I never set out in a given spiritual direction due to any kind of calculation or left brain sort of decision. Instead I followed dreams and synchronicities and spiritual experience.
This makes for a zig-zaggy path at times. And a long one.
My path began in early childhood with experiences that included a mystical connection with nature, experiences of deju vu, an interest in all things supernatural, the ability to sense energy and the occasion psychic dream. I developed a fascination with witches while still in grade school and sometimes imagined that I was a witch.
As I got older I heard 'ghosts,' had premonitions, vivid dreams and visions. The vision I remember best from that time happened when I was seventeen years old. It wasn't an easy vision but it was very clear. It had to do with the destruction of sacred grove and the people who mourned that loss - I understood those people to be druids.
I set that part of my life aside for a while and when I came back to it there were experiences with paranormal investigation, mediumship, and dreams. For a while I studied New Age topics. But the truth is that what interests me isn't really new. It is old. So I'll be focusing a bit more on that going forward.
I started this blog because I needed a place to keep myself on track and that hasn't changed. Because that hasn't changed however the content will, of necessity, shift. I will be writing about what makes me the person I most want to be.
Last Weekend I attended the Order of Bard, Ovates and Druids East Coast Gathering in Milford PA and it was a lot of fun!
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| Damh the Bard Inspiring Me to Reclaim the Pen of Fiction! |
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| Kristoffer Hughes offering wonderful insights on the legacy of Iolo Morganw. |
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| The Ritual Tent |
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| The Scrying Center |
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| Make Your Own Amulet Station |
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| Ritual Tent: Fabricated and Constructed by a Member of the Order |
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| Ritual Area |
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| The Path Into the Woods |
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| Love the Idea of Stewardship! |
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| Walking in the Woods |
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| The Raptor Show Begins! I believe this guy is the Red-Tailed Hawk. |
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| Close Up of an Owl |
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| Meeting a Golden Eagle! |
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| Still water. |
This summer was beautiful and bright and busy. In just a couple of months, I helped build a fence, planted a garden, remodeled a pantry, and took a relatively public step in the direction of my own earth-centered path.
In between those well-planned, over-sized events came a host of smaller and more spontaneous experiences - the feel of the dew on the grass, the sound of the wind coming down off the mountain, the moon lighting up the soft summer sky, the scent of fresh earth, the heat of garden, the taste of tomatoes straight off the vine - and somehow those small things ended up staying with me in a way that the big things do not.
Thesepics chronicle my summer in big ways and small.
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| Spaghetti squash, strawberries, tomatoes, cukes, peppers and beans fresh from our garden. |
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| Fence phase two with our yard and garden on the other side (plus neighbors pool). Phases 3 & 4 are done too! |
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| Pantry in progress. |
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| Pantry now.. Hard to see in the sunlight but cabinets are a pretty pale green. |
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| The full summer Moon and possibly Venus. |
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| My little dog on the way to the park. |
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| Path alongside the lake. |
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| A window into the woods. |
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| A friend overhead. |
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| Summer sunset complete with crescent Moon and Venus.. |
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| Our solstice fire doused by the rain at the end of the day! |
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| Fence phase one (side yard) is complete! |
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| Working the psychic fair at Inner Peace. |
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| My new friend come to hang out. |
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| Herb garden growing. |
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| Our beautiful berries. |
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| The top of the mountain behind our house. |
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| Talking to spirit people at a country cemetery. |
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| Salad fresh from our garden. |
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| The start of the herb garden. |
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| Ready for summer! |
Just wanted to let everyone know that I'm going to be offline for several weeks due to tenosynovitis (inflamed tendon) of my right hand : ( So aside from the occasional social media post (being handled by a friend) I won't be communicating electronically at all.
Not being able to write or type for an extended period is a bit daunting and I can't help wondering how I will manage. I hope I will benefit from the electronic and paper hiatus. I hope I'll enjoy all the wonderful mostly hands free things that I love (like reading and researching) and get deeper into activites that I don't get to do as much as I'd like - like meditating and psychic development and dream work and astral projection and sitting in the garden and watching the sky.
So on one hand I'm looking forward to the break and on the other I'm panicking.
I'm panicking because I'm a writer and I love writing. I love typing. I love blogging. I love writing copy. I love early morning longhand journaling. I love penciling in notes, very neatly, in the margins of books. I love notebooks and journals and paper. I love making lists and checking things off as I navigate the day. I have dozens of places to write and hundreds of things to write about.
Being disconnected from all of that will be strange but maybe it will liberating as well.
How will I hold up? Your guess is as good as mine but I will let you know hopefully sometime in August!
I celebrated the Solstice with some wonderful friends in one of the loveliest settings you could imagine. The weather was questionable to begin with, but we were thrilled to see the overcast morning turn into a beautiful sunny afternoon with just the right amount of wind. Between the solstice fire and the pond was a wide expanse of green, where dogs played and humans exchanged tarot card readings and friendship.
