Spiritual journeys in tending the living earth, permaculture, and nature-inspired arts
Many years ago, I shared the story of the “mystery of the stumps“, which was my path into druidry. I grew up spending all my days in a forest that was rich, full, and bountiful. When I was 14, that …
Druidry is rooted in relationship and connection with the living earth: the physical landscape and all her plants and creatures, the spirits of nature, the allies of hoof and claw, fin and feather. The land and her spirits are our …
Imagine walking into a forest where you are greeted by many old tree friends, each members of different families that form a community. You know their common names, their less common names, and the secret names that have taught you. …
Deep, in the darkest months of winter, a variety of cultures offered blessings to the trees for abundant harvests. A few years ago on this blog, I wrote about Wassailing at a friend’s orchard; since then, I’ve done wassailings each …
Following the path of the sun and the moon, we can learn much about the work of a druid retreat in our lives. The daylight is where we typically live–it is bright, it is loud, people are about, and lots …
I had the most amazing thing happen to me about a month ago, and it involved the direct (palliative) healing of an active strip mine site. I was heading to teach an herbalism course at a friend’s business about 15 …
Sometimes, the hidden, the unacknowledged hurts are the worst kind. These are the kind that you bury, deep within yourself, or that society pretends never happened. We hear stories of these every day–massive cover-ups of the truth of crimes being …
In the last year, I’ve written much about druid tree workings, or the spiritual work one can do with trees and other plants. For more on this series, see these posts: the face of the tree, connecting with trees on …
This post is the third of a series of posts on Druid Tree Workings–ways of connecting, communicating, and working with trees. In my first post on the series, I described finding the face of the tree. In the second post, …
The trees themselves present much in the way of mystery teachings. This second post in my “Druid Tree Workings” series explores various methods for listening to the voices of the trees and developing methods of communication, like finding the face …
I recently came across an article from The Guardian in 2012 detailing the work of scientist Bernie Krause, who has spent his life recording sounds of nature. Krause’s major finding is simple: the loss of biodiversity, from the depths of …
I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about various wild foods and other kinds of wildcrafting and foraging on this blog, and I wanted to talk today about the principles of wildcrafting and ethical foraging more broadly. This post …
One of the challenges that North American druids face is understanding, visiting, and working with sacred sites. In my druid training, one order in particular really emphasizes the sacred site–the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD). And I think …
What’s the value of a tree? What’s the value of a forest? I’ve explored these themes before, but I want to come back to this in light of some new research put out by the Pacific Northwest Research Station, and …