Saturday night, I was dancing around a cauldron ablaze with candles, with drums thundering and voices lifted high in song, at the monthly Spark Collective gathering. Sunday morning, I attended a Unitarian Universalist service. Tellya, there are differences. Paganism is fundamentally an ecstatic practice: it’s about living in…
Paganism, Gothic Aesthetic, and the Sensibility of Darkness: An Observation
‘Tis the season, so let’s talk about it: it’s a thing, among us Pagans. Cemeteries, bones, skulls, ravens. Vampires and absinthe and Ye Olde Occulte Symboles. Dark. Spooky. Sexy. It scares some people. Particularly non-Pagan, white-light-obsessed Christians and New Age folks. At this time of year, the Pagan community leaps…
And So We Fight On
We believe in a better world We believe in justice We believe in a better world We believe in peace We believe in a better world We can heal our planet We won’t bow down. We won’t bow down. …
Starting Fresh: Imagining a New Paganism
What if we were starting today? If, here, 18 years into the 21st century CE, we were to invent a new, Earth-loving, progressive, reality-based religion? Imagine a practice, a cosmology, a set of values rooted in what we now know about the Cosmos, about Nature, about ourselves. If we were…
A Reflection at Dusk
Days are noticeably shorter now. The coastal fog cycle native to my region is sputtering with the weakened power of the Sun, so we have days of heat followed by days half of which are soft and gray, burning off only in the afternoons to sun. Autumn is here. Usually,…
Reemergence
As regular readers know, I broke my arm at a Pagan event three weeks ago. Since, I have been contending with lining up a specialist to do surgery to reset it, having the surgery, and recovery. I am in the boring phase of this process. I can’t do…