Spiritual Mania

Okay, I have to tell you.  I am going crazy.  Since I started this blog, I have been trying to keep myself from blogging several times a day.  I’m trying to space out my posts, so I don’t get burnt out and then ignore the blog for months like so many I see out there.  But the fact is that right now, I am going through some kind of spiritual manic phase.  I’ve decided that it coincides with the time of the year.

I celebrate the stations on the wheel of the year (I don’t like the term “sabbat”) one station later than other Neopagans.  This is because of the seasonal lag here where I live with the Midwest.  This means that the hottest day of the year is not the solstice in June, but closer to the traditional date for Lughnasadh.  And nothing is being harvested August 1st here.  That comes later, around the autumn equinox.  And so on.  So, what this means is that my Lughnasadh rite looks like a summer solstice rite, not a harvest rite.

I call it the “Burning Tide”.  I commemorate the climax of the consummation of the union of the Oak King and the Summer Queen, the immolation of the Oak King (his le petite morte, if you will), and the beginning of the decline of the Oak King.  Well, I feel like I am headed rapidly toward my own spiritual climax.

I’m going to be celebrating the Burning Tide with my family here in about a week and a half and my mind is buzzing with ideas.

First of all, I renamed the blog and decided to change the URLs too.  Since I only had a half dozen posts, I just cut and pasted them below along with the dates of the original posts.  I explained the new name in my last post.  And I know I promised to talk about the ADF ritual in the next post, but there is so much I want to talk about:

1.  I want to explain why I originally named the blog Temple of the Earth Mother.  It seems like an inconspicuous pagan name, but it was unique for reasons I will explain in a future post.

2.  I want to talk about the ADF ritual I went to last Sunday, on the heels of the Neo-Wiccan ritual with Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone.

3.  I want to share with my rapidly growing spiritual bucket list.

4.  I want to talk about nudity and the experience I recently had at Pagan Spirit Gathering with this.

5.  I want to talk about this idea of gods as discrete beings that seems to be on the rise in Paganism, and idea of patron deities.

6.  I want to share with you my ideas about ritual creation and what I learned from Steve Posch at PSG.

7.  I want to talk about my family Burning Tide ritual (afterwards).

8.  I want to talk more about silence, especially silence in nature.

9.  I want to talk about involving ancestors in my spirituality.

10.  And I want to share with you my plans to do a descensus averni ritual starting tomorrow.

See, I wasn’t kidding about the mania.  Since the last one is the most urgent, I am going to talk about that in my next post.