The Slippery Spirit

I am a critical person; it's built into my personality as an "internal processor" and it is part of my "witches work" to juggle it until the day I die. I won't deny it, but I'm also not going to sugar-coat it. However, I will attempt (as I regularly do) to channel this trait into a positive characteristic rather than a destructive one. A rant that regularly passes through my head comes from the criticism I exact against many contemporary pagans. In my opinion, most self-identified pagans don't live a very pagan lifestyle. They call themselves pagans, but they don't act as if their pagan-ness is driving the decisions of their world. It is accepted that Wicca is a pagan religion. It is said that all Wiccans are pagan, but not all pagans are Wiccan. Wiccans are typically called "witches." It is very possible for someone to be a non-pagan witch. An example would be a Curandera, a Hispanic spiritual healer who uses ritualized actions to ...

Please try to put aside all of your ideas about dragons. I am not here to explore the idea of the fire-breathing, scaled creature of today's movies. In my mind, the dragon is different than that and much more than that. Dragons in The West The Persians called the primordial chaos a "dragon," but that could have been a translation issue. We really have no English word for the thing that Tiamat was, but it was her body that was used to create the universe. This kind of dismemberment cosmogony was exposed to the cultures of the Ancient Neat East, including the Semitic peoples, before the writings that became the Bible were written. In Isaiah 27, we find mention of "Leviathan" as the dragon of the sea. Remember that the sea was present at the time of creation - "and God parted the waters and made dry land appear" - the sea was the primordial ocean, the representation of the chaotic world before it had any ordered form, and it was out of this that the wo...

I often find repetitive physical work to be a kind of meditation. So I wanted to share with you a sacred moment I had recently. The trees near me are finally done dropping their leaves, which means I couldn't continue to put off the raking of the yard. I told myself I would wait until all the leaves were down. Now the work needed to get done if I wanted any kind of lawn in the spring, and I had to do it before all the plants under those leaves died. Since this is a job that I do only once every year, I decided to make it into a simple little sacred moment. My Ritual: I smudged my rake saying, "May this tool become an extension of my hand and follow the directions of my desire." (This is my stock request when purifying a tool that isn't one of my usual ritual tools.) I smudged myself saying, "May this work bring strength to my body, focus to my mind, and peace to my spirit." That's all it took. I then spent half the day raking leaves. I spent tim...

Most of the projects that I do with my hands help me to deepen my connection to the spiritual forces around me. I am lucky because every moment of my life has the feeling that the sacred is present. When I am involved in craftsmanship, that feeling is amplified tenfold. One of the most important activities in which a shaman can engage is establishing and deepening one's connection to Nature and their environment. I won't explore the details of why at the risk of sounding like a know-it-all. But I think it's safe to say that a shaman isn't a shaman if he doesn't know and have a good working relationship with the spirits of his environment. This week's entry at my craft blog, Craft Harder , is about trees, plants and deepening my connection to my environment. If you are interested, you can read it here.