PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

Today is my celebration of being born into this world and in this life, there is only one thing we can be truly certain of, and that is death.

We take a look at one of Iraq's most elusive religious minorities. Hindus gather for worship along the Ganga River in an annual ritual. And Muslims in the West stand up to religious violence. It's Faithful Friday, our weekly segment on faiths and religious communities around the world. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

Did you know that a new Sun was born this year?

Astronomers estimate that, here in our Milky Way galaxy, there's a New Sun born at a frequency of about one a year.

One a year.

When I was studying in Jerusalem, my room wasn't much bigger than the bed itself. There simply wasn't space for an altar, but I felt lost without one.

Fortunately, at one of the museums I found a postcard of a Phoenician goddess figurine. I tucked it into the corner of the mirror on the wall, and voilà: instant altar. One 3 by 5 inch postcard was all it took.

Later I found a copy of the same pregnant goddess in an antiquities shop down by the King David Hotel. (Mass-produced and hence affordable to the ancients, they remain so today, even for those of us on student budgets.) How many people come to Jerusalem to buy idols? the shopkeeper joked as he wrapped her up.

She sits now underneath the Yule tree, pensive, her hand on her great belly. Soon.

As I write this entry, the moon is on the verge of peeking through the branches of the Eucalyptus tree just to the east of my apartment. I love looking at the full moon rising through the branches of that tree: the tines of Cernunnos caressing Diana.

Of course, being witches, we all know why tonight is special. We've been waiting almost three years for a blue moon! Two full moons in one month--think of all the magic we can do!

As a part of the natural world we must deal constantly with cycles of life and death. Several of today's stories in Earthy Thursday deal with these and related themes, as well as what sits just beyond our everyday human experience.

This past week was a whopper, primarily because we in the northeast got walloped with an all-consuming blizzard. About 3 days before the blizzard, my son Gabriel and I were outside at his rabbit hutches getting them ready for foul weather, and we noticed that one of his female rabbits, Soot, was carrying straw and building a nest. We decided to move her from her shared hutch with 3 other females to a private hutch where she could give birth in private. We moved her and waited, but days went by and she didn’t birth any bunnies. I even noticed that she didn’t look pregnant anymore—she was much skinnier.

In the meantime, the Blizzard of 2015 struck. I found myself caring for my son’s rabbits far more than I probably should have. I felt a certain calling to tend to them frequently: replacing frozen water bottles, shoving more hay into their hutches, sweeping 6 inches, then 1 foot, then 2 feet of snow off the tops of their hutches and shoveling it away from the fronts so we could access them. I donned every bit of warm clothing I have and spent an inordinate amount of time tending to the rabbits, giving them extra feed, and cutting cardboard boxes and pressing the cardboard into the fencing of their hutches to create windbreaks. In all this time, Soot didn’t give birth.