To Be a Witch: A Response Post Pt. II

So Midnight and I were discussing further the Re-wilding Witchcraft article and certain points that the author had made in regards to the response (as witches) to the coming doom of mankind. Regarding that, and also spurred by a comment made by one of our readers on that particular post, we decided to talk about our thoughts and musings in a “part II” blogpost, and on (as I affectionately call it), being a ‘wyldling witch’. Please forgive any repeats in what you read below, we both speak on similar topics and I couldn’t find a way to blend both of our thoughts into one so I left them separate.

Essentially, right now… we’re being lied to. Hardcore. We’re being spoon-fed everything and doused in fluoride to keep us complacent in front of our glowy movie boxes and sipping carbonated beverages and espressos while the world around us is falling to pieces. This is the end for us, plain and simple. It is time to acknowledge that there is no turning back for us as a species. Hell, there’s no turning back for a lot of things… we’ve damn near reached Peak Soil and Peak Oil, the oceans are on their way out, thousands upon thousands of other species are going extinct each day… Some of us will survive and live on, but our legacy is coming to an end. There is no stopping it at this point. Those of us who take the time NOW to learn the ways of their local wilds, local edibles and poisons and medicines, the tracking of game and divining of bird flight and weather prediction, of REAL WILD WITCHCRAFT, of communing with the land wrights and the Otherworld….. and teaching all of that to our children…. those few will be the ones who survive. The rest will be overcome, chained, and eventually annihilated, totally oblivious to the world burning outside of their A/C-cooled cookie-cutter homes. And they will be lost to oblivion. And the world will go on without us.

by Margaret Seidler on DeviantArt

Isáine:
I do think that there are multiple aspects that need to be recognized and cultivated here. I agree with the Re-wilding Witchcraft article’s author in his talking about witches rising up, resuming our old ‘face’ so to speak, and re-learning and creating the death-rights and things like that. Bringing back ceremony in all aspects of birth, life, and death. Essentially I think he was getting at this: make peace with the fact that death is imminent. Annihilation is upon us. Get to know death, and yet LIVE. Work with the spirits, work with the land. Work with yourself and your family. I was talking with Midnight about this and we feel like those who will survive will be those who do these things and learn to re-wild themselves and re-wild their witchcraft, then teach their children those skills-– how to make a snare and butcher meat, how to wildcraft herbs and the knowledge of herbalism– particularly for your *local* flora.. this is key here… How to live off the land and be a part of the land, and also to be a part of the spirit world and know how to work with spirits, particularly– as Sarah Lawless puts it– working in the realm of bioregional animism (working with the spirits of your locale, the ‘Genius Loci’).

Paganism is a religion or spirituality (however you look at it) that is broad-reaching, but generally claims to be in some form or another, earth-worshiping. But are we really? Witchcraft and paganism are dark and old, like the deep earth where the roots and bones are lying. Magic comes from the earth, and the Otherworld(s), and from within ourselves. But many of those who would use the title “pagan” and “witch” know very little, truly, of the earth or of the other side of the Veil. We have gouged out our Seeing Eyes ourselves, clipped our own wings and talons and bleached our fields (spiritually and physically speaking) infertile. We worship alien gods, shun the Ancestors and ignore the herbal medicine that is right outside our kitchen door (or worse yet, spray those healing, magical dandelions with bee-killing, water-poisoning Roundup)… We claim to love the Earth Mother and yet we stick our heads into the sand when some seemingly crack-pot conspiracy theorist hippy starts yelling from the rooftops about the state of the world and our part in its undoing. We have forgotten how to make offerings, we have forgotten what a sacrifice really meant to those who came before us– the continuation of a clan line, the feeding of your people from fertile fields and woods, the promise of the sun’s return, survival of mother and babe during childbirth– the blessings from those who had gone before upon those who now live. Life for life, blood for blood. These are the kinds of things that we need to bring back into our practice, into our witchcraft and every-day lives.

