Earth-based Religions

How I Became a Pagan

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Paganism. The name itself has a certain wild and crazy sound to it, a sense of scribbling wildly outside the lines of the establishment. Much as I’d like to claim that aspect of the word, that sense of neo-medievalists dancing naked in the spring moonlight before they copulate in the furrows so that the crops will come again this year, that isn’t me, and it isn’t my paganism. I’m an urban middle-aged man, ex-school teacher, born and raised Jewish. What has brought me to a spiritual place where I can assert my religion is pagan, (or primal, to use Huston Smith’s more encompassing term) ?

Earth-based Religions

Elemental: Why We are All Pagan

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“That’s simple,” I answered. “We’ll honor the elements.” A feature of most contemporary pagan rituals. “We all have to breathe. We all need light and warmth. We all stand on the earth that feeds and shelters us. We all need water to stay alive, whatever else we believe or don’t believe.”

art

The Empowerment of Your Own Wisdom

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I led a nature divination workshop in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum a few years ago. I asked the group first to ground and center, then remind themselves of their oracular question, and then simply look around at the marshland where we had gathered. One woman decided to ask two questions rather than just one. She stationed herself on a boardwalk overlooking the marsh, closed her eyes and asked: “How can I find the time and energy to enjoy my life, given the fact that I am extremely busy with work right now?” When she opened her eyes, she immediately noticed the swaying grasses and rushes in front of her and realized that she, too, could be flexible like these plants.

art

The Feast of Mary Magdalen: Celebrating Incarnation

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I would like to declare July 22nd a feast day to celebrate our incarnation on this earth, something all of us alive and who have ever lived share with all life and life to come. We are made of the same substance; we are subject to the same joys and sufferings of the flesh.

Earth-based Religions

The Information Age? Meet John Michael Greer.

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I am reading The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, by John Michael Greer, a book I recommend (it has somewhat bizarrely cheered me up) and hope to find time to describe here. Meanwhile, here’s an excellent review. Searching for the author I was astonished to find pics of him as a druid in full regalia — I came across a hint of that in the book but it is otherwise secular ecology, sociology and future vision with nary a Green Man. Trolling his blog I came across this quote which seemed too good not to repost, seeing that I am swamped with words here at Tikkun, and hiking in the hills last weekend was mourning how little I really understood about the lansdcape I was walking through:
Our time, as the media never tires of telling us, is the information age, a time when each of us can count on being besieged and bombarded by more information in an average day than most premodern people encountered in their entire lives. Now it’s important to remember that this is true only when the term “information” is assumed to mean the sort of information that comes prepackaged and preprocessed in symbolic form; the average hunter-gatherer moving through a tropical rain forest picks up more information about the world of nature through his or her senses in the course of an average day than the average resident in an industrial city receives through that channel in the course of their lives.

Earth-based Religions

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom was sent to us by a member of the Faith and Spirituality group with which Tikkun is working to plan many workshops, a service, and a sacred space at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan, June 22-26. The member, Louisa Davis, suggested this poem as a blessing for the social change work taking place at the forum:

Another World is Possible
[br]
by Rose Flint
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We can dream it in, with our eyes
Open to this Beauty, to all
That Earth gives each of us, each day
Those miracles of dark and light–
Rainlight, dawn, sun moon, snow, storm grey
And the wide fields of night always
Somewhere opening their flower
stars – this, this! Another world is
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possible. With river and bird
Sweet and free without fear, without
minds blind to harmony, to how
We can hold. We have been too long
Spoiled greedy children of Earth, life of rocks and creatures
Slipping out of our careless hands.

Culture

Summer Time, When the Living is Easy

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When I was ten years old, I had a dream: I wanted a chipmunk to eat out of my hand. I laid peanuts in a trail that led from 15 feet away to the tip of my toes, with one final nut in my palm. I sat for what seemed like hours before the chipmunk arrived. The small animal scurried around, looked the whole situation over, scampered away, and then quickly returned to pick up the first nut in her mouth. After she tucked it into her pouch, she proceeded to the next, and the next, and then scooted away to hide them in her burrow.

Earth-based Religions

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from a piece about Earth Day by Jeff Vogel, a respiratory therapist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York:
Earth Day 2010

All living things — large, small, and in between — share in the precious gift of life on Earth. However, it is we humans, with our large brains enabling us to be self-consciously aware of this gift, that are the only creatures to celebrate Earth Day. As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, let us remember that this grand unifying perspective was made possible by one of our nation’s greatest gifts to the world, the first stunning photo of Earth from outer space taken during the Apollo moon missions. This awesome image of our beautifully round whole Earth, suspended in the vast blackness of space, may be humanity’s crowning achievement, the climax of our long collective urge to explore our surroundings. This new perspective of the Earth took our self consciousness to a whole new dimension.