5 Questions on Spiritual Practice

March 21, 2019 By John Beckett

Regular and consistent spiritual practice is the core of any religion. This is especially true of Paganism, which is a religion of doing rather than a religion of believing. In this month’s Conversations Under the Oaks, I got several good questions on spiritual practice and so I’m going to address them all here.

1. What are some good ways to have a daily Pagan spiritual practice?

The best way is to pick one thing and get started. Meditation, prayer, offerings, greeting the sun and the moon – pick one thing and then do it every day for three weeks.

Doing one thing every day is better than doing three things every other day and much better than doing five things whenever you decide you feel like doing it. Start small and build from there. If you miss a day, don’t beat yourself up, but do understand why you missed it and what you can do to not miss it next time.

After doing that one thing every day for three weeks straight, add something else. Continue this process until it feels right. The goal isn’t more – the goal is enough.

This post from 2016 on Beginning a Devotional Practice may be helpful.

2. How can one gauge what a specific deity might want in offerings, if there isn’t much information on what Their followers did in ancient times?

Particularly when you’re starting out, it’s important not to overthink this. Offerings of food and drink are near-universal in polytheist traditions. With some exceptions, if you like it and you would serve it to your human guests, Gods and spirits will find it acceptable.

As your practice deepens, and especially as your relationship with a particular deity or spirit grows, you’ll start to get an idea of what they prefer – and what they don’t. Talk to other devotees, and especially to priests and those who’ve done extensive work with them.

But mainly, make offerings, with whatever you have to offer.

3. I usually offer food stuff, so I clean off my altar within a couple of days and lay it by a tree. What if you wanted to offer something like a toy, that you can’t burn and it would be polluting to leave in nature? You would want to remove it from the altar some time to leave more offerings I would think. Throwing it away is terrible symbolically.

I completely agree that throwing away offerings is terrible. Offerings should never end up in the trash, or even in recycling (much of which ends up in landfills anyway). If you don’t know how to properly dispose of it, you should seriously consider whether or not it’s an acceptable offering.

Our ancestors often deposited offerings in bodies of water. I’ve done that before and will do it again, but throwing a manufactured item in a lake would probably be considered “dumping trash” rather than a sacred offering.

But our ancestors also buried offerings, sometimes ritually breaking them first to insure they couldn’t be used in this world again. That’s one of the ways we know something about what they offered – they were hidden in the ground, or preserved in a bog.

If I felt compelled to make an offering of something that couldn’t be burned and shouldn’t be deposited in water, I’d bury it.

Llyn Cerrig Bach, Anglesey, Wales – many valuable ancient offerings were found here while constructing an air field during World War II

4. Have you found a reason to work with specific non-deific spirits, i.e. the Dead or Landspirits?

Very much so. Both the ancestors (of blood and of spirit) and the spirits of the place where I am are part of my daily cycle of prayers. I make offerings to my ancestors weekly, sometimes collectively and sometimes to those whose names I know. I make offerings to them and to the land spirits as part of most rituals I do. It helps to stay in contact with the ancestors – our most accessible spiritual allies – and with the neighbors who share the land where I live.

I make offerings to the land spirits when I travel to new places – it seems polite to introduce myself. The laws of hospitality say visitors should not show up empty-handed if they can avoid it.

I especially work with them on matters where we have common cause: with the ancestors for healing for myself or for sick relatives; with the land spirits on environmental and weather concerns.

If by “specific” you mean named spirits, I’ve only done that with ancestors who either I knew in this life, or whose names I’ve been able to discover through mundane research. I can occasionally “see” individual land spirits, but I’ve never really been able to interact with them one on one.

5. Do in-laws count as ancestor spirits? One of my husband’s grandparents recently passed away, and I was thinking of including her in my ancestor interactions and offerings.

In my daily invocation of ancestors, I say “hail to my ancestors of blood and ancestors of spirit, you whose child I am and on whose foundations I build.” Ancestors are not just those whose DNA we carry – they’re also those whose practices and ideas live on in us. At the very least your grandmother-in-law helped make your husband who he is and he’s a huge part of your life, so she is your ancestor even if you never knew her. If you did know her, she’s even more your ancestor.

It is good and right – and necessary – to honor the recent dead. Our mainstream society tells us “funerals are for the living” and ignores what we need to do to tell our recently deceased loved ones that we will still love them, but that it’s OK for them to move on. It is good to make offerings to those who have died, to speak to them, and to remember them.