Soon the Earth will take her sacrifice by force, and it will be our blood and bones in the dirt.

from edies.farm/tag/rewilding/

Midnight:
I think when looking at something of this scale, what’s really important is that we do SOMETHING. We have seen the truth of things, ignorance should never have been an excuse but now it isn’t even an option. Willful blindness is evaporating like so much mist. Our generation is faced with a hard reality now. Perhaps not in our lifetimes but in our children’s and certainly in our children’s children’s, mankind will face an extinction level event. Our situation isn’t a question of rethinking our resource management anymore, now its a base question of survival.
Not survival as individuals, but our survival as a species is in question. We have been at war with the earth. We have poisoned tomorrow’s water to drink today. We have killed and cut and maimed the land in our efforts to further progress.

Now as the world is want to do, a balance will reassert itself. If we do nothing then it will do something, by obliterating us. I think that the author’s message was that we need to first find each other, then reestablish our connection to nature. We need to re-immerse ourselves in it, re-wild ourselves and our magic. Our best chance of survival in any significant way is to be a part of nature, not apart from it. To do this we have to strip away many of the fineries we have donned to fit in amongst and be accepted by the other “recognized and established” religions and modern society as a whole. ( I’m saying all of this as blanket statements with no distinctions between craft or sects because in every aspect I am trying to include all of us… any distinctions we may feel or value between us are irrelevant. To any outsider looking in they see only witches, and in the face of what we are looking at dealing with, any differences are irrelevant in the face of what we all need to become. ) We need to return to being the mediums between this world and the Others. That means knowing death, knowing the wild places, knowing the spirits and how to speak to them, how to garner their blessings and how to live with the wild world. We need to re-synch with our local wilds, learn (y)our sacred places, learn (y)our magical times– not by a book but by living it and feeling it. More importantly still, we need to know how to pass this knowledge on to others, and we need to share it with our children so that they, and their grandchildren, have a chance at surviving.

……………………………………………………

Our “Part III” post will be a recap and further suggestions, as well as some resources on how to re-wild yourself, re-wild your witchcraft, and be a “Wyldling Witch”. We would love to hear your thoughts and any input, and keep this discussion going and the dialogue open. Feel free to comment below, or e-mail us at thetwistedtree.shoppe@gmail.com

Wildcrafting: Roadside Weeds

The day was warm and humid, the hot wind tugging at my skirts as I strapped my toddling son into his stroller and set off down the street. We live two blocks from the grocery store and it is a quick trek. As we turned off our street onto the main road, I stopped my trudging through the grass and peered over at a tiny clump of umbrella-shaped white flower clusters a dozen feet back into the field. My son started gesturing towards them, so we went over. What I had thought was possibly a patch of yarrow in my drive by’s the last week or so, was just a patch of very short-statured Queen Anne’s Lace. I asked if my son would like a flower, and after seeing him nodding vehemently I smiled and plucked one for him, the prickly hairs poking my fingertips. He grasped it with wonder and we continued on our walk. Not thirty seconds later, I spotted some tall spindling plants topped with tiny purple flowers. I had seen a picture that resembled them a week before and plucked one to try and identify it once we got home, my guess was vervain. A few feet after that was a patch of tiny white-petaled, yellow-centered daisies. Again my son reaches for them begging for a flower. So I plucked one for him and he traded the Queen Anne’s Lace flower for the daisy. And just after the daisies was a tiny patch of red clover– the first I have seen in the area. For my own enjoyment I picked two and tucked them into the stroller. On we went, and at the turn to the grocery store stood the very large grouping of Queen Anne’s Lace flowers that had been there the last month or two by now, half of which had gone to seed, their umbels drying and curling up towards the sky like little cups full of fuzzy brown seeds. These are the seeds that have kept my womb empty of child the last few months. I plucked one seed-head for my altar and another flower to take home. Interestingly enough, none of either group of QAL flowers had any, that I could discern, with a red dot in the middle of the umbels like the plants that I had seen on the roadside in the larger town 20 miles away. Past the QAL towards the grocery store were more of the spindly purple-topped plants.

