Tag: nature

Taking up Land Healing as a Spiritual Practice

Dana's avatarThe Druid's Garden

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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Cycles of Nature, Cycles of our Lives: Allowing for Fallow and Abundance in Spiritual Studies

Dana's avatarThe Druid's Garden

Preamble: Now that I’m the Grand Archdruid of AODA, starting in 2020, I will be doing one AODA Druidry-based post a month. A lot of my posts are already tied with AODA practices as it is my core spiritual practice, but I wasn’t always as explicit about it as I will be now! 🙂  All of these posts, while framed in the context of AODA druidry, will be applicable to many different kinds of nature-based spiritualities and druidries.

A beautiful cardinal flower in late summer

The Wheel of the Seasons offers us many lessons and one of the core principles in AODA is the principle of the Cycle and Season. In Western Pennsylvania, where I live, we have a growing season that runs from May to late October. That us, from Beltane to Samhain, during the light half of the year, we can grow vegetables, forage berries, and be…

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A Tree for Year Challenge

Dana's avatarThe Druid's Garden

Into the trees

One of the most common questions that people ask when they start down a druid or other nature-based spiritual path is: how do I connect deeply with nature?  Connecting to nature can happen in such a wide variety of ways.  It can happen through connecting with our heads, through learning, study, and engaging with books or classes.  It can happen through our hearts, where we emotionally connect with nature and places.  It can also happen through our bodies when we physically experience the natural world.  It can be through our spirits when we connect with the spirit of the tree.  But regardless of which of our selves and methods we use, it requires an investment of ourselves, our time, and building a relationship.

A while back, I wrote about the Druid’s Anchor Spot, which is a spot that you can use to regularly engage and observe…

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

Dana's avatarThe 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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Meaning of Life

Working Deeply with Water: A River Healing Ritual

Dana's avatarThe Druid's Garden

A healthy stream A healthy stream

One of the incredible things about the hydrologic (water) cycle on our great planet is how connected these cycles are and how a single drop of water may continually travel the globe over a period of time. The waters that rain down upon me here in Western PA likely came after being evaporated from the Pacific Ocean and making their way in gas form across the North American continent.  From the clouds, they solidfy and rain down, slowly moving down our mountain property to the stream that sits at the bottom of our property: Penn Run.  Penn Run leads into Two Lick Creek, which runs into Blacklick creek, which runs into the Conemaugh River.  The Conemaugh becomes the Kiskiminetas, which runs into the Alleghney, which meets the Monogahela in Pittsburgh and becomes the Ohio. After passing cities such as Cincinatti and Louisville, it merges with the Mississippi…

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Ancient Americans

Healing with the 13 Moons of Nature’s Seasons and Her Bird Tribe Women

Druidry for the 21st Century: Pandora’s Box and Tools for the Future

Dana's avatarThe Druid's Garden

The story of Pandora’s box has always been a favorite of mine, ever since I was little.  Pandora was so curious. She just had to open the box. She just had to. And when she did, she let out all the bad things in the world: suffering, pain, war, famine, pestilence, betrayal….but she also let out one good thing: she let out hope.

I think when we start talking about the present and the future of the world-its kind of like being inside Pandora’s Box. It seems that more and more reports come out, more and more news comes out, and the longer that things go on, we keep being surrounded by all the bad things. Ten or fifteen years ago, perhaps these things could be ignored.  But today, I don’t think there is any more time for that. The reports, like the recent National Climate Assessment, don’t often…

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Druidry for the 21st Century

Dana's avatarThe Druid's Garden

This is a challenging age, doubly so for anyone who is connected spiritually with the living earth and who cares deeply about non-human life. The Fourth National Climate Assessment, released towards the end of 2018, presents a dire picture for the future. This isn’t the only recent report from governing bodies globally–report after report continues to paint a clear picture of what humanity is doing, and what we need to do to change.  And yet, it seems to be business as usual.

The cycles of nature The cycles of nature

When I talk to druids about their thoughts about this present age, there seems to be a few ways to think about it.

First, the glass half empty approach is feeling extremely demoralized, looking at climate change reports and long-term forecasts and seeing the continued inaction on behalf of world leaders. The glass half empty approach may also have feelings that nothing we…

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