This will be the first in a series of blogs that will focus on contemplative practices in Paganism and their role in developing ourselves, our relationship to the universe, and our communities. I will also be exploring different ideas related to soul, spirit, evolution, and enlightenment. I will be presenting what I believe to be useful and/or true, but with the understanding that my truth need not be your truth. I will be sharing my perspectives and observations with the hope that it will encourage you to do some exploring. The material will be a bit chewy and dense, and will make the assumption that you are already knowledgeable about a variety of topics. I'm asking you to contemplate and to meditate upon these posts; they are not meant to be the quickly read fare that we snack upon as we peruse the internet and social media offerings.

Most of my friends and associates think of me as a serious person that is always up to their elbows in projects. I have a very full schedule with teaching workshops, writing, mentoring people within and outside of our tradition, organizing small, medium, and large educational events, and running a metaphysical shop. My days usually start at 5:00 or 5:30 AM and pretty much every hour is accounted for until around 9 PM when my off time begins. On May 4, 2013, my shop Bell, Book, & Candle sponsored an event called “The May Moon Revel”. It involved a live band, belly dancing, readers, book signings, food, drink, amazing costumes, and random merriment. It was a great deal of work and from my perspective well worth the hours required to plan it, and to pull it off.  By the way, it just barely, sometimes, breaks even so money is not its motivation. After the event, one of my friends (who did not attend) asked me why I used my time on a frivolous event when I have so many important things already on my docket? Before going further, I'd like to say that I believe that my friends and members of my community do have a right to question my choices. I would actually say that is one of the hallmarks of actually being in functional friendships or communities. So my answer was not “none of your business”, it was “let me tell you why”.

I have always taken pride in observing that most Pagans tend to leave campgrounds, hotels, and other borrowed or rented spaces in better condition than how they found them. I actually look forward to the routine of walking around my tent or cabin and not only picking up the small debris that I or my friends have dropped but also digging up the bits I see left behind by previous campers. It helps me settle in for the transition homewards. Unfortunately, this custom of cleaning a space that you have used does not seem to extend to the leftovers of magick and workings. Over the years, I've attended so many gatherings, festivals, and conferences that I cannot even begin to guess how many that may be. By comparison, I can count on my two hands the events where there was an active effort on the part of the organizers to clean up the energy of the space where a ritual or a working took place before it was used by a different practitioner or group. I do know a significant number of groups or individuals that do clean up after themselves in shared space, but it is far from the norm, and not the majority from my experience. And by clean up, I mean clearing and the settling of the energy of the space not merely putting the chairs back in their places or picking up the leftovers from a ritual or working.

Do you listen to weather forecasts? Do you use that information to make choices about how you will do things? I certainly do, and it is much the way that I view astrological forecasts. For example, let's say that tomorrow you have a very important job interview and it is going to take place in a nearby city. The weather forecast calls for snow, winds, and icy roads. You could call and try to reschedule the interview. You could see if a friend with four-wheel-drive could drive you there. You could stay in bed and pull the covers over your head. There are wide array of possibilities of what you can do in response to awakening the next day and finding that the roads are covered in ice. The sacred science of Astrology can give us predictions about the parameters of the environment and the times that we will be moving through. What it cannot predict is which options or which choices we will make in response to the circumstances that manifest before us.

A number of years ago I was attending and presenting at a conference that was focused on physical and mental health concerns for queer people. I was in the audience listening to panel discussion on queer people, spirituality, and religion. At the beginning of the session they asked if there were any clergy present in the room. It turned out that I was the only person in the room that identified as clergy. They wanted someone to offer a prayer or a blessing of some sort to open session. I explained that I was pagan, and that I could do something that would be short and sweet and germane to topic at hand.

I am back to writing my blog after taking a break to take care of myself and the many lovely people in my life. My blog should be back on a weekly schedule, barring times when the priorities of my life are more pressing than an online presence. My heartfelt thanks to those that reached out to me and also to those who gave me space. I was also away at PantheaCon and will write about how it touched me next week.

