By Fire Well and Tree

  Photo by Garon Joseph: https://www.pexels.com/photo/band-plays-wind-instrument-at-the-street-during-the-parade-3521559/ February is shaping up to be way better than January. I'm almost all packed to head to Convocation , a really good indoor festival, even if it is in The State Up North. We have our midwinter thaw, even getting up to the 60s today. I was greeted by birds singing and geese honking when I stepped out my door this morning. AND I have Winter Olympics on, although I have not been able to watch as much as I would like. I will end up missing the curling and hockey gold medal games due to my travels. Fat Tuesday morning found me doing a big ol' Internet search on the origins of Carnival, and Lent.  I have this informal armchair-anthropological theory that many of our religious taboos and customs surrounding food have to do with survival, and we dress them up with religion to convince people to not violate them. So, if oxen are more valuable alive than dead, eating c...

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...