Category: Earth-based spirituality

To Light a Flaming Pumpkin: The Inexact Art of Family Ritual, by Molly Remer

Our bounty is inIMG_7695
creativity
friendship
community
the myriad small adventures
of everyday.
We tell of magic
and moonrise
and listening to the pulse
of the earth beneath our feet.

Ah, October. Fall has settled into the trees and air. Last year on Samhain (Halloween), as the sun was setting and the full moon was rising, my family stood together in the dim light on our back deck, lit a fire in a hollowed out pumpkin and offered handfuls of herbs into the flames as we celebrated our blessings, our harvests, and our bounty, as a family and as individuals. As we spoke aloud our blessings and our bounty, our words got deeper, broader, and more authentic. My twelve year old son stepped forward to say how thankful he is that he gets to live with his best friend, his fifteen year old brother, and they embraced over the flaming pumpkin. My fifteen year old son offered his thanks for a family that has “cool IMG_7387rituals like this” and my four year son offered his blessings for the “energy we feel together.” My seven year old daughter offered her gratitude for pandas and for toys.

The next week, we returned the seeds to the pumpkin and released it to the outdoors to grow next year.

Seventeen years ago, I held my first Winter Solstice ritual. I wrote my wish for a baby onto a small piece of paper and rolled it up into a “seed” of my dreams that I planted within a special wooden box. On the autumn equinox the following year, I gave birth to my first child, a son who now stands inches above me, but who joins hands with his family each month to sing “Dance in the Circle of Moonlight” together on the back deck under the full moon.

After having this first baby, it became increasingly important to me that we celebrate holidays and traditions that reflect our spiritual values and worldview rather than the packaged version of the holidays offered by society, or the religious observances of dominant faiths that do not match our own. While we have celebrated the wheel of the year together in a variety of ways in what has now been sixteen years of parenting and twenty-one years of marriage, it wasn’t really until last year that I felt I finally, truly hit my stride in planning fulfilling, nourishing family rituals. Perhaps it is because I am no longer trying to juggle nursing a baby or changing a diaper while simultaneously also guiding a ceremony. Perhaps it is because I’ve loosened up and accepted the myriad imperfections possible within a multi-age celebration. Perhaps it is because when one of the children wanders off during circle or interrupts me while I’m talking, I accept it as part of the flow, and continue our work without breaking my stride. Perhaps it is because I now laugh too when someone makes a joke during my careful ritual, and continue to roll with it, instead of feeling like it is disrespectful. Perhaps it is because I consider a 15-20 minutes family ritual perfectly sufficient instead of trying to plan for a full-fledged, retreat-style “program” of activities. Perhaps it is because we’ve joined hands in family circle in so many ways and for so many years that we all now trust that I’m not giving up on doing this together.

In the course of the year we’ve anointed one another’s foreheads with fragrant oils while standing in the freezing water of a freshwater stream. We’ve felt the raindrops kiss our faces and the rays of the sun peek in and out of the clouds as we celebrated the summer solstice by releasing wildflowers into the river. We’ve howled at the moon together, built a green man face from leaves, stones, and sticks in the field, created flower mandalas, thrown pinches of cornmeal into the woods as a symbolic sacrifice, soaked our feet in warm water laced with rose petals and then massaged one another’s feet with lotion, walked through a spiral of candlelight, and offered handfuls of herbs into a flaming pumpkin.

As we notice the changing seasons and honor the call of nature within our lives through ceremony, celebration, and song, we make visible the interconnected dance of life. We reaffirm our commitment, our relatedness, to each other and to the natural environment around us. We communicate with and are in relationship to that larger force of life and spirit that we call Goddess. And, we bring our spiritual beliefs into our bodies, hands, minds, and hearts in an ever-spinning Wheel of celebration, attention, observation, enjoyment, communion, and love.

 “We can think of ritual as the container we weave in which we can be carried away by magic and ecstasy.”

—Starhawk and Valentine, The Twelve Wild Swans

For your own flaming pumpkin ritual, choose a large, round pumpkin, cut off the top 42311806_2188101348068742_1038582461505732608_oand hollow it out. Keep the seeds to plant with the remnants of your fire later. You may start the fire with paper and a lighter and then keep adding herbs to keep it burning, or you may stoke it by putting some alcohol in the bottom of the pumpkin to begin with. Alcohol burns cool and can create a longer lasting, less smoky flaming pumpkin. Offer your autumn bounty into the pumpkin with herbs sprinkles/handfuls—these can be spontaneous spoken aloud declarations of your harvest, your celebrations, your gratitude, etc. What are you thankful for?

