Last night was our last night with my husband’s kids for we don’t know how long. We all went out to eat at T.G.I. Friday’s and ate spinach dip and ice cream sundaes until we were stuffed to bursting. We laughed a lot, and we all mostly tried not to think about the uncertainty of the times ahead.

My husband has been in negotiations with his ex-wife informally since October, and formally (read: with lawyers) for two months trying to work out a child custody arrangement that will let him see the kids after we’ve moved. We originally hoped for a three-month period of time with them during the summers, but after their mother objected that this would interfere with their homeschooling schedule, we compromised with a proposal to have them two months during the summer, and one week each in March, October and in December over the winter solstice. It’s still not very much time, and it’s going to be really expensive for us to have to pay to fly four kids back and forth across the country several times a year instead of us just making one trip out and back… but it’s worth it to see the kids.

Now, after four weeks of missed deadlines and inexplicable delays, we finally received a counter-proposal from my husband’s ex. We’re… flabbergasted. She wants to drastically reduce his time with them to only a few weeks a year while also stipulating that if the schedule changes at the last minute, he forfeits his time with them completely (something that’s a big concern for us, since his ex has on numerous occasions changed her plans at the last minute or scheduled the kids to spend time with grandparents on days when they were supposed to be with us — if she did this under the new proposal, she could deliberately sabotage the only time we have with the kids). We received this counterproposal the day before the movers come and we leave for Seattle, despite a long legal process during which we requested her feedback for weeks and received nothing but silence in return.

We’re out of time. We’re almost out of money and we’re worried about being able to afford the legal fees to fight this, especially long-distance. And we’re getting pretty low on energy and hope, too, after months of attempts at compromise and civil discussion that have met with obstacle after obstacle, months of having to tell the kids, “We don’t know when we’ll see you again, but we promise that this isn’t goodbye for good” — not even sure that we’ll be able to keep that promise.

So we’d like to ask you for your support and your prayers. We would like to reach out to our religious community for emotional and spiritual support during this really hard time — to help us, and the kids, to get through this together more or less intact and still joyful and optimistic about what the future will bring. We have a lot of worries right now. We’re worried about our time, money and energy running short in the face of a stay-at-home mom who has her husband’s much larger salary as well as my husband’s child support payments at her disposal. We’re also worried about the prejudicial nature of their mother including the fact that we’re Pagan in the child custody agreement as a reason why we shouldn’t be allowed to see them during Christmas. We’re worried that once we’re out of town, our chances of winning a child custody battle will be greatly reduced, even though the new job that’s requiring us to move has brought my husband not only great career opportunities but a lot of personal fulfillment and happiness during only the short period of time he’s worked in his new position — a job that his ex demanded that he quit so that he could stay in town.

We’re Pagans. We’re proud of that fact, and proud that we belong to a community that believes intentions matter and magic is real and can make a difference in the world. We’re saying prayers and burning candles with reverence and hope, but we’d also appreciate any blessings or positive energy you can send our way. Thank you for being such a wonderful community for us, for all that you’ve given us over the years and all that you’ve allowed us to give back through our writing and blogging. Our hearts are filled with gratitude.

If you’d like to help us out with our legal fees, please consider donating below. Even a small amount will help:

What is She? Who is She? Celestial, ephemeral, pristine and pure, delicate, new, grace itself, fresh and bright. Earthy, dark and grounded, sweat and dirt and hot breath, the hard flex and tension of muscle, the rough power of fire and stone, the burning fluidity of molten ore. Primal, deep and ageless, utter stillness and distance, utter light in the darkness, spun out, flung out, fragmented, holographic, the whispering wholeness buried within each disparate glint of limit and form.

And the hammer, the anvil, the spark — the sweat and hot breath of the universe, the work and labor of the cosmos brought to bear on itself, the earthy Ground of Being lifted, deepened, expanded to fill a sky overwhelmed with the clamor of stars, each forged, each made new, pristine, a shining fragment of light. And the stars, the infinite suns, perfect spheres in a great dance of beauty, humming with song, swung in great arcs as though in one another’s arms, spinning into newly created moments, new beginnings, like a child spinning around her center in a fresh spring meadow, arms flung out, effortless in grace and welcome.

And the hiss of the steam, the pulsing of groundwater, the twining thrust of energy rising in the mound, a serpent of stars in the dark earth. The tongue of flame licking dark and bright above the wellspring, the purity and intensity of all-consuming heat, soften, tempered by the fresh, cold waters.