Once we got home, I pulled out our region-specific plant field guide and began looking up the plants we had found.
Queen Anne’s Lace (which by now I know well)
Blue Vervain
Daisy Fleabane
Red Clover

Daisy & Clover

Queen Anne’s Lace Flower

Queen Anne’s Lace Seed Head

And, all of them are medicinal. Of course, it is never recommended to ingest or otherwise use medicinally plants wildcrafted from roadsides. But it just goes to show you that there can be a treasure trove of wild medicinal and edible plants right in your own backyard, neighborhood, fields, and wild places. You just need to know how to look, and take the time to forage. It is vital to know how to properly identify the various medicinal and edible plants and fungi in order to discern them from their poisonous look-alikes (or just to know what is poisonous and what isn’t in general), especially in your area or region. A perfect example is Queen Anne’s Lace, which has a few very deadly look-alikes. Proper identification is imperative. You don’t want to go around picking poison hemlock or water hemlock (both are deadly), which can be mistaken for QAL by amateur foragers. Be sure to pick up a region-specific field guide with color photos, and/or books on medicinals and edibles and their identification for your region. Take it with you on a walk and see how many plants (and fungi) you can identify and find out which ones are edible and/or medicinal near your home, in a local park (beware of pesticides!) or nature preserve. Learn the different identification notes– hairy or smooth stem, shape of the leaves, flower differences, inner sap consistencies, etc. Believe it or not, a smooth or hairy stem can be a very important identification! REMEMBER: Queen Anne has hairy legs! (The hemlocks have smooth stems that are often mottled in color). Don’t forget about berries and trees too. Wildcrafting herbs and foraging for food are wonderful ways to get in touch with your local spirits (or Genius Loci), learn your native plant species, and get a nutritious wild-harvested meal for you and your family. And, speaking of Spirits, don’t forget to take some offerings with you to leave if you harvest anything in your adventures, or even just as a “thank you” for allowing you to come to this place and study and learn about the plants that are under Its care. Who knows, maybe they’ll take a liking to you and teach you a thing or two.

My new favorite spirit-offering

Our regional fieldguide to medicinals and our go-to medicine-making book

Pagan Homeschooling & Parenting Resources

 

This is going to be an on-going post updated as I find new information, resources, and websites to add to it. This is partly for my own records, but also for sharing with others. Our son is only 2.5 but it is never too soon to start “education”. We are keen to the “un-schooling” movement, and I am also a fan of Waldorf education, and being homeschooled myself for a time, I have a fondness for it. We will probably be doing a blend of styles, potentially enrolling him in a Waldorf school or group, etc. when the time comes, but we as an eclectic pagan family want to raise him in a nature-honoring, animistic and spiritual way while also teaching about other religions and cultures, science and mathematics, philosophy and astronomy, arts and bardcraft, writing and storytelling, etc. etc. If you have any resources to contribute, or experiences with any groups/sites etc. please leave us a comment!

Random lists, groups, and resources:

http://www.pinterest.com/blissfaery/craft-y-kids-pagan-parenting-homeunschooling/ [This one actually has a lot of resources and books]

http://thecrunchypaganmomblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/pagan-homeschool-curriculum-and-lesson.html

http://home-school.lovetoknow.com/Pagan_Homeschooling

http://www.homeschool.com/forum/

http://uuhomeschoolers.wordpress.com/

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/paganfreedomschoolers/info

http://witchesandpagans.com/EasyBlog/resources-for-pagan-homeschoolers.html

http://www.mothering.com/forum/50-learning-home-beyond/1203437-pagan-homeschoolers-curriculum-thread.html

http://homeschoolingonashoestring.com/homeschooling/methods/curriculum/ (homeschooling on a budget)

http://www.unschooling.org/

http://a2zhomeschooling.com/religion/

http://flyingoffthebroomhandle.blogspot.com/2012/10/podcasting-for-pagan-homeschooling.html

https://www.facebook.com/groups/PaganHomeschooling/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Askeja-Witches-Homeschool/537159899733655