This post falls outside of the normal boundaries for my blog, but I decided I wanted to share it nonetheless. I won’t burden you with the details, but I just experienced a three week stretch full of such a varied array of stresses and struggles the like of which compares with the worst I’ve experienced. This is saying quite a bit because I have clear memories back to about 18 months of age. Despite walking in the deep vale near the brink of my personal abyss, I still had to manage the mundane tasks of work, fulfill my ministerial duties as priest, offer counsel as a reader, and more. I have passed through this challenge and have gained insight through the experience. The pearl that was gained and my summary for this set of experiences is:

This past weekend I shared the details of a new magickal technique that I've been working on for some time. I have always been a tinkerer and an experimenter and have developed many formulas, workings, castings, spells, and such. Most of the serious magickal practitioners that I know are always adapting and expanding tried and true patterns, and/or creating new rituals and techniques from scratch. There is a lot of perfectly good material available that can simply be followed step-by-step and produce great results. We must not place novelty and innovation above what is known to be efficacious. However, the ancients did not know everything, and we do not have a complete record of their written or oral magickal technology, and there are needs today that they could never have imagined. Moreover if you are in a living tradition, then there must be room for innovation and the incorporation of new material.

The sacred legacy of the past is important, but the legacy that we gift to the future is a more loyal way to honor those that came before us. We are here because many of our ancestors did whatever they could in the name of hope for those that were the family they knew and hope for those that would be born past their dying day. I would honor their hope and their forward looking perspective by taking the torch of legacy and carrying the light forwards. 

I was recently asked by a Christian friend about the Pagan version of Paradise. This question was posed in the context of an ongoing series of conversations and questions as a genuine effort on their part to understand my path. I joked with my friend that often their questions are hard to answer because they are so far afield from my sense of being Pagan, and I told them that this question was a prime example of this difficulty. 

 This is an update on something that I wrote for Green Man back in 1995 (Thank you Diane Conn Darling wherever you are). Surprisingly I had to change very little although 18 years have passed since I first wrote on this topic. Though framed through the lens of being Queer, this post has much to say about being a warrior and acting with honor. This is my way of saying give it a read — this is not a political rant and may be applicable to your life whoever you may be. I could have actually deleted the word Queer from this post and said virtually the same things. I could have justified that deletion on the grounds of making my post more accessible and perhaps more widely read and shared. However that would not have honored the root and the impetus for my ideas and observations, and moreover it would not be a warrior’s choice.

Earlier this month the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel hosted the Between The Worlds Conference in Wilmington, Delaware. It was a tremendous amount of hard work on the part of many and was successful in all the ways that we had hoped. I am thankful and grateful for all those things that were planned and achieved, but I'm particularly grateful for something that was not planned but simply emerged from our stay at the hotel. Literally dozens of the staff members of the hotel thanked me and the other organizers for the kindness of our attendees. The staff was personable, professional, and cooperative with all our requests. All the conference organizers made an effort to thank the staff and several of us have written letters thanking individual staff members. And I will repeat it again, the staff went out of the way to say what a wonderful group we were. These words were not simply the words of courtesy offered as a matter of good business practice.

As a piece of background information, I should explain that the DoubleTree in downtown Wilmington is in the legal district and primarily caters to lawyers and bankers and various corporate sorts that are there on business. Staff turnover in the hotel industry is swift, so very few people were still working at the hotel that remembered us from our previous conferences because it is not an annual event. Those that did remember us had vouched to the rest of the staff that we were a good group. They had of course been warned that we were a wee bit eccentric but good people.

This is part two of a two-part blog that tries to move beyond the binary distinction of life and death. Please read the first part if you have not as you will get more out of this post if you do. To break out of the dichotomy of life and death we need to introduce identity as another measure of the attributes of existence. In order to explore how identity helps us to expand our understanding of life and death, let's start with the very large and then move down into the very small.

This is a closely packed and idea heavy blog post so please read slowly, and chew slowly so you can digest it. This is also part one of a two-part blog that tries to move beyond the binary distinction of life and death.

In less than a month we will be at a threshold that has been looming for many years. I'm talking about the Winter Solstice of 2012 with all its associated hype and hoopla. For the sake of simplicity, I will talk about the upcoming Winter Solstice, with full knowledge that it is also the Summer Solstice for our neighbors south of the equator. What I have say applies whether it is Summer or Winter. Countless books and articles have been written about this momentous point in time. For some in the New Age and metaphysical communities this has been the focus of their studies or careers for some time. As the owner of a metaphysical shop, I've had quite a number of people ask me whether or not I believe in the Winter Solstice of 2012. Sometimes glibly, I've responded “yes of course I believe in it”, and then I point at the calendar and “say there it is.” Then, if they are willing to listen, I share what I'm about to share with you in this blog.

