This has been a busy time for your Village Witch...mostly because she keeps leaving the village and hitting the road.

I've only just returned from the Pagan Unity Festival in Burns, TN and am pondering the differences between festivals and conferences, since I was fortunate enough to be included in the Cherry Hill Conference several weeks ago.

All these gatherings. What draws us into these artificial communities? And are they really so artificial?

I am sitting here with my back to my home altar and the sun is beginning to shine in through the curtains. The birds are braying for attention and licit love, and the greening of the world from three days of good rain is a good sign that winter is mostly behind us for this turning of the Wheel.

We have come at last to the final hours of April, which is rightly called the cruelest month. This particular April has seemed about ninety days long--even with opera glasses and a proper squint, I can no longer see Fool's Day.

In the refrigerator, there is a big mason jar filled with sweet woodruff, strawberries and good white wine. "Summertime" is coming from our local NPR affiliate--a careful rendition that speaks less of hope than of persistence.

I know, I know. I'm terribly far behind. There is some yummy Maywine steeping in the fridge and I have plans to unwind the ribbons so that the Maypole can be raised, danced and wrapped on Wednesday and then again on Saturday.  There's a sweet ritual organized for the respectful public and my flower crown is all plumped-up and lovely.

But...

But...

I am excited to be travelling to Columbia, SC today for "Sacred Lands and Spiritual Landscapes", a symposium from Cherry Hill Seminary and USC.  I'll be presenting my latest research on the border reivers and seeing some dear old friends (Holli Emore, Patti Wiggington et al) and meeting some dear new ones (Sara Amis and Elinor Predota et al).  I expect to be restimulated and reinspired by the work of all the folks at this conference and will be grateful to listen to the cheeky wisdom of Ronald Hutton again.

Here's a link to the conference--

http://www.cherryhillseminary.org/students/degree-programs/intensives-and-conferences/ronald-hutton-featured-in-spring-chs-usc-symposium-more-info-tba/

This was originally published in the Mountain Xpress way back in 2000.  I was looking at my woad yesterday and thinking about the best time to harvest the leaves for dye and thought of this piece.  So I'm sharing it with you, as we in the Northern hemi prepare for Beltane. Some things have changed in my world since then--but the challenge remains the same.  Hope you enjoy it!

Serving as a high priestess is a hard job. "The toughest job you'll ever love" may apply to military service, but it could just as easily be found in a Pagan-clergy handbook -- if there were such a thing.

You know by now that I do (and advocate you doing) interfaith work. It isn't easy and sometimes it isn't even rewarding but it's important for people like me to be at the table with other religious folk for any number of reasons.  But this post isn't about that.

Because I do the aforementioned interfaith work, a rabbi buddy of mine invited me to his family Passover seder a couple of years ago. When I asked what I should bring, he suggested flowers or kosher wine. I had never heard of kosher wine but there's rather a lot of choices out there. I brought both.

A Passover seder, if you have never experienced one, is an ordeal by food and wine.  It lasted six hours and my head was spinning by the end, mostly from kosher wine and trying to speak Hebrew.

and sometimes I think we don't talk enough. 

Quandary.

When I was coming up in these spiritual systems, it was all about connecting with some Divines, usually a cobbled together "pantheon" of cultures and attributes that we liked.  We set that up within the elegant framework of the Wheel of the Year. I love the Wheel because it is a sweet crucible for connecting, as well as celebrating and honoring. Simple and very user-friendly.  There are two Solstices and two Equinoxes (and don't bother to correct me--I know those aren't the accurate plurals)--placeholders that mark the visible change in seasons in those places that still have four of those.  They actually happen--they are not based on lore or myth.  You can look them up--they happen for everyone at the same time.

For years I’ve struggled with St. Patrick’s Day.  No, not the drinking and eating--no struggle there.  But I learned years ago that you wear green on St. Patrick’s day if you’re Catholic and orange (for William of Orange--see the Battle of the Boyne for more info) if you’re Protestant.

I wear a lot of green (and black, to be honest), most of the time.  But I am hardly Catholic.  And though I’ve threatened to pre-order an orange jumpsuit for Gitmo, I wouldn’t do the Prod thing either.

What’s an Irish Pagan woman to do?

I'm doing a rather brisk business in tarot readings and counseling of late. Not complaining, you understand. I love reading cards and have been doing it since I was about 12. There are few things more satisfying than offering a client a different way of viewing a situation through the lens of these colorful tools.

For many months now, there are cards that regularly show up for everyone. I'm tempted sometimes to take them out of the deck and try a reading that way but I suspect other cards would join together to give the same reading.  As they do.

Sometimes those cards are specific to the client sitting across from me but often they fall into the category of "zeitgeist."  They inform other parts of the reading but they are basically setting the stage for a life, a vision, a path.

Pagans' Night Out is a simple concept really--Pagans from all sorts of traditions and non-traditions and folks who don't call themselves "pagan" for all sorts of reasons--get together in a public space for networking, conversation and, usually, beer.

Do you do that in your community? We've been doing it here in Asheville for many years--organized by CERES (Coalition of Earth Religions for Education and Support), a 501c3 faith-based Pagan charity.

We came to it out of desperation, really.  Back in the 1990s, there were several strong covens in our area and they mostly didn't get along very well. Some of you will remember the "Witch Wars" that seemed so prevalent during that time and our community was not exempt.

