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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in farming

Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs
Praise to the Farmers

    Walking out of my office is like opening an oven. The heat is a wall, strong, searing; there is a scent similar to baking bread rising from the grass that is toasting under the sun's unrelenting rays. My drive home takes me past farms along Route 5 in Deerfield: potatoes, tobacco, and corn growing strong and green despite the heat. We are not experiencing a drought; in fact the other day a thunderstorm hit on the way home with wind and rain so strong visibility was brought down to just a few feet. I am sure the rain was welcome just the same. 

    I think often of the local farmers. I am grateful for the countless hours they spend at their vocation and I recognize that it is a life I could not live. My own grandparents were farmers and factory workers, supplementing a life of hard work and unpredictable yield with wages earned by working in a foundry. Hard work and luck seem to be the mantra for farmers. Hard work, luck, technology, and engineering, farmers rely on many factors to answer their calling to serve. How did my grandparents manage? And their grandparents, and theirs? Go back generations, centuries, eras, and eventually everyone's forebears were farmers of a sort. They had only their own hard work, luck, and the grace of the gods to ensure plenty. 

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Frau Harke, Goddess of the First Harvest

Around Lughnasadh or soon after, I saw my first mourning dove at our Appalachian farmhouse. We’ve lived here since March, and while I’ve seen blue jays, cardinals, chickadees, nuthatches, falcons, crows, and more, mourning doves were conspicuously absent. And then there it was on our white post-and-rail fence. The next day, I saw another, and then more appeared in the bushes and trees over the next weeks. This morning, there were five perched on the fence, observing me as I let out our dog.

I think of Frau Harke when I see them, thanks to Jacob Grimm, who wrote in Teutonic Mythology that "Harke flies through the air in the shape of a dove, making the fields fruitful” (Vol. 4, p.1364). Harke is a giantess of German folklore in the Brandenburg and Thuringia regions. Her name means “to rake,” calling to mind the harvest and care of the earth. While usually a dweller of wild mountain forests, she does travel about during her holy days, like other goddesses of her type. Folklorist Benjamin Thorpe wrote that "At Heteborn, when the flax was not housed at Bartholomew-tide [August 24], it was formerly the saying, 'Frau Harke will come'” (142).

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Pagan News Beagle: Earthy Thursday, July 28

Rare species on Easter Island face extinction. New fossils in China challenge assumptions about human evolution. And we talk about the economics of air pollution. It's Earthy Thursday, our weekly segment on science and Earth-related news! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

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Pagan News Beagle: Earthy Thursday, May 7

One of the greatest needs of industrial civilization is cheap and plentiful energy. Our search for such energy has often come at the cost of the environment. But need that be the case in the future? Several of our articles this week take a look at the relationship between our power sources and the environment as well as how new technological innovations may make green energy truly sustainable and practical very soon.

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PaganNewsBeagle Earthy Thursday Sept 25

For our Earthy Thursday feed today, we have five stories (and one lovely photo) about Gaia, our lovely planet and Earth goddess. A double rainbow; a deadly garden; rooftop gardening; butterfly conservation; climate change evolution; and small farm families.

Had to share this great double rainbow photo from a sacred place of polytheist interest.

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Recent comment in this post - Show all comments
  • Lizann Bassham
    Lizann Bassham says #
    Thank you for all of these!!
PaganNewsBeagle Earthy Thursday Sept 18

Happy Thursday! Today we have an Earthy Thursday feed with earthquakes (caused by human activity); changes to farming in a climate-changed world; a zero-waste supermarket experiment in Germany; a town in Vermont goes 100% renewable; and combating climate change might just be --- free?

Those earthquakes swarms in (normally earthquake free) Oklahoma. The USGS recently concluded the high-intensity injection wells (aka "fracking") were responsible after all.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Over at Patheos, Sam Webster wrote a most engaging essay on the revival of the Pagan concept of sacrifice. The article starts with the traditional and ancient concept of animal sacrifice and continues on to more symbolic sacrifices such as invocations and acts of service. Naturally, it was the part about animal sacrifice that generated the most comments, many thoughtful and appreciative, and quite a few that were angry and accusatory.

It’s not a surprise that some people have a natural revulsion to the kind of blood sacrifice practiced in the religions of the ancient world, and in some branches Paganism and Afro-revival religions. We have little exposure to death in our industrial world, and what exposure we do have is from the media ie. news, film fiction, and video games. Last week’s episode of Game of Thrones concluded with a scene of violent and dishonorable death, and more than one person I know found it deeply disturbing and unnecessary. (For the record, so did I) I’m not sure how realistically GoT portrays a feudalistic society, but the version we see on HBO is certainly nasty and brutish.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Ruadhán J McElroy
    Ruadhán J McElroy says #
    Religious animal sacrifice increases the level of care. Increasing the level of care increases the level of caring. To give what w
  • Joseph Bloch
    Joseph Bloch says #
    I can't agree with you enough, and in fact I posted on this very same issue back in December. Animals that are killed as part of t
  • Dver
    Dver says #
    Animals not under human care don’t ever die nicely. Oh thank you so much for a (sadly rare) reasonable and intelligent post on th

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