Air: Without air, there would be no life. Air is the essence of life. On Venus, the gasses are too inhospitable for life as we know it. The gas giants of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus have liquid nitrogen for an atmosphere, and are considered to be lifeless. Only Earth and Mars which have atmospheres seem to be capable of sustaining life. As an atmosphere, air keeps the heat in, and converts water gasses into liquid. This enables life to flourish. As the wind blows the seeds to the ready earth, so it also brings rain clouds to dry areas.
Grey Squirrel Agile and alert, the grey squirrel remains active throughout the year. Chattering on tree branches, she amuses people who watch her antics. What people do not know is that the grey squirrel was a creature of the virgin forests of North America. She is one of the few mammals who adapted to cities. In winter, the grey squirrel eats tree bark and nuts that she stored in the fall. She locates these stored nuts by smell. Any acorns that the grey squirrel does not find will grow into trees for future squirrel homes. She is at home in the trees.
One of the first things I realized when I started honoring city spirits actively was A) how varied and individual their personalities are and B) there is a protocol for engaging with them, particularly as the relationship is first being established. Now that first point should have been a given for me; after all, as an animist it makes sense: spirits are individuals. I don't know why it came as such surprise to me that talking to New York City was different from talking to Paris who was different again from Venice or Washington or Berlin or Köln but it did. I suspect in my case, it was largely a matter of not having had much facility for sensing city spirits for a very long time and then suddenly finding myself able to engage. There was a real moment of cognitive disconnect to realize how much NYC had taken care of me and watched out after me when I'd been all but oblivious to his presence. Then there was the awareness that sometimes there isn't just one governing spirit in a city. New York City for instance has at least two: a spirit of NYC that I experience as male, and the spirit of Manhattan, a very angry (and justly so) Native spirit that reads to me asfemale. We'll come back to that in a bit. Then of course each borough has its own spirit and each neighborhood within that.It's a general rule of thumb in doing this work that the name of the spirit is the same as the name of the city, the name of the borough spirit is the name of the borough and so on.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...