Category Archives: Articles

…So let’s not forget that the solstice is due on June 20 this year…

And we also celebrate Midsummer’s and its Eve on the 24th and 23rd: the next Monday night and Sunday.

The imagery for Midsummer’s is easy: people in a ring, dancing round the fire, sun-wise, arms raised, on top of a hill… driving their cattle through the fire, jumping through the blaze, and rolling flaming wheels down a steep hill…

Gold AND yellow…

The Sun becomes the Questing Knight, the same as the Green Knight…

Oak leaf wine, golden green… honey cakes, local fruit… and crumble some onto the earth as an offering.  Maybe add pink rose-petals to the wine…

Simple things: like laying on the grass…

Decorate the house with birch twigs and roses, and hang fennel over the door…

Garlands of St. John’s Wort, fern seeds, golden mistletoe. Angelica, marigold, camomile, chervil, marjoram, calendula, sun-flowers yellow-faced…

"Beans and peas and lettuces, 
  radishes and beet
Rise up soon and make for me 
  a garnish for my meat.
Blessings once and blessings twice 
  do I give to thee
Something given, something gained, 
  Blessed shalt thou be."

Make an incense of frankincense, cinnamon, red sandalwood and oak leaves.   

Alison-san is making the most delicious shortbread cookies: Blue Hen Cookies – available at Lark and Larder, the Boise Coop, FarmDeliver, Savory n’ Sweet, and Ketchum Kitchens….

…and more…

Aikido is a gem of many facets – sometimes it seems that every one of O’Sensei’s students remembered a different teacher, and of course, many, many different styles have been preserved and developed – but here is one facet that clicked into focus for me recently:

what if O’Sensei spent his time away from Iwama and Tokyo coherently pursuing what he felt to be his “mission in life”?…

what if he spent his time away from Iwama and Tokyo creating and nurturing a network of dojos run by Omoto-Kyo, ex-Omoto-Kyo and Ko-Shinto believers ( hand-picked deshi,  some of them raised, almost, as members of his family) – – – and ex-Kamikaze pilots, too (!) – often with his own name on the sign –  in places – and close to shrines…

read more:

Paddy Slade’s Seasonal Magic is good for all the Mayday games that conjure serendipity in aid of a good Spring, Summer and harvest…  Add to these the traditional helpers of Great Nature, and we have the imagery that feels perfect for the first day of May… the month named for one of the Seven Sisters, the wife to Hermes…

A ribboned hoop, with gold and silver balls.  A wooden rod with the bark peeled in a spiral, and on top a painted cockerel.  Birch branches, and branches of other trees  –  collected over night…  the hawthorn, the rowan… (set up over the windows and door, but NEVER brought inside). Miniature maypoles and candies. Two hoops bound with flowers – one inside the other – and mounted on a stick, with a small female doll and a garland. The maypole itself, of birch or ash, hung about with garlands, ribbons, silver spoons, watches, tankards and symbols of the sun, moon and stars… rich fruitcake and rough cider to reward the musicians, the May queen and the May king, sitting in a bower with their attendants dancing around them… Announcing the May Queen’s arrival with a bugle… or a lur!  A wreath of forget-me-nots, and on a pole: a wooden stag’s head…  a wood-wose… the bale-fires lit with nine types of wood, and driving the cattle between the two fires, on the hilltop… round cakes of oatmeal broken in four, and who-ever gets the last piece jumps the fire. Butter, milk and eggs left when the fires are out… whisky and oatmeal for the foxes, crows and eagles, a golden lion and on either side a red and a blue hobby horse… birch bundles to ensure fertility… the fly agaric growing beneath the birch… the burning of straw houses or of effigies… a greenwood hand-fasting, washing of faces in May morning dew, a fiddler leading the dancing line serpentine, two dancing circles – deosil and widdershins one inside the other – amongst the dancers: Maid Marion, Robin Hood and his Merry Men… the dancing procession to bless every house…

…the month of celebrating the burgeoning Spring: the lambs, the laying-like-crazy hens, the hare going crazy to lay like a hen…

…dye your Eostur eggs naturally with vinegar, red cabbage, onion… and decorate with sun signs…

…candles should be yellow and green, altar-cloth of green…

…roll fires downhill, just as at Midsummer’s and Lughnasa…

…the Equinox birds are nightingale and sparrow…

An old charm to honor a tree:

When nights and days are balanced and halved
Cut from the branches March has saved
Twelve supple wands all budded green
Twist them together to weave a crown.