But it’s best if we give them some time before we start asking them for favors from the other side. They have a huge transition to make, and while time runs different in the Otherworld, it still exists. People who know more about these things than I do tell me it’s best to give someone at least two or three years before calling on them for anything other than messages of love and well-being.

7 Spiritual Practices for Difficult Times

May 23, 2017 By John Beckett

A few weeks ago, Morgan Daimler asked her Facebook friends “what’s your go-to for spiritual renewal during difficult or stressful times?” She got a lot of responses ranging from trite to powerful. I gave a generic answer (long walks outdoors) but also noted that the proper practice depends on the circumstances. “Difficult or stressful” can mean different things, which in turn require different approaches.

I’d like to expand on that. I’ve experienced my share of stress and difficulty over the years. I’ve tried a lot of things – some of them have worked and some of them haven’t. These are the things that have helped me.

The usual disclaimers apply: I’m a Druid and not a psychologist. Spiritual practice is no substitute for mental health care. If you have depression or other mental health issues, get professional help. But if you’re going through life’s ordinary difficulties (which often feel anything but ordinary) here are some suggestions.

Urgent stress

If your “fight or flight” instinct has been triggered, I recommend flight, at least at first. Reactive, aggressive responses are rarely helpful and often make things worse. Getting yourself away from the source of the stress lessens the urgency and gives you time to catch your breath and think clearly.

I’m not talking about a panic attack (which is out of my area of expertise) or an actual physical attack (which, depending on the circumstances, may require fighting). I’m talking about situations that feel demanding and oppressive, where you feel like a gun is pointed at your head even though it isn’t.

Go for a walk. Preferably in a wild or at least a green setting, but through the neighborhood will do. Don’t try to think, just walk. Get your blood flowing and your muscles working. Breathe. After a while your adrenaline levels will start to drop, and you can start to see things as they really are. That helps you think clearly as you try to figure out exactly what’s wrong and what’s your best course of action.

What if you can’t get up and go walk? What if the source of urgent stress is a sick child or some other emergency that requires your continuous presence? Step away mentally – go on a walk in your mind. Move your concentration to somewhere peaceful and restorative, then start working through things.

That’s not easy and it’s virtually impossible to do without practice… which reinforces the need for regular spiritual practice, day in and day out, even on those days when you’d rather not. Regular spiritual practice builds a foundation and a reserve we can draw on in times of need.

Overloads

You have 25 hours of work and only 24 hours in the day, and you really need to spend some of those hours sleeping (seriously – lack of sleep is a killer). A project has a deadline that’s rapidly approaching. You don’t know how you’re doing to get everything done that needs to be done.

Make a list. What all do you have to do? Look at it again – what do you have to do, and what can wait till later? What’s easy and can be cleared out of the way with little effort? What’s most important and deserves the bulk of your time? Start working the list and checking things off.

What can someone do to help you? All those times when people say “just let me know if I can do anything to help” – take them up on it. Your good friends don’t want to see you overloaded, and most will help if they can. But you have to ask them… and when the situation is reversed, be there for them.

Making a list doesn’t sound very spiritual to you? Haven’t you heard of the 42 Negative Confessions? The 12 Labors of Hercules? The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism? The Ten Commandments? Ever read the Mabinogi? Read Culhwch and Olwen and look at all the lists in the story. Making lists is a near-universal religious practice – put it to use in your life.

Despair

Things are bad and you can’t see how they’re ever going to get better. Intellectually, you know you’ll manage one way or another, but right now you can’t see that far ahead and you’re not in the mood to listen to anyone’s cold hard logic.

Pray and make offerings. You can’t control how you feel, but you can control what you do – and it is always good to worship the Gods. Giving to Them reminds us that there’s something bigger than ourselves. And giving promotes reciprocity: we give to Them and trust that They will give to us.

Give thanks for what you have, even if you don’t feel very thankful right now. Speak the yearnings of your heart, even if they’re clouded with pain. Don’t know what to say? Find an ancient prayer to recite, or perhaps a modern one.

Pour libations and make food offerings. Making offerings in a fire is a powerful act at any time. If it’s part of your tradition and appropriate for the deities you’re approaching, make your offerings to the Gods, and then after a suitable period of time, revert the offerings and consume the now-sanctified food and drink. As you eat and drink, you ingest the blessings of the Gods.

Difficult decisions

Should you move to another state for work or should you keep trying to find something where you are? Should you go back to school or would your time and money be better spent elsewhere? Should you say yes to the Goddess who wants an oath from you, or are you better off unencumbered?