There used to be this odd thing at funerals here in the South.  There were these big floral arrangements, often with artificial flowers in bright cheery colors, and wired to the center was a toy princess phone.  There were words on the arrangement:

Jesus Called Her Home

They seemed so peculiar at the time and I haven't seen one in years. But when I heard this weekend that Diane Wolkstein had died unexpectedly in Taiwan, my first thought was:

I'm one of the facilitators for a day-long Brigid retreat on Saturday and am priestessing our Mother Grove public ritual that night.  What that means in practical terms is that my car is full of boxes and cloutie trees, and the dining room table is also covered with material for one thing or the other.

Have you been spending the week getting ready for this lovely holy day, those of you who honor it?  Have you cleared and reset your altar?  Put some oats and whiskey out for Bride and her white cow?

The thing I almost forgot was the bhrat--that length of cotton cloth that goes out onto the Earth tonight to catch the dew or the rain. I use cotton because it's easy to rip into clouties or cut into squares for healing work.

I've been wearing a little necklace since sometime in October--a pendant that looks like the cover of the Chalice Well in Glastonbury. A charm really, and each time I caught my reflection in the mirror and saw it, I'd tap it with my forefinger in the same way as you'd set a glamour. "Pick me," I'd say to myself. "Pick me."

I got word today that they did indeed pick me and I'll be at the Glastonbury Goddess Conference in late July and will do a workshop of deep grounding techniques.  It's an honor, of course, but it also means I get to be in Glastonbury again, this time in the summer.

We first went there in September, I think, and the weather was wet and cold. We stayed in a b&b at the foot of the Tor where they fed badgers in the evening. I spent time at the Chalice Well and its gardens but fell in love with the Somerset Rural Life Museum, which has one of the most beautiful barns I've ever seen.

As you may have gathered from my recent post, I rather love the upcoming holy day and the Divine whom it honors. I want to share with you some of the fun Brigid things we did as my daughter was growing up.  Some of it is old lore made fresh, some of it is new.  I don't know the difference any more--it is all so deeply ingrained in my knowings around this coming of Spring.  I shan't give you sources for what I do, except that I do them and have done them for many years.

Imbolc is a wonderful time for children and there are many ways for the Littles to be involved.  On the night before Imbolc begins (which we celebrate as a three-day festival), Brigid travels the wide World, accompanied by a Cow.  She brings blessings to children and to pregnant women and She has many places to visit.  Those good children who love Bridey know that before bedtime they need to do three important things.

First, they must set out a little bed for Her to rest upon.  We always made one from a shoe box.  We'd roll up some soft batting and tuck a cloth napkin around it.  A lace handkerchief made a pretty pillow and a thick cotton washcloth looked much like the cotton blankets we had on our own beds.

Yeah, now I have an earworm of Johnny Cash's cover of that song...but I digress.

Imbolc feels as though it is only moments away, rushing down from the treetops here in the dripping southern mountains.  We love Brighid around these parts.  We do a public ritual to honor Her day.  Years ago--a decade maybe?--we dedicated an old stone spring house and its spring to Her.  Several local priestesses are dedicated to Her and Her crafty self. And we have the ink to prove it.

We dream of forges and vats of beer. As who doesn't...

We spent part of the afternoon at Mother Grove rearranging the entry room--a tiny space I call the "lounge." We moved the coffee-and-tea tables onto another wall and covered them in some plain black fabric. Looks sleek and modern.

Since there were several of us playing interior designer, a couple of us started stripping the main altar and replacing tealights on the other three.  The Ancestors had been exiled in their niche, covered with a black lace veil with no candles or wine or treats and it was also time to open up their area and fill their goblet and out a little something sweet on their plate.

It's time now to move all the Brigid stuff from the South altar and honor our gold-red Woman.  We're big on our Bridey at Mother Grove--She's one of the reasons we decided to work on creating a Goddess temple here.

We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant today. We had a fun waiter with whom I conversed about chopsticks (we had brought our own, as we usually do). When we left the table, he wished us a happy New Year and we responded in kind.

And then I laughed.  Because it's likely that neither of us actually celebrate tonight as the start of a new year. O, yes, culturally-speaking, everyone celebrates today as "New Year's Eve."  But the reality is that I celebrate the new year at the beginning of November and again at the Winter Solstice.  And he will celebrate the lunar new year in several weeks.

But the pull of tonight's liminal status is hard to ignore. And it is awfully nice to wish someone a kind of blessing that will last for a whole year: Happy New Year!

In the midst of seed catalogs from the mail box and fresh vegetables from the plastic-covered rows of the little kitchen garden, the agricultural year has turned another notch on the great Wheel of the Year.

My big plan was to finish up some loose ends so that I could truly enjoy my first winter holiday season in town, not working retail. Daughter was coming home, holiday cards were mailed away...even the weather was nice.

Did your December deviate from the plan, too?  There have been unexpected rituals, several funerals, more than one friend or circle mate whose life took a turn for the...challenging.

We did manage a Witches Night Out a couple of weeks ago but that seems like it happened in another life. Oy vey, as they say.

The old agricultural year is winding down to its usual conclusion. This time of the Long Dying is still vibrant here in the southern highlands of the Appalachian mountains.  Today began in thick fog and reached a temperature nearly 20 degrees higher than the average for this day. Warm, light breeze, perfect for outside work in the garden.