Spiritual journeys in tending the living earth, permaculture, and nature-inspired arts
It is a cold evening, quite cold for early October here in Western Pennsylvania, with the temperature dropping quickly as the sun sets. I knew that tonight would be the night I might get to see the Aurora Borealis for …
One of the questions that people who are yearning for a creative practice or who are starting one often ask–where do you get your ideas? Where do you find your inspiration? How do you have visions of what to create …
I think it is easy to forget in this day and age that so many of our traditional art forms are directly rooted in the living earth, and reconnecting with those ancient forms can bring us closer to nature. This …
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 …
The average human being will sleep approximately 229,961 hours over the course of their life. Dreaming, including working on dream recall and lucid dreaming, can offer us gateways to cultivating a rich inner life and in supporting our spiritual and …
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. …
A few weeks ago, I received a text message from one of my most tech-savvy friends. The message described how he was exploring Stable Diffusion, an AI art generator and found my work in the database as well as the …
Creativity is the birthright of all people. When humans are young, play and creativity are central to our own development. Children don’t worry about it being ‘good’; they just make things, play with crayons, laugh, dance, and sing. They play. …
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 …
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 …
When people think of the Tarot, they often think of its primary use as a divination tool. Tarot is an incredibly versatile tool, and now you can get hundreds of decks on practically any theme, choose from dozens of books …
I open up a sacred grove with intention. After opening the grove, I sit for a few moments, breathing deeply and centering myself. When ready, I pick up the chalk pastel and I allow the chalk pastel to move across …
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 …
Ever since I self-published the Tarot of Trees, I get a fairly regular stream of people who are interested in creating their own oracle decks and want to know how to do it. So in today’s post, I’ll share …
Things seem broken right now. These last two weeks have been very hard weeks for many people. The national conversation here in the USA grows more difficult by the day, and it seems nearly every nation is facing many kinds …
I am excited to announce that my 2018 Mount Haemus Award article, titled “Channeling the Awen Within: An Exploration of Learning the Bardic Arts in the Druid Tradition” has been released on OBOD’s website (a better-formatted PDF is at the …
“You have so much talent” or “I’m not talented enough” are powerful statements, statements I hear on a regular basis from those who long for a creative practice. The idea of talent can cause an incredible amount of inaction, of …
Everyone has a story to tell, and some stories are worth their weight in gold. How we retell past events, through the bardic art of storytelling, can help shape our present understanding. Thinking about stories as acts of empowerment in …
This is my song, this is my voice, These are my words, this is my choice. Hear me now, take heed of my words. Love me now, and your spirit will fly. Hear me in the howling of the wolf, …
“The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can …
One of the changes that humans have experienced with the rise of industrialization, and more recently, consumerism, is a shift away from creating our own lovingly crafted objects, objects created with precision, skill, high-quality materials, and care and into using …