Ritual
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A Brightening Ritual
It’s the February Sabbath! Midpoint between the winter solstice (Yule or Midwinter) and the spring equinox (which I call High Spring), it is the time when the light is noticeably returning after the deep darkness of winter, and the hope of spring is growing. It can thus be called Brightening, anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Where I live, it’s the time when it rains constantly, and so I have named this Sabbath, for my own purposes, Riverain, the Festival of Water. This is a concept for a Brightening/Riverain ritual I came up with this year. We did an adapted version of it in the Atheopagan Saturday Zoom Mixer today. The…
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Shush Now
In the beginning was the word, and the word was BOOM. BOOM exploding out from nothing, from the tiniest point And even in those early moments the wild particles colliding, Combining to form elements, molecules, scattering wide in the blank empty script Of possibility. On they went, making compounds, slowly pulling towards one another in disks of Spinning gravity, tightening, tightening until BOOM again: a star turning rotating part of a thousand a million a billion a galaxy BOOM The molecules pouring out, heavy and pregnant until Grinding to lava glow the rough spheres, the gravid disks collapse to make worlds BOOM The comets pounding down with water, with carbon…
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GUEST POST: A Memorable Mabon
A guest post by Sue Irwin In 2016, after a lifetime of religious affiliation, I walked away from it all. I became an atheist. Although it took me several months to realize it, I was a new atheist with a hole. I was a new atheist with desires. Freed from the mental and financial shackles of the organized religion I’d been born into, I realized I could do anything that I wanted to do. For someone raised in an oppressive religion, this thought is life changing. And what did I want to do? Two things topped my agenda. First, I wanted to read anything and everything I’d missed in all…
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An Exciting Announcement!
I am pleased to report that Llewellyn Worldwide has contracted to publish my next book, ROUND WE DANCE: Joyous Living Around the Year and Throughout Life. This is an Atheopagan book about incorporating rituals into your life, and will go into specific seasonal themes, rites of passage and personal rituals, with ritual outlines and techniques and associated craft projects and recipes. I’m excited! I am busily working on this volume while looking for my next full-time job. I “go to work” at my desk every morning, take a break for lunch and return to writing until 5:00 in the afternoon. I haven’t ever been this disciplined about writing before, but…
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Reintegration
Coming down from the mountainI have seen the lofty gloryI will go again some dayBut for now, I’m coming down. –Meat Puppets There is an ache in my heart right now, a longing for the people and experiences of Suntree Retreat. It isn’t that I’m not glad to be home. I like my life, by and large. But I have had a peak experience and there is a feeling of sorrow, of yearning now that it is over. At the Retreat, I came to feel a deep caring for every attendee and for what we were doing together: the rituals, the vulnerability, the courage, the socializing, the celebration. Such an…
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Towards a Daily Spiritual Practice
One of the things which characterizes our Atheopagan path–and which we share with many other Pagan denominations–is observation of the eight holidays of the Wheel of the Year: the solar solstices, equinoxes and the midpoints between them. So every 7 weeks or so, we have a seasonal festival to celebrate, if we so choose. How we define those holidays can vary widely, as we are aware of our local climates and ecological processes and seek to match our celebrations to them. And we don’t have to celebrate all of them if we choose not to. In addition, we may hold occasional rites of passage for our friends and loved ones,…