Waldorf Style:

http://www.oakmeadow.com/

Earthschooling (through the BEearth Institute of Education, a preschool through G8 [plus high school add-on] DL school):

http://earthschooling.info/thebearthinstitute/?page_id=753

Charlotte Mason Method of Homeschooling:

(very Christian but can be adapted, and free) http://www.amblesideonline.org/

(with a pagan-spin) http://delaney-smith.net/school/Year_1/

Classical Method of Homeschooling:

“Books such as The Well-Trained Mind (which is my main resource for curricula and homeschooling) and The Latin-Centered Curriculum are both unabashedly Christian. However, this method originates with the Pagan writer, Martianus Capella, who developed the system of the seven liberal arts that comprised early medieval education.” (Quote from http://witchesandpagans.com/EasyBlog/curricula-for-pagan-homeschoolers.html).

Non-Religious General Online Learning Sites:

http://www.time4learning.com/ (preschool through 12th grade)

http://www.abcmouse.com (age 2 through early elementary)

http://www.starfall.com

http://www.readingeggs.com

Pagan Parenting

http://www.witchvox.com/_x.html?c=parent

http://www.paganparenting.com/

http://parentingbythelightofthemoon.blogspot.com/2010/07/links-every-pagan-parent-should-have.html [Includes links to magazines, educational resources, crafts and activities, etc. AND links to pagan-parent meet-up groups.]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paganfamilies/

http://www.janetcallahan.com/shopping/ebooks [Pagan Parenting in the NICU]

Books and Activities for Kids in Pagan Families

https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/pagan-kids

http://www.paganchildrensbooks.com/magic_carpet/pc/home.asp

http://www.pieplatepublishing.com/productcat/childrens

Picture Books for Pagan Families: Autumn Equinox

Picture Books for Pagan Families: Lammas

Picture Books for Pagan Families: Summer Solstice

Picture Books for Pagan Families: Beltane

Picture Books for Pagan Families: Samhain

Picture Books for Pagan Families: Spring Equinox

http://sacredhearth.com/activity-books-for-pagan-children

http://www.pookapages.com/ [Themed around a young witch named Elsie and Pooka her cat, including coloring pages, recipes, esbats for kids, kid’s BoS, and other activities for pagan children].

http://www.rayneannastorm.com/english.html [printable coloring pages for things such as sabbats, zodiacs, Book of Shadows, etc.]

To Be a Witch: A Response Post Pt. I

How tame we have become. How polite about our witchcraft. In our desire to harm none we have become harmless.

Truth speaks, uttered forth, and realization hits. My stomach tightens and my jaw clenches.

I will not be part of this process, because to do so is to be complicit with the very forces that are destroying all life on earth. It is time for Witchcraft not to choose, but to remember which side it is on in this struggle.

A fire burns deep in my belly and my throat tenses. Again, realization hits. We have given up everything– our roots, our truth, our power. We have disempowered, hell even dismembered ourselves in an attempt to be accepted by the masses. I chuckle, a bitterness coating my tongue, as I remember defending my new-found neopagan beliefs to my mother, insisting that it was no baby-devouring devil that I worshipped, but the green beauty of the earth and a loving goddess… Harm None, says the Rede… all the while the dripping of rooster blood onto black feathers and brick dust across the threshold called to me, but I turned away, heart aching, for fear of being outcast.

Ours is a practice grounded in the land, in the web of spirit relationships, in plant and insect and animal and bird. This is where we must orientate our actions, this is where our loyalty lies.

This is where our loyalties lie. With root and rock and stone and beast and bird… Months, no, a year or two ago I spoke of the duty, the responsibility, that we as pagans and witches have to defend the earth. How we claim to be “earth worshippers” and yet we can’t even be bothered to recycle. But I was dismissed, my words brushed aside. Offense was taken, my words faded into the wind that blows dry and crackling with toxic particles that are killing us as we breathe. But here– here I have found someone once more stepping up, and he is being held aloft, his words spread ’round. It’s about damn time someone starts listening to what some of us have been trying to say. But he has a much more terrible, a much more sinister picture he has painted. But it is one that is most needed, I feel, to jar us awake and knee-jerk us into a reaction if we are to save anything, much less ourselves.

