As If it Were the Last

Yom Kippur was this week, and I found it trickier to integrate into my Pagan practice. While Rosh Hashanah has several lovely rituals that felt easy to respectfully adapt, Yom Kippur is literally 25 hours of fasting and asking God to put away the smitey stick for another year, which jars with my beliefs about sin and the sacred. So I took a while to find my bearings with this holiest of Jewish holy days.

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A Naturalistic Pagan Casts Their Harms on the Waters

Now that I’m no longer Christian or a daughter, I feel pulled to reconnect with that erased part of my ancestry. I have -0% interest in converting, but I’m slowly and cautiously integrating small bits of practice and culture when I feel I can do so in ways that respect both Judaism and my own beliefs and values.

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Lammas 2021: Autonomy

Bread is one of the the most fascinating human creations. It’s part science and part alchemy. It connects us to Earth, which gives us the wonders of grain, water, and yeast, and to millennia of ancestors who have fed themselves, their families, and their communities through this incredible process. Also, it’s delicious. So Lammas – literally a holiday for bread – is a big deal around here.

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Summer Solstice 2021: Reverence

We desire to know, to sort into boxes labeled “house sparrow,” “creeping bellflower,” “altocumulus.” This desire is ancient within us, hearkening back to when we owed our wellbeing to knowing whether an animal was friend or foe, whether a plant was food or poison, whether a cloud signaled drought or flood. Even without that necessity, sometimes it’s just cool to know what other lives I share my space with: what bird makes that mournful cry in the evenings? what’s that plant suddenly thriving in the shaded corner where nothing else would grow?

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May Day 2021: Embodiment

Was it weird to celebrate May Day this close to Summer Solstice? A little, yeah. But it still felt like a celebration of the energy that May Day represents: that burst of creative and generative energy, the speeding up of plant and animal growth and activity, the return of heat and fire, even to our chilly northern climes. For me, as long as I feel climatologically and atmospherically appropriate celebrating what a Sabbat represents, then I’m going to go ahead and do it.

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Imbolc 2021: Creativity

Imbolc is, for me, also a Sabbat about keeping promises. After Winter Solstice, we know, both scientifically and from past experience, that the days are getting longer. But around here, it takes a while for that to be apparent to our senses. Based on my schedule, around Imbolc is when I really start to see that increase in light. Imbolc keeps the promise that Winter Solstice made. So I want my Imbolc celebrations to be about keeping promises that past me made and my executively dysfunctional ass then promptly forgot.

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The Winter Confluence

For the past several years, I’ve been adamant about not celebrating Christmas or Chanukah. “Not my religions; not my holidays” was my standard response when someone asked about my plans. I did this for because, one, it’s fun to watch people’s faces when I tell them that I don’t celebrate the world’s biggest consumerist holiday,… Continue reading The Winter Confluence

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