PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

“There are things,” my Grandma Winnie would say, “better left forgotten.”  That was always her response to questions about her life.  So, for many years all I really knew about her was what we lived together in the tiny mountain community of French Gulch.  When she died in the early 1990’s in her early 90s, my father and I cleaned out the shack where she had lived with my Grandpa Russell.  I came away with a bit more information about who she was from my father’s stories of her.  We sorted through a box of photos, and my dad did his best to identify the images as I wrote on the backs.  Then he showed me a letter, typed in 1911 in San Francisco.  The letterhead was from The California Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  “There are things,” I heard my Grandma Winnie say in my head, “better left forgotten.”

After some prodding by Himself and some encouragement from friends, I'm taking a stab at the Pagan Experience Project. I'm not necessarily going to do every prompt all the time, but if the prompt elicits good thinky thoughts, I'll share them. I've decided to start with week two's prompt on personal practices.

Loki's not a terribly formal Deity, and and so many of my practices are not either; I share morning coffee with Him every day; I meditate once a day; ideally I do yoga, but that practice is a work in progress.

In today's Faithful Friday post, the Beagle brings you stories from many faith traditions. Next Monday, Jan 26, has been dubbed "Blue Monday" and is supposedly the most depressing day of the year, so in this Beagle installment we concentrate on the interaction of mental health and religion, especially in Paganism.

The Wild Hunt featured this well-written article on Paganism and depression last week, including perspectives from a wide variety of Pagan therapists, activists, and advocates.

(Image of Loki by Astral Eventide, commissioned by me in 2011)

The prompt for Week 3 of the Pagan Experience is to blog about Deity - Those Who guide you. Considering the fact that this blog is pretty much The Loki Show, it's probably redundant to introduce Him here; if you read my blog, you're familiar with His work.

So I'm standing there naked in the kitchen.

Mind you, this isn't something I make a point of doing. It's the end of January, and this is Minnesota. Early in the morning, the kitchen is just as cold as the rest of the house, no place to stand around naked.

You have to understand that at this time of year, the North becomes a desert. Our intense cold wrings every trace of moisture from the air. If you don't slather on moisturizer, you turn into an ice-mummy. Fortunately, there's no need to resort to bear-grease, like in the old days.

So, I'd just toweled off from the shower and rubbed down with body-lotion. Waiting for my skin to absorb it, I ran downstairs to plug in the waffle iron.

That's when it happened.

Home. We don't really know how we feel about it. We may reject the place that raised us and seek to escape its troubling pull. Or we may long for an idealized home and set out to find it. But home is something you can neither escape nor find in its perfection. Rather, “home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” (Robert Frost) We can't avoid the imperfection inherent in living with those we haven't chosen. And even those we choose can disappoint us, and we them.

In today's Earthy Thursday post, we've got: biggest British chestnut tree; amazing nature photos; big trouble for California's Big Trees, discovering America's forgotten tropical-style fruit; native American bees.

Check out this 300-year-old horse chestnut tree, declared the largest in Britain.