This is an important New Moon as it is the first one of 2025. This is a good time to seed your intentions for the moonth (or year) ahead.
...PaganSquare
PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.
Recent blog posts
I was one of 3 people, each from different paths, who performed a ritual of their path at a funeral. I wore my religious robes and brought a drinking horn to perform a traditional sumbel toast.
...
A shocking development in my perfume journey happened. And I think it was because of this name of this website, witchesandpagans. Or possibly the pagan and heathen religious content of my post "What Is Beauty?" I think I may have just been discriminated against on the basis of religion. Perhaps I am mistaken? There is no way for me to check, though, because I can't access the basenotes site to ask. This is the story of what happened.
On a different website, someone recommended Basenotes as a site where people discuss making their own perfume, so of course I wanted to participate. When I signed up I looked around their forum to see where would be a good place to start participating in their community, and found an entire board called Shameless Self Promotion. The rules said you can't promote your products but you can promote your blog. So I looked at all the posts here on my blog to find one where I was talking about perfume but not promoting any of my products, and also not promoting anyone else's products. In fact I thought it safest to choose one where I didn't even mention the names of any products. So it couldn't be one of the ones where I list perfumes for the seasons or for offering to the gods because that could be considered promotion. I decided on the post "What Is Beauty?" because it's purely my thoughts about the subject, no promoting or selling involved.
...
Pickles and Roots
Don't look now, but there are three pink things on my plate.
A beet, walnut, and prune mince—what in Central Europe they call a poor-man's caviar—spread on a nice, thick slice of toast.
The pickled turnip, admittedly, gets its rosy color from beet juice. (By itself, turnip doesn't have much visual appeal.) It doesn't get more Deep Winter than pickled turnip.
Pickled pink radish, bright with lots of fresh ginger.
Throw in a glass of milk and an orange, and that's what passes for breakfast here at Witch Central these days.
Deep Winter: the Eve of Thirty-Ninth Night, with February Eve, the midway-point, still a week and odd days off, and here I am, breakfasting on roots and pickles; and glad I am to have them.
Thomas Edison carried quartz crystals with him at all times and called the stones his dream crystals. He believed they inspired his ideas and inventions. Literary legends George Sand and William Butler Yeats also relied on crystals to help spark their considerable creativity.
Data has also been gathered to show the effectiveness of quartz in certain healing techniques, such as chakra therapy, acupressure, and light-ray therapy, as we will discuss in depth later. But the simplest way to promote healing with crystal is to wear a stone. Quartz can take the form of great hexagonal stones or of crystals so small that only a microscope can see them. Quartz can appear in clusters or singly. It can also appear in every hue of the rainbow. The gorgeous and varied hues of quartz come from electrostatic energy, which now can be altered through technology. I, however, prefer the simple beauty provided by Mother Nature herself.
...Taking Silver
Oh, well. I never really wanted to be Achilles anyway.
It's the classic hero's choice: a short, heroic life, but remembered forever, or a long, uneventful one, and then forgotten.
Given the choice, which would you take?
Remember AIDS?
If I'd had the heroic beauty that I always wanted, I'd probably be dead by now.
These days, I go to more funerals than weddings. When the phone rings, I think: Uh oh, who now?
I've stayed lean, though. Because I neither dress nor act my age, from a distance I tend to read as a lot younger than I actually am. From a distance, I still see them looking.
Hey: if life is an Olympic event, I'm happy taking silver.
So: a friend invited me to a sacrifice. A real one: you know, killing an animal. Blood, all that.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention: I'm vegetarian. Been that way for more than 50 years now.
Am I going? You bet.
Will I eat any? Um...ask me again later.
No matter what kind of -vore you are, others die so you can eat them and live.
It's not the killing, it's how you kill.
I've said for years that one of the reasons why I don't eat meat—besides, frankly, not liking it much—is that I'm not willing to eat something that hasn't been killed properly: i.e., in a sacred way.
Has the hunter said the prayers and made the offerings?
Does the sacrificer know what she's doing?
Has the animal been killed respectfully and cleanly?
Well, now the bristles hit the breeze. Were these just words of convenience, or did I really mean them?
