Today I’m very excited to announce the upcoming release of my new book: Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Approaches for Healing the Earth.  The book is now available for preorder and will be released on March 28, 2024 from Shiffer/REDFeather (the same publisher who released my other two books: the award-winning Sacred Actions and the Sacred Actions Journal). Today, I offer a sneak peek of my new book–and I wanted to share it with my blog readers first. If you like my work and want to support me, please consider pre-ordering the book and sharing it with your friends and on ..read more

As we’ve been exploring on this blog, for many of us, life is more than a bit overwhelming right now. Many of us are feeling beyond capacity from multiple angles: the breakdown of the social fabric and increasing social and political challenges, war on multiple fronts, environmental crisis, increased work demands, health challenges, finances, and hyperinflation–you name it.  I’ve been sharing some perspectives here on the Druid’s Garden recently in my posts about straddling the edge and straddling the edge post II, where many of us have shared how difficult it is right now to find balance ..read more

As we’ve been exploring in my post last week–a new paradigm is rising, a paradigm being enacted in backyards, home kitchens, community gardens, clubs, mushroom clubs, herbalism schools, ecovillages, pigment foragers, and thousands of other places. This is a new paradigm that will help us restore connection with humans and the land and approach the earth with care, reverence, and respect. This paradigm is emerging as a counter-response to the current paradigm that has threatened all life on earth and that is currently causing runaway climate change and mass extinction. While it is still emergin ..read more

A paradigm is a set of patterns: of thoughts, actions, beliefs, and practices, under which people operate. We all were born into the paradigms of our current age: where money, colonization, domination, and the myth of progress are embedded into the foundations of our current civilization. This paradigm is replicated and interwoven in nearly everything our present civilization produces: from mass industrial agriculture to mass education, from big government and big corporations to the exploitation of native peoples and environmental degradation. It is replicated on the individual level, with th ..read more

One of the questions that people who are yearning for a creative practice or who are starting one often ask–where do you get your ideas?  Where do you find your inspiration?  How do you have visions of what to create and how do those things come to you? In the druid tradition, one of our three core paths is the path of the bard, and our emphasis is on seeking inspiration, connecting with the flow of awen (inspiration), and experiencing that flow in our lives.  But how do we actually do this?  In today’s post, I’m going to share an advanced technique that I use often to do j ..read more

Samhain is marked on my landscape by a hard frost–usually occurring in the last two weeks of October.  As I wrote about last week, we had our first freeze just this past week and it is the most profound shift of the year.  This week, we are looking at more below-freezing temperatures. A green lush landscape gives way to one bathed in browns, oranges, and reds–particularly in the garden, where the hard frost or first freeze indicates a finality to many annual garden crops like eggplant, tomatoes, or squash, with only those hardy plants tucked under cover still surviving.  Thus, a ..read more

As I write this, we have our last day before a freeze–the day before death comes to our landscape.  On my landscape, in temperate Western Pennsylvania (USDA Zone 6), we’ve had almost no frosts to speak of–the summer has seemed endless, as we move into fall. Many of the plants are still quite lush, with pumpkins, peppers, and tomatoes all still growing. Many of the perennials know it is time to rest and have died back, sending their energy deep into their roots.  But the tender annual plants don’t have such a cycle–and here, they generally grow till they are killed by the cold.  ..read more

There is something magical about putting your hands in the soil. The cool, damp feeling, the smell of earthy loam, the crumbling of the loam between your fingers. Touching soil, the building block of life, grounds you in a way that is indescribable.  Putting your hands in the earth, to plant, to heal, to grow food or medicine, is always a balm for the soul. Especially when it is rich, nourishing soil. Everything in the world has energy (or in scientific terms an electromagnetic field) and I think we can intuitively sense when that soil has soul. A reminder of the sacredness of soil- a sig ..read more

Recently I had some local homesteaders visit who wanted to see our homestead and the various systems we’ve been building.  At one point, I uprooted a dandelion that was growing in a bed and the whole root just came right up–and one of them said, “wow, look at that soil.”  And to anyone with a practiced eye, they know that building good soil is the key to everything else: it is the key to helping plants fight pests and disease, it is the key to abundant and rich yields, and it is the key to fostering a healthy and balanced ecosystem. I also attend to soil building a lot as we are wrap ..read more

My post from last week generated an incredible amount of discussion from people from all walks of life. So rather than continue to talk about soil (which is now scheduled for next week), I wanted to take another week to explore this idea of straddling the edge, seeking balance, and largely failing to do so. To recap from last week, I shared about my own increasing difficulty with being in balance and having a foot both in the consumerist/materialist culture and an increasingly difficult workplace and also pursuing a path of land healing, nature spirituality, and homesteading. I talked about fe ..read more