A Beltane Blessing: Recipe for Sacred Herbal Offering Blend

The Druid's Garden

Sacred blend being stuffed in leather pouch for around the neck

Offerings to the land, spirits, and/or diety are a common stable in many traditions, druidry being no exception. Many opportunities present themselves and having something you carry with you can be built into your regular druid practice (and kept within, say, a crane bag).  Some years ago, I wrote about sustainable offerings and the kinds of offerings you can leave as part of a regular spiritual practice. These offerings might be home-grown herbs (as in the case of today’s post), home-brewed alcohol, small blessed stones, home baked bread or cakes, small shells, even your own nitrogen-rich urine.  I think the important thing with any offering is that it truly puts no strain on the ecosystem–but rather, is a true blessing.

In the spirit of this idea of sustainable and sacred offerings, in today’s post, I’ll share the…

Voir l’article original 1 814 mots de plus

Publicité

Tabatha’s Amazing New Zealand Facts!

Tabatha's Travels #tabathalovestotraveltheworld

Hello everyone! I hope you are having an amazing weekend 🙂 

I hope you are all happy (and ready!) to learn some amazing facts about New Zealand 🙂

Yes it that time when this kitty extends her writing skills and writes for the fantastic website Katzenworld 🙂

My article is now published and ready to view at:

https://katzenworld.co.uk/2018/04/29/tabathas-fantastic-facts-new-zealand/

Thank you for your continued support! 

Your (cute) travel blogging kitty Tabatha xxxx

Voir l’article original

OK. This shocked me.

The Arty Plantsman

No one can tell from the outside that they’re driven by fear. Sometimes they don’t even realize it themselves. The post 15 Signs That You’re an Introvert With High-Functioning Anxiety appeared first on Introvert, Dear.

via 15 Signs That You’re an Introvert With High-Functioning Anxiety — Introvert, Dear

I am stunned by how much of this applies to me (except number 7 – nobody would ever call Mt Taciturn here a chatterbox).

Voir l’article original

OK. This shocked me.

The Arty Plantsman

No one can tell from the outside that they’re driven by fear. Sometimes they don’t even realize it themselves. The post 15 Signs That You’re an Introvert With High-Functioning Anxiety appeared first on Introvert, Dear.

via 15 Signs That You’re an Introvert With High-Functioning Anxiety — Introvert, Dear

I am stunned by how much of this applies to me (except number 7 – nobody would ever call Mt Taciturn here a chatterbox).

Voir l’article original

Wild Food Profile – Burdock Root (spring and fall)

The Druid's Garden

Great Burdock (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Foraging is an important part of my spiritual path, as it is one of the ways that I build a closer relationship with nature.  I also think its an important part of the « oak knowledge » that druids should consider cultivating.  As we regain our understanding of the plants, trees, and herbs around us, we grow closer to that landscape.  By harvesting food from my backyard growing wild, I’m taking that landscape within and allowing it to nourish me.  This nourishment comes in many forms, and not all of them are physical. As our amazing spring returns after a long, hard, winter, I am so excited to get out there and enjoy  wild foods!

The early spring or late fall is a wonderful time for wild foods. From violets to ramps to dandelion greens and dryad’s saddle and morel mushrooms, the leafy veggies, edible…

Voir l’article original 1 571 mots de plus

Authenticity, Ancestors and the Druid Revival Tradition: Reclaiming our Ancestors and Living Druidry Today

The Druid's Garden

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths….are coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer coins.”

“On Truth and Lying in a Moral Sense” Nietzsche, P. 250

Standing stones in Bangor, PA (recently set)

There seems to be a preoccupation with “authenticity” and “truth” within the druid community (and outside of it). Time and time again, people have asked me a lot about the history of the tradition, the « truth » of the druid revival material, the lack of knowledge about the Ancient druids, and how we can be a « legitimate » religious or spiritual tradition. This has come not only from the outside, but also from members of the two druid orders to which I…

Voir l’article original 3 550 mots de plus

Smoke treatment and seed germination

The Arty Plantsman

This counts as this week’s geeky plant post. My mental health is good but I am unbelievably tired this week.

As many of you know, I have a great interest in plants adapted to a summer-dry Mediterranean climate. This includes the Fynbos habitat of South Africa which is what ecologists call a ‘fire climax community’. This basically means that the style of vegetation is maintained by periodic bushfires which kill off older, woodier plants and leave room for the cycle to start again from buried seeds, bulbs, tubers etc. Eventually, over several years the amount of flammable woody material increases until a fire resets the habitat again.

Fynbos, with a large Restio in the centre and the tubular red and yellow flowers of an Erica species in foreground

The plants of the fynbos have many adaptations to this cycle. For instance some bulbs (which stay safe underground during the fire…

Voir l’article original 856 mots de plus

Returning to the Hemlock Grove: Old Growth Forests as Sacred Sites

The Druid's Garden

This week I’ve been back in the Laurel Highlands of PA (my homelands) for a writing retreat for my research team for my university position. I was able to take a short break from our work today to spend some time at Laurel Hill State Park and visit the 6 acre old growth Eastern Hemlock forest there. Eastern Hemlock is one of my most sacred trees, and I know I’ve written more about it than any other tree on this blog. You might remember my blog post about the sacred Eastern Hemlock tree back in December.  If you do, you’ll remember that the Eastern Hemlock is under serious threat from the wooly adelgid, which is an aphid that feeds on hemlocks, sucking away their sap till they die. Many of the Northeastern US old growth hemlock groves (and hemlocks in general) have been lost to the adelgid.  So these remaining…

Voir l’article original 1 102 mots de plus

Diary of a Land Healer: March/April

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…

Voir l’article original 1 736 mots de plus

Sacred Landscapes, Part IV: Sacred Time, Sacred Space

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…

Voir l’article original 2 070 mots de plus