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We have come from beyond the garden,
stories both old and new in our hands.
Our breasts are bare our hips are heavy,
and we are willing to show  our incisors.
Centuries of silencing and suppression
have been unable to stick to our skins,
our lapis beads rest easy across our throats,
and red crescent moons shine upon our brows.
No longer willing to settle for giving birth
to demons or destroyers,
we bleed all over the pages  of history,
eat all the apples we please,
carve stone into shapes that tell our hearts
to remember,
and sing of the forgotten things,
untamed, unbound.
Our most reliable sacred text
is the one we write each day,
shard by shard,
step by step,
bone by bone,
breath by breath,
side by side. 

Priestessing during a pandemic has not been easy! The past nearly two years have forced a serious assessment of where I currently am in my work and my willingness to offer what I can offer and to withdraw from what I cannot.

After careful consideration, I have been working in person with a very small group this summer every week, using the Lilith Circle Guide that accompanies the anthology Original Resistance. While I do not feel ready to branch back out into larger, more public group work again, it has been a really nourishing and rewarding experience to gather in a very small group. I encourage you to consider ways in which you might set your feet to the spiral once more and to reach back out to your own community in face-to-face connection with a circle that feels nurturing, safe, and enriching to you.

My daily life as a gythia includes both surprise duties and surprise rewards, as well as the more usual planned variety of each. Within the past few weeks I've found myself staying up late to help someone get rid of or get closer to entities she brought with her. I've helped a lost spirit that had attached himself to a living person to finally cross, for which he was thankful. I've sent a being that didn't belong in this world where he belonged. I've confirmed that a god was with someone, via my own connection with Odin and Loki, although they would say no more about it, firstly because if they interfered then the person would not have a chance to form the kind of connection the other god desired, and secondly because my gods did not want to encourage me to form any accidental connections with a pantheon outside the Asatru one. I'm glad to help, and helping people like this is one of the reasons I have these abilities. But sometimes the surprise is a present just for me.

The local landwight has been eating well this month, as my household generated an unusual amount of vegetable matter to compost. And there has been a lot of rain, a blessing from Thor. One day I was looking at my lovely mimosa tree and I remembered that out of the two decades I've lived here, the tree dropped live seeds that sprouted only once. They had been growing in inappropriate places-- the lawn, namely, and I had tried to transplant them, but they didn't survive. I suppose I made a silent wish in that moment-- I wished to grow a seedling of my mimosa tree. A few days later, when I went out to check on the area near the garden gnome statue, which is my icon of the landwight, I saw it: a tiny, tiny seedling, with tiny little mimosa leaves. Right behind the statue.

Take a close look at this reconstructed Iron Age round house from Pimperne, Dorset, England.

Note, in particular, the internal circle of support posts and lintels, marking off the inner living area.

If it doesn't look strikingly familiar to you, you can't possibly be pagan.

Although Stonehenge predates the Iron Age by more than a millennium, it's hard not to suspect that its familiar ring-with-lintels structure may well have been a visual echo of something that its builders knew intimately from their own daily lives.

You've heard of Stonehenge as temple, observatory, cenotaph. Well, it may or may not have been any, or all, of those things.

But it seems to me not to stretch credibility to claim that, first and foremost—whatever else it may also be—Stonehenge is a house.

Tonight, at my house, we’re preparing to celebrate Lughnasa tomorrow, the feast of the First Harvest.  The house is clean, the altar is already set.  Tomorrow morning, a quick trip to the farmers market will provide veggies for the feast, then we’ll bake up a small loaf of bread and gather sunflowers, wild wheat, and blue cornflowers for an offering.  Just like every other year.