She is too much. I cannot hold onto Her, I cannot see Her — I can only follow the winding, spiraling connections, dynamic and always changing, fluid, fleet. Sometimes She is overwhelming, even austere, so hot and great that Her fire burns cold. Sometimes She is all innocence and promise, coaxing and gentle and warm, caressing and playful. Sometimes She is so intimate I cannot tell Her from my own passion, the drive that spurs me, the energy that courses through my blood and lashes out in righteous anger or sharp, clever words like a long blade. Sometimes, She is absence, void, the emptiness of death or grief, the keening of wind whistling through the hollow, the barely glimpsed sliver of light reflecting off the rainfall in the dusk, wane, distant, not enough.

Who is She? I don’t know. I cannot describe Her outside of poetry, and poetry cannot do Her justice. She is creativity at the heart of existence, tempered and expressed in culture and art, the resistance and pressure of material forms that force us into relationship and engagement, and the release from those heavy forms afforded by inspiration and the spark of light and insight that lifts us up beyond ourselves, seems to defy even gravity itself. She is my Goddess, my Sun, my Center, my Light, my Starscape, my Tongue, my Fire, my Draught, my Forge…

I’ve joined sites all over the world wide web — from Reddit, BoingBoing and Wikipedia to WordPress, Google, even the Pagan Newswire Collective — in a blackout protest against the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy ACT) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) bills that would drastically change the way the internet works and undermine innovation, communication and even basic safety by putting in place the infrastructure necessary for large-scale censorship.

My stepdaughter recently treated her father and I to this gem of wisdom when we were talking about her uncle’s job in the marketing industry:

“But if you create positions of power based on the idea that a good person will use that power wisely, you don’t have any way of preventing a person who isn’t good from abusing that power later on.”

She was raised on Lord of the Rings. Can you tell?

That’s what this protest is really about. As a writer and creative type who thrives in the online world, issues of copyright protection and piracy can be very real problems for me. Of course I want legal protections for my work. As an avid reader and web-surfer who loves lolcats and Dinosaur Comics as much as the next person, I want the artists, writers and creative types out there who produce content for my favorite sites to have those same protections — even, no, especially if those creative types are just some college students messing around on YouTube and not Hollywood stars making millions off the latest blockbuster.

But that’s not what SOPA/PIPA is really about. The SOPA and PIPA bills are like the ring of power forged in the fires of Mount Doom: one law to rule them all, one law to find them, one law to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Sponsored by a bloated entertainment industry that overcharges for pretty much everything, these bills would put in place the kind of invasive oversight infrastructure that would not only allow large corporations to sue technology start-ups and independent artists out of existence based on little to no evidence of piracy or copyright infringement, but would require on-going surveillance of user-produced content that makes Facebook’s privacy problems look like child’s play. Any website perceived as a potential threat to the Powers That Be would be vulnerable to lawsuits, while individuals would be subject to censorship and data-mining as a matter of course, creating a hostile and uncertain online environment in which conformity becomes the order of the day.

Ungood. Doubleplusungood.

Now, here’s the thing. Over on Google+ today I saw that Diana Rajchel is participating in the blackout, but also writing a piece on why the SOPA/PIPA issue is receiving more attention and immediate action than the NDAA/indefinite detention amendment that would make it possible for the government to indefinitely detain anyone suspected of terrorist ties, including U.S. citizens. (People always say that last part as though it’s especially bad, though personally I’m horrified at the idea that we think it’s okay to detain anyone, citizen or not, indefinitely without trial or access to legal aid.) Lots of people have been making noise about this amendment online and protesting its implications, but that didn’t stop Obama recently from going ahead and signing it (although he noted his reservations and promised that his administration would never detain U.S. citizens in that way — he should have a talk with my stepdaughter).

At the time of this writing, I haven’t read Diana’s post so I don’t know what she’s going to say. But her G+ update got me thinking about the challenge of balancing our political activism, choosing carefully how we address the myriad injustices that we face as a society. There are a lot of them. Sometimes the deep, systemic problems get overlooked in the swell of support for more sensationalist issues. Someone a little further down in my G+ stream complained that the only reason #Occupy caught on was because poverty had finally begun to effect middle-class white people who’d thought they were immune. That may well be true, and it’s painful and frustrating for people and communities who have been struggling with poverty and marginalization for decades, centuries, even millennia. For the most part, people are pretty small-minded and self-centered, and it can be difficult to mobilize a society around issues that only affect small, disenfranchised groups who lack the visibility or clout of the mainstream. Diana brings up just another example of this. The indefinite detention of terror suspects is a far greater injustice than whether or not some new social network start-up gets a fair shot at providing us with amusing pictures of cats. Right?