As part of our solstice ceremony, each of us was given the opportunity to place an offering in the fire. Mine was mugwort and sage donated by a dear friend, a handful of rose petals from my garden, a fortune cookie message I found resonant on a half-forgotten difficult day and a hand written commitment to the things I mean to accomplish between this solstice and the next. Standing before the fire I released all the fear and insecurity I could muster and prepared myself for the new energy to come.
The rain held out until our gathering was about to close, then fell full-force, dousing our fire and rushing our goodbyes. Thinking about the day later in the evening, it occurred to me that each of the elements had been especially well-represented. This, I thought, has meaning.
Committed to my new journey and direction, I had approached this solstice as a student, reading about the old ways and the Wiccan connection between the Summer Solstice and the journey of the god. But I didn't want to approach Midsummer in terms of a single element or the masculinity of the solstice sun and in the end I didn't. Instead I experienced the living dance of wind and fire, the steady containment of the earth, the falling, clearing curtain of rain, and the sacred alchemy of fire and water.
This Memorial Day Weekend we watched a wonderful movie called Above and Beyond
. It was about the fighter pilot volunteers - some Jewish, some not - who flew for Israel in its 1948 war for independence. These were men who survived World War II and then continued to serve, risking both their lives and their American citizenship to so. A truly amazing story!
. It was about the fighter pilot volunteers - some Jewish, some not - who flew for Israel in its 1948 war for independence. These were men who survived World War II and then continued to serve, risking both their lives and their American citizenship to so. A truly amazing story!
Recent Journal Entry
To give you an idea of what I write in my journal, here is an excerpt from last weekend's journal entry.
I'm listening to Celtic music as I journal. It's early Saturday and all the windows are open and there is rain in the air. The point of journaling for me is to find peace. Not necessarily to examine my life or arrive at some great stream-of-consciousness insight - though there are times when those things happen. I have Welsh and Irish and Scottish in my family tree and this music touches me in a place other music does not. So it may be that it's time to chase beauty and peace instead of knowledge and skill. At least some of the time, anyway. And it says something, I think, that when I listen to this music and write from that quiet place inside, I tear up. Every time. Last night, shadows moved in my room and sleep eluded me. But this morning, here I am on the page.
It's not great writing. But it is the kind of writing I could only do with pen and paper because, for me, typing out my inner thoughts just isn't the same. We are more likely to read as we type. Which makes us more likely to edit or censor.
That doesn't happen with typing fiction necessarily, but it does happen, for me anyway, with nonfiction.
Fast, sloppy stream of consciousness writing makes it possible for me to reach a place I don't get to with other writing. Sometimes, this place is peaceful. Other times, it is sad. But I almost always feel better after I've been there.
To me, the music is key and Celtic music moves me like no other.
One of the songs I listened to (a Celtic version of St. Hildegard Von Bingen's O Frondens Virga (Oh, Flowering Stem) by NóirÃn Nà Riain:
I am in the last weeks of the Practical Astral Projection Intensive offered by famed astral projectionist and author of Astral Dynamics: The Complete Book of Out-of-Body Experiences Robert Bruce.
We had been asked to observe our hypnagogic imagery (visions that come to us when we're in between sleep and wakefulness) at night before we went to sleep. So on this particular night I was observing the darkness behind my closed lids when I begin to feel a lot of vibration / pins and needles over my whole body but especially in my hands which were clasped over my stomach.
Vibrations are a known precursor to astral projection or out of body experience and a sign the course has taught us to look for. In the beginning of the course (and at periods throughout my life) I found the vibrations a little overwhelming but at the time of this event we were several weeks into the class and I had learned how to relax into them. And so I just let myself experience the sensation.
As relaxed I began to feel my vibrating hands lifting slowly but steadily up into the air. I knew my flesh and bone hands weren't lifting because I was motionless and relaxed (and not making any effort to move) but I really couldn't feel them - I was aware of my vibrating floating hands, instead. Or, to be more precise - as I remember it, they were still vibrating, but I am quite sure that these vibrating (or energetic hands) were floating.
I didn't try to force anything else into happening and then the hypnagogic imagery came back and I saw a desk - possibly my own but with different items on it (I think) - from the perspective of the person sitting at it. I have a vague memory that it had interesting things on it - possibly a crystal ball which I do have but not on my desk. I also had a sense of a room beyond that but it seemed dark.
Unlike my usual clear and bright hypnagogic imagery this visual was muted and dim but there was detail and it seemed fairly real. Also, I noticed that it was 'to scale' whereas most of my hypnagogic images seem quite small - for reasons I don't really understand.
Seeing the desk seemed to signal the end of the experience - possibly because, as I recall, my hands were no longer vibrating - so I turned over and jotted down what happened in my dream journal. And was too excited to go back to sleep for some time!
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