Recently there has been a pattern on social media of BIPOC people expressing their completely valid pain and anger and sadness over the continuing murder of Black people by police, and getting pushback from “spiritual” people claiming that their anger is too much, or somehow misplaced. I have also experienced this phenomenon. I used to call it “spiritualler-than-thou” syndrome, until I discovered that it already had a name, spiritual bypassing.
Continue readingPraxis
Earth Day 2021
Everything you think you know about Wicca is wrong
This blogpost was inspired by this conversation on Twitter:
The snark quotient of this post may be dangerously high — you’re strongly advised to put your snark goggles on, because I have a snark hammer and I am not afraid to use it.
Continue readingNotable and quotable 24: death and tea lights
I haven’t done a “notable and quotable” for a while. I’ve been a bit busy making YouTube videos and promoting the second editions of my books, Dark Mirror and The Night Journey. But I spotted some great posts and thought they were worth sharing in case you missed them.
Continue readingHow to make an ancestor altar
Dialogue with traditions
In initiatory Wicca, there have been some fairly heated arguments over the years about what tradition means, and what aspects of Wicca can be creatively altered to be inclusive. When I started talking about making Wicca more inclusive for LGBTQIA+ people, the response from some people was “but what about the tradition?”
In this post, I propose a new approach to questions of tradition: more of a creative dialogue, and a focus on the real purpose of a tradition (which is the approach I have tried to take all along, but some people assumed that I was throwing away all adherence to tradition).
Solidarity with Black Lives Matter
There have now been hundreds of Black people killed by police in the USA. The militarization of the police has continued and expanded since the Ferguson protests over the killing of Michael Brown.
I have mainly been posting about the protests on my Instagram and Twitter accounts.
Notable and quotable 22
This week’s absolute belter of a post was Christopher Penczak’s article Holding the door open.
Don’t miss Julian Vayne’s series of interviews, Our Magical Things.
And a lovely post on egg healing in Slavic magic on the Divine Multiplicity blog.
Really great post on being in mythological time from Kiya Nicoll (how was I not following Kiya’s blog before now?)
And a guest post by Ing Venning on Nimue Brown’s blog.
Hugging while 2 metres apart
Many people are going to be deprived of touch and hugging while self-isolating during the coronavirus pandemic.
Here’s a method for hugging while standing two metres apart (the recommended distance to avoid transmission of the virus).
What we have in common
I dreamed that I was in an Anglican or Episcopalian Church in North America and had been invited by the vicar to introduce a hymn. She handed me the order of service which already had a hymn picked out, and it had been annotated to change “him” to “her”, so I introduced it and encouraged people to sing “her” where appropriate if they wanted to. One of the congregation said they didn’t really know the tune for that hymn. So then I suggested we sang Morning has broken and changed “him” to “her” in the second verse, and “God’s” to “Her” in the third verse. Then I woke up.
