Loving Nature in Tornado Season

May 16, 2013 By 3 Comments
the desert is beautiful - and unforgiving

One of the most useful – and most difficult – skills in life is to learn to see things as they really are, unvarnished by either fear or wishful thinking. As children we learn that if we go out in the rain we will get wet but we won’t melt. We learn that our homework won’t do itself. We learn there are no monsters under our beds, though sadly we learn there are sometimes monsters in other places. The wider we can expand this practice of seeing things as they really are the better we can … [Read more...]

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What Do You Value?

May 14, 2013 By 5 Comments
the pyramid that was destroyed was much smaller than this one, but it was far older

Last week a 2300 year old Mayan pyramid in Belize was destroyed by a construction company who wanted the material for road fill. Here’s a link to a story on CNN and another to a story by the AP on the Washington Post that has pictures. Although this pyramid was on private land, Belize law prohibits destroying ancient structures. But the material used by the Mayans is both high-quality and easy to get. Jaime Awe, Director of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, said “these guys knew … [Read more...]

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Nature Religion?

May 12, 2013 By 22 Comments
sacred

Is Paganism a Nature religion? Should it be? The topic comes up periodically and recently we’ve had some thought-provoking and comment-inspiring essays, including this one from Sam Webster and this one from Gus diZerega. I’ve given up trying to define Paganism – that’s an impossible task. But in this big tent, there are Pagans who explicitly worship Nature as God/dess, Pagans who include Nature in their worship, and Pagans for whom Nature is at best secondary to their worship of the … [Read more...]

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Farewell Sookie Stackhouse

May 10, 2013 By 5 Comments
deadeverafter

there are no spoilers in this review, although it discusses Dead Ever After in general terms I’ve always loved supernatural fiction. From the classics of Stoker and Shelley to the early work of Anne Rice to the more recent urban fantasy, if a book had vampires and werewolves and magic in it I wanted to read it. Over the past few years my fiction-reading time has become rather limited, but I’ve always made time for new Sookie Stackhouse books. Sookie Stackhouse is a telepathic waitress … [Read more...]

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The Ethics of Seership

May 8, 2013 By 8 Comments
Oghams

Jason Pitzl-Waters at The Wild Hunt has a piece on the missing Ohio women who were rescued this week and the fact that noted psychic Sylvia Browne had told the mother of one of the missing women that her daughter was dead. Jason says: Were I in Browne’s position I would feel endlessly tormented over the people my predictions have hurt. I think incidents like this should call us collectively to examine how we practice, and in what contexts do we feel comfortable handing out predictions ... … [Read more...]

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Telling Their Stories

May 5, 2013 By 2 Comments
Denton CUUPS Beltane 2013 31

When I took my first vows of priesthood, one of the things I promised was to “tell your stories, both ancient and new, to all who wish to hear; so that the Old Gods may be worshipped once again.” So when Erin Kane and I both got the message that Morrigan wanted her stories told here and now, we started working on a way to do that at Beltane. Last night’s Denton CUUPS Beltane Circle was not your typical light-hearted celebration of fertility. We had a Maypole dance and a spiral dance, … [Read more...]

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Pagan Coming Out Day

May 2, 2013 By 11 Comments
PCOD

I hadn’t planned to write about Pagan Coming Out Day, which is today. I’m happy we have this day and I clearly see the importance of it, but I don’t have a lot of personal energy around it. I don’t hide who I am, but I don’t broadcast it, either... except in this strange on-line world where everyone broadcasts everything about themselves. I don’t like it when other people push their religion on me so I try not to push my religion on them. If you’re interested, just ask and … [Read more...]

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Truth and Meaning

April 30, 2013 By 17 Comments
yes, you can fly... but I still don’t recommend jumping

Over the past couple weeks I’ve seen a lot of comments on the nature of truth. Some say it’s objective and knowable, some say we can’t know it so why try, while others say it simply doesn’t exist. I’m an engineer, not a philosopher. But the English majors’ taunts of “barbarian engineer” haven’t been true in at least 25 years. This is an important topic and I want to explore it. If you want deep definitions, I’m including links to the Wikipedia pages, which are quite … [Read more...]

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Comments, Texas Pagan Events, and a Video

April 28, 2013 By Leave a Comment
beckett-header.jpg

I have a variety of short announcements to make, so I’m going to combine them into one post. Disqus Comments Patheos is transitioning all its blogs to the Disqus commenting software and Under the Ancient Oaks was transitioned this weekend. According to the Patheos Tech Wizards “the import fully completed except for nine interim comments made during the last few days, and it appears that all historical comments and new comments will now be available in Disqus. We have also imported the … [Read more...]

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Funeral for Toomer’s Oaks

April 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Two years ago a crazed Alabama football fan poisoned two 130-year-old oak trees on the campus of rival Auburn University. I blogged about it at the time, trying to explain the unbelievable passion college football inspires in the Southeast, and expressing my disgust at anyone who would kill something older than any living human for such a ridiculous reason. This saga is coming to a close. Last month Harvey Updyke pled guilty to “criminal damage to an agricultural facility,” which is a … [Read more...]

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