No living system that can escape the fate which our actions have bound it to. We are living in the age of absolute ecological collapse. Habitat loss is occurring at a staggering rate, driven by what industrial civilisation has in common with the religions of the Book: the view that nature, like woman, is ours to dominate.

Terror and a deep sadness I have not felt in a long time weighs heavy in my heart. My chest tightens to match the restriction in my throat like a serpent squeezing tighter and tighter with its soft belly scales cold and smooth on my skin. This is what we have done. This is what we are doing. We are experiencing the largest extinction event in the history of the world– including that of the dinosaurs. And it is all. Our. Doing.

So what does our world look like?
Let me describe to you our power animals.

Wolf carcasses bored through with rifle point. Wet piles of Golden Eagles and Buzzards fed poisoned meat. Sharks long-lined and finned by fishing fleets that have butchered through the Tuna shoals we have fed to our plague of familiar cats. Barn Owls bleeding from their eyes and hæmorrhaging their guts down ghost white plumage due to the warfarin in rat poison. Toads and amphibian life mutating into monstrous pained death, whose gelatinous bones do not float back up the river.

Tears well in my eyes, I bite my lip. Read it again. And again. We say we are earth-worshippers, animists, druids, shamans, witches… Then BE that which you claim to be. DO that which you are meant to do– your charge stands before you cloaked in crude oil, belly filled with plastic. Your enemy stands before you, honey-tongued and black-suited with pen in hand as the resources of the world are signed away, as another 10,000 species become extinct. Your fellow pagans and witches are not the enemy. Nay, in a time as critical as this, there cannot be strife amongst allies.

Seawater so acidic that the shells of molluscs are dissolving. Oceans overfished to the extent that they resemble deserts, seabeds ploughed to destruction, micro-particles of indigestible plastic poisioning bird life and turtles, reefs bleached, plankton populations which are the building blocks of all ocean life disappearing…Water, I bid you hail and welcome.

All life comes from the sea, and without it, we would be nothing. Our tears as acidic as the waters that now cannot hold life nor oxygen enough for us to breathe. Our bones returned to a desert landscape no longer lush and green.

The Earth itself is exhausted, soil degradation endemic, washed with its nitrogen fertilisers into our already poisoned seas. The living Earth is fragile, it takes a hundred years to form a centimetre of topsoil. Farmland is a limited resource and eroding fast… Insect populations will soon not be able to pollinate the crops… The wheel of the year has been broken. Earth, I bid you hail and welcome.

People speak of peak oil, but no one is considering peak soil. Our foods are becoming less and less nutritious as our crops grow in pesticide-laden soil that has been stripped of its vitamins, minerals, bacteria, and fungi. Soon they simply will be unable to grow at all. Bees are dying at an unsustainable rate. Butterflies are disappearing. Amphibians are suffering horrible mutations and terrible deaths. We are growing as a population too fast to support it.

This is where you should feel the knot of fear in your stomach. The CO2 emissions that are wreaking havoc now are the result of what we burned forty years ago. Since then we have engaged in an orgy of denial and consumption. There is no tech-fix in the Anthropocene, the age of manmade climate change. Nothing has been done… Clearly we are being lied to. Clearly something is very wrong. Air and Fire, I bid you hail and welcome

My eyes close, pressing out tears that roll in rivulets down freckled cheeks, wetting lips that may never again feel truly fresh, clean, nontoxic water cross them. Lips that wish to spread wide and let forth a raging cry to the world. But none would hear me, it seems.

Some will be afraid of this knowledge; witchcraft should be liberated by it, liberated from petty concerns to pursue lives of beauty, liberated from the sleepwalking into death that our culture has made for us and our children. So I counsel, confront death. For witchcraft to be anything other than the empty escapism of the socially dysfunctional or nostalgia for bygone ages, it needs to feel the shape of its skull, venerate the dead and the sacred art of living and dying with meaning. We are all on the fierce path now.

