A varied month: bisexuality, climate fiction, and essays.
Continue readingclimate change
Review of The Actual Star
A mysterious cave in Belize is the heart of this novel. In 1012, the last monarchs of the ancient Maya are preparing for the sacrificial ball game. In 2012, Leah Oliveri travels to Belize to rediscover her roots. And in 3012, two competing factions of a religion born from climate chaos travel to Belize to see which of their visions should prevail.
Continue readingThe winters of my childhood
In the 1970s, I remember proper snow in Hampshire, England. We would go out for walks and the snow would be ankle-deep (on me, a child) and collected in drifts against the fences. The snow only lasted a few days, but when it came, it blanketed the countryside in white and transformed it. I remember building a snowman in the back garden for quite a few years.
Continue readingI am the Earth
If you hold a shell up to your ear
Then you can hear
The oceans in your blood.
If you stand or sit or lie
Then you can feel
The earth’s crust in your bones.
If you focus on your breath,
Then you can sense
The air that gives us life.
If you touch your belly’s curve
Then you caress
The fire that lives within.
If you know that these are sacred
Then your body knows
You are the Earth and the Earth is you.
Without the oceans, trees,
And birds and bees,
There is no Earth, there is no me.
The Earth is sacred,
The Earth gives us life
There is no planet B.
Yvonne Aburrow
7:20 am, 22 April 2022 (Earth Day)
Inspired by the phrase “I am the Earth and the Earth is me” in Earth Day by JANE YOLEN.
Earth Day 2021
We all rise together
On solidarity with other people, small acts of kindness, self-care, and activism.
Continue readingNotable and quotable: Earth Day
It’s Earth Day today, and the significance of it being in the middle of a pandemic, when Nature is getting a brief respite from the depredations of industry and big oil, has not been lost on people, I hope.
The Tower and the Virus
My first guest column at The Wild Hunt.
I have been anxious for months, years even. I have watched with growing horror the rise of right-wing populism, the melting of the icecaps, the burning of Australia, the beginnings of wars over water and resources, the seemingly inexorable destruction wrought by climate change. The protests of Fridays for Future and Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion gave me some cause for optimism, but it is also obvious that governments have not been doing enough to turn the economy around to stop the production of carbon emissions. So when everyone suddenly swung into action to deal with the coronavirus crisis, it gave me some hope that perhaps now the needful actions to deal with climate change (many of which, it turns out, are quite similar to the actions needed to flatten the curve of coronavirus transmission) would seem doable. It also feels like now everyone else is as anxious as me.
Continue reading at The Wild Hunt.
If you enjoyed this post, you might like my new book, Dark Mirror: the Inner Work of Witchcraft.
Books I read in February
I read three books in February, all of which I have read before: the first three books of S M Stirling’s Emberverse trilogy. I re-read them because I like the characters very much.
Pagan statement of solidarity with Wet’suwet’en and Tyendinaga
We the undersigned believe that the colonial occupation and exploitation of Wet’suwet’en lands, and all other unceded lands, is illegal.
Dowsing for Divinity 