  • Optional: offer any sacrifices/releasing on slips of paper into the flames
  • Optional: Sing “Hallowed Evening” chant (by my kids and me)

Hallowed evening
Hallowed night
We dance in the shadows
We offer our light.

Additional Articles:

Autumn Equinox with the Ancestors, or after ecstasy indeed the laundry*) Eline Kieft

As I hang the laundry back home, I remember how just 24 hours earlier I arrived back on the beach after an incredible time at the ancestral burial mound where I spend the night in ceremony at the Autumn Equinox.

Ile Carn is a neolithic passage grave on a small tidal island in Finisterre, Brittany. I had visited there the summer before, and found that the other world was strongly accessible. When places become very touristy, like Stonehenge or Mont St. Michel, it sometimes appears as if the spirits retreat and the potency of the place thins. I asked them then if I could come back for ceremony, and when the answer was yes, I promised to return.

So here I was, on the Autumn Equinox, or Mabon. This is a time of balance, when the days and nights are equally long. A time in which the harvest has been gathered and we can start to prepare for a time of gestation and growing in the dark womb of winter, before the light is reborn again next year. My personal aim was three fold: I wanted to celebrate this year, especially to give thanks for my life, which had been on a precarious knife-edge earlier in May. I also wanted to ask for guidance for both my budding business and for my academic work in terms of re-discovering our own indigeneity in the west.

Continue reading “Autumn Equinox with the Ancestors, or after ecstasy indeed the laundry*) Eline Kieft”

Field of Dreams by Sara Wright

Once the new white pine forest that stretches out before me was part of a larger field that belonged to an old farm. The woods cascade down a steep hill on the east side of the house and run parallel with the brook that empties into another that crosses my property in the wetlands below. 

Over a period of thirty – five years I have chosen to allow nature to decide how best to use this field and she turned it into a beautiful white pine forest. I created walkways through the young trees and moss covered pine strewn ground, and now, even during the hottest summer days a stroll under the pine boughs that create a protected arch overhead, is always refreshingly cool. The sweet scent of pine, moist earth, and nearby water creates a longing in me to breathe this perfume forever…The paths are like serpentine ribbons crisscrossing one another. Some take me to the brook, others climb a knoll I call cedar hill. Wild apple and cherry trees, chokecherries, hobble bush and partridge berry provide fruit for the animals that pass by, as do blueberries and brambleberries that are scattered on the hill in late summer. In some protected thickets wild animals bed down to sleep… Continue reading “Field of Dreams by Sara Wright”

The Swan-Bone Flute by Rachel O’Leary: Reviewed by Max Dashu

A girl leaps out of her tree perch to warn a pregnant doe that a hunter is drawing his bow against her. For this act of defending the mother deer, who should never be hunted, her uncle beats her. And so this novel drops us into the world of East Anglia in the year 598, in the wake of the Saxon invasions and enslavement of some of the British population. In this world, the old folkmoot councils are threatened by the rising power of the thanes, a hierarchy of lords under the new Saxon kings. And these lords are eroding women’s power at a rapid pace. Continue reading “The Swan-Bone Flute by Rachel O’Leary: Reviewed by Max Dashu”

Finding Missing Pieces of My Ancestral Story: Scotland and Ireland by Carol P. Christ

When I began researching years ago, I knew the names of my grandparents and what country in Europe their ancestors were from, but not much more. I have now traced most of my ancestors back to the Old Country, some to the 1600s. But there remained four ancestors with unknown places of origin among my sixteen 2x great-grandparents. A week or so ago, I decided to go back to the online resources, focusing on James Inglis, the Scottish seaman, and his Irish wife, Anne Corliss. This time I was more experienced, and I was determined to find the records.

Several sources confirmed that James’ parents were James and Isabella. Unfortunately, more than one James Inglis was born about 1838 to parents with these names. I had already ruled these Jameses out, because they were living in Scotland during the 1861 census, while my ancestor was by that time married and living in New York City. Scottish birth, marriage, and death records are incomplete before 1855 when civil registration was required; neither the marriage of James’ parents, nor his birth record were online. Continue reading “Finding Missing Pieces of My Ancestral Story: Scotland and Ireland by Carol P. Christ”

Insect Conversations by Barbara Ardinger

“She’s doing it again,” Mrs. Cockroach is saying to her friend Old Mrs. Spider. “You know? The giant? She’s been blowing on me and telling me to live somewhere else. Like, I’d leave a good home?”

