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 …
Beltane
A 21st Century Wheel of the Year: Regeneration at Beltane
A druid walks upon a landscape, barren, cold, with trees cut and plants uprooted. Tears in her eyes, she surveys the damage that others have caused: the homes of so many animals disrupted after logging, the wild ramps and ginseng …
A Fire and Smoke Ritual for Land Healing and Blessing
A few years ago, I led a smoke cleansing (smudge) stick making workshop at the OBOD’s East Coast Gathering event. As that event often has upwards of 100 attendees, I spent months growing and harvesting materials for the event so …
Embracing Ancestral Fires and Fire-starting at Beltane
The tiny sparks from my flint and steel shower down on my char cloth. This flint and steel set was a gift from a fellow druid from almost a decade ago, a gift that has long offered me a connection …
A Beltane Blessing: Recipe for Sacred Herbal Offering Blend
Offerings to the land, spirits, and/or diety are a common stable in many traditions, druidry being no exception. Many opportunities present themselves and having something you carry with you can be built into your regular druid practice (and kept within, …
Ecoregional Druidry: A Druid’s Wheel of the Year
In the 1990’s, now Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, Gordon Cooper, developed the idea of “wildcrafting your own druidry”; this practice is defined as rooted one’s druid practice in one’s local ecology, history, legends and …
A Beltane Blessing: The Magical Art of Pysanky Batik Eggs
When I was a child, my family and I would spend hours carefully drawing melted beeswax onto eggs and dyeing them, the rounds of successive colors growing darker and darker. Once an egg had been fully dyed and covered in …
Cycles of the Sun and the Moon in Our Lives
Humans evolved in alignment with the movement of the sun and the moon. As the sun moved, so did human camps of hunters and gathers. As the sun moved, so still move many birds, fish, and mammals as they migrate …
Dandelion Wine Part III: New Recipes and Insights
I’ve posted on Dandelion wine before on this blog, and I wanted to follow up on my previous posts on dandelion wine – making the wine and racking/bottling. I’ve also written more generally about the dandelion as a beneficial plant–so …
Wild Food Recipes: Maple Candied Violets and Honeyed Violets
Once again, the beautiful, purple-blue sweet violets are dotting the landscape. Where I live, they are in full bloom and will remain that way for the next few weeks. Last year I shared a traditional candied violet recipe with egg …
The Wheel of the Year in the Druid Tradition – Description of Druidic Holidays
When we think about the practices that various groups and cultures did on a yearly cycle, agricultural holidays are some of the most prominent. The modern Wheel of the Year in the Druid tradition seeks to re-establish a set of …
The Wheel of the Year – Druidic Holiday Guided Mediation
For our grove’s spring equnox / Alban Eiler celebration, we also had a Druidry workshop that focused on introducing some of our grove members to the wheel of the year. I thought the workshop went quite well, and the information …
Tree Planting Ritual – Druid / OBOD Style
This is a simple tree-planting ritual that I wrote for our grove’s upcoming Beltane celebration this weekend. Our grove is only partially wooded currently–we will be planting about 15 new trees around the grove to help fill it in. …