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Since Ariadne's Tribe is a living spiritual tradition, it has taken us a number of years to complete our sacred calendar. This post and the next one will be the last additions for the foreseeable future. This has been a long-term community effort in the Tribe, and I'm grateful to everyone who has participated in this process.

So where are we in the calendar right now? We've just passed the Blessing of the Ships and are now in the season that leads up to Summer Solstice.

The days and weeks leading up to the height of the winter holidays are both exciting and sacred to people from many different spiritual traditions. Christians have Advent, for example; Norse Pagans have Sunwait. Liturgical seasons leading up to a sacred day are far older than either of these traditions, and they have an important function: encouraging us to focus not just on the upcoming "special day" but on the way the year hinges around it.

And the Winter Solstice appears to have been the "central peg" on which the sacred calendar turned across much of early Eurasia, with the Sun Goddess as the driving force behind the year. Check out Patricia Monaghan's excellent book O Mother Sun! for some great research about this subject.

Rainbow Season is my kindred's end of summer ritual. Since summer is monsoon rain season the end of summer is rainbow season. We honor the mermaids in the summer and Heimdall at the end of summer. Heimdall was Tom Newman's patron. I don't know if we're going to keep doing that in future years but we're at least doing it one more time, this year, in honor of Tom. It's also 1 year since he died.

Heimdall is the Guardian of the Rainbow Bridge. The Rainbow Bridge is the path that leads from Asgard to wherever the gods want to go. When the end of the rainbow touches down on Earth (Midgard) it only goes one place, to Asgard. The gods can bring dead people to Asgard via the Bridge if they wish to select specific humans for that honor.

My kindred’s Autumnal Equinox ritual this year is called the Rainbow Season Ritual. It’s a ritual to Heimdall and his nine mothers. Other heathen groups celebrate Vetrnatr or Winter Nights in the fall, but here in the Mojave Desert, trying to celebrate the onset of cold weather when it’s still over 100 degrees out just doesn’t feel appropriate to our local weather and landscape. If we are to honor nature, then we must take real nature into account, and not just what a date on a calendar says. I considered trying to move Winter Nights to the actual time I would expect it to start freezing out, but then it would coincide with Yule. So instead, we’re celebrating the end of monsoon season. After the thunderous, rainy, lightning-prone time of Thor comes the rainbow, the time of Heimdall.

We tend to think of nesting birds and cute fledglings as a spring thing. In practice, right now many birds are raising second clutches as we move into the summer. Some will raise three, even. This is the season of second chances.

The survival rate for cute, fluffy chicks isn’t great. A momma duck can start out with a dozen tiny bundles of fluff and be lucky to raise one viable duck to adulthood. The problem for chicks is that they are mouthfuls of protein with no scope to defend themselves or escape. They come into the world at just the point in the year when everything predatory is looking for neat bundles of protein to post into the mouths of their own cute and hungry young things.

Taking fifteen minutes—or less—to plan your autumn and winter can make all the difference.

As you will see, I’m not suggesting the all-too-common, hyperactive, overly-ambitious, unrealistic agenda that leaves you exhausted and makes you want to rip your hair out.

If you view the modern holiday season as a non-Pagan concern and therefore see no reason to make plans, consider the following.

The days are getting longer.  Even if the weather is still winter, I can start to see the energy of spring building as we step forward day by day.  My day job is at a university so the new semester has started and the insanity in my day job is stressful and chaotic.  This reminds me of the energy spring brings.

Spring season is all about new beginnings, fresh starts, and moving forward.  In my way of doing things, I’ve considered over winter what is important, what I need to work on.  I may have (very likely have) made a to do list of what I need to do for my goals – what the next steps will be.