Long walks outdoors, making lists, and prayer and offerings are helpful here too. But there is one spiritual practice especially suited for this difficult situation.

Divination. Tarot, runes, scrying – pick your favorite method. Divination can’t make your decision for you, but it can show you where a particular path will take you and what things will be like when you get there. Does that place sound good? Keep going down that path. Not really what you wanted? Better make some changes before it’s too late.

Divination will show you things you aren’t seeing, whether those things are hidden from you or whether you’re just not paying attention. Divination allows you to ask questions of Gods and spirits and many times, to get answers that are more specific than you might think.

Divine for yourself if you can, pay an experienced diviner if you can’t – or if you just want an objective reading. Regardless of who does the divination, making difficult decisions is easier when you’re forewarned.

Hard situations

Your financial situation is difficult and getting worse. Your job is creating dangerous levels of stress. You need a better place to live. You have dealings with a court and you need justice.

There are numerous mundane actions you can take to make a hard situation better, and sooner or later you’ll need to take some of them. But sometimes things are so hard you can’t figure out where to start, and even if you could you’d never get there on your own.

Sigil magic. Any magical system can help – sigil magic is my favorite. It’s simple and flexible, and it doesn’t require a lot of expensive and hard to find ingredients. Most importantly, it’s fast – you can create and fire sigils, see the results (after an appropriate time, of course), make adjustments, and then create and fire some more.

The Chaos Protocols by Gordon White is the best reference for learning sigil magic. If you don’t want to buy the book, read Gordon’s Rune Soup blog post Sigils Reboot: How To Get Big Magic From Little Squiggles.

“Magic is always the tactic of last resort for those who refuse to give up hope. You do not summon Cthulhu to help you find the TV remote.” – Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols

Aimlessness

Your magic doesn’t feel very magical anymore. Your spiritual practice used to be a source of power – now it’s just work. You feel like you should be doing something more, but you don’t have a clue what that would be. You’re not hurting, but you’re stuck.

Call it a plateau, call it the doldrums, call it aimlessness. It’s not a horrible place to be, but you don’t want to spend any more time here than you have to. There are two practices to recommend in this situation. They’re very different on the surface, but they bring similar results: rewiring the way you think.

Meditation. I often eschew Buddhist-style “empty your mind” meditation in favor of meditation focused on Gods or spirits, or on ideas. But this is a situation where mindfulness meditation is very helpful. Focus on your breathing, or on a candle flame. If thoughts pop into your head, acknowledge them, let them go, and return to your breathing. Just sit. The physical and psychological benefits of meditation are clear – the spiritual benefits can be every bit as dramatic.

Mystical experiences. “One of these things is not like the others…” All the other practices in this post are things you can just do. They may work quickly or slowly, but if you do the work you’ll get the results. Mystical experiences cannot be commanded. They happen in their own time, or not at all. But there is nothing – nothing – as effective for getting you off a plateau than the first-hand experience of a God, a spirit, or the immensities of Nature.

Fortunately, while we cannot force them to happen, there are things we can to do make them more likely to happen.

Build a foundation of regular devotion. Do the necessary prep work. Do your rituals in wild places and in dark places. Be patient, but be persistent. Be open to the workings of the Gods, and be receptive to Their call.

These are the spiritual practices that work for me in difficult times. They won’t prevent bad things from happening – nothing will do that. They don’t keep me from getting upset or stressed or stuck. But they help me regain my center faster and they help me respond to difficult times in the ways I want to respond.

Spiritual Practice Techniques: Walking

November 26, 2010 By John Beckett

This is the fifth in an occasional series on spiritual practice techniques.

One of the primary purposes of spiritual practice is to develop balance and wholeness. Your body needs this practice every bit as much as your mind. Any form of exercise can be a spiritual practice, and some physical exercises are explicitly spiritual, such as yoga and Qigong.

But for me, the simplest exercise is the best – walking. The health benefits are large and well-known, and as Pagans who see the body as part of the whole person and not as something to be transcended, anything that makes us physically healthier improves our overall spiritual health.

Like so many of us, I spend most of my time indoors. There are weeks when it seems like the only time I’m outside is when I’m going from the car to work and back again. Walking gets me outside and lets me breathe fresh, unconditioned air. I can see and feel the seasons: the heat of Summer, the cold of Winter, the flowering of Spring, and the coloring of Fall.

