Spirit of the Oak! Spirit of the Oak from the Plant Spirit oracle!

As we’ve been exploring over the last few weeks, plant spirit communication can take many forms. The rustle of leaves outside of your window, the inner knowing, or the song a plant sings to you as you honor it for the harvest. These simple messages weave a complex landscape beyond what we can sense with our fives senses, and invite us deeper into the mysteries of the earth and all living beings. And as we’ve explored, the voices of the plants, the spirits of the plants, take a number of forms and can appear to each of us uniquely. What is clear is that the more that we open ourselves up to understanding them, honoring them, and working with them, the more connection we have with the living earth in her many forms.

Part of the reason I’ve been sharing so…

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Walking the Path of the Ovate: Building Localized Ecological Knowledge

by The Druid’s Garden

The Druid's Garden

Rocky Maine Shore at Sunrise

Everything changes in this wild place. The ebb and flow of the tides drives the ecology on this rocky shore. The landscape abruptly changes its appearance based on proximity to the sea and elevation. Firs and spruces dominate along with a groundcover of laurel and blueberry. Even old friends, like birch, maple, and beech, take on new skin. The mountain peaks offer a desert-like climate where air and fire dominate. I am in this wild place, letting it seep into my bones, into my breath, into my spirit. Desipte the books on ecology I’ve purchased, I really have no idea what I’m seeing, no real knowledge of the deeper mystery of this land and shore. Books cannot teach that kind of wisdom, only time and experience can. My eyes physically see, but I am seeing without any real understanding of what it is that is…

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Diary of a Land Healer: March/April

by The Druid’s Garden

The Druid's Garden

Mid-March – Crocus in the Snow

The landscape waits, with bated breath, for the warmth to finally arrive. The last two months have been unseasonably cold, and the longer that time passes, more anticipation is present in the air. The plants and buds swell, but are unwilling to come out while the temperatures still go into the teens at night. At Imbolc, Punxsutawney Phil, our local divination oracle, predicted six weeks of winter, but in truth, winter has turned from 6 weeks more, to 12 weeks more, and now almost to 18. Just two days ago, the weather broke, and it seems that spring is finally in the air. Here at the homestead, we are all growing weary. Each morning, my cat Acorn runs to the door, ready to go outside and explore. When I open the door for her, a breath of cold air hits her face and…

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Sacred Landscapes, Part IV: Sacred Time, Sacred Space

by The Druid’s Garden

The Druid's Garden

A woodburned sign bidding druids to enter a sacred space

“This is sacred time, this is sacred space.” At the end of the opening of every OBOD ritual, this powerful statement is made. But what does “sacred time, sacred space” really mean? What is “the sacred” and how do we know it? What is sacred in the context of American Druidry, where we do not have an abundance of ancient stone circles or accessible sacred sites? In this post, I want to spend some time today thinking about the ways we might enact the sacred in our own lives and lands as part of building sacred landscapes and re-enchanting our land.

In my first post in this series, I talked about the “disenchantment” of the world through industrialization and the rise of a religious tradition that did not acknowledge the land as sacred. And truly, a disenchanted worldview–where…

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Sacred Landscapes, Part III: Ley Lines and the Energy of the Earth

by The Druid’s Garden

The Druid's Garden

Over the last two weeks, we’ve been exploring the idea of re-enchanting the world. Two weeks ago, I introduced the idea of re-enchantment through a discussion Max Weber’s claims that the world has been “disenchanted” by industrialization. Re-enchanting, then, is potential work that we as druids and earth-centered spiritual people might do. If we want to do this re-enchantment, however, we need to draw upon and better understand the ways in which ancient humans created sacred landscapes. In last week’s post, we explored the historical understanding of “ley lines” and alignments on the earth to understand some of the physical tools that ancient humans worldwide used to enchant the world. Today’s post continues this discussion in a more metaphysical sense–understanding the more modern “ley line theory” as it applies to earth energy and considering the energetic work we might do.