Practice
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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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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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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…
