By Fire Well and Tree

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” ...

  Special guest appearance by Taco towards the back  I am not 100 percent sure how I came to be so...YULE!!!  When I first became pagan, I felt like I was all about the Samhain, the spooky. And heck, yeah, I still love it.  But somehow Yule took hold and now I plan Yule Lad visit to my grove's kids, and Solstice eve vigils, and a Yule Along for the 12 days, and then Twelfth Night sumble.... Anyway, here we are again. The last two years there's been Yule-A-Long and Yule Lads, but that's it.  In 2020, we tried to have a Zoom Twelfth Night. I get that Zoom has been a godsend for many, and we certainly used similar technology (Blackboard Collaborate), but as much as they can help people with some anxieties, they do the exact opposite for mine. So in 2021 I didn't even bother, and was mostly too full of Seasonal Affective Disorder to even care. We didn't even decorate those two years.   BUT, this year is all... well, different. Not normal, but close. (I des...

 ... I mean, it is THE pagan holiday... The first one I ever celebrated WITH people. I think it was 1992, and my roommate and I went to the now-defunct PCCO's "Take Back the Rite" Samhain gathering at what is now Bicentennial Park (maybe it was then?)  The Faith Mission bus was there to pick up homeless since it was cold but decided to attempt to disrupt our rite and then stand in a circle around our circle lobbing prayers at us. Yay. There are probably Neopagans out there that don't like Samhain... But I don't really know them.  I try to explain it to non or new Neopagans as a combination of Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, and New Year's Eve.  In reverse order, the connection with the Celtic New Year and fire festival of the same name has many groups (including one of mine) marking the end/beginning of their liturgical year.  And if you have a hard time with resolutions, this is one of the many cultural new year celebrations that you can get a do-over (if you phr...

  Okay, you're right. they're all my favorite.  But Imbolc is different! No, I really mean it.  Imbolc holds many memories of awesomeness on my path, as does my relationship with Brigid (or Bridhe or whichever other spelling you want.) When I first embarked on this path, it was because I wanted to be more familiar with the spirituality of my ancestors. my immediate ancestors were varieties of Christian (Evangelical, Catholic, or Methodist) but i wanted to go back further. One branch was Irish and since that was the cool white ethnicity i explored it. The others were varieties of German and English, which in my mind had historical baggage i didn't then want to engage with. So from the beginning, Bridhe was it.  even when I meandered into heathenry later (having made some peace with that ancestry) and even Vodoun for a bit, she was a constant.  I became a  flame keeper  (next shift February 11).  I made sure I had a fire pit at my new home, I have t...

I forgot to hit enter!!   I had started writing some imaginary fictional stuff around high days. I of course can't find them... so I'm just starting over here... I every so often day dream about my ideal neopagan experience.  I decided to start to record them for... I don't know... a book? a guide to manifestation for the future? Who knows... So what follows here is just that. It is also MINE and I will hold and enforce all applicable copywrite privileges.   The leaves were just beginning to turn. The community had been in the fields for what seemed like days on end, bringing in the harvest.  Those that were not in the fields were in the kitchen, preserving whatever they could for the lean months to come.   The children were grabbing the corn husks and gathering them together fashioning two figures, male and female.   The sun was beginning to set, earlier than the day before, and the people returned to their dwellings for the evening's m...

 Here in suburbia, it is "my Lughnasadh," and I've begun a 12-day devotional in honor of the Many-Skilled One.  If anyone has ever spoken to me at great length about such things, you may have heard me called the Fire Festivals "portable."  What I mean is that the solstice and equinoxes have fixed astronomical points, related to the Earth's orbit around the sun. The fire festivals (Samhain, Imbolc, Beltainne, and Lughnasadh) have been assigned points mid-way between them, but my own UPG is that this is a modern convenience, and the folklore surrounding them may indicate that events in the tribal pastoral/horticultural rhythms were indicators of the time for being festive.  If you take, Imbolc, for example, one of the things surrounding Imbolc was the ewe's milk coming in, so a key indicator of by how much your heard may be increasing. Well, what if that doesn't happen on February 2?  What if it happens on February 5 or January 27?   What if we haven...

 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 ...

It’s  ALMOST  that time again, for the Solstice-A-Long!  As with last year, I have devotionals for both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.   The solstice itself is days away, but I wanted to at least put this out there so folks can prepare and get their ideas going  for the  wave of druidic en ergy circumnavigating the world  continuously for 12 days!  You don't have to be a druid though!   The entire  devotional can be seen as a ritual, with movement into sacred space and honoring an “otherworldly guide” at the start and then also at the end.   As with year’s past this is a guide and a guide only. Feel free to adjust to suit your own ecosystem, climate, and especiall y pantheon preferences.  This was originally developed with a  Norse  pantheon,  HOWEVER, it can be easily  Celtified , Hellenized, Romanized,  Vedicized , etc.   As always, I ask that if you do that, pleas...