My Pagan Values: Balance

For this turn of the Wheel, instead of writing about my Sabbat rituals, I’ll be writing about the eight values I chose for each Sabbat this year – the whys and wherefores; what each value means to me within the context of the holiday. I hope you enjoy!

The Chariot is my favorite Tarot card. Any deck I’m interested in, I look at that card first. If I don’t resonate with it, that deck and I won’t spend much time together. Decks that feature a bicycle are (unsurprisingly) a big hit for me, although at the moment I’m in love with the Chariot from Isabella Rotman’s This Might Hurt tarot, where the rider effortlessly balances on two motorcycles at once! Swoon! In my incredible spouse Leora’s deck-in-progress, the Resilient Tarot, I am the Chariot, riding my bike across the card with a look of sheer glee on my face. That’s how much I love the Chariot.

What does the Chariot mean to me? Balance. Getting the shit in my life into enough balance that I can bring some order to the chaos and keep moving forward. Balance between motion and rest. Between filling myself up and pouring myself out for community. Between meticulously planning my life and letting the tides of happenstance carry me.

Balance is dynamic. Staying upright on a bicycle at rest is very difficult. Even in a track stand, that seemingly motionless bike is often full of small motions that keep in in place. Balance isn’t a one-and-done state of being. It’s a constant process of awareness and adjustment.

I value that greatly in my spiritual life and practice. I strive to live in balance with Earth Itself and with All That Is. That looks different on different days, in different seasons of the year, in different seasons of my life. Nothing is static, so balance can never be static. I find a still point at the center, and then the center moves, and I must move with it.

This may, then, be a strange value to celebrate at Fall Equinox, despite the obvious association of equal night and day. After all, I can’t do anything about the balance of the equinoxes: Earth orbits; Earth tilts; we have one moment of perfect balance, and then we move on to greater darkness or greater light. But the Equinoxes do feel like moments when Earth’s journey and mine align for a day, and I want to celebrate that.

The brevity of the equinoxes also reminds me to give myself grace. If Earth Itself can’t constantly maintain balance, it’s more than okay that I can’t, either. I stop moving. The bike tips over. I fall down. Then I get up and pedal again, and I move back into balance, whatever that looks like today.

Blessed be.

This turn of the Wheel: a review

With Lammas 2021 behind us, I’ve completed my yearlong experiment in minimalist rituals. How did it go? How do I want to proceed?

tl;dr version: I loved it. I want to keep doing it. I need to make several decisions about how I’m going forward, but I feel I’ve prepared the ground well for those decisions and whatever grows from them. That’s the short version. Read on for the loooong version.

Wheel of the Year with Earth by Bart Everson via Flickr

Lammas 2021: Autonomy

Bread is one of the the most fascinating human creations. It’s part science and part alchemy. It connects us to Earth, which gives us the wonders of grain, water, and yeast, and to millennia of ancestors who have fed themselves, their families, and their communities through this incredible process. Also, it’s delicious. So Lammas – literally a holiday for bread – is a big deal around here.

Of course there’s more to it than, “Yay bread!” (Although… “Yay bread!”) Lammas begins the harvest, when folks start to reap the fruits of careful sowing and tending. As a white person in the urban US, I have the privilege of year-round access to grocery stores and restaurants. I’m in little danger of starving to death even if my own personal harvest (mulberries. so many mulberries) isn’t enough to see me through the winter. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, I feel so much power in the reminder that, even if we feel disconnected from the land, we depend on it, and the people who tend it, for the food we need to live. Also, like any good postmodern neo-Pagan, I’m a sucker for a good harvest metaphor. I also feel a communal aspect in Lammas, related to the fact that, for many years, our Reclaiming community’s Lammas celebrations began early that morning, with many of us gathering in a community-member’s kitchen to bake bread for the afternoon’s ritual.

All of this is why Leora and I began our Lammas ritual this year by making skillet biscuit bread and mulberry quick jam (so. many. mulberries). While our cauldrons bubbled on the fire and filled our house with irresistible smells, we checked in with some tarot cards to see where we are and where we want to focus for this next segment of the Wheel. Then, in keeping with the day’s “autonomy” aspect, we parted ways for individual time doing whatever felt sacred to each of us in the moment. I don’t know how Leora spent their time (though I think wood burning tools came into play), but I spent mine lying on the ground in the backyard, doing death meditations and feeling my body dissolve into the body of the Earth. We ended by reconvening and – you guessed it – eating delicious bread and jam. (Seriously. If you like bread or fruit compote, try these recipes. So tasty and sooooo easy!)

Our Lammas altar

It was exactly the kind of ritual I love: logistically uncomplicated but so spiritually fulfilling. I missed the large community aspects of past Lammases, but in our community of two we celebrated both the autonomy and the interdependence that make our lives possible. We examined what we’re harvesting in our lives (besides mulberries). And we created space for spiritual practices that held meaning for us, not just whatever the ritual outline dictated came next.

