Sometimes we settle inward,
tending to hearth and home,
the soft spaces
of our own being and belonging.
Sometimes we spread our wings
and leap into the broad unknown,
letting ourselves soar
as we fly into the possible,
wind in our feathers
and fire in our eyes.
Sometimes we integrate the two
and flourish in our own centered wholeness,
one hand against
the heartbeat of home,
one fist lifted high
to feel which way the wind
is blowing today.
I'm getting ready to take a social media break for travel and I'm also doing my Cauldron Month early this year, so this will be my last news post until August. :) If you've never heard of the Cauldron Month concept before, a free resource kit is available for you here.
Happy Summer!
PaganSquare
PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.
In meditation class this morning,
I got lost behind my eyes,
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One aspect of ancient Egyptian archaeology that I've always enjoyed is that the dry climate of the Nile valley and the surrounding desert preserved biodegradable items like clothing and baskets (and mummies, obviously!). Unfortunately, the Aegean isn't dry - it's a portion of the Mediterranean Sea dotted with islands. So sadly, on Crete and Thera (modern Santorini) most of the biodegradable artifacts have long since rotted away.
But that doesn't mean the situation is hopeless. There are other ways to discover what kinds of biodegradable objects the Minoans had.
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Stories, whether oral tradition myths, written fiction, or written nonfiction, change over time. Each generation changes its heroes to suit them. Storytellers tell the same myth a dozen different ways to suit different audiences, occasions, and lessons. Nonfiction writers revise their books and make new editions (like I did.) Every printed or recorded version of a book is a snapshot in time.
It occurred to me as I sat in the morning sunshine mending a quilt that I had made that I was in a way making a new version of my quilt. It started as a way to use up silk test strips from when I operated a custom fabric dyeing business, and every piece in it was a silk fabric I had hand dyed. As I used darning, a type of needle weaving, to mend parts of the fabric that had worn, aged, or cat-clawed away, I kept the same log cabin design and every fiber I put in it was also hand dyed, and yet, the more I mended the more it became a completely different textile.
...Advice for crafting wishes: When you wish for a suitcase full of money, you must specify that you don't mean a gentlemen's toiletry case that your then-teenage older brother put pretty looking pocket change into in 1978.
Here follows some further advice on how to make a wish, which I have learned the same way I learned the above: by experience. This is general wish advice, so it doesn't matter whether you are making your wishes via folk magic, such as birthday candles or a wishing well or a dandelion or a star, or a formal spell of some kind, or by appealing to a wish granting entity.

In the days of yore, people often made their own inks, thus imbuing them with a deeply personal energy. They simply went to the side of the road and gathered blackberries or pokeberries from the vines that grew there. Often a bird flying overhead will supply a gift of volunteer vines best cultivated by a fence where they can climb, making berry-picking easier. When it comes to matters of the heart, contracts, legacy letters and any document of real importance that you feel the need to make your mark upon, an artfully made ink can help you write unforgettable love letters and very memorable memorandums. This spell is best performed during the waning moon.
Gather the following for your ink recipe: a vial or small sealable bottle, dark red ink, 1/8th cup crushed berry juice, nine drops of burgundy wine, apple essential oil, and paper.

Here are some more questions and answers about my new book Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path, and about me and my other books and projects. This book is the ONLY official, authorized new version of my out-of-print book Asatru For Beginners.
With that out of the way, here are some more of the questions and answers. Part 1 of this 2 part series ran last weekend.
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