Blessed Mabon

Tags

Mabon, reflection, way finding

Salve! Blessed Mabon to one and all.

It has been a very long time since I was last here and the Cabinet has gathered quite a bit of dust. I hope you will excuse the mess.

Winds of Winter

I miss winter, there seems to have been so little of it this year. This week has been fairly wintry but still it seems more ephemeral than spring blossoms. There is something about the purity in the air once it drops so cold. The way the silence that the snow fall brings envelopes everything. The vital comfort of warmth. The call of the crows, cackling in the icy air to mock the quiet stillness of the snow, their inky darkness sparkling in contrast to the steel grey sky. Diana stalks the autumn forests and Persephone reigns over the hungry spring, summer seems to have no master, but the winters belong to her, the Morrigan. This division is by no means law, but simply feels to be the way of things. It is to her that my thoughts wander  while gazing into the void of a starless urban sky.

Sorry about the Silence

Getting back into research mode has been a little harder than I thought. It’s not remembering how to do the research that is the problem, it’s knowing when to stop. I’ve been chasing threads of this and that through the misty woods of uncertainty and often found myself in territories far away from my original purpose. I apologize that I’ve let such a gap form between postings, my goal from last post was to do roughly one a month, and I realize now that like all habits, consistency is going to be the primary thing that keeps this blog alive. If I want consistency I need to do more.

I’m going to try to set myself on a general schedule, I’m going to do at least one more heavily researched article per month, as I said in my last post, but I want to add to that a commitment to try to do at least one post a week, usually shorter but perhaps related. I think sticking to a monthly theme might be helpful in handling these extra research threads that I want to discuss but don’t ultimately fit in my vision for the month’s primary research post.

So what then is the then for January?  Crows, Conflict, and the Morrigan.

I’ve already got some, hopefully, good content drafted. Stay tuned.

Gaia Aurelia Cerva

Welcome to 2017

A new year has begun and I think it’s time to kick this blog into a more robust and substantial shape.

Most posts have been my thoughts and feelings and personal reflection, and while that isn’t going away I do want to share some more things of substance. My plan is to start pushing out more research based articles on a number of topics.

• Nature and Civilization – Finding the Wild in an Urban Environment
  • How does one approach the practice of a nature-centric faith while living in an urban environment?
  • How do animals and plants adapt to survival in urban environments and what can we learn from that?
  • How can we ethically interact with nature under urban stress?
• How did we get here? – Navigating the murky marsh of history and religion
  • We all know little facts and stories about how things came about and why things are a certain way, or what this or that is about, but often times these narratives can hide fascinating tales of greater complexity.
  • How to be more historically literate, how to evaluate sources, ways to gain access to scholarly material outside the ivory tower, how to pick apart texts to find the useful material in regards to reconstructing practices.
• The Dead
  • We identify with our local living communities, but do we do the same with the local dead? If so, how?
  • Digging further into the concepts of the Beloved Dead, Mighty Dead, Ancestral Narrative, and more.

I hope to do at least one in depth article per month with other posts as the ideas crop up, including reviews, musings, and probably a few craft projects (I’ve got a ton on the horizon including some approximation of an Etruscan woman’s dress.)

Blessed New Year!

Gaia Aurelia Cerva

New Moon Sanctuary

Tags

Diana, Home, Hope, New Moon, Sanctuary

As I was leaving work I checked into Facebook to see that tonight was the last new moon of 2016, that it was time to set one’s intentions for the new year. I was very disappointed with what I read, the same sort of standard kind of fare when it comes to articles regarding what to do with the new moon. This is the first new year to come calling where I have not felt a tiny bit hopeful that the coming year at least had the potential to be better than the one that was ending.