It’s a gunmetal grey day, portending welcome rain. The last of the autumn foliage is still evident, this being Northern California, and somehow it is calm and silent in our neighborhood despite the proximity to shopping districts. Today is the day I declare it: the season of Yule has begun.
O cold, inexorable darkness Draw back now beyond these circling walls. Should fear, and want, and danger walk It shall not be, it is not here. Let this place of warming light Bulwark against freezing night: a promise Holding through the day that we, come nightfall…
They aren’t gods. They aren’t self-aware, and thus have no agency. They don’t communicate. They simply are. Irrefutably. And they are not “worshiped”. They have no egos with which to soak up adulation. They are here. They are real. They are honored, revered, contemplated with humility and wonder. They are the Powers…
We’re going to die. All of us. Grappling with this fact may be the single most powerful factor in what it means to be human. It is so profound and unarguable a fact that every religion has to confront it in one way or another, and Atheopaganism must, as well. And while…
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…
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…
