Sometimes I realize that a thing I do is quite Pagan without ever having consciously linked the behavior to my belief system. At some point over the last decade, I began to prize experiences over objects.The growing awareness that most objects do not get recycled (including the “recyclable” ones), and that most items we purchase…
Tag: advice
To be a witch is to be a liminal being in a world that loves absolutes. The phrase we learn early on about casting circles is generally something along the lines of “a time between times, a place between places.” From the very beginning of our dabblings in witchcraft, we learn to bend our perception…
New for 2023! I’m offering monthly Friday Night workshops on Zoom, starting in February, on a variety of Pagan and witchy topics. These workshops are all stand-alones, so you can take the entire series or just the ones that appeal to you. They are $15 each, with sliding scale options for folks who face financial…
Many times, when a pattern repeats itself for me a few times, I think of it as a cue to speak more widely about that particular pattern. The repeating theme right now? It’s luck. Over the last few months I’ve had an unusual number of clients, students, and friends come to me for help with…
The very first pre-Christian Deity I served was Brigid, an Irish goddess. As a young musician with a military background, she was easy for me to relate to. “A musician AND a blacksmith? Sign me up! I want to make music and hit things too!” I still consider my time in service to her to…
Many years ago, I was introduced to the idea of selecting a single word for each calendar year to act as an intention, touchstone, and big-picture goal. The beauty of a single word intention is that the simplicity means multiple ways of connecting are possible. For example, my word for 2020 was “Manifest.” One of…
This sermon was offered live (via Zoom) to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Wyoming Valley (Pennsylvania) on Sunday, November 27th. To be human is to be part of the natural world and also oddly separate from it. We technologized so quickly. Electric light wasn’t common in homes in the United States until the 1920s, roughly…
The best target for a spell was, is, and will remain the self. There are many reasons for this. We learn to manipulate ourselves into doing things really early on in life – picking up toys, brushing our teeth, being nice to our siblings when we don’t feel like it, etc. Self-manipulation on multiple levels…
Stories wield incredible power, and are one of the core shaping influences in human cultures. We can easily look around the world for examples of this: here in the United States, our culture is shaped by Christian mythology. In India, Hindu mythology forms the culture. In Iceland, the Icelandic and Norse mythology of old supports…
We inherit a lot of perspectives from our parent culture. Some of these are obvious, and we begin the work of deconstructing them pretty quickly. I began hacking at the “girls can’t be strong” trope almost as soon as I could walk. As a result, I’ve made good progress on pulling that particular weed out…