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Eclipses are said to be a closing of one door and an opening of a window. At this past full moon on 6th September I did some Tarot queries using Joanna Colbert Powell's Gaian Tarot. The results were a bit counter-intuitive. A full moon is a culmination, but all the cards were pointing to beginnings and letting go so the new could happen. So eclipse season ain't over yet. Nope! The weather happening globally is the narrative set by the eclipse.

Fire and water are duking it out all over the USA. Here in Ireland, after a relatively dry (for us) winter, spring and summer, Lunasadh has brought the monsoon season upon us. In our boggy, heavy clay laden west of Ireland the water tends to pool. There is only so much land can hold and then it just lies on top. In winter we have these naturally occurring lakes called turloughs that evaporate in summer. Well, the turloughs are arriving early! And our car engine was killed when some local flooding on our lane turned out to be deeper than estimated.

I didn't realize that I was speaking polytheistically until I'd already said it.

“How it is out there?” asked the clerk, as she rang up my bottle of water and bag of ice.

I shook my head. “They say it's going to get worse.”

Conversations of this banality this go on between strangers in the Midwest every day, especially when it's hot and muggy.

New to Minnesota, my Israeli friend threw up her hands in exasperation.

“Augh!” she groaned. “Doesn't anyone around here ever talk about anything but the weather?”

Well, this is the Midwest. We have lots of weather here and we talk about it a lot. We're proud of our weather, and find it intrinsically interesting. Hell, we have weather here that can kill you. That's pretty interesting.

For pagans, of course, there's added incentive. Earth, Sun, Storm, the Winds: what we call “weather” is what the gods are doing.

A few months back, I wrote a column on books about the sea (or mermaids, to be exact). While digging through my library, it occurred to me that different columns for each of the traditional Elements might be a good idea. Just one problem: when I went looking for books on Air (and, by extension, wind and storms and so forth), I could find virtually nothing.

Sure, science books aimed at all ages are plentiful -- and I recommend some of the better written ones out there. The atmosphere is kind of important, after all. But books which deal with Air (and air and wind and atmosphere and so on) from a non-scientific point of view are few and far between. I could not find a single text written from an explicitly Pagan or polytheist perspective. So, I was left with lots and lots of science texts, some poetry, and a few mythological texts. And that's it.