Also: yay, bread!

Summer Solstice 2021: Reverence

As has been the case for many of our rituals in this turn of the Wheel, this one had a lot of adjustment and adaptation. This raises an interesting question for me as a religious person in this 21st century, especially since my religion is rooted in the cycles and processes of Earth Itself: if circumstances (by which I mostly mean the weather) don’t favor the ritual I had planned at the time I’d planned it, do I postpone the ritual until more favorable circumstances arrive, or do I adapt the ritual to the circumstances? The former gets me the ritual I envisioned, with the spiritual impact I was hoping for. But the latter reminds me that I may be my own spiritual authority, but I’m rooted in the interdependent communion of all things, and I’m far from the authority of that. Pagan plans and Earth laughs, to mess up the old adage.

So, with temperatures unexpectedly (though not unwelcomely) tumbling after weeks in the mid- to high-90s F, dinner outside in the small but precious ecosystem of our yard turned into dinner by the open back windows, well bundled against the chill. The ritual’s basic structure stayed the same: dinner in sacred space, fully immersed in the nature that we are and are in, with no screened devices.

It was harder than it sounds. Leora and I have multiple identification apps on our phones. We struggled against the impulse to dive for them at the first note of birdcall, the first wave of an unfamiliar leaf, the first wisp of white. We desire to know, to sort into boxes labeled “house sparrow,” “creeping bellflower,” “altocumulus.” This desire is ancient within us, hearkening back to when our wellbeing depended on knowing whether an animal was friend or foe, a plant food or poison, a cloud a signal of drought or flood. Even without that necessity, sometimes it’s just cool to know what other lives I share my space with: what bird makes that mournful cry in the later afternoon? what’s that plant taking over that part of the yard?

But for me, when curiosity replaces necessity, the identification can sometimes disconnect. I gain “mourning dove” and lose the shiver of that haunting coo. I gain “wild geranium” and lose the particular delicacy and hue of each blossom. At those times, I have to put away my field guides and ID apps and be with and in all this incredible life. Present. Reverent.

After dinner, we did a three-card tarot reading. It was my first time looking at a deck since December. I think it’ll be a long time, if ever, before I bring the cards back into my personal practice. But as a way for Leora and me to look at our lives now and our path forward together, it’s pretty fun.

The ritual wasn’t what I had planned. It was what it needed to be. That is part of the Mystery.

Blessed be.

Photo by David Clode via Unsplash

May Day 2021: Embodiment

Yes, I see you looking at the post date here. Eli, you may be thinking, it’s almost June! Summer Solstice is three weeks away! Why are you just now posting about May Day?

The answer, gentle reader, is this: grad school.

On May 15, 2021, my beloved, smart, and persistent spouse Leora finished their Master of Social Work degree. May Day itself was smack dab in the whirlwind of their final assignments. Then, between post-school recovery and the flurry of well-deserved celebrations that basically took the place of an actual graduation ceremony, yesterday was our first chance to celebrate May Day. So we took it.

This is one of the greatest advantages to being a naturalist. I know my deity won’t be upset if I celebrate a Sabbat late, because my deity is too busy being the entire planet to worry about when (or whether) I celebrate its seasons. Was it weird to celebrate May Day this close to Summer Solstice? A little, yeah. But it still felt like a celebration of the energy that May Day represents: that burst of creative and generative energy, the speeding up of plant and animal growth and activity, the return of heat and fire, even to our chilly northern climes. For me, as long as I feel climatologically and atmospherically appropriate celebrating what a Sabbat represents, then I’m going to go ahead and do it.

The ritual itself was uber-simple, even considering our commitment to a year of pared-down celebrations. We acknowledged sacred space and went to the Midtown Farmers Market. We brought fresh local produce. Later that night, we put some of that produce on flatbread pizzas and made a simple syrup with the rest. That’s it. And that’s not it.

Ever since we moved to the Longfellow area of Minneapolis, the MFM has been a sacred place for us. Few years have passed when we haven’t attended the market’s first day, coming as it does so close to both May Day and our anniversary. One of those years was 2020, with the first Saturday in May falling in the midst of the worst of the early-COVID panic. Minnesota’s Stay at Home order was firmly in place, and chaos was mostly the order of the day. A stripped-down version of the market opened, but with the perfectly sensible restriction that only one person per household could enter the space at a time. Leora and I couldn’t bring ourselves to go alone. Market Opening Day has always been a family and community event for us.

This year, Leora and I are fully vaccinated, and most folks have a firmer handle on how to navigate each other in a COVID world. Also, grad school is done. Going to the market felt not like “getting back to the way things were” but moving forward in the way things are. A little more considered. A little more aware of our fellow human beings. What a wonderful way to celebrate the Sabbat of embodiment.

_{Image via the Corcoran Neighborhood Organization}