Spiritual journeys in tending the living earth, permaculture, and nature-inspired arts
A few weeks ago, we had the Mid-Atlantic Gathering of US Druids (MAGUS 2023). This gathering has been going on since 2017, and it seems like every year gets better! Since the start of MAGUS, we have been experimenting with …
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 …
The Fall Equinox is a time of no time, a time of balance between the night and day, of balance between the physical and metaphysical. Thus, it is a good time to seek balance and communion with the spirit world, …
Rituals are not just an important part not just of druidry or of nature-based spirituality, but of human life in general. According to leading scholar Catherine Bell in her book Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, human beings have been involved in …
2020 has been challenging for nearly everyone in a multitude of ways. One of the things that we are faced with right now is grief: grief over lost friends and family who have passed, grief over a previous way of …
The Spring Equinox, Alban Eiler, is the time when the light and the dark in the world are in balance. The timing of the Equinox is fortuitous–this time of balance–after such turmoil in the world. Here in the last two …
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 …
One of the incredible things about the hydrologic (water) cycle on our great planet is how connected these cycles are and how a single drop of water may continually travel the globe over a period of time. The waters that …
Sometimes, when we are hiking on a trail, we are in a hurry to get somewhere–that far-off vantage point, that mile marker on the map, or just seeing what is over the next horizon. I remember hiking with some friends …
This past weekend, we had a delightful time at the 2nd OBOD Mid Atlantic Gathering of US(or MAGUS). It was a wonderful weekend full of positive energy, community, and celebration of the land. I was involved heavily in the ritual …
A group of people gather in an orchard, the snows quietly falling, the cold brisk and clear. Our voices ring to the heavens, toast is offered to the branches of the tree. We drum, sing, make noise, and scare away …
The following is a land healing ritual that we did at the OBOD’s Mid-Atlantic (MAGUS) gathering last weekend (May 2017). (For a wonderful review of this gathering, please see Dean Easton’s A Druid’s Way Blog!) This ritual was done by …
A group of people make music and merriment near a roaring fire during the longest night of the year. Their mission: to await the sunrise and hold vigil through the darkness with feasting, celebration, and the burning of the sacred …
In my post last week, I discussed the different ways that we might heal the land including physical land healing, healing human-land connections, and various forms of energetic healing. Today, I want to delve deeply into the aspects of energetic …
A number of people have asked me for ceremonies and activities that help facilitate sacred work on the land in various ways. Why would we want such ceremonies? Quite simply, we can get the most effect by combining actions out …
This is the fourth year of the OBOD East Coast Gathering, (which I have reviewed before on this blog) and if anything can be said for certain, its that a tribe has now been firmly established. In the four years …
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. …