On the other hand, I wouldn’t have even known about the NDAA amendment, or Diana’s plan to write about it, without those very social networking sites. Young Egyptian protesters wouldn’t have been able to organize an uprising without Twitter and Facebook. #Occupy wouldn’t be changing the conversation about capitalism and corporate personhood without the internet — hell, the very movement is branded with the epitome of a social media symbol, the hashtag. None of these political movements have been perfect, and all of them have taken for granted certain assumptions of the very political and social structures they’re trying to change. That’s why political activism is an on-going commitment to the process of creating and carving out space for social justice, not a once-and-done fix-all. As Pratchett’s anti-hero Samuel Vimes said, “Revolutions always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions.”

So how do we choose when and how to act? How do we choose where to put our focus? Each person has to answer that question on their own, but I’ll let you know a bit about how I decide:

As a Pagan, I honor the cycles of the natural world. Life and death, mutation and evolution, adaptation and survival. As human animals, we have this thing called “culture.” Other animals have it, too — there’s evidence that apes can learn and pass down social behaviors from generation to generation, for instance — but I think it’s safe to say that human beings have pushed culture kicking and screaming into the foreground as our primary form of adaptation and evolution. For most animal and plant species, evolution comes gradually as unhelpful biological traits and instinctive behaviors are slowly weeded out of the gene pool as individuals with those traits don’t survive long enough to reproduce.

But when a species or a community develops culture, they now have another way of passing on helpful behaviors and traits to the next generation: education. Cultural adaptation gives a community an alternative to the slow process of genetic trial and error. An ape that can learn from an older member of her social group how to use a twig to dig for ants doesn’t need to be genetically related to her teacher in order to benefit from the lesson. And that same ape doesn’t need to have offspring of her own in order to pass on these learned behaviors for the benefit of others. Species that have the capacity to learn and to teach can circumvent death as their primary way to correct for inappropriate or poorly-suited patterns of behavior. New behaviors can be learned as environments change and communities grow, and those behaviors can be spread more quickly through cultural education than through generations of genetically-predisposed offspring.

In other words, when it comes to evolution our choice is quite literally: education, or death.

That’s how fundamental education and the free expression and exchange of information is to the survival of a species like us humans. Education or death.

The history of the human species has shown us over and over that communities kept in ignorance and isolation are the very same communities that tend towards militarism and violence. The cycle of ignorant xenophobia and social aggression feeds on itself like a snake eating its own tail — without access to education and free communication, death becomes once again the only way we can learn the lessons of adaptation and cooperative, mutual survival. Yes, it is absolutely necessary to fight the injustices of war, violence and oppression, to confront them head on and stare them down with an unwavering commitment. But the foundation of that struggle is our ability to communicate and learn from each other, to listen with receptivity and appreciation to those who seem different or strange to us. Scaling back the war machine is only a temporary measure at best without substantive, fundamental cultural change — and that change can only come about through education, communication, creativity and innovation.

So I’m participating in the SOPA/PIPA blackout protest because I want, with all my heart, for folks like Diana to keep on writing about the NDAA amendment and all the other crazy, fucked up injustices in the world.

Sure, lots of people are probably mobilized around the SOPA/PIPA issue because it could jeopardize their ability to make lots of money off of user-generated content and sponsored ads online, or because it might interfere with their addiction to dubbed-over nature documentaries about honey badgers and auto-tuned Charlie Sheen interviews. Are those really shitty reasons to care about the problem of internet censorship? You bet. Is the SOPA/PIPA blackout protest gaining momentum because it affects ordinary, mainstream, middle-class white people, and not just those “bad people” potential-terrorists? Yep. So it goes.

Because that’s what a free society looks like. If you want a society where people are free to care about and mobilize around the deeply, vitally important issues of social justice and peacemaking, you have to work for a society where they are also free to care about silly, trivial nonsense if they want.

Does it bug the hell out of me? Fuck yes. It seems grossly unfair that religious, ethnic, racial and gender minorities have been struggling forever against systemic prejudices, that the impoverished, disenfranchised and most vulnerable in our society are the easiest scapegoats to blame and punish when something goes wrong, and the easiest to ignore when everything seems fine. A lot of the time, I feel like Ani DiFranco when she sings:

You want to track each trickle back to its source
and then scream up the faucet until your face is hoarse,
because you’re surrounded by a world’s worth of things you just can’t excuse.
You’ve got the hard cough of a chain smoker,
and you’re at the arctic circle playing strip poker,
and it’s getting colder and colder every time you lose.
So go ahead…. make your next bold move.

