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High Spring: An Equinox Compendium
I’ve written various posts on celebrating the vernal equinox over the years. Here are a couple of them, to help you plan your celebration of this Sabbath. Happy Spring! The Sabbath of Innocence High Spring: Themes, Resources and Ideas
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AtheopaganCon: An Aspiration [POSTSCRIPT: We did it!]
For some time now, folks online and in the Zoom chats have referred now and again to “APCon”, an imagined in-person gathering where we can meet, discuss our path, socialize, and share community. Real hugs (with consent, of course)! With the vaccine coming online and hope beginning to stir about life after COVID-19, I am starting to think about this as more than just a dream. I would love to see in person as many as possible of the wonderful, amazing people I have met through Atheopagan Zoom and online forums. Accordingly, I have created a short survey about the concept of APCon that I would appreciate your filling out.…
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Post Five Hundred: Thank You
Once upon a time, on a laptop far, far away, a guy with some ideas posted an essay about them to Scribd. He sent it to some friends who had expressed interest in it, too. It was 2009. Among those friends, there were discussions. After awhile, too, there was a Facebook group dedicated to discussing the ideas. And that group started to grow. People the guy didn’t know started joining the group, expressing relief and joy at having found people of like mind. The ideas grew, too. The dude produced more materials fleshing out the ideas, and posted them as files to the Facebook group, along with long posts about…
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Why Paganism Hasn’t Failed…Yet.
John Halstead has written an article around a table lifted from the anthology Deep Green Resistance*. It’s a great piece: go ahead and read it. I’d say that’s about 2/3 of a perfect assessment of modern Paganism and the current Pagan community…at least in the US, where I am familiar with it. He’s not wrong, and his critiques are apt…painful and embarrassing as they may be for many American Pagans. John orients his piece around this table: Now, I think one of the most incisive and true critiques in this chart are that much of modern Paganism has “adolescent values of a youth movement”: black-and-white thinking, knee-jerk resistance to authorities…
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Brightening
It interests me that the new dawn in American politics comes at the same time that it has become evident (in the Northern Hemisphere) that the days are lengthening. We are no longer in the darkest of winter; the February Sabbath approaches, and the Sun, though young, is definitely returning. A member of the Atheopagan Facebook group dubbed the February Sabbath (or, in the Southern Hemisphere, the August one) “Brightening”, and though in my region I celebrate this as Riverain, the Festival of Water, I like that characterization a lot, as it is so universal. And who knows? It might even share a word root with Brighid, the Irish goddess…
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Coming Up Dry for the Festival of Water
In my Wheel of the Year, the February Sabbath is Riverain, the Festival of Water. This is because ordinarily, it rains torrentially in late January and into February in my region. The hills grow emerald with new grasses and the creeks swell and thunder. It is a beautiful time, the time of burgeoning life. But then there are years like this. It was 73 degrees F. here (nearly 23 Celsius) today. In mid-January. There is but a shower or two in the forecast for the next two weeks. On the day after SLOGG, no less! It’s about two weeks until the February Sabbath—roughly the midpoint between Yule and High Spring—and…
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The Unthinkable
Because it has never happened before, we think it cannot be. And this is ironic, because we believe that in our aspirations and efforts, we can make what has never been. We know that with heart and work, we can make a better, kinder world. Unfortunately, those with awful values and hatred in their hearts also aspire and try. And with enough effort–and enough indulgence and blindness on the part of those who surround them–they, too, can make manifest. As happened on Wednesday in the murderous, seditious attack on the United States Capitol. There is much to say about this and it has been said elsewhere. I don’t need to…
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Beginnings
Ask around in Pagan circles, and you’ll get disagreement about when the year actually begins. Some say at Hallows (Samhain): the new year is birthed at the very moment of the death of the old. Some say Yule, with the rebirth of the “baby Sun”. And some—not many, but some—go with the calendar year, January 1. I fall in the second camp. To me, the period between Death at Hallows and Birth at Yule is the time of decomposition and recomposition, of decay, uptake into existing life, and spinoff through pregnancy or seed production into new individuals. I wrote about this recently. We have come to the time of year…
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Yule: the Big Picture
Yule is of course a joyous time for celebrating love and family and the return of the Sacred Sun. But it also marks the end of the cycle of the year and the beginning of a new, and it is this I’d like to address today. I often talk about the “arc” of the year instead of the Wheel of the Year, because in my conceptualization of how a human life maps metaphorically onto the year’s cycle, there is an important segment–the period between Hallows and Yule–which we never experience at all, because they are the time of Decomposition and Recomposition. They are what happens after we die, and before…
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Rituals in Quarantine
So, there’s this pandemic. And it’s going crazy in a second wave. There’s plenty to say about failure of leadership and idiots who won’t wear masks because Freedumb and the whole sad story of this year, but it’s already been said elsewhere and it’s not the focus of this post. No, this post is about how we can use video conferencing platforms to conduct group rituals, easing the personal impact of sheltering in place from the pandemic on the near-universally beloved celebrations of the solstice holiday season. Yes, many of us are Zoom-burnt. We’re having to do our work, maintain our relationships and so much more through the virtual window…
