But maybe you are just the talking part of a large collection of bacteria. We continue to be colonized every day of our lives. “Surrounding us and infusing us is this cloud of microbes,” said Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University. We end up with different species, but those species generally carry out the same essential [...]
If it’s Beltane, why I am still splitting firewood? Usually I observe the rhythms of the “Celtic” year by turning off the furnace at Beltane and relighting it at Samhain, using just supplemental wood heat otherwise. Not this year. But during a brief sunny interval yesterday morning, the first black-headed grosbeak of the season landed [...]
I spent about an hour today on the snow shovel after fifteen inches fell yesterday, laughing a bitter and sardonic laugh at people who associate flowers and bunny wabbits with the spring equinox. (At least the Sun is stronger now than in midwinter.) Today’s preoccupation is the talk that I have to give tomorrow on [...]
I spent the last three days camping with friends up on the Arapaho National Forest. I have done a little deep-winter camping before, but never before on skis with a sled. I learned that my sleeping bag is not really warm enough for -18 F. (-27 C.) nights. Must remedy that. Even after that short [...]
I tend to get into some bad places psychologically when it’s the dark of the Moon and work is not going well. “No one respects me, no one pays any attention to what I say”—that sort of thing. The best cure is to take a dog (who may or may not pay any attention but [...]
M. and I have returned from the smallest of the three Colorado Pagan camp-out festivals held at Wellington Lake, a large private campground. Wellington Lake is dominated by a large rock formation called (imaginatively) The Castle. The photo above, however, is the west (back) side, which most festival attendees never see. But if you are [...]
Lupa posts on bioregionalism, animism, and ecopsychology. When M. was in grad school in psychology in the 1990s, she hoped that ecopsychology would be the Next Big Thing. Articles on the psychological affects of interacting (or not) with the non-human world were popping up in places like McCall’s magazine. Addressing “nature-deficit syndrome” would be a [...]
¶ Burn more frankincense in your rituals: it is psychoactive. ¶ From this side of the pond, I would say that if not enough young people are not taking up Morris dancing, they are not getting drunk enough first. (In England?! — ed.) Will it be only the Pagans and that sort who keep it [...]
The New York Times profiles a California water witch (dowser). How many rural witches are still around is an open question. Water witches have no trade unions — or covens. Few advertise, or dowse full time. I learned dowsing on a construction job, and I had no “intuitive sense” of where the rural gas line [...]
Bringing back the woolly mammoth would be a good thing. I want animals to go with my religion.
