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…
Category: Self-Care
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…
“To be hopeful is to have a form of emotional resilience. A hopeful person believes that although challenges, grief, and adversity occur in every life, somehow things will work out. They believe that they have the ability to figure out a path forward or respond in a way that makes adversity just another part 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…
Magic is not only used for big efforts like finding a new job or healing an illness. It’s also incredibly useful as a stabilizing, smoothing force. When the patterns of life shift, it can be useful to look at what we can do magically to make the waves a little calmer. The transition out of…
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…
My practice of life as well as witchcraft is oriented toward the physical senses – I naturally gravitate toward an embodied way of being in the world. I want to feel experiences on my skin, in the movement of my limbs, in the taste on my tongue, in the sounds that I hear, in the…
I will never forget the first time I heard the music from the Pure Moods album in the early 90s. I was a tweeny and my parents brought home a copy of the CD. I clearly remember dancing around the living room while listening to it. I needed to move my body in order to…
The Marine Corps motto is ‘Semper Fidelis’ – Always Faithful. For those of us who served in the Corps, there’s another motto we heard regularly as well: ‘Semper Gumby.’ This amusing saying means ‘Always Flexible.’ I’ve been thinking about it a fair bit as the latest pendulum swing of the pandemic knocks over various events,…
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.’ An interesting…