There is so much injustice in the world. Sometimes the cause of peace seems to be up against impossible odds. But then I also like to remember the story about Mother Teresa in the streets of Calcutta, tending to a group of starving and injured children, when a reporter approached her and asked, “What about the children over there? Why do you help these children instead of those children, when those others need help, too?” And Mother Teresa looked at the reporter and said, “You’re right, they do need help. Why don’t you put down that microphone and go help them?”

When we show up to each other, when we reach out and communicate — that’s when we can coordinate our efforts. We don’t each need to be strong enough or powerful enough to save the world all by ourselves. All we need is to be willing to work together to do our part.

That’s why I’m protesting SOPA/PIPA today. Because I want to be able to keep writing blog posts like this. I want to keep being able to tell stories about why I love this world so much, and why I long for peace with every fiber of my being. And yeah, sometimes I want to watch silly videos on YouTube and laugh and find joy in those things, too. The world needs joy and silliness just as much as it needs anger and protest. I don’t want a revolution if there isn’t going to be some dancing.

Strict pantheism is, I think, a difficult outlook to maintain. You find only a few people — even among Pagans — who are truly and purely pantheistic. Polytheism has its multiple gods, goddesses, elementals and other spirits, inhabiting a sacred natural world but also maintaining distinct personalities within it. For polytheists, a local river god, no matter how closely identified with the river, is not just the river, but conceived as “something more,” as possessing some quality of character or personality, some human-like attributes with which we, as human beings, can communicate and interact. Certain monotheistic religions go to the other extreme, conceiving of deity in purely transcendent terms, inherently separate from the “created” world. Usually modern critiques of each of these belief systems focus on the extent to which they deny or imbue sacredness in the natural world. Examples from past cultures show us that polytheism can degenerate into petty bickering among fallible and narrowly anthropomorphized deities, whose capriciousness no longer points to the mysteries of a shifting natural environment but has become entirely self-referential and melodramatic. Likewise, religions based on transcendent conceptions of deity come to rely heavily on abstract revelation (often supposedly only available to religious or political leaders) rather than personal experience of a sacred world, and even the extreme view that nature is inherently “evil” or degraded and must be rejected and escaped.

So how does pantheism cope with the “hour of adversity” and the inescapable reality of physical death? What can the bardic tradition of satire in Celtic mythology and folklore tell us about how we can confront a loss of faith in our spiritual lives as well as in our political leadership?

You can read the full article here.

House-hunting in Seattle has put me in mind of these many different sacred spaces, and what new altars I will craft as I make a home for myself on the shores of a new ocean. So, while I’m nursing my jet lag and scrambling to pack, I thought this week might be a good opportunity to take a look back at some of those altars of old as I dream of inspiration for new ones yet to come.

Household Altars

These are the altars I create as permanent fixtures throughout my home. Some of them are indistinguishable from your typical home décor, while others have a more obvious purpose.

This one, for instance:

A simple meditation altar nestled in the corner of the bedroom, minimalist but with a certain gentle elegance. I used this space as a focus for my meditative work on the Three Realms — land, sea and sky — here represented by a small cairn of stones, a bowl of water and a candle in a sun-etched jar.

Here is another all-purpose altar:

Right outside our front door, we keep this altar fresh with seasonal offerings (here, you can see late summer wildflowers and a small bowl of summer squash harvested from the garden) and whisper a prayer of blessing and gratitude as we ring the chimes each time we pass.

Another permanent altar is this wall-mounted shrine:

Enlisting the help of a spiny aloe plant, a sage candle and a small bottle of sea salt, this shrine honors cleansing and health in one of the messiest rooms of the house: the kids’ bathroom! After a difficult winter of constant sniffles and head colds when we first moved in, we set up this small shrine to welcome cleansing and cleanliness into our lives. Our regular care for the aloe plant reminds us to regularly care for our physical as well as our spiritual and emotional health.

Children’s Altars

Speaking of kids, we also have a few altars dedicated for kid-friendly purposes.

This is the Great Mother goddess altar that sits atop the bureau in the kids’ room:

They helped us bless and consecrate this statue of mother and child with a story about the Modron and the Mabon from Welsh mythology, part of the work we did as a family to help them heal from their parents’ divorce and reaffirm their relationship with their mother while welcoming me into their lives as a not-so-evil stepmom. They also regularly collect offerings — everything from flowers, to colorful leaves, to acorns and chestnuts and cool looking rocks — to place in the small offering bowl to show their gratitude and appreciation for Mother Earth.

