Today is Orange Shirt Day, the day for remembering Indigenous children who died in residential schools and honouring the survivors.
It was organized by grassroots Indigenous activists for many years before it was officially adopted as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Continue readingThe Occult Clerihews Challenge! Write a Clerihew about a famous occultist (and post it in the comments or link back to this post so I get a ping-back).
The only rule of clerihews is that they have four lines with an AABB rhyme scheme, and the first line ends with the subject’s last name. I’ve bent the rule slightly because it’s hard to find words to rhyme with Gardner and Valiente. Clerihews don’t have to scan, nor be a complete biography of the person they’re about, and they’re comic rather than serious.
Continue readingThere are three harvest festivals in the Pagan Wheel of the Year. The first is Lammas (also known as Lughnasadh) which is the grain harvest (wheat and barley). The second is Autumn Equinox, which is the fruit harvest (particularly relevant in southern Ontario with the huge fruit-growing region of Niagara). It is also the time when day and night are of equal length, but the nights are going to get longer until the Winter Solstice. The third harvest is Halloween (known in Scots Gaelic as Samhain, in Irish as Samhuinn, and in Manx as Sauin), which is when farmers would traditionally slaughter any animals they could not feed during the winter, and salt down their meat for food supplies over the lean cold months.
Continue readingInspired by the title, and the quasi-animism, of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, which I only found out existed today, as it was featured on CBC.
Continue reading
Dowsing for Divinity 