I do most of my exercising in the early mornings, before work. Much of that is walking, and since I’m outside at about the same time every day, it’s easy to follow the progression of the Sun through the year and the progression of the Moon through the month.

Leave the iPod at home. Part of that is a safety issue – you need to be able to hear on-coming runners, bicycles and cars. But you also need to be able to hear birds and crickets, squirrels and rabbits.

There are times when I need to listen to the natural world, and there are times when I need to sort through things. I do my best thinking, writing, and problem solving while walking. Even when I’m indoors and don’t have time for a “real” walk, if I’m working on a difficult problem I find myself getting up and walking, even if it’s just pacing back and forth across the room.

There are treadmills at the fitness center where I work, and I’ll use them if the weather is just too inhospitable to go outside. The physical benefits are still there, but I don’t get anywhere near the spiritual benefits as I do from an outdoors walk. I have to admit I’ve gotten a bit wimpy here – back when I was running the only thing that kept me indoors was lightning. There’s a Swedish saying that “there is no bad weather, only bad clothes.” It’s true.

Walking in a forest or a park is nice, but even a walk around the block can be inspiring. Life is everywhere: ornamental trees, grass pushing up through cracks in the sidewalk, insects on the ground and in the air – even the most desolate city can speak to you, if you’ll open your eyes and ears.

If you’ve ever engaged in regular physical exercise this probably sounds familiar. If you haven’t, give it a try. You don’t need any special equipment (aside from a good pair of shoes) or any special training. Just go outside and go for a walk – and let Nature speak to you.

Spiritual Practice Techniques: Devotional Reading and Listening

October 10, 2010 By John Beckett

This is the fourth in an occasional series on spiritual practice techniques.

Devotional reading is intended to help keep your mind and your heart focused on matters of Ultimate importance.

It is not intended for education, although you will certainly learn when you do it. It is not intended as worship, although it will move you to worship. It will not make the world a better place, although you will be inspired to work for peace and justice and sustainability.

Read the Bible every day and the words of Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, and Paul will be with you constantly. Read the Quran every day and Muhammad will speak to you. The principle is the same no matter what your religion. How many people do you know who pour over the pages of Entertainment Weekly and never miss an episode of TMZ? They keep the world of celebrities constantly on their minds and in their hearts. Surely we can show the same level of dedication to our faith.

Unitarian Universalists have many choices, including the Bible. You can go a long way with the basics – the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Channing. Blogger Boston Unitarian offers regular excerpts from the Unitarians of the 19th century – you could do far worse than to use his blog for your daily readings. If you prefer East to West or contemporary to classic, try Thich Nhat Hanh.

For Pagans the obvious choices are the myths and lore from which we get much of our knowledge of our gods and goddesses. The Norse Edda, the Welsh Mabinogion, and the Greek and Roman classic mythologies all make good devotional reading. Yes, the Mabinogion was Christianized by the monks who first wrote it down, but re-Paganizing it as you read isn’t difficult. The same holds true for the Arthurian legends.

Don’t overlook contemporary fiction. I came across Within The Hollow Hills (1994 – edited by John Matthews) in a used book store earlier this year and found it to be as good at centering and focusing my attention as any of the ancient works.

There is a ton of magical fiction on the market in the Urban Fantasy genre. I find much of it enjoyable – some of it actually approaches devotional status. The question (that only you can answer for yourself) is whether a particular book or author or series motivates you to do things that actually help your practice (such as meditating or doing spell work or energy work), or whether it’s just magical porn.

I’ve come late to the world of podcasting, but there are many good Pagan podcasts and several of them make for good devotional listening. Thorn Coyle’s Elemental Castings and OBOD/Damh the Bard’s DruidCast are my favorites. TommyElf’s From the Edge of the Circle is thought-provoking, and while Shhh! There are Pagans in Texas! hasn’t reached devotional status yet, I listen to it regularly for the community connections in the DFW area. I should also mention the CUUPS Podcast, with the disclosure that my Spiritual Practice Seminar was the main content of Episode 8.

Choose carefully, though – I’ve come across quite a few Pagan podcasts that remind me of morning drive radio shows. You don’t have to be serious all the time, but I didn’t like juvenile humor when I was a juvenile. If you like that you’re welcome to it, but don’t expect it to provide the benefits of deeper, more spiritual material.

Listening to music can be very devotional – my Baptist father used to sing hymns virtually non-stop. Fortunately, the quality of Pagan music is finally catching up with its enthusiasm. My current favorites are Damh the Bard for traditional folk/acoustic, Wendy Rule for meditative/ethereal, and Pandemonaeon for what they call “folk metal” and I call good Pagan rock.