As my oldest stepdaughter becomes a teenager, my husband and I have begun to teach her a bit about what it means to be a Druid, and we’ve helped her begin to think about how she can create an altar of her own:

Here, you can see a few of the objects she’s picked out to start crafting an altar in her bedroom at her mom’s house. A candle, an oyster shell, a volcanic rock and an acorn cap (that she can use as a whistle) represent the four elements of fire, water, earth and air, placed on top of a journal her grandmother gave her.

Altars on the Go

Because my husband and I both do a fair bit of traveling for work, I’ve also crafted a small travel altar that fits snuggly in a suitcase or carry-on luggage:

Included in my travel altar are wooden plaques representing the Three Realms, a set of offering dishes, a small candle, some mini-sticks of incense and small incense holder, a book of matches, a small sachet of dried herbs, a handkerchief altar cloth and a bag containing a set of prayer beads, a compass and a few stones and clay amulets. Packed away inside the travel altar box, the whole thing fits snugly in a small hemp bag along with my tarot deck and a pocket-sized journal and pen set.

Altars for All Occasions

I also sometimes construct temporary altars for particular tasks — holidays, spellcastings and other special occasions and celebrations.

Here, you can see a simple altar set up for a home blessing spell:

Set up initially on the coffee table in the living room, for this spell I lit the three candles (including the central “house warming” pillar candle) and proceeded around the house, blessing each doorway and entrance with a sprig of fresh rosemary dipped into sea salt water. There’s nothing like a good house cleansing to clear out the cobwebs and invite in the warmth, joy and light of a happy home!

Another spell, somewhat embarrassing now to admit though it was incredibly effective, was this Valentine’s Day Love Spell, which involved a ritual bath and a toilet-top altar:

Yes, that’s right. An altar complete with candles, incense, rose petals and even a small glass chalice of mead — on top of the toilet. But hey, effective and convenient!

I’ve also created altars for holiday celebrations, such as this one:

A Brighid’s Cross woven from the dried stems of crocuses, and a small golden candle floating amongst glitter like star dust in a dark bowl of water. Simple but powerful ways of honoring my goddess, Brighid, on her sacred day.

And of course, I can’t forget about my god, Manannan mac Lir, and the simple altar I set up during my ritual devotions to honor him:

And finally, this showcase wouldn’t be complete without a few pictures of the altar from our Druidic wedding ceremony down on the beach:

Photograph by Matt Lusk Photography

A very special occasion, indeed! You can see in the photograph below symbols of the four elements, a lovely little dish with our offerings to the three Kindreds (the gods, the ancestors and the spirits of the land), the heart-shaped wooden bowl that holds our handfasting cord and the shell that held our wedding bands.

Photograph by Matt Lusk Photography

And here’s my youngest stepdaughter, our Flowergirl and Earth-bearer, walking in procession carrying her bowl of dried herbs and flower petals to sprinkle around the sacred circle as the ceremony begins.

Photograph by Matt Lusk Photography

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project 2012.
Why not join in?

Imagine how we are woven bodily into this world, pulsing veins and sinew wrapped tightly around bone. Blood and marrow so intimate in the secret recesses of our structure.

This is what connects you to them. Your whole life presses forward. Like a single thread pulled taut until it aches, the spun-spiraled blood and body of your life pulls away from the past, yet anchored there by the fact of your birth, the stubborn persistence of your being. They had that too, and now here you are. What strange and unwieldy imperfections make up the beauty of your body, the lumpy joints and stringy tissue.

And the tension in you, it is theirs as well. The need for movement, dance, perhaps to somehow dance your way out of imperfection and into harmony, a music molded by the contours of the land. Maybe a land you don’t remember, maybe a place you’ve never been. But it is there in your body nonetheless, an echo of labor — the steady pace over half-familiar hills, the gentle lover’s way of knowing how the roots of every tree in the forest twist and twine beneath the soles of ancient feet. If your footing is now not so sure in the long, flat halls of the new millennium — if sometimes you stumble — it is their stumbling, too. We trip together over the ghosts of long-old roots.

So this is how you do it, then: Speak to them. Speak to them in dream. Sing to them the same lullabies you sing to your children to lull them to sleep. Toss them the rope of your longing. They are the beloved dead, the living memory that still gives shape and skin to your life. They want as much to be whole as you do. They want to move and dance through what new halls or hills your feet traverse.

Imagine how they are woven bodily into this world, pulsing in our veins, wrapped tightly like sinew around our bones. So intimate in blood and marrow we hardly know them from ourselves.

What dancing we must do, a foot in each world, between the ghosts of these roots and the shadows of the branches.

This post is part of the 30 Days of Druidry creative writing project.

