Archive for the ‘Spirit’ Category

Patrick McCollum’s Fight For Your Religious Rights

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

Patrick McCollum’s legal challenge against the State of California may sound like it just concerns the religious freedom of prisoners, but make no mistake: the outcome of his case will affect every one of us, and determine whether our Constitutional right to freedom of religion is conditional or absolute.
There have been several great articles written [...]

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5th Annual Brigid Poetry Festival

Friday, January 29th, 2010

I had to go back to this post to find the earliest reference (Reya’s original blog post is lost in the mists) to the now annual Silent Poetry Reading in honor of Brigid (Saint or Goddess, as you prefer). And while the first invitation was for a single day’s blogging event, watching the misty full moon tonight [...]

How To Stir a Pot

Friday, December 25th, 2009

One summer in the beginning of the Aughts, I spent an amazing week in Somerset with Donald Engstrom and Sharon Jackson. That is to say, the weather was amazing, the countryside amazing too, the company was fabulous, and the spot we were staying in was perfectly lovely. Our job, on the other hand, was thankless, [...]

Getting Ready…

Monday, December 21st, 2009

We’re all about holidays in this house: Solstice, birthdays, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve, and Hangover (New Year’s) Day. It’s all good, and all cause to light the house with shiny, colorful things.

Yesterday we headed to Deborah Oak’s place in San Francisco to celebrate the Solstice with old friends and great food. John Sulak [...]

Sit Down and Be Counted!

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

One of the most interesting studies to come out in the past decade is Voices from the Pagan Census. The book is based on surveys that were circulated from 1993 to 1995, by hand and via magazines and newsletters, but also through the new communications tool called the “internet.” I remember coming across several copies, [...]

Elders, Revisited

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

It has been over two years since my first post about elders. And now, handily, Brendan Myers has posted a lovely article on the same topic over at the Wild Hunt blog. Not only that, but he’s also taken up the issue of what to do when you have no elders around to learn from. [...]

Half Empty, Half Full

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

It has been a very lean summer. Everyone is cutting back, stores are closing, and I don’t know anyone who takes their job (if they still have one) for granted. Those of us who are self-employed continue to blog, network, write our books, and drum up gigs wherever we can. We are all caught up [...]

Terrorism in America

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Newt Gingrich’s recent comments to a right-wing religious audience that “We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism” have been getting lots of coverage, and rightly so. What worries me more, however, are his comments immediately before and after the “paganism” line: that the ACLU is a “hateful, anti-religious system” aimed [...]

Diving Deep and Surfacing

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Oh, it has been a long time since I last posted—my apologies to regular readers who were hoping for a little more blogging between the end of April and the beginning of June. I had to take time out to host another wonderful May Day party, my 20th year of doing so in Sonoma County, [...]

Living La Vida Virtuosa

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

That’s “the virtuous life,” for those of you like me who are not proficient in Spanish. The subject has been on my mind lately as I finish reading Brendan Myers’s recent book The Other Side of Virtue. It has taken me a long time, partly because it is a new subject for me. Paganism as [...]