Despite the beauty of Popham Beach, Beltane On The Beach is at its core about the Pagan community in Maine. Over the years there have been countless weddings, handfastings, initiations, rights of passage, and other rituals to be witnessed by the community, in addition to the Beltane traditions of the Maypole Dancing. Read more
So it is on this Earth Day that I recall that early enthusiasm, with the real world just outside the door, just off the gravel road, just behind a neighbor’s house, just in that stand of trees. Challenges await, but today I celebrate. Read more
Mud is a messy dialogue. It is the in-between state, the parley between earth & water, ground & sky, inside & outside, soft & hard, firm & fluid. Mud season in Maine looks both backward and forward. Read more
For many of us, there is no choice but to re-dream the magickal practices that we will follow and that we will teach to others. We can do so in an airy way with no grounding, and our practice will be as thin as the work we put behind it, or we can use the power of aspects of our own culture -- of Western science and nature studies along side myth and legend from our ancestors -- to provide us with some of the tools we use for that re-dreaming. By tying your religious practice to a daily devotional activity of meeting your non-human neighbors through guides, your sit spot and nature walks, you can find that "advanced" knowledge you have been hungering for. Read more
It’s a system that has died, been reborn, is on life support and is completely managed by man, so what am I finding? Read more
There are many of us who would like nothing more than to live a subsistence lifestyle. We would like to be able to live light on the land, in partnership with the Earth and the other creatures we share Her with. Unfortunately, there is a deep and unavoidable problem with that lifestyle, and we can’t reconcile the life we want with the life we find that we must live. Read more
It’s not all silliness and Florida Man har hars. Think drug cartels, murders for hire, the Seminole wars, a young Andrew Jackson cutting his genocidal teeth, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Read more
If we extend the metaphor further, then not only did St. Patrick (and by extension, Christianity) drive the Druids and Pagans from Ireland, but also he drove Truth and the wisdom of mind-expansion from Ireland. Anybody want a green beer yet? Read more
Last weekend the US entered Daylight Savings Time. This is always a moment of great grumbling as people lose an hour of sleep to the clock change. Facebook posts pop up with anti-Daylight-Savings memes of various types. This one in particular had led me to think a lot about the nature of the day and this tradition of Daylight Savings. On the one hand it is completely true that moving the clock has no effect on the length of the... Read more
When I was growing up, the native people of the land where I lived were invisible to me. They were represented by museum displays as curiosities of the past. They were described as a subject for study by archaeologists. I never even realized that there were still Ohlone people living in the area. Read more
A Sense of Place
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