Summer will come, and the winter wind
Turning and turning the leaves on their stems
Then they must fall, but now in Spring
The twig is bound, but the bud remains.

Hang the leaf from a sturdy limb
of Oak or Maple, or Ash or Elm,
Thus will the tree live long and well..

So if you are sad to see the Yuletide decorations disappear, maybe, precisely, you would enjoy doing a little to decorate for all eight Northern/Celtic seasons of the year… …and that impulse is precisely an impulse to improve ourselves and improve our culture for ourselves…

Next up is Imbolc, which is about welcoming back the Spring as Great Nature just starts to get started, while the snow is still on the ground…

Each of these festivals comes out of the ground, so the true timing of Imbolc is when the snowdrops and crocuses start to bloom, where-ever it is you are…

Candles should be white. Cloth white and green. A golden bough with bells for Brighid 1), goddess of metal-workers and poets… A cup, a mirror, a spinning-wheel… A white wand of birch or willow… A glass of spring water…

1. If you have a golden element that represents the moon, it needs to keep pace with the real moon. You need a range of phases you can swap out, and during the waxing moon, you want to be just a little ahead of the real moon. Then during the time of full moon, you should change the location of the element twice: the second time you change it, change the location to somewhere up high, and less conspicuous. Then during the waning moon, you want to be four or five days behind the real moon. At Dark of the Moon, your element can be absent, or it can settle at a thin sliver of a new moon…

– – – by Kimbal Anderson Sensei

The person who helps us with my extravagant approach to dog-inculturation, she has a reward sound which is basically telling my dogs ‘aren’t we having a freaking great time doing this?’ And the dogs are going ‘Yeah this is great – because you get me!’ The dogs are going ‘you get me!’ And she’s going ‘You get me’ ‘Yah, we get each other!’ ‘Are we are going to do some fun?’ ‘Yeah! I’ll do a back-flip! What the hell! Okay!’ ‘Show me, show me!’ ‘Okay I’ll do it…’ Because they get it by pure frequency.

I wanted them to have an aunty. They need to have uncles and aunts who are not swayed by family politics. She’ll do stuff with them that neither of us would conceptualize doing because we imagine we know what we’re doing. But all we’re doing is creating a communication about a certain area, not the vastness of all the interactions these animals can have.

And Shoki can hear the sound of her coming, walking up the street, just like they can understand a certain car or a certain motor. He just does.

But the deal is, he has to go sit at the threshold when we open the door, he can’t go out. They have to sit and look at each other, and they’re all a-buzz, they’re vibing… And he’ll look at her ‘wha, wha, what?’ He’s gotta wait. ‘You gotta wait, you’re learning not to run out in traffic. Then I’ll go ‘Okay!’ And she’ll go ‘Shoki!!!!’ You know…

And he just looks around: ‘What are you going to do today?’ Tomorrow will be a reboot of the running-through-the-tunnel-that’s-going-around-the…You know… Dog dressage. ‘Dog-sage’ I guess you could call it. He’s an athlete to me. And the others now have to sit now, on at their little Australian Shepherd sections, in their place, and watch it without barging in, interrupting… Kind of like not interrupting class. And it’s so fun to watch them, because they all reinforce each other. Like ‘You sit there. Because my turn’s next.’ And they’re learning what is necessary if they were in the outback to do what they need to do to protect themselves: get to water, eat a kangaroo, deal with human foolishness… Because we are confusing. As you know, there’s several of you, quite a few of you in one structure. They know that too. They tend to be pretty singular in this.

But not always. I had one dog who’d put on a human face. Man, it’d be like this aboriginal face on. He’d be like ‘woah dude’…

He’d vibe himself into his ancestor land!