There are many many options for devotional reading and listening. Find something that appeals to you, something that reminds you of your connection to the Divine, to our ancestors, to the natural world, and to all of Life. And then make it a daily part of your life.

Spiritual Practice Techniques: Writing

September 24, 2010 By John Beckett

at the computer in Indiana — *Writing at the computer, circa 1996 – one of the darker periods of my life. Writing helped get me through a difficult time.*

This is the third in an occasional series on spiritual practice techniques.

I have practiced writing as a spiritual discipline for most of my life, far longer than I’ve been a Pagan or a Unitarian Universalist. I think this is the engineer in me coming through: I had issues to deal with or religious questions to consider and my first impulse was to define the problem as clearly and objectively as I could. It helped – some times more than others – but it always helped.

Writing as a spiritual practice serves three main purposes.

Writing promotes objectivity. Our daily lives are filled with emotions and emotional reactions. This is a good thing – we are humans, not Vulcans. But many factors can influence how we feel about a given issue: what we were taught as children, old beliefs we haven’t quite overcome, stress at work or at home, even things as mundane as what we had for dinner last night. Writing forces us to distill all those feelings into a few words. Once those words are on paper, they are no longer completely within us – we can evaluate them with more detachment. It becomes easier to realize that what we think is the problem may only be a symptom of a deeper problem. Once we recognize the root cause or the core issue, we can address it directly instead of constantly dealing with symptoms.

Writing provides records. In elementary school science class I was taught that scientists keep journals of all their experiments – the experimental hypothesis, elements, methods, test conditions, and results. Your life is an on-going experiment of one. Regular writing generates records of what you did, how it worked, and how you felt about it. There are many times when I face a problem I know I’ve faced before. I can go back to my writings and see what I did in similar situations. Sometimes that tells me what I can do this time, other times it tells me what I shouldn’t do. Memories are very fallible – don’t count on remembering everything.

There are times when I really wish I had found this spiritual path much earlier in life. But then I read some of the stuff I wrote in my 20s and early 30s and I realize I wasn’t ready for it – I had to go down a lot of dead end streets before I was able to understand and accept that what I was yearning for wasn’t what society was telling me I “should” want. Sometimes you don’t appreciate how far you’ve come till you stop and look back at where you used to be.

Writing promotes discipline. Unlike eating and sleeping and sex, there is no evolutionary urge for spiritual practice. There are so many demands on our time – we have to make time for doing the things that align us with our highest goals and beliefs. We can neglect to meditate day after day and think it’s been a week when it’s really been a month. But with writing, it’s all there – quite literally – in black and white. The discipline we develop in this practice will carry over and help us in other techniques and practices.

Keeping this blog has been a tremendous discipline for me. I know that if I don’t get something up at least once or twice a week, many of you folks will quit reading. So I’m more regular with my writing than I ever was before.

How should we write? My essays end up on the blog, while I keep my more personal notes in a plain text file – that makes it easy to keep copies at home and at work, and to search when I can remember “what” but not “when.” In the years BC (Before Computers) I wrote things out on notebook paper and stuffed them in a manila folder. In the Spiritual Practice workshop at Pagan Pride Day a participant said that physically writing on paper was a magical act for him.

Whether you write longhand in a leather-bound diary or type into a word processor or anything in between, the important thing is that you write regularly – at least a couple times a week.

Twitter and Facebook don’t count – they’re too brief and mostly too shallow.

If you aren’t already keeping a diary or journal, start. If you struggling with decisions or directions or beliefs, try writing through them. And look back every so often to see just how far you’ve come.

Daily Spiritual Practice

September 22, 2010 By John Beckett

David Pollard of Sacred Journey Fellowship recorded my Daily Spiritual Practice presentation at the North Texas Pagan Pride Day on September 11. Now it’s part of this month’s CUUPS Podcast. If you haven’t made it to any of these classes, here’s your chance to catch up from the convenience of your own computer.

You can download CUUPS Podcast #8 directly here. The on-site player is playing #6 for some reason – you’ll have to download it and play it on your own. Or you can get it from iTunes – search for “CUUPS Podcast.”

Happy Equinox!

Spiritual Practice Techniques: Prayer

September 10, 2010 By John Beckett

This is the second in an occasional series on spiritual practice techniques, and will be part of my presentation tomorrow at the DFW Pagan Pride Day.

