Happy belated Imbolc
Happy belated Imbolc! I’m normally a bit more timely in marking my holidays, but this has been a busy week for me. This week I moved to…
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The great Christmas letdown–consequences of a perverse marriage between spirituality and commerce
It’s fitting that both the day after Christmas and the day after New Year’s fall on a Tuesday this year. Tuesday is an appropriate day to wake…
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The promise of the Winter Solstice
Modern humans in the Christian-dominated Western world have loaded all of their spiritual celebration energy into the months between Thanksgiving and Christmas This can make December in…
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Recreating a tattoo from the “Siberian Ice Maiden?” I’m not so sure about that.
There has been a lot of buzz about the frozen body of a 2,500 year old Pazyryk woman, known popularly as the “Siberian Ice Maiden.” She was…
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The Samhain celebrated by the ancient Irish and Scottish
Let us welcome the Irish and Scottish fire holiday of Samhain! Forms of this ancient Celtic festival have spread around the world, particularly with Halloween. Such popularity…
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Wheel of the Year criticisms peak at Autumn Equinox
Due to a rather strange set of circumstances, Wheel of the Year criticisms are now part and parcel of the Autumn Equinox tradition. And I’m all for…
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Lammas is not Lughnasadh
Preparing for a semi-public Lughnasadh ritual that I’m leading motivated me to dive deeper into the holiday and its origins. I wanted to ensure that I accurately…
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Celebrating the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere
The day that gives the Earth the longest daytime in the Northern Hemisphere and the longest nighttime in the Southern Hemisphere goes by many names. In the…
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Celtic erasure and how my fellow Pagans often unwittingly contribute to it
Up until recently, I wouldn’t have considered using the phrase “Celtic erasure.” Certainly, growing up in Chicago, “Celtic” was everywhere. St. Patrick’s Day—at least the Chicago-several-generations-removed-from-Ireland version—was…
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Bealtainn calling January: How my Scottish heritage charmed me back to Paganism
I hit a wall on January 8, 2020, but maybe that was the best thing to happen to me in a long time. I was burned out…