Whether you live in the Northern Hemisphere or the Southern Hemisphere, it will not be that long until it is the Solstice. The Solstice always brings to mind, for me, the journey of Spirit into Matter and round again. It is also a time to recognize the divine spark that exists within each of us as well as that which exists in the Heavens. This blog post looks towards that upcoming holy day and also takes my previous post’s comments on dialogue with the Divine in a different direction. I will ask that you indulge me in reading a poem that I wrote to capture the gist and the geist of a dream before it faded back to the astral. Read it at least twice or better yet read it out loud. Poems are meant to be spoken and to be heard if they are to be fully experienced.

The God/dess/es do not care about your rice krispies nor are their messages to be found in the snap, crackle, and pop. I have had what I believe to be genuine communication with the beings that I consider to be Deities and have experienced a number of forms of divine embodiment, or divine possession if you prefer. As such I do believe and have personal experiences that deepen the belief that the Great Ones do directly affect our lives. However, I regularly encounter people who report a chatty, friendly, rapport with the God/dess/es that they work with and/or worship. I have puzzled about this and in many cases it seems very sincere, but I doubt that beings whose scale of perception and consciousness are large enough to be considered Deities engage in small talk. I will warrant that this may simply be a limitation of my imagination and sensibilities, but I have another thought. 

I talk to my dogs, and like so many other doting dog lovers, I also talk for them. There is real communication between us, but there is also much that I add for my own benefit. Many humans are prone to anthropomorphizing pretty much anything as a way of bridging the gap between what we are and what is different from ourselves. This is actually a very sound and useful strategy as a starting point, so long as we remain aware that it is not the end of the process. The same is true when we theanthroposize, when we ascribe human emotions and thought patterns to a God/dess. Once again a good beginning point but one that requires heightened vigilance. This is complicated by the fact that many in this culture have a religion of origin that encouraged the idea of a personal relationship with God. Upon making the transition to some form of Paganism, this concept of personal relationship often remains relatively unchanged and unexamined. This can create another overlay of expectations that interfere with true communication with the Divine. I do believe that we each have a personal concept of the Divine and a personal way in which we relate to the Divine. Accordingly, I do suggest that a full and extensive re-examination of the parameters of human and Divine interactions is a good idea when we move to a new faith.

Thanks to all of you who checked in with me during and after the hurricane that in our house came to be called Sandy Claws as a tip of the hat to Nightmare Before Christmas. No damage of any consequence came to our home or our shop, just a bit of cleanup to do. We are grateful.

This is part two of a two part post on getting the most out of the experience of ritual. I’ll continue thoughts from last week, bring in a few more notions, and I’ll make some observations about the special circumstances involved in participating in rituals that are not part of your path. If you have not read the first part of this blog, please do.

Sorry for the delay in posting my blog, but it has been a whirlwind week including finalizing arrangements with the host hotel for the Between The Worlds Conference, preparations for three major rituals, work on an initiation, family matters, and many other things.

This is part one of a two-part blog about how to get the most out of ritual and ceremony. The focus will not be on the writing nor the enacting of ritual but rather on the internal work required to make it more fulfilling and more authentic. One of the outcomes of being more fully present and engaged when you're in ritual is that you will accomplish more for yourself and you will be providing service to others.

In the last several weeks I've seen links and posts buzzing around in the Pagan social media realm related to the topics of dishonorable leadership, the warning signs of a bad magickal group, cult awareness, and so forth. This is nothing new and indeed at least once a year there seems to be a flurry of this kind of interest. One of the earliest Pagan writers on this topic was Isaac Bonewits, founder of Ár nDraíocht, who in 1979 created the first version of his Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame. It was quite good and updated versions of it are readily available online. Certainly wherever human beings are involved, there is the potential for all manner of dysfunctional behavior. I certainly think that we should be vigilant and on guard against systems, groups, or individuals that make the fulfillment of their needs paramount over our personal spiritual development. On the other hand, and this is where this blog post is headed, our fear over the potential for exploitation has its own unhealthy cost.