The practice of prayer has somewhat of a uneven reputation in the Unitarian Universalist and Pagan communities. Some of us doubt the efficacy of prayer. Others have been turned off by supposedly spiritual people whose prayers resemble the Christmas list of a four-year-old, by those who pray for the harm of their political opponents, and by those who pray only when they find themselves in trouble.

Most of these are criticisms not of prayer itself but of how we choose to pray. There are at least three forms of prayer that are always valid and always helpful in our attempts to develop a deeper spiritual practice and a more meaningful life.

The first is the expression of gratitude. The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said “If the only prayer you said in your entire life was ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” Those of us who honor the Goddess and God know who we’re thanking, but even the non-theists among us recognize that we enjoy much we did not earn. Offering our gratitude reminds us we owe much to our families and communities, to our ancestors and predecessors, to those who grow our food and to the natural world in which we all live and breathe. It also reminds us to “count our blessings” and to recognize that no matter how difficult any given day may have been, we still enjoy much. It did not have to be this way, but it is, and for that we can be thankful.

The second is the expression of devotion. I like Isaac Bonewits’ comparison of the gods and goddesses of our ancestors to our aunts and uncles: if we talk to them on a regular basis they’re more likely to help us out when we’re in a bind than if we ignore them for weeks and months and only pray to them when we want something. And like our human aunts and uncles, there are some deities we simply like being around and like talking to. But again, you need not be a polytheist – or a theist of any kind – to express your love for that which is greater than we are: justice, compassion, truth, and life itself.

The third is the expression of the desires of our hearts. What do you want most in life? What will truly bring you satisfaction? If you really think – meditate, contemplate – about what is most important to you, then the “Goddess gimme” prayers will fall away and will be replaced by matters of ultimate importance.

Prayer has been an important and fulfilling spiritual practice for thousands of years. Don’t let some people’s bad examples keep you from incorporating it into your own practice.

Spiritual Practice Techniques: Following the Sun and Moon

August 30, 2010 By John Beckett

Sunset over Chickamauga Lake in Tennessee

This will be the first in an occasional series on spiritual practice techniques. It’s flowing out of the spiritual practice workshop I led at this year’s Druid Gorsedd and the Intermediate Pagan Practice class Cynthia and I led this past weekend. I’ll be repeating the workshop at the DFW Pagan Pride Day on September 11.

I used to be a runner. Injuries and weight gain (a chicken-or-egg thing) forced me to stop several years ago, but I’ve maintained the practice of exercising early in the mornings before work. As a result, I’m outside at about the same time several times a week. This makes it easy to follow the Sun and the Moon as they move through the seasons and through the year.

As children we learn that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. But not exactly – it only rises in due East (90° on the horizon) and sets in due West (270° on the horizon) at the Equinoxes. At the Summer Solstice it rises toward the North: 61° where I live. In higher latitudes it’s even further towards the North: 47° in Dublin, Ireland. In the Winter the opposite is true – the Sun rises toward the South. And the Sun rises earlier in the Summer and later in the Winter. Here in Texas that’s only noticeable for the weeks on either side of the Solstices, but again in higher latitudes the changes are far more pronounced.

This is elementary-grade science, and I’m sure I was taught this in school at one point or another. But until I started watching the Sun rise and set every day, I didn’t connect with it. Once I did, I began to do a better job of connecting to the rest of Nature, and of understanding the significance of Stonehenge, Newgrange and other ancient sites oriented toward the skies.

Following the Moon is even more dramatic. It rises about 50 minutes later every day and its face changes noticeably through the month. Plus the point at which it rises and sets moves from North to South and back again like the Sun, but instead of taking a year to complete the cycle, it does it during the month.

The Full Moon is amazing but so are other phases: there’s Diana’s Bow, the sliver of a crescent that first appears just after sunset at the New Moon. There’s the pregnant waxing gibbous, growing toward fullness. Yesterday as I drove West to church I had the waning gibbous Moon in my vision for most of the trip. And the waning crescents (just before Sunrise) around the Equinoxes produce the Horns of the Moon.

I’ve heard it said that Pagans should never need an almanac (or a computer) to know when and where the Sun and Moon will be on any given day – we should feel it in our souls. That statement strikes me as just a little Earthier-than-thou, and it’s certainly easier to keep up with them if you live in a place where the skies are usually clear, but following the Sun and Moon is one of the simplest and most effective ways to stay connected with Nature.

To begin a Pagan spiritual practice, go outside and look up!