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 …
ancestors
Earth Oven 101: Firing and Baking in an Earth Oven
One of the great joys and challenges of our present time is finding a way into a deeper connection with our ancestors, the living earth and her processes, and our own human gifts. A lot of this practice is slowing …
A Druid’s Silent Supper: A Samhain Ritual of Ancestor Connection
Friends and grove members are welcomed into a candlelit home, and with the fire in the hearth blazing. Each person brings a dish to share–steaming piles of local foods in season: a beautiful roast beef, pumpkin soup, sourdough bread, baked …
Visioning the Future: The Web of Relationships
Late-stage capitalism has provided us with a series of visions about the future that are pretty terrifying. The grand narratives of infinite growth and progress at all costs have landed us in a warming age marked by the loss of …
Sacred Trees in the Americas – The Magic, Medicine, and Uses of the Tulip Poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera)
One of the most majestic experiences you can have with trees is being surrounded by old-growth Tulip Poplar trees. Tulips grow extraordinarily tall and straight, with thick gray trunks and spreading roots. You feel like you are in a cathedral, …
Druid Tree Workings: Cutivating Recpiprocity
When I was still quite young, my grandfather used to take me and my cousins into the deep forest behind our house and teach us many things about nature. One of the fun things he taught us, for example, was …
Beyond the Anthropocene: Druidry into the Future
Druidry today has both ancient and modern roots, and there have been several distinct “phases” of druid practice historically. While it’s not critical that the practitioner of the modern druid traditions know what I share, it is helpful to have …
Visioning the Future through the Bardic Arts: Creating Vision, Creating Hope
I used to be a big fan of reading dystopian fiction when I was younger. It seemed like a distant world, a reality far from our own. But perhaps now, those books resonate too close to reality. As someone who …
Honoring the Ancestors of the Bardic Arts: Tools, Techniques, and Legacies
Browsing an antique store a year ago, I found a wonderful shoemaking hammer. It was an interesting shape, and when I held the tool, I could literally feel the connection this tool had had with its previous owner. Whoever had …
Awen, Bardic Arts, and the Ancestors
The time between Samhain and Yule is always a time of deep reflection for me. As a homesteader, this represents the end of the season– the first frost happened in the week I was drafting this post, making everything curl …
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 …
Druidry for the 21st Century
This is a challenging age, doubly so for anyone who is connected spiritually with the living earth and who cares deeply about non-human life. The Fourth National Climate Assessment, released towards the end of 2018, presents a dire picture for …
The Ancestors, the Descendants, and the Stones
What would our descendants say about this time period? How would we, as a people, be written into their histories? What stories would they tell of us? Perhaps our ancestors would say that this was a time of recklessness, willful …
An Ancestor Oracle Deck
Samhain is here, and with it comes a time of reflection, casting away, and working with our ancestors. In my post several weeks ago, I discussed in great depth the ways of working with various kinds of ancestors–in this post, …
Honoring the Ancestors of Land, Tradition, and Blood
As the world (where I am at, at least!) gets bathed in frost, as the plants wither and die, as the trees bathe themselves in color and then drop their leaves, as the cold wind blows and as the darkness …
Finding and Working with Ancestral Traditions
When I was a child, my grandfather took my cousins and I to a wild area we later called “Grandpa’s field.” It was a field on the edge of the forest below our houses, the edges rich with crab apples, …
Reclaiming Our Heritage and Connection With The Land: Herbs, Plants, and Harvests
As you might have noticed, my posts on this blog slow down considerably in the months of August – October. This is because as a single homesteader, I’m quite busy bringing in the harvest canning, drying, and freezing; preparing my …