Sacred Actions: Doing our Bit in the World

The Druid's Garden

Sacred action is all about us learning how to align our outer lives with our inner core of nature spirituality and connectedness, and ultimately, help us live more regeneratively and with care. Sacred action is about doing small, slow things in our own lives to better align with our sacred nature-based spiritual practices and the living earth. It is through these seemingly mundane changes that we create a better today, a better tomorrow, and a better world.

Sacred Actions – A new graphic for the Sacred Actions wheel of the year

Sacred refers to things that are connected, meaningful, reverent, or somehow tied to our sense of the spiritual or the divine. Most of the time, this word is used in relation to things that are not part of mundane life: these are the special moments, ceremonies, or spiritual insights that impact us deeply. When we experience a sense of…

View original post 1,256 more words

Creating Sacred Space

I’ve been thinking a lot about our spaces lately – in many ways they’ve become more important to us than ever, and a place where many of us are now spending most of our time (or not enough).

The space we live in is an energetic extension of ourselves. What affects us will affect the energy of our space (and vice versa).

In a time when we’ve seen a dramatic increase in fear, stress, uncertainty, and an outpouring of negativity, the more we can hold ourselves + our spaces sacred, the more we all benefit.

While we may all know the importance of clearing the energy of our space, it bears reminding, especially given that some may be feeling too overwhelmed or tired to prioritize it (it’s been my experience that this is when we most need to do it).

Continue reading →

Lughnasadh for Solitary Practitioners

The Druid's Garden

In a typical year, at Lughnasadh, my grove would be gathering for our favorite celebration of the year. This is typically a weekend of rituals, feasting, fire, and merriment, all hosted here at our homestead in Western PA. With the pandemic raging around us, this kind of gathering cannot happen at present. As much as I enjoy our yearly Lughnasadh gathering, I’m taking time this year to focus on my solitary practice and enjoy Lughnasadh in a different way. Looking at the history and lore of Lughnasadh offers some wonderful solitary practices that honor the history of this holiday and have a fun time. For a historical look at Lughnasadh (and where some of the inspiration for this post was drawn), you can see Máire MacNeill (1962) The festival of Lughnasa: a study of the survival of the Celtic festival of the beginning of harvest published by Oxford University Press…

View original post 881 more words

Introduction to Sacred Gardening: Connection, Reciprocity, and Honoring Life — The Druid’s Garden

Walking into a sacred garden is like walking into another world, one full of joy, happiness, and wholeness. Fruit hanging from happy branches, plants coming up from all angles inviting a nibble, a taste, a touch. The pathways spiral and you get lost, looking at flowers, breathing in the fresh air, and tasting the tart […]

via Introduction to Sacred Gardening: Connection, Reciprocity, and Honoring Life — The Druid’s Garden

Wildcrafting Druidry: Getting Started in Your Ecosystem

The Druid's Garden

One of the strengths of AODA druidry is our emphasis on developing what Gordon Cooper calls “wildcrafted druidries“–these are druid practices that are localized to our place, rooted in our ecosystems, and designed in conjunction with the world and landscapes immediately around us. Wildcrafted druidries are in line with the recently released seven principles of AODA, principles that include rooting nature at the center of our practice, practicing nature reverence, working with cycles and seasons, and wildcrafting druidry. But taking the first steps into wildcrafting your practice can be a bit overwhelming, and can be complicated by a number of other factors. What if you are a new druid and don’t know much about your ecosystem? What if you are a druid who is traveling a lot or is transient? What if you are a druid who just moved to a new ecosystem after establishing yourself firmly…

View original post 2,115 more words

Using an Oracle or Tarot Deck to Establish Sacred Space

The Druid's Garden

Plant Spirit Oracle

As some of you may know from my posts on Facebook and Instagram, in early 2020, I’ll be releasing the Plant Spirit Oracle as my second self-published divination deck (if you want to support the project, see link in the right sidebar with the Oak image). I described the Plant Spirit Oracle project a bit in an earlier post. For today’s post, I wanted to share a ritual space strategy that I developed as part of the PSO project–how to use a tarot or oracle deck to establish a sacred space.

The idea in a nutshell is that rather than calling in th elements or powers in a more static way, you can use an oracle deck to draw upon them in a more dynamic way. Thus, each time you create sacred space, you will be asking the cards to help you select the right…

View original post 1,702 more words

Inner Work

A Druid’s Primer on Land Healing: A Healing Grove of Renewal

The Druid's Garden

Reishi growing from a stump in my sacred forest

Many years ago, I shared the story of the “mystery of the stumps“, which was my path into druidry. I grew up spending all my days in a forest that was rich, full, and bountiful. When I was 14, that forest was logged. My heart broke, and afterward, I tried to enter the forest but it was horrible: downed trees everywhere, so much damage, so many friends that had been cut and taken away. I thought the forest would never heal. I withdrew not only from nature, but from my spirit and creative gifts, and spent a time in numbness and mourning–a period that lasted almost 10 years. I didn’t return to the forest till I was 24. When I finally went back in, so much had changed–the land was regrowing. Large thickets of birch, blackberry, and cherries were…

View original post 3,153 more words

Working with and Honoring the Sun at the Solstice

The Druid's Garden

Sacred rays of the sun

The sun’s rays come over the horizon, on the solstice, the most sacred of days. The solstice goes my many names, the day of high light, midsummer, Alban Hefin. Across the globe and through time, it has been celebrated since before recorded history. In the light of the sun, we have strength, warmth, growth, energy, abundance, healing, and wisdom. The sun has been shining down upon our beautiful planet has been shining for at least four billion years and we can expect it to remain unchanged for another five billion years. The sun is also enormous–it accounts for 99.86% of the mass of our solar system. It is such an incredible thing that it’s hard to image in the scope of the sun as it compares to of human lives or human history. You might say that the sun is one of the most…

View original post 1,668 more words

Druidry for the 21st Century: Psychopomping the Anthropocene

The Druid's Garden

As an animist druid, I recognize the spirit of all beings. I honor and interact with the spirits in the land, in the trees, in the animals and birds, in the insects, in the rivers, in the mountains. Animals die, plants die, insects die. Their spirits live on. In the Anthropocene, even mountains die, they are removed for mining activities all along the Appalachians and in many other places. Rivers die, and have been dying cor centuries as we fill them with refuse. In the Anthropocene, many things die. What happens to that mountain’s spirit when the mountain is gone? What is happening now to the millions of non-human lives that are dying because of human activity? That’s the question we focus on today–as part of my druidry for the 21st century series. Earlier posts in this series include Druidry for the 21st Century and Druidry in the age of…

View original post 3,777 more words