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Into the Season of Harvest
We picked our tomatoes this week. They were all ripe and ready to go, so Nemea cut them off the plants and we have them in our kitchen now. Other than a basil plant we keep indoors, this is our harvest: grown in half wine-barrels, the tomatoes are fine varieties, rich and filled with flavor. The light has become more oblique, now, and the days end more quickly. Summer’s Waning is long past and Harvest looms on the 20th. Though it’s 96 degrees F. (35.5 C.) outside, Autumn is coming. Autumn is here. I can feel it in the land. After months of no rain, the brown hills creak and…
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On Spiritual Burnout and Bypassing
Sometimes, the ways and events of the world can weigh you down. Over the past 18 months or so, we have seen a LOT of that, what with the pandemic and the various awfulness happening in the news. I know things are starting to get to me when I am less drawn to my Focus (altar), less motivated to do my spiritual practices. It’s ironic, because spirituality is the cultivation of a feeling of meaning, awe, connectedness and joy, and you’d think we’d go running for that when times are hard. Some do. I’m just not one of them. Instead, my tendency is to lean into what’s the damned point,…
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GUEST POST: Playing with the Senses During Ritual
by Eloise Martel Something I find useful to immerse into the ritual experience (especially when you start and you don’t really know what to begin with) is playing with the 5 senses: Sight, Hearing, Touch, Smell, and Taste. Playing with the senses can trigger specific memories and help you achieve your goal during the ritual. You can find correspondences (herbs, days, colours, stones etc.) in almost all the 101 witchy books, but don’t forget to ask yourself what associations make sense to you personally. If the goal during the ritual is to make yourself feel certain things, what you are going to use has to speak to you. Sight: Many…
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Riffs on a Meme: Enchanting the Mundane
Today, in the weekly Atheopagan Zoom mixer gathering, I was exposed to an Internet meme that really resonated. It is this: This is so completely an Atheopagan approach to life! Turning pedestrian tasks into romantic and thrilling adventures is a way to add happiness and joy, and to retool our mental approach to them to enhance our motivation and focus. Nothing supernatural required: just a reframing and a playful approach. Currently, I am stuck on trying to get a new job. I’m still so burned by what happened at the last one that I haven’t been able to bring myself even to update my resume yet. But I have to…
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Meanwhile, Down South…
Yesterday I posted on the impending Northern Hemisphere Sabbath of Summer’s Waning or Dimming. But of course, this also means that what approaches in the Southern Hemisphere is Brightening, the holiday marking the point at which winter is technically over and the days have noticeably lengthened from their shortest phase at the solstice. Brightening is a hopeful holiday, a time to make plans for achievement of the coming year’s goals. I wrote in more detail about it here. So to Southern Atheopagans, I wish you the new hope of the strengthening Sun, audacity and aspiration in your new plans, and the tenacity to get through this last little bit of…
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Summer’s Waning
So I’ve finally settled on a name for the August Sabbath…or two of them, really, because I like “Dimming” quite a bit as well. It’s not really “Summer’s End”–at least, not where I live–although I can still consider it the beginning of the autumn season. Hot days lay ahead, especially in September. But it is undoubtedly Summer’s Waning–the days are notably shorter than at Midsummer, and the sky has begun to find the hard blue of autumn. Summer’s Waning is an elusive holiday, particularly since it has no Overcultural corollary. Defining what it means and how to celebrate it can be tricky. But here is what I have come up…
