By Fire Well and Tree

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...

 <insert photo of Twelfth Night altar> While my liturgical year ended and began two months ago, the rest of the world* turned the page two days ago.  And so, the Twelfth Night of my Yule celebration conveniently coincides with New Year's Eve. As the five or ten of you who read along regularly know, I like to have a party that evening to celebrate.  It can be a bit much for this introvert, but I do it because I genuinely love hosting and making food and serving beverages to those that I care about.  Yuletide, and really all our holidays, began as group and family activities, and while I have done these things solo, it doesn't really put the cap on the season the same way.   Our whole Yuletide season prefaces with the Krampus walk on the first Sunday in December. One grove member has a Wassail party soon thereafter to really kick things off, and then I bookend it on the other side, and then usually Yule and Winter Solstice rites in between.  During...

   Photo by Manuel Torres Garcia: https://www.pexels.com/photo/trees-covered-with-christmas-lights-at-night-10664540/ Since I started keeping track of time this way, I've been also trying to pin down how the ancient groups would have done so.  I had been assuming that the 'new moon = new month' formula, as seems to be the case for the Coligny Calendar and other Celtic sources, would be the same for other groups.  But then I came upon an Anglo-Saxon calendar listing, which quoted Bede's  Reckoning of Time   as indicating the month of  Wynterfylleth  as beginning on the full moon ( "because winter began on the first full moon of that month [of October]."   So I asked my friend  Alaric Albertsson . He usually posts on his Facebook page about which Anglo-Saxon month it is... and I noticed he also goes full-moon to full-moon. The upshot (and Alaric, PLEASE correct me if I misinterpreted) is that the Anglo-Saxons likely didn't have calend...

  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...

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 norther...

 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 w...