Confront death, not by pretending that you have cut a deal with the Elder Vampire Gods invented for you by some internet Dark Witch fantasist in their over-priced books. Confront death, not by pretending that a beautiful Beltane ritual and a blue sky means everything will stay the same. Confront death, not by practicing the magic of ploughmen and wortcunners in your urban appartment believing that it makes you more authentic than any given Wiccan…

Witchcraft has never been about turning the other cheek to this. The witch has been created by the land to speak and act for it… We need to offer the death rites in a culture that pretends that death can be cheated by buying the latest i-gadget or hooking ourselves up to plasma bags of young blood… If you are engaged in witchcraft I suggest that you work on the lament, on your death rites, your eschatology and on your spirit body. There are the examples to emulate of those sensitively lifting roadkill from the asphalt for burial or reanimation, tending the graves of their neglected local cemetery, lighting candles for their ancestors, remembering the lost children.

If you call yourself a Witch, if you call yourself a Pagan, an Animist, an Earth-Worshipper of any kind. Take a look around you. Open your eyes to the world. Open yourself to the Spiritworld. And step across. We need you for this fight. The earth needs you. Leave behind the capitalist materialism and constant hate between yourself and others– the continual attempt to separate us and keep us wary, untrusting, and isolated. Take up your stang, and step into the role you claim. Before it is too late. And, as a final note, I will leave you with one last quote. I encourage you vehemently to go and read the article quoted herein in its entirety. And read it again. And then, once you’ve read it (and hopefully read it at least twice) go and read a response article by Sarah Anne Lawless. And then, go be a fucking witch.

Witchcraft has never been passive in the face of power. Our witchcraft will not be silenced at a time such as this, it will not be polite. Witchcraft cannot retreat to the wilderness, because there is no exterior wilderness left; instead we need to exteriorize our inner wild. We need to wake up the animal in our bodies. This is witchcraft as contagion, as living flame. We witches must however reluctantly return the curse that has been laid upon us all.

Quotes (and photos) taken from the article, “Rewilding Witchcraft” over at the Scarlet Imprint website. Please read it in its entirety here: http://scarletimprint.com/2014/06/rewilding-witchcraft/

Please read Sarah Lawless’ response post here: http://sarahannelawless.com/2014/07/01/the-witch-and-the-wild/

Burial Rites

And they call her the Bonekeeper ~

She drums, the soft leather beater tapping out a steady rhythm that sounds out from the frame drum in her other hand. Her eyes close, her head tilts back and she begins to sway. Grass pricks at her bare feet and smoke of anise, mugwort, damiana, wormwood and mullein rises up in the low-hanging oakleaf canopy above her. Before her lies the feathered body of a great bird, her lover knelt beside it, knife in hand. The rhythm changes from a slow three-beat to a quickened four-beat. Dum dumdumdum dum dumdumdum… this is the burial rite. Wings are cleaved from torso, feet carefully detached, toes spread around a maple seed ball to hold them in place. Feathers are salvaged. These are all placed in layers of rock salt and covered with a tight-fitting lid to keep out moisture and those who would devour all. The rest is wrapped in burlap, and placed gently in a hole nearby, gaping wide from the dark earth where roots lie stirring with the new spring. More herbs are burnt upon the coal and poured into the hole with the Dead. In a few months time what remains when feather and flesh has been eaten away will be exhumed, he will bring out his herbs and smokes, and she will again bring out the drum, and this time, they will sing the bones back to life ~

It is All Connected

Original work first posted at Isáine’s other blog, Witch of the Wyldwood, May 7, 2013. 

This breath that I am taking, this air that I am inhaling, it is the out breath of other living creatures. It is the essence of plants and trees, it is the product of natural processes occurring constantly all over this planet, in the fibers and cells of plants, in the lungs and cells of animals and other human beings. My exhale is the breath that they will draw, the air that they will pull into their pores and the fibers of their being. What I take into myself will feed my cells, nourish my body, and then it will leave my body with my soft exhale and return. And so it continues….

