Holidays
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Yule Offering #3: Love
My final wish for you all this Yule season is that you be surrounded with love. We are social apes, we humans, and loneliness is a terrible burden to us. Here at the dark and cold time of year, we can feel even more isolated, even more as though we must face life’s trials on our own. It is quite likely that this was one of the main drivers of the creation of our Winter Solstice traditions in the first place. I happen to be someone who has no blood family any longer. It’s better that way, overall: the dynamic within my family was toxic and abusive and would not, could…
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Yule Offering #2: Courage
My second hope for you at Yule is that you engage the season with bravery. This is the time when we stand up to darkness and cold and the prospect of much more of it, and we do so with a combination of brazen silliness and real strength: the kind of strength it takes to deal with difficult family members and multiple obligations and inclement weather and looming deadlines and planned projects and lists and unsnarling the bloody lights and figuring out where we put the tree stand last year and deciphering Grandma’s 40-year-old spider-scrawl on that recipe that simply MUST be made. The many demands of life multiply at…
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Yule Offering #1: Stillness
Here’s my first hope for you at (what I consider) the New Year: the Winter Solstice, or Yule. That after the holiday frenzy of Silly Season, after the parties and dinners and rituals, there comes a moment when you can just stop. And be still. And feel within you the glow of all your life’s wealth: the beauty, the love, the gifts that the very Earth itself rains down on you. I hope that—even if only for a moment—you will feel your body swell with the joy that is your birthright, and you will know that you belong here, between soil and stars, a unique expression of the very Universe, looking…
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What Shall We Give for Yule?
For those of us who care about our Earth, this season presents a conundrum: How do we navigate this most commercial and consumeristic of seasons and remain true to our values? Well, here are some thoughts. I hope they help. First of all, the tree. Buy a real one. Artificial trees create three times the carbon impact of a real tree, and they’re made of plastic that lasts for thousands or even millions of years. The best option is a live tree you can plant outside after the holidays, but short of that, get a live tree cut…you can save the trunk for next year’s Yule log. When it comes to…
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After the Fire
It isn’t really over, of course. Two dozen have lost their lives. Thousands are without homes, their possessions rendered to gray ashes. The most vulnerable among them–renters, the uninsured–will almost certainly flee our expensive region, despite admirable community efforts to raise funds to support them. The acrid smell of burned lives lingers in the air, and driving past the devastation is still like a bad dream. On and on it goes: the gray, burned wreckage, the burned-out cars. That said, people are getting on with it, as they must. The ground floor of our local daily newspaper has been let out as a disaster center with representatives of dozens of…
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Dark Hallows
Hallows is unique among Atheopagan Sabbaths. For one thing, it’s a week long: it extends from Halloween through the actual midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, which falls around the 7th of November. A whole week of observances, of rituals, of spooky-eerie awareness of Death, of Ancestry, of the Dark. As it happens, where I live, the transition from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time happens on the first weekend in November, so there is a sudden plunge into night as the clocks roll back an hour and sunset is suddenly an hour earlier. It doesn’t take imagination to realize that the Darkness has arrived. And let’s…
