with this throughout, but as it is a busy season for everyone, I may have to double up!*** 12/29 : Good Day! And Welcome to Day 10!   We are almost at the end, and as such, we need to make preparations to return to the more mundane world.  In the Matthews’ book, they talk about St. Distaff’s day, which is the first day after the Twelve Days of Christmas (usually the day after Epiphany) when women were permitted to return to their spinning.  As we prepare to return, we can place a symbol of our work on the altar, and honor those deities or spirits associated with that.   I tend to put my drop spindle on the altar, since not only will we be returning to work, we will be returning the house to  it s  more mundane rhythms as well. ...

At this, the balance point of the year, I engaged in a 3 day devotional. The devotional honors my local ecosystem, and the Norse pantheon in the Northern Hemisphere, but it can easily be flipped around for the Southern hemisphere. I also originally wrote this as a devotional to specific deities, inspired by two large group rites in  The Troth 's Book of Blots. I scaled them down to just a simple devotional and offeratory framework, substituting general themes and suggested offerings for liturgical scripting.  I shared this with ADF in the mode of the "Yule-a-long," that druids all over the globe (because we have them now) can drive a current of "druidy energy around the world." Ideally, folks would honor the deities that are most appropriate for the themes from their own hearth practices, and that reflect their local ecosystems as well.  In retrospect, one could also honor the energies of moving from light to dark. The altar is arranged in three sections. On...

Yes, I see the date on the calendar.  I actually did it about three to four days afterward and between flitting here and there with festivals and such, well.... Still, the patterns and energies are still there, so for completeness' sakes..... Again, I'm using the Druid Plant/Animal Oracles combined.  The significator or keynote for the Midsummer to Lughnasadh period is "Celtic Bean."  The first sentence describing the meaning of this card is "Something which you thought was dead has come back into your life in a new form." After the reconciliation of the last six weeks (Beltainne to Midsummer), the fruits of that burst forth in this one.  Projects get restarted or something that was long forgotten comes back to light, and some of these things may do so in unexpected ways. From the mental, intellectual side, the card is Owl.  (One of my favorites!)  Owl respresents wisdom, and especially that of turning "disadvantage into advantage."  This can...

A bit late you say?  Well, as I have mentioned  elsewhere , in my own hearth practice, Beltainne happens either after the last frost of the season, or when I am done with the majority of planting.  I may also time it with the blossoming of my lilac bush, but I am still testing that theory.  Either way, it is about being in tune with and in touch with the spirits of my land and the rhythms of the seasons where I happen to live. However, for a religion to be public rather than hearth, some agreement is needed, and most people have already celebrated it communally.  While I'm waiting for the funds for the last bit of planting, I decided to do a reading for Beltainne.  This can be for the community at large, or for whomever it speaks to, and quite likely it is both. That is the way these things work sometimes. I am using the combined Druid Plant  and  Animal Oracle  by Stephanie and Philip Carr-Gomm deck.  While my primary reading for ot...