We didn't go to fast food restaurants when I was a kid. As a teen witch, I became a bit fixated on acquiring salt packets, but since my family didn't eat out, there weren't many opportunities to pick some up. By the time I was earning my own money and could choose to eat out, I was a vegetarian... this was before most major fast food restaurants had a veggie option on their menu. The books I was reading as a teen Pagan recommended carrying a portable ritual or magic kit with you. Since salt is so useful to Pagans--cleansing, protection, earth symbolism--magic-to-go supply lists would always i ..read more

Photo by Ian Lloyd (lloydi.com). 7. Everything possible about Hatshepsut’s temple... I love the podcast "99% Invisible" (who knew glass was so interesting?) and have frequently thought that I would listen to the host, Roman Mars, read the phone book. A recent episode - "The Smell of Concrete After Rain" - included a bit where Roman read some parts of a list called "Two Hundred Fifty Things An Architect Should Know", and I was completely charmed by it. I looked it up and read the rest of the list later, and though I didn't understand all of it, I was still taken by it even without Roman's lovel ..read more

Scheinwerfermann / CC BY-SA "In Defense of Seriousness": I think it's that religious experience for me is ABOUT connecting with the serious and solemn. it's about the both literal and figurative gravity of the world on which we live; it's about grappling with things that are so much bigger (and so much smaller) then I am. I invoke religious awe as a tool for experiencing the parts of my life that are beyond my direct experience - it's how I step outside myself and see that, far from being the center of the universe, I am a fragment of happenstance. For me it's a tool to center and ground myse ..read more

A socially distanced Beltane was necessary this year. Litha remains a question mark, particularly for my group full of people with health issues. I was in charge of our Beltane, so I tried to take the lessons learned by Jamie Robyn when she ran our virtual Ostara (her post about what she learned is here). I had a mouse so I didn't have to reach across the altar. I took out our usual group vocal responses. I had everything plugged in. The other thing I was interested in when writing a virtual Beltane is how virtual rituals could be better than in-person rituals. There are many ways in which th ..read more

Lessons from a Ritual in Virtual Space A guest post by Jamie Robyn Living through a global pandemic means that we are having to become creative in how we connect with one another. For Pagans, this means we are having to adapt our rituals, rituals that usually depend quite heavily on physical presence. As I was writing and preparing for our small group Ostara ritual, the outside world was changing quickly and drastically. By the time we actually could hold ritual, we were all in quarantine or self-isolation and we needed to come together virtually. Now, with the ritual done and a bit of time t ..read more

Strathcona Community Centre My puppy, Poppy, loves social distancing because she's scared of most everyone and everything. When we're walking, I know where the closest person is at any given time by the direction she's pulling. She's particularly frightened of group sports involving balls, automatic doors, people walking behind her, scooters, skateboards, groups of people standing on the sidewalk, and people who appear to be talking to themselves (including those on cell phones). The emptier streets and the cancellation of team sports at the fields near us are nice for her, though she still ge ..read more

Image from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; image is in the public domain. March 18: In the days since posting this, it has become clear that we must practice the most strict social distancing possible, which means that we must cancel all in-person rituals and events unless they are only with those we already live with. I'm leaving this post up because the thought exercises in it are still useful for other situations where minimizing contact is important, such as when someone in your group is immunocompromised. On an additional note, I know a lot of groups use a communal c ..read more

I tend to write rituals slowly. I think about it a lot first, contemplating themes and possible activities. There's a lot of research too, often with a lot of false starts... I still have a lot of notes about lichen from an Imbolc ritual that ended up going in a completely different direction. When the ritual starts to come together in my head, I open a copy of the most recent standard ritual format and start filling in the opening and closing first: the customization of the quarter calls and invocations. The actual writing of the centre section is relatively quick after that, but still can t ..read more

A fierce yawn from the last puppy still awake. One of the challenges of a religion without a central authority and professional clergy is that we are all responsible for our own spiritual health. Even when times are good or even just a regular level of stressful, that's a lot of responsibility to shoulder, but probably no more arduous than all the other responsibilities of adulthood: physical health, mental health, financial maintenance, work responsibilities, volunteering, home care, family care... adulting is a juggling act for almost everyone. The problems come when the going gets ..read more

"How would you describe something [something] that isn’t there [nothing]? ... the way they [the Indians] decided to represent the nothing was they took a little piece of nothing and they drew a circle around it, which turns the nothing into a something." 1 And thus zero was invented. The way we represent the sacred is we take a little piece of the world and draw a circle around it, which turns the ordinary of our living room or local park into sacred space. Nothing is always present - the void of our death looms - whether there is a zero or not. And the sacred is always present ..read more