What is intuition? How do we develop it, and why does it matter? In this post, I want to share some techniques for developing your intuition, particularly surrounding nature and natural settings, and some techniques and practices that you can …
Knowledge
Journeying into Deep Medicine, Magic, and Connection: A Comfrey Initiation
As I’ve shared before, I have personally gotten so much depth and connection from working directly with the earth for healing food, and medicine, and meeting my needs. More than just knowing or being out in nature, using nature to …
A Beginner’s Guide to Druidry and Becoming a Druid
Seemingly more now than ever before, people are seeking ways to reconnect with the living earth, with their creative gifts, and with their ancient ancestors. They are looking to deepen their understanding of themselves and the world around them. Through …
Land Healing – New Book Announcement!
Today I’m very excited to announce the upcoming release of my new book: Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Approaches for Healing the Earth. The book is now available for preorder and will be released on March 28, 2024 from …
Addressing Challenging Times with Gratitude for Lessons Learned
As we’ve been exploring on this blog, for many of us, life is more than a bit overwhelming right now. Many of us are feeling beyond capacity from multiple angles: the breakdown of the social fabric and increasing social and …
The New Paradigm for the Future: What do we do next?
As we’ve been exploring in my post last week–a new paradigm is rising, a paradigm being enacted in backyards, home kitchens, community gardens, clubs, mushroom clubs, herbalism schools, ecovillages, pigment foragers, and thousands of other places. This is a new …
Looking in the Face of Death at Samhain
As I write this, we have our last day before a freeze–the day before death comes to our landscape. On my landscape, in temperate Western Pennsylvania (USDA Zone 6), we’ve had almost no frosts to speak of–the summer has seemed …
Straddling the Edge at the Fall Equinox
The Fall equinox is traditionally regarded as a time of reaping the harvest and also a time of balance between the dark half and the light half of the year. As is customary this time of year, I’ve been reflecting …
An Animist Primer for the English Language
The longer that I’ve really embraced animism, not only as a life philosophy but as an active spiritual path, the more I realized that to be an animist is to radically turn your world upside down on every level. Being …
Exploring the Sacred Animals of the Quarters in the Druid Tradition
In the druid tradition, in multiple modern druid orders, we associate animals or fish with the four directions. The classic ones are: The Great Bear in the North The Hawk in the East The Stag in the South The Salmon …
Mushrooms as Nature’s Alchemists: Cycles, Connections, Healing, and Vision
When I feel lost and feel like the hope is gone in the world, I go spend time with some mushrooms. Mushrooms, more than any other organism on this planet, give me hope. So much so, I’ve been doing an …
A Conversation on Pollution, Extraction and Hope with Wild Pigments
There is a growing movement of people reconnecting to nature through the foraging and creation of wild pigments–pigments from the earth allow us to connect, grow and heal. This is so much more than foraging for colors from nature to …
An Exploration of Gratitude Practices and Plant Reverence in Herbal Practices
Please note: This article appeared first in my new column, “Roots, Shoots, and Spirits” in the Winter 2022 issue Plant Healer Quarterly, a magazine for empowered herbalists and culture shifters. Folks can buy a year subscription or sign up for …
Daydreaming and Mind Wandering as a Creative Practice
What do Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory (the painting with the melting clocks), Elias Howe’s invention of the lockstitch sewing machine in 1845, and the Beatles’ song Yesterday, have in common? They all were ideas that first emerged in dreams. …
The Wheel of the Year for the Age of the Anthropocene
It is hard to deny both the increasing challenge of climate change nor its impact on local ecosystems, local people, and all of us living in this age. While both druidry and Wicca (and many other neopagan practices) share the …
Beyond Tolerance: Peacemaking for Diversity, Understanding, and Religious Plurality
In nature, monocrops are extremely unhealthy ecosystems–they are in a perpetual state of damage and cannot support other life. A monocrop is where only one thing grows, and that thing is the same as far as the eye can see–acres …
Sacred Trees of the Americas: Linden/Basswood
Linden is always a joy to find anywhere you go. A tree with a gentle spirit and incredibly useful offerings, the Linden is there for you. I remember meeting Linden for the first time when I was young with my …
Mapping Your Spiritual Journey
One’s spiritual journey is full of so many twists and turns, particularly if you are taking up the druid path. Druidry is a path that really focuses on individual relationships with the living earth, and thus, you will find a …
An Animistic Garden, Part II: Gardening Strategies
A garden full of life, joy, wildness, and spirit–where the vegetables, herbs, fruits, and nuts grow fat with the joy of being nurtured, where the spirits are working with the gardener for the good of all, and where all is …
An Animistic Garden, Part I: Garden Philosophy and Bridging between Domestication and Wildness
“That’s a pretty wild and unkempt garden you have there. Did you lose control?” a visitor to my land once said. “Yes, I responded, it is wonderful.” When you look at pictures of gardens online, in gardening magazines, etc. things …
Druidry, Colonialism and the Spirit of the Mountain
A fundamental issue in practicing nature-based spirituality has to do with not only your relationship to the land but the relationship of the land in relation to your blood ancestors. Many druids, including those of caucasian descent in North America …