Pagan Holly

I’ve been learning as much as I can about Paganism and I’ve realized there’s so much I don’t know. I was already aware of my ignorance in a general sense. Although I’ve been Pagan for years, I still think of myself as new to this. Now, though, I have a much better idea of where, specifically, my knowledge is lacking…and critically, I understand how to change that. Every time I say something like this, a handful of well-meaning (always male) friends tell me I shouldn’t be hard on myself, that I’m actually pretty smart, etc. So let me be clear. The things I’m saying here have absolutely nothing to do with “low self-esteem.” This is not me “being hard on myself.” And I know I’m smart. Becoming aware of the limits of my knowledge is evidence that I am learning. I find this exciting! It means I’m facing a challenge and I can see which direction I need to go to overcome it.  As of right now, there are 24 primary source texts on my to-read list. There are 57 modern Paganism and witchcraft...

I thought it would be good to talk about what’s on my altar, which necessarily means talking a bit about my devotional practice. Both the altar and the devotional practice are works in progress. Writing about them will undoubtedly help me think of ways they can be improved. I’ll start with the altar itself: it is a small, roughly cube-shaped cabinet I bought at Goodwill for like $10 when I was a teenager. It’s particle board with a glass door. There’s a glass shelf inside, giving it two layers of storage space. I have trouble picturing a standard household application for such a short cabinet but it’s just the right height for use when I’m sitting on the floor, and since I like to sit on the floor when I’m doing ritual or magical work, it’s perfect. I’d be open to upgrading it to something higher-quality and more attractive but any replacement would have to be equally functional. Inside the altar are extra altar cloths, extra candles, extra matches, a couple crystals, the box for the “...

Autumn is in full swing: the leaves have changed colour and are starting to fall, the skies are often grey, the air is cool, and nights are becoming long. I love fall. But is it my favourite season? I’m not sure. I decided to examine the pros and cons of each season and try to rank them from favourite to least favourite. Some context: I live in southern Ontario, Canada, where seasonal change is pretty extreme. Winter is long, dark, and freezing cold. Summer is long, hot, and humid. Spring and fall encompass dramatic changes in day length, temperature, and the natural world. It’s not unique in this regard, and there are certainly places where seasonal temperature variation is much greater (Siberia, apparently), but I think it’s fair to say that every season in this region is kind of a lot. I’ll start with fall since it’s the current season. Pros of Fall The weather is cooler (eventually). Autumn brings cooler temperatures around mid-October. I can finally open the windows after many mon...

I weeded the garden yesterday. After doing hardly any gardening at all in 2022 and 2023, it felt good to put in some work and see some pretty dramatic results.

Have you ever woken up with a bruise or cut you didn’t have when you went to bed the night before? If you’re a light sleeper, you might be certain that you didn’t get accidentally smacked by your slumbering partner or stepped on by the cat during the night. So how did it happen? I’m sure there’s usually a mundane explanation, but when it happens to me, I always wonder – only half-jokingly –  where I went in my dreams and what I got up to. I’ve been interested in dream interpretation for as long as I can remember. I’ve gone through phases of writing down my dreams first thing in the morning so I could remember and analyze them. As a teen, I’d check dream symbolism books out of the library. I moved on to interpreting dreams using literary analysis techniques. When I joined a mindfulness and meditation club, I learned a new dream interpretation method that I now like best for interpreting most dreams. If you want to interpret your dreams, you will need to record them while they’re sti...

I wanted to start blogging again, but as I forced myself to draft something, all I could think was, “I can’t see how to get where I want to go.  Opportunities are passing me by. I’ve lost my connections to things that used to sustain me. I feel old and worn out. I don’t want to feel old. I can reconnect to things that are important to me, right? There’s no way I’ve missed all my chances. It’s okay that I can’t see the way forward. I know I just need to start, but it’s so hard. It seems as though I keep dragging myself back to the same starting line.” That didn’t sound like much of a blog post, but it immediately put me in mind of a song I’d forgotten