 

                         

 

Old Mrs. Spider looks up from her weaving. “Yes,” she says in a weary voice. “But you know she’s not a giant. She’s just a normal human being, well, overweight, as I understand humans measure their bodies. And if she’s going to blow on us and ask us to live somewhere else, well…..I think she needs to brush her teeth.”

Mrs. Cockroach chuckles. “Indeed. We insects, maybe with the exceptions of fleas and termites, we don’t have bad breath. Blood-breath and wood-breath are sour! I was sitting on the wall in her bathroom, keeping an eye on things and telling the termites to get away from the window, and she just walks up. Doesn’t she know we insects and arachnids are protecting her house?”

Continue reading “Insect Conversations by Barbara Ardinger”

In A Sacred Grove by Laurie Goodhart

I’ve always been an artist-painter, with an innate drive to explore the mystic and ethereal. Concurrent with artwork I minored in Philosophy as an undergrad, then farmed (certified-organically) with animals and plants for thirty years, all the while accumulating a fine archaeology reference library.  The farming grounded the other endeavors in a way that probably nothing else can. Scraping by in the best of years, and always subject to the vagaries and perils of natural forces, one learns that there is no other way forward than to surrender, constantly alert to the complex nuances of Earth and Life.

Even though no longer farming, I still carry on in this way. A couple of weeks ago I participated in a three-day regional Artist’s Open Studio Tour, hosting the general public during some of the most sweltering days on record in our area. Bringing people into the un-air-conditioned studio to suffer was an awful prospect, so I hung forty large paintings and twenty tiny ones in a large shady area that I’ve thought of as The Sacred Grove, since acquiring this property five years ago.

A sacred grove because it is bordered on its long side by a small stream that emerges from a spring at the uphill end. Further uphill from this area is a columned platform that the previous owners erected and dubbed, The Parthenon.  These wonderful features dovetail exquisitely with the fact that for the past twenty years my artwork has focused on what I call Remnants And Residents Of A Lost Sanctuary Of Aphrodite. Continue reading “In A Sacred Grove by Laurie Goodhart”

Lion – Guide to the Power that Resides Within, by Judith Shaw

judith shaw photoLion, ancient symbol of strength and courage, is found in cave art from our early days. From the Egyptians to the Medieval Christians, lion could represent danger and chaos or protection and triumph over chaos. But through it all lion’s traits of strength and courage – power and vitality –  remain at the core.

Continue reading “Lion – Guide to the Power that Resides Within, by Judith Shaw”

Pain and Pausing, by Molly Remer

“I pin my hopes to quiet processes and small circles, in which vital and transforming events take place.”

—Rufus Jones

Last year in August, I wrote here at FAR about my own pattern of getting sick each July and 67552265_2390846147794260_5776927048312291328_othe steps I have been taking over the last three years to change that pattern for myself. This year in a surprisingly literal twist, I fell and hurt my ankle in June, and now, eight weeks later, am still recovering from that fall, thus inadvertently continuing my pattern of spending July of every year “out of commission.”

There is no dramatic story associated with my fall, I was quite literally just standing still on the front porch, waiting for my kids to open the front door after getting home from a Girl Scout meeting, when my foot slipped off the short front step and I came down hard on my ankle, twisting it beneath me at a 90 degree angle inward, as if I stepped down onto the end of my leg bone instead of my foot. I knew immediately that this was not a “normal” misstep or simple twist of the ankle, my leg hurt in a different and deeper way than I’ve ever experienced before, the swelling instantaneous and visible through my sock before I could even crawl inside. My husband Mark came running to help me and all I could say was, I think I’ve really, really hurt myself. Continue reading “Pain and Pausing, by Molly Remer”

Mid –Summer Musings: Lady in Waiting by Sara Wright

Yesterday at the Mid-Summer Turning I took a woodland walk in warm summer rain and then spent a quiet day at home. I visited with a few tadpoles and green frogs that inhabit my vernal pool, sat on the bridge and listened to the flow of water over stone at a woodland waterfall, a place so dear to my heart. I also spent quiet time reflecting…

For too long I have been a woman in waiting… waiting for diagnoses for myself and my dog, waiting for direction – I need to make a decision about where I am supposed to live – waiting for intuitive nudges, waiting for calls from loved ones that don’t come, waiting for this dark cloud to lift, praying for the power of the spirit and body of the earth to fill this empty vessel that has become who I am. Continue reading “Mid –Summer Musings: Lady in Waiting by Sara Wright”