This water that I am drinking is millions of years old. It has been over rocks and crevices, has sustained plant life and animal life and human life, for millenia. It carries in it the memories of All. It carries within it the memory of our beginning, of our happiness and our pain. It has fallen on deserts and mountain tops and run through deep gorges and seen the depths of the sea where no man’s eyes have been. It has been consumed and excreted by land, sea, sky… plant, beast, human. It is our tears, our sweat, our blood. What I take into myself will feed my cells, will nourish my body. Then it will leave my body in one way or another, be rejoined with some larger body of water or evaporated into the atmosphere where it will reform as water droplets in the clouds until they are too heavy to stay there and will fall once more back upon this land, this thirsty land with thirsty creatures upon it. And so it continues…

We are all connected. To the essence of our very beings, the makeup up our cells, what vitalizes our bodies and sparks the mind, we are ONE. There is no denying that. Well, there may be denial. There is plenty of denial. But there is no running from it, hiding from it, or thinking that we can step outside/above the rest and not be affected by what we do to the rest. Because we will be. We ARE being affected.

We are choking on this air. We are puking up this water. Our lungs grasp for any amount of freshness, our cells shrivel, dehydrated and poisoned. The air is full of fumes and noxious gases and poison. The plants are disappearing  They are the filters, the creators of clean air. And we are destroying them. The water is dirty, full of chemicals and petroleum and plastic, and poisons. We are taking these into ourselves. And the rest of the plants and animals on this planet are too. Our cell structures are being damaged, our DNA is being damaged and changed because of these toxins. Water is not a renewable resource. Air is not a renewable resource if we destroy all the forests.

Take a step back and really think about all of this. Think about your place in this world, your interconnectedness to the All, your place in the weave. And what is your impact? And What are you going to do to CHANGE it? To help others to change? To save this planet before it’s too late, to save ourselves before it’s too late?

Here Be My Gods

These are my gods. The Lightning, the Mountain, the River. The bite of Winter’s Coming upon the wind, the Storm rolling in from the East, the Snow blanketing the Earth.

I see pictures like this and my breath is stolen from my chest. Such beauty… our world is full of it. This is GOD, this is GOD-US. This is my church, my temple, my shrine. My bare feet in the dirt are my prayers, my breath frosting on the cool air is my offering. I may worship gods, I may work with spirits, but at the basis of my practice I am an animist. Land, sea, sky. Plants, rocks, animals, even the rain. Are all Divine. 

In the Dark of the Night

Originally posted over at Midnight’s blog, Storms & Spirits, December 14, 2012. 

I stand relaxed, swaying slightly, moving to my own inner rhythm. Slowly I stretch my senses, exchanging one sight for another as I close my eyes and let my other senses paint an image for me. More important than that I feel what is around me. I feel the faint sparks of energy, of life in the tree. I bow to it, fluid, formal, a gesture of respect.. I whisper to it. Lay my hand on it, long-fingered dark-skinned hand against rough bark. For a moment I feel the connection, I am part of something beautiful. ( I honestly cannot say more than that.. I have tried and nothing suffices. So since I can’t explain it well I will just say that it’s beautiful. ) I hear a pulse deeper, stronger than my own. Then I am myself again. Myself with something more, some faint lingering of the pairing, some residual connection. At the edge of my mind, another consciousness; the tree no longer so soundly asleep. Faint feelings of curiosity and other emotions, more and less than human rub against my mind. Herbed smoke wafts up from the coals, tongues of it wrapping around us with vaporous fingers. I reach down grabbing my bowl and with deliberate care empty the contents around the tree.  Circling again I bend low and touch the roots that stand above the ground. Words form in the back of my throat. Liquid, they flow from me. At last I sit amidst the roots and earth, herbed smoke and fallen leaves, and I laugh, long and clear.