…The spirit of adventure runs through my veins with the rich color of crushed raspberry
May it always run so free may it be blessed and may I be reminded of the courage and love shown in small, wild adventures.
June brings out the hunter in me. The mission: wild raspberries.* A friend once laughed to hear me describe picking raspberries as a "holy task," but it is. A task earthy, embodied, mundane, and miraculous at once.
Two of June's treasures each year for me are the roses and the raspberries. This week, I sweated and struggled and was scratched and stung, but I returned home once again with my bounty.
The 30 Days of May ecourse has come to an end and the month of May itself is drawing to a rainy and humid close for me here in the Midwest, but one of the lessons that lingers for me was identifying the call of the "May Queen" in my life this month.
I have been working on a lot of projects, many exciting and some stressful, and I was feeling tense, taut, stressed, unhappy, unsettled, depressed and discouraged. On one of these stressful days, The Judgmental Committee in my head not only decreed that I was a bad mother, but also a bad friend, wife, daughter, and overall person. I was feeling pulled between the needs of my older children, my baby, my work, and my business and ended up feeling as if I was not doing a good job with anything. And, then in response to the prompts from 30 Days of May, the May Queen delivered her message: Discernment. Much of life about wise discernment. I have a tendency to become dualistic in my thinking, either I DO IT or I QUIT IT FOREVER. At the same time, I am very harsh with myself at my perceived inability to “flow” and surrender.
the flowers bend their bright bodies, and tip their fragrance to the air, and rise, their red stems holding all that dampness and recklessness gladly and lightly, and there it is again — beauty the brave, the exemplary, blazing open. Do you love this world?
–excerpt “Peonies” by Mary Oliver*
Loving the world feels like a difficult topic to write about today when I see news coverage of the recent oil spill in Santa Barbara and read about the dolphins dying. It can be easy to start to feel discouraged and hopeless in the face of such destruction and lack of love for the earth, our precious, irreplaceable home.
The Goddess Gaia is alive In this time and in this space She speaks in sunrises And waves against the shore She sings with the wind She dances in moonlight She holds you close Your heart beats in time with hers A great, grand hope and possibility For this planet.
A blush of green begins Delicate lace of wild plums Graces gray forestscapes
Heartbeat in the forest sings The passion of life untapped. The soul of the world is speaking the language of spring.
During the drought we experienced in Missouri around three years ago, a lot of the trees in our woods died. Some of them died that year, but we weren’t absolutely sure they were really gone until no new leaves grew the following year. Some of them died the following summer, probably due to having been weakened so much by the drought conditions that they couldn’t rebound. This past winter, for a variety of reasons, we decided to cut some of them down. It felt, and continues to feel, like a somewhat “selfish” decision to have cut them, like we should have just let the cycle of the forest continue its life and rhythm unimpeded by human interference. It was hard to evaluate the variables of good woodlot management, firewood procurement, and personal safety while also feeling like I was betraying my sacred spot in the woods, betraying the relationship I built there. I still don’t know whether we made the right choice. I do know that the landscape in the woods has changed now and it pains me to see what we have done.
When planning a ritual involving children, I always have to remind myself to keep it short and simple! Just in time for Spring Equinox, I'd like to share the simple ritual of spring welcome that my family and I enjoyed over the weekend with a group of our friends. This ritual is designed to be done at night around a campfire and to be followed by a drum circle...
Loads of earthy, Gaian stories today: ancient trees, blackberry wisdom, saving predators and pondering the vegan/carnivore ecological conundrum. Check them out below.
A yew tree in the corner of a Welsh churchyard is said to be 5,000 years old. Our Neolithic ancestors were as fascinated by it as we are.
Thesseli
You should post on Substack too, where you won't have to worry about being deplatformed or kicked off the site for your views. (Also, I've archived th...
David Dashifen Kees
I feel it necessary to state, unequivocally, that anti-trans points of view are not an essential part of Paganism. As a trans Pagan myself who helps ...
Our blackberries will ripen next month! I look forward to them also.
Lovely - in my part of the world it is blackberry brambles - there is something so precious about fruit gathered at a bit of a cos
