The candle. September Pagan Challenge # 15.
Candles must be the most versatile magical thing there is.
spirituality
My brain hurts
Mindfulness • September Pagan Challenge # 12.
I don’t do mindfulness because it makes me ill. There’s a large body of evidence that people with a predisposition to anxiety and depression shouldn’t engage in mindfulness practices because they exacerbate these issues.
Continue readingHow I discovered the Craft
Spiritual bypassing
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 readingBlogging and privacy
People are often confused that I’m a blogger but I really value privacy. They seem to think that having any sort of internet presence is incompatible with privacy. In this post, I will attempt to explain why that is not the case, why privacy matters to me, why it should matter to you, and what that has to do with Pagan stuff.
Continue readingThe tree in summer
Following up on my previous post about the tree outside my window, here are some photos of the tree in the summer.
I realized that the reason I didn’t take pictures of the tree last summer was because of the insect screen on the window.
Haloes, East and West
We just started watching the series Warrior Nun on Netflix. It’s rather enjoyable so far. However I couldn’t help noticing that it is wrong about haloes.
New edition of Dark Mirror
I am delighted to announce that The Centre For Pagan Studies and the Doreen Valiente Foundation are publishing the revised and expanded edition of Dark Mirror: the Inner Work of Witchcraft by me, Yvonne Aburrow.
Buy the paperback from the Doreen Valiente Foundation Shop
Buy the hardback from the Doreen Valiente Foundation Shop
They are also publishing a new edition of my follow-up book, The Night Journey: Witchcraft as Transformation.
BIPOC Pagan Reading List
A reading list of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) authors covering Paganism, the occult, astrology, Tarot, and Indigenous spirituality.
Note that the deities of African diaspora religions can only be contacted through those religions and not via other religions. And that Indigenous life ways and spiritual practices are specific to their cultures and should not be culturally appropriated.
I’ve put out a call on Twitter and Instagram for more books to add to this list, and I will post updates (as I do with the Queer Pagan Reading List).
Notable and quotable: coronavirus (4)
Reflections on lockdown, the necessity of seeing trees, mending the cosmic egg, seeing the Earth from space, the ancient British mythology of plague, soul values, a poem that made me cry, and making meaning from the pandemic.