This post is also part of the Pagan Blog Project 2012, organized by Rowan Pendragon.
Call it a two-for-one!

Going into the future is like going into the dark.

That was the theme of our family’s solstice ritual this year, as the nine of us (grandparents, parents, four kids and one cool step-uncle) settled down into a circle in the darkness of the living room. It was several hours after sunset on the longest night of the year, and the kids were antsy with excitement over unopened presents. I struck a single match, and began to weave our sacred space.

Earlier that morning, we’d been up before the dawn, tramping as quietly as we could so as not to wake the neighbors, down to the park where we climbed the highest hill, lit a candle and a few sticks of incense and sang the sun to rising. The kids had made birdseed ornaments to hang on a specially-chosen tree (this year a scraggly oak rooted near the banks of a half-frozen creek). As Druids, we prefer to celebrate the continuation of life by sharing gifts and offerings with the local animals and plants, instead of killing an evergreen in a flurry of mixed-up metaphor. The candle burned steadily through the dawn twilight, until in a sudden gust of wind, it guttered and went out. At the kids dismay, I chuckled and said joyfully, “We don’t need the candle anymore! Look!” At that moment the first rays of the sun broke above the horizon.

But that night it was all darkness again. The ill-lit circle of faces held a mixture of anticipation and solemnity. As the single match died out, quietly we went around the circle, naming our fears and feelings about the dark. My youngest stepdaughter declared earnestly that she wasn’t scared of the dark on nights like this — she felt only excitement and happiness to be surrounded by family, with the promise of gifts and decorative lights and merry-making yet to come. But the older girls were more hesitant, gingerly testing out their uncertainties and anxieties. Going into the dark can be frightening, said one, because you don’t know what’s coming.

I nodded. “On the longest night,” I said, “we think about the hope and promise of the light returning and the days growing longer and warmer again. But going into the future is a lot like going into the dark.” And I lit the candle in the center of the altar — a flame that grew like a bright star twinkling in the far distance of empty space, guiding the way towards the birth of the new sun and a new day.

~

I thought about that ritual again last weekend, when the world celebrated the end of 2011 and the beginning of the new year. Jeff likes to call New Year’s Eve, “Sirius Night”. Every year, the brightest star in the sky reaches its zenith about mid-night on New Year’s Eve, the highest it will climb in the night sky until next December 31. Sirius is a star of wealth, prosperity and promise; but also a star of restlessness and impetuosity. It is a star of the hunt, one of Orion’s loyal hounds, or in the myths of some ancient cultures, the point of an arrow that flies towards its target. In Greek, its name means “sparkling” but also “searing or scorching.” In Akkadian, its name is the Star Dog of the Sun. Later in the year, when it rises above the horizon just before dawn soon after the summer solstice, it heralds the coming of the sweltering “Dog Days” of July and August. It’s no wonder that the secular New Year is so often associated with the resolutions and promises we make to ourselves about what we want to accomplish in the coming year. We feel the energizing light of Sirius at its peak even through the darkness of these long winter nights — like a hound straining at its leash, eager for the hunt to begin again.

Sirius gives us energy for the chase, but it also provides steady guidance through the dark. As the brightest star in the night sky visible from anywhere on earth, navigators and travelers have used it for millennia to find their way across rough seas and unfamiliar landscapes. In the crisp, clear air of cold winter nights, the stars seem to shine with a brilliance much greater than they do in the thick, hazy atmosphere of hot summer months — and Sirius, as always, shines the brightest of all. By its light, we feel as though we can see the whole new year stretched out before us, full of big plans and grand adventures. We forget how heavy and lethargic those plans can become along the way. In the coldness of winter, we’d love nothing better than to run towards those Dog Days of summer!

For me, 2011 was a year of waiting. Though my life went through a couple of Big Important Changes, most of the year was spent in planning and preparation so that by the time those changes came, I was already anxious to be moving on to the next project. Much of the time I spent with the feeling of treading water, running in place. This New Year’s Eve, I felt the yearning, eager energy of Sirius overhead more than ever. So while the neighborhood settled down into boisterous celebration — I slipped out into the twilight for a walk of silence and solitude.

I wandered through the nearby woods, usually still busy with dog-walkers and joggers even after sunset. Not this night. Everyone was at home, partying with family and friends, or out at the clubs and bars getting ready to ring in the new year with toasts and sloppy kisses. I alone walked through the mist that stirred between the bare limbs of the trees.

But not quite as alone as I thought. As I rounded a bend in the path, I stopped dead in my tracks. There before me, grazing in the clearing on the crest of the hill only a few yards away, stood six deer — slim silhouettes against the darkening sky, all grace and poise in the dusk.

