It’s supposed to be a time of bounty: the gardens overflowing, the grapes coming in to be crushed, the hard blue sky of autumn whispering, “hurry, time’s a-wasting.” A time for feasting with friends and reveling in sunsets; a time for sporadic hints of the wild weather to come. But what…
The Truest Safety Net
I called my brother yesterday, for his birthday. I left a message. I haven’t heard from him in eighteen months…although I did the same thing last year, too. We last spoke in January of 2014. We aren’t estranged. At least, I don’t think we are. I think he’s at a…
Midsummer: The Sabbath of Ease
We’re now in the long, golden days of the Northern Hemisphere summer, approaching the very longest day: Midsummer. Historically, for those of us whose forebears are European, this was the time of year when grain crops were in the fields and not yet ready to harvest, but fruits and early…
A Sticky, Sweaty, Complicated Mess (That Nearly Everyone Wants)
We were up long before the day-o To welcome in the summer, to welcome in the May-o For sumer is icumen in, and winter’s gone away-o! May Day has just passed, which many Pagans know as Beltane, the festival of young adulthood, love, and sexuality. Time for rising…
A Subtle Art, the Medium of Which is Emotion
She was lifting the curtain, looking down from the window in her Civil War blouse, jacket and hoop skirt. Outside, a wagon bearing a flag-draped casket was drawn forward by black horses, flanked with erect soldiers. Suddenly, it was 1865. I was 6, and touring the Custis-Lee Mansion at Arlington National Cemetery with my…
“But I’m Lonely!” Finding Fellow Atheopagans
Atheopaganism is a new religious path. The essay in which I laid out its principles is only five years old, and it has been visible on the web for only a year. This inevitably means that practitioners seeking to find people to circle with are going to be a little…