Joy & Grief: figuring out my Samhain Advent
I completely dropped the ball on doing fire festival advents this year. In the wave of grief following the death of my friend and the death of my mentor, it […]
death
The Exhaustion of Grief
When I first started First Nations Studies, I knew Elders would be in the classroom. I don’t know exactly what I expected, but I didn’t expect Uncle Ray. Instead of […]
The Samhain that Wasn’t
Following up on a successful, if belated, Loafmass, this year I wanted to have a good Samhain celebration. I tried to get to it by October 31st, but that didn’t […]
What cannot be said will be wept
I feel as if I’ve spent an entire week crying; weeping out my anguish first for the betrayal of the mothers who once welcomed me, and today for the physical […]
The Sacred Triad and the Wheel of the Year
Note: this post is written from the perspective of someone living in the Northern Hemisphere on the West Coast of North America. Also it is full of my headcanon about […]
World Suicide Prevention Day 2015
I don’t know. There was a big post I wanted to do about my Oma and my mom and my aunt and how suicide/suicidal ideation/suicide attempts runs in our family, […]
30 Days of Paganism: Places of spiritual significance
There are two types of “place” that I’m going to talk about here. One is a general type of place. The other is a specific spot in the world that […]
30 Days of Paganism: Paganism and major life events
This post’s topic can really be parsed down into “How do your religion and major life events intersect?” Which is a fair question; most mainstream religions have things in place […]
The Morrigan Chose Me…and I chose Her right back
There’s this idea in neo-Pagan or polytheist circles that the gods choose us, we don’t choose them. Sometimes that’s correct — sometimes, yes, the gods do search us out without […]
30 Days of Paganism: Beliefs – Birth, death and rebirth
From the perspective of the faith I’ve been building I haven’t actually given this part a lot of thought — I think I’ve just sort of grafted my personal ideas […]
Descent and The Chthonic Ocean
I realized, while trying to pen my two separate posts, The Chthonic Ocean and Descent, that I couldn’t separate the two. So here are both, for D, and I’ll just […]
X, or the Gift of Poison
Someone on TC suggested that one could do Gebo, the X-shaped rune for the Pagan Blog Project (like most of you, I’m sure, many of us were scratching our skulls […]
Landbinding
I mentioned Landbinding once, I think, in my blood sacrifice post. Since then I’ve been meaning to actually talk about what Landbinding is, or at least what sorts of nebulous […]
Expelling the Venom
A lesson I have yet to learn: other people’s advice is never as good as my own intuition. On Saturday night I went with some friends to their belated Full […]
44 Days of Witchery, Day 15: Thoughts on the afterlife?
Nope. Which is to say, I don’t really think about it that often. I have some theories, some comforting thoughts in the event of the death of a loved one, […]
Finding Answers (and coming away with more questions)
So in my last post I talked about going down to the beach to see if the God Who’d been nudging me really was Manannan Mac Lir. (I probably didn’t […]
The Suddenness of Loss
This morning my dog, Major, died. He was 11. We’d had him for 4 years; an SPCA rescue. Some part of me knew that this was his last summer, but […]