Living in a city, it’s easy to forget the miles of preserved forest just down the block from my apartment, to think of the park instead as a place for human recreation. But the woods are home to more than human people and their pets. This was not the first time I’d seen deer in the park — earlier last fall, I’d seen a group of young bucks wandering among the graves of dead soldiers in the cemetery on the other side of the ravine — but it was the closest I’d ever been to so many at once. The sight of them left me breathless and startled. I realized that I was caught in a tension between two desires: to draw closer, even to chase them if I could… and to bow, to kneel.

The civilized part of my brain chattered nervously, warning me to hold still so that I wouldn’t frighten them away, worrying about the noise that my body made when I walked or slowly drew in breath. But the deer seemed unconcerned. Some of them gazed at me curiously before lowering their mouths again to the wet grass. One walked casually to another and bent its head as though in murmured conversation, and suddenly I found myself wondering if I were the subject of gossip. The thought struck me as silly and in the same moment, I knew that my sense of strangeness had slipped from me and I was no longer a trespasser on the scene, but a part of the community of the woods that night.

“Out of the Mist Appeared Antlers…” by Rob Smith

~

The many names of Sirius speak to its eager, restless energy — the energy of the hunt, of the quick journey into the unknown in pursuit of beautiful, fleeting promises that bound like deer across the land. Though I usually skip the whole new year’s resolution routine, this year I’ve decided to make a single, simple promise to myself. That promise is: to walk.

To walk with more gratitude and attention upon the earth, yes, but also to walk more widely and steadily. Too often, grand schemes for a better life keep me indoors planning and preparing, and the simple everyday tasks in front of me get left undone. Life becomes a series of excuses and promises that as soon as everything is planned and ready, as soon as my schedule is settled and the journey is plotted, then I will finally get moving… tomorrow, next week, next month, surely by next season.

But walking is simple. There is no need for elaborate planning or preparation, and so no excuse not to just get up and do it, here, now. So my resolution this year is to walk. Ten thousand steps a day, if I can. That will be more than three and a half million by the end of the year. With just a short stroll around the neighborhood after breakfast and another before dinner, I’ve already walked more than 10,000 steps each day for the past week and a half. But with 3.5 million steps ahead of me, it will be almost impossible for me to stay stuck in place. I will have to go out, to spend time exploring the world around me. But at animal-speed, at my-own-body-speed, not racing over the landscape in a car or a plane, worrying more about the destination than the process of the journey. I will walk, not run. I will hunt the here and now, steadily, patiently.

To walk with resolution into the future the way I walked into the darkness of the woods that night, open to all that is unplanned and unexpected that I will meet along the way. That is my hope. Fear and hope turn on the same tense music of uncertainty. That first walk on New Year’s Eve, Sirius Night, was the beginning. The first steps in the journey of the coming year.

Her siblings all sat quietly, listening intently to the more-grown-up-than-usual conversation, and her voice carried a weight of anxiety in the silence.

“This is going to be one of those Princess Bride moments,” I told her. “I’m going to let you know that the giant screeching eels don’t eat you. I’m telling you now because you look nervous.”

“Okay…” She laughed uncertainly. Over the past few months, we’d been talking a lot during our dinner conversations about the #Occupy protests and why people were angry and what might happen during the up-coming election and what the consequences might be. We’re not exactly conspiracy theorists in our household, but we do tend to take the long, cynical view of history and the kids know the rise and fall of empires is about as inevitable as the turning seasons of the year that we celebrate through ritual and storytelling. These are kids who’ve been through a divorce and more than a couple big moves, who’ve left friends behind and changed schools…. They’re kids who know firsthand that nothing lasts forever.

“Okay,” I said. “So, if the government ever collapsed, your job would be to be a good person, to have hope and work hard and do your best to help make the world a better place. To love others and believe the best of people and do what you can to make your community safe and happy, to support and help those who are vulnerable and strive to always be kind, compassionate and fair. All right? That’s your job now, and that will always be your job, whether or not there’s a government. It might get a little harder, or it might get easier. But the really basic truths of life don’t change.”

“Yeah, okay, I know, but what would it be like?”

At which point there followed a half-hour impromptu lesson about the Cold War and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, how even as recently as when I was born everyone thought that the war would go on forever and that nuclear annihilation was just around the corner… and then one day, it all just kind of started to dissolve. And life continued. And for people on the ground, ordinary folks who don’t have a lot of political clout or financial power, the basic truths of life remained the same: have hope, work hard, strive for justice, cultivate compassion, love each other.

