Witchcraft, Love & Shadows — The Witch & Walnut

Here we are in the thick of Valentines week. This could either be a wonderful time for you, a painful time… or perhaps means nothing at all. As per last years post….Valentines doesn’t really do it for me. Since we are on the topic of love, I thought I would dive into a little word…Continue…

Sometimes, spirit offers you a call and its a call that can’t be ignored. Part of the reason I write so much about working physically and energetically with land healing on this blog is that its clear to me now that a large part of my call is in this direction. When I was a child, it was the logging of my forest–and my eventual return to that forest years later. At my first homestead, I had to spend years working to connect with the spirits of the land and heal the land physically. When I found the current land where I live, everything was perfect about it in terms of features I wanted–except that three acres had been logged pretty heavily. I put my head and my hands and cried–how did I find a perfect piece of land that just had been logged? The spirits laughed and said…

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Amazon Queen Warrior Penthesilea

Ritual for the Burning of the World

The Druid's Garden

As I write these words, fires are ravaging Australia. It’s a bleak situation, ecologically and politically. The firest at this point are about the combined size of the entire state of West Virginia and are all through the entire continent, particularly along the coasts. Ecologically, this is a disaster with severe and long-ranging consequences for Australia and the world. While billions of lives have been consumed in the fires (animal, insect, bird, fish, reptile, amphibian, plant and fungi), the Guardian reports that it is likely that numerous species will go extinct from the fires because sites that house critically endangered species are all burning—in some cases, all of the protected habitats of these species are on fire. The situation in Australia is being made worse by current Australian leadership, who, rather taking a firm stance on climate change and human causes, instead are digging in their heels and pandering to…

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Create Your Own Personal Haven—Anywhere

Good Witches Homestead

Stress! It’s the scourge of our contemporary society. And the thought of retiring to a safe haven where you can banish stress, repair your nerves, and renew your life is a concept whose time has come. Creating a personal sanctuary, whether it be in a bedroom, bathroom, patio, garden, or the Great Outdoors, seems to be a cherished goal for many of us stressed-out people.

But how to go about fashioning such a retreat? What elements are required, and can you do it in a limited space and on a tight budget? These questions and many others form the contents of my book, A Sanctuary of Your Own. Perhaps you’ve read books, visited websites, and watched TV programs dedicated to this subject. With wild enthusiasm, you’ve started designing your space, and you’re halfway there. But, somehow things aren’t quite gelling. So in this short article, I’ll distill some of…

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The Evergreen Cult – Podłaźniczka

A Druid’s Guide to Homestead Bird Flocks and Flock Happiness

The Druid's Garden

On the Druid’s Garden homestead, we have many feathered friends. I think a lot of people see birds just as livestock, but here, we see them a little differently. Thus, I wanted to create a short guide for people who were thinking about cultivating a relationship with a backyard flock of birds but they weren’t sure what kind of birds they might want! Of course, this is my own druid perspective on homestead bird flocks, which might be a bit different than what you’ll find on more general sites. In this guide, I’ll talk about a variety of backyard flock breeds, how they might help your garden and homestead, challenges, temperament, and more. I will also note that I haven’t raised birds for meat, so I won’t talk about that much in this guide. I’ll cover four common backyard flock birds: chickens, ducks, geese, and guinea fowl.

Entering Into Relationship

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The Bee and the Machine: Moving Beyond Efficiency and towards Nature-Centeredness

The Druid's Garden

Animals have spirit!

Over the course of the last four centuries, the Western World has created a set of “unshakable” principles concerning the natural world: that nature is just another machine, that animals don’t feel and do not have souls, that plants and animals aren’t sentient. Descartes, writing in the 1600s during the early rise of mechanization, was one of the first to make this claim. He posited that animals are mechanical automata, that is, they are beings without souls, feelings, or pain. These same ideas were not limited to non-human life; we see the same kind of thinking being applied to justify slavery, genocide, colonialization, and a list of other atrocities. When we combine this kind of thinking with the economic ideas of “growth at all costs” and “efficiency”, we end up in the dystopian fiction we find ourselves living in right now. I want to take some time…

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On Being a Minority Religion and Paths to Building Respect

The Druid's Garden

“I’m sorry, I’m unavailable to meet on that day.”

A pause, “well, why is that? This is an important meeting.”

“Because it is a major holiday for me, and I am taking a personal day to celebrate it.”

Another, longer pause. “Wait, your holiday is Halloween? That’s not a religious holiday.”

“No, my holiday is Samhain, which is a holiday dedicated to my ancestors. Modern Halloween traditions actually derived from this much older holiday.”

Another pause. “Can’t you celebrate it on another day?”

“No. The timing is critical to the celebration. Would I ask you to meet on Christmas or Easter?”

Another pause. “That’s not the same thing.”

The above interchange is a fairly common interaction fairly typical of my workplace experiences in being a minority religion, a druid, here in the USA. In fact, I had this exchange with someone just last week. Since this kind of thing seems…

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Shoes

Many people take their shoes off to keep the negative energy from the day out of their house.

I don’t know if it’s still a practice, I’ve been married nearly 35 years, of tying tin cans to scare off evil spirits and shoes to the bumper of the transportation the newlyweds use to leave the wedding beginning their new life together.