Imbolc 2017, Ritual Debrief

My Imbolc ritual wasn’t a full ritual, not like I did Loafmass last year. Hopefully at some point I’ll get it figured out enough to actually do rituals for the 4 big holidays in one contiguous year. Anyway. I went simple, because my brain has been fried lately, because I’ve been exhausted, because the pressure …

Twice Weekly Prayers to the D’Angeline Gods

I assure you all, I am still alive. I managed to hurt my back some more this past month, and spent a good deal of September recovering. (See my rants about disability at my Twitter.) While recovering, I was not idle, religiously. In September I wrote three sets of prayers for three pantheons, and then …

Mother Tree Prayer

Do you watch the show Killjoys? Well, you should. It’s amazing. Seriously one of the best SF shows on right now. Also, religiously relevant to me. It’s become my new BSG. In Killjoys there’s a religious order called the Scarbacks. (Oh, yeah, don’t watch if you can’t handle self-mutilation like suspension on hooks or cutting …

30 Days of Paganism: How your faith has helped you in difficult times

It helps about as much as anything else, I guess. Or maybe I’m not defining “difficult times” properly, here. See I tend to think of most of my life as “difficult times”, even when things are good, because I suffer from mental illness and spend much of my time locked in depression and anxiety. So …

30 Days of Paganism: Beliefs – The power of prayer/reciprocity

Prayer has always been a tricky thing for me but lately it seems to be getting easier. I’m getting over the blocks in my head that had prevented me from really praying to the gods. Prayer is not a coin you put into a god to get the result you want. It’s a form of …

Weekly Ritual, January 29th

I did my ritual this morning, right after I woke up, like I said I’d try to do last week. It worked much better — put me in a better state for the day. (Relative; my tooth pain has been catastrophic for 2 days and I haven’t slept much, so I’m really only functioning at …

Weekly Ritual, January 15th, 2014

Today was time for my weekly ritual. I sat down in front of my portable altar, plugged in the lights, and lit the two candles. I lit some sage and waved the smoke around me, before beginning to meditate. I did two rounds of the Chenrezig meditation this time, and I’ve decided to start doing …

Prayers for Peace: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Lantern Ceremony

Yesterday, August 6th, was the 67th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. (August 9th will be the anniversary of Nagasaki.) It’s become traditional in various places to hold a lantern ceremony, where paper lanterns are let go on the water as a prayer for peace and the end of nuclear weaponry. I’ve been in Powell River …

Prayer, and how it’s difficult

I realized today — I don’t know how to pray. I do pray, quite often, but it’s always clumsy, and sort of haphazard, like I’m picking my way through a cluttered cabin full of spiritual knick-knacks and doodads, trying to find just the right one for my purposes. Quickly uttered “Dear Brighid, please wrap so-and-so …