Part of me is still that eager, angry, old-before-her-time young person who balks at the ignorance and herd mentality of so many others, especially those in power. Who thinks that political relevance must be earned through a hard eye and a cynical sneer, a rough edge always ready to rub raw against the injustices of the world and wear them all away.

But more and more, there is another part of me waking to the world — a gentler person, who sees that justice and kindness are not coarse stones that we must polish through constant friction, but more like the clay we mold patiently with warm, wet hands.

I’m really pleased and honored to be able to announce that I am now officially the Wild Earth feature editor for Aontacht Magazine! It’s going to be a lot of fun joining the editorial and production team of such an awesome magazine, and I’m thrilled to have yet another excuse to work with writers in the Druid community who are “walking their talk” and connecting with the Earth and the natural world in authentic, creative ways — and of course, to do a bit of writing of my own!

My first contribution appears in the most recent issue of Aontacht, which you can download for free on the Druidic Dawn website. The piece is called “Seven Wonders of the Natural World – In Your Own Backyard,” and in it I share a little bit about the winners of the New7Wonders campaign and the themes of diversity, depth, balance and mystery that these exotic sites exemplify — plus, how we can discover those wonders of nature everywhere, not just in far-away places but also in our own neighborhoods and local landscapes.

There are also a lot of other great articles and features in this issue, including an excellent interview with New Zealand Druid Pamela Meekings-Stewart, and a fascinating exploration of the traditional four directions and their correspondences by Simon Danser, who takes a whole new approach and even manages to work in some theoretical physics. There’s also some poetry, a few book reviews, an article on the historical significance of mistletoe and a cool overview of therapeutic uses for lavender essential oil.

And yes, it’s totally free, thanks to the generosity and support of members of Druidic Dawn, the non-profit organization that sponsors the magazine. You can view the most recent issue of Aontacht Magazine on their website, or download it as a high-quality .pdf file (6.73 MB). (There’s also an archive page where you can find all of Aontacht‘s past issues, going all the way back to 2008.)

The word “aontach” (pronounced AYN-tahkht) comes from Irish gaelic and means “unity,” and Aontacht Magazine focuses on Celtic and Druid spiritual traditions all over the world, guided by their motto: “creating unity through community.” In his annual review, OBOD’s chief Philip Carr-Gomm described Aontacht as the most active online Druid magazine out there, and the magazine has a broad readership base that include many different orders and organizations in both the northern and southern hemispheres. It also embraces an interfaith approach that welcomes articles on Celtic polytheism, Celtic Reconstructionism, Revival and Neopagan Druidry, and Celtic Christianity too.

Aontacht Magazine comes out four times a year, on the solstices and equinoxes, and each issue has a theme. This past issue’s theme was “Storytelling” — and we’re currently looking for submissions for the next issue inspired by the theme “Sacred Places.” As the Wild Earth feature editor, part of my job is finding quality essays and articles from other writers that explore the overlap of Celtic spirituality and earth-centered consciousness.

So if you’re a Druid or Celtic polytheist, consider this a call for submissions! There’s more information in Aontacht‘s submission guidelines, and you can email submissions to aontacht@druidicdawn.org. Make sure you mention in your email if you would like your piece considered for the Wild Earth feature.

And hey, if you’re not a Celtic polytheist or Druid but you still want to share your insights and experiences about walking an earth-centered Pagan path, don’t forget that I’m still the editor and blog administrator of No Unsacred Place, a project of the Pagan Newswire Collective! You can send guest post submissions for NUP my way by checking out the submission guidelines and emailing nature@pagannewswirecollective.com.

It’s become a winter solstice tradition at our house to wake before sunrise on the morning after the longest night and head down to the local park where we climb the highest hill and greet the new sun with songs and offerings. My husband’s four kids are with us for the week, and we spend hours in the days leading up to Alban Arthuan preparing for our dawn celebration, rehearsing songs like They Might Be Giants’ “Why Does the Sun Shine?” and making birdseed ornaments and other animal-friendly decorations to leave as offerings to the land spirits in the local woods.

This year, we’ll be spending the winter solstice with my parents in Lancaster, and instead of my husband and I attending Christmas Midnight Mass at my father’s church, my parents will be rising at dawn with us and the kids and tramping out to the woods to join in with our Pagan celebrations. The kids are extra excited to be spending their first solstice with their new step-grandparents, and we’ve been working extra hard this week to make sure we have all of our gifts to each other and to the gods ready to go.

For some fun, quick recipes for birdseed ornaments and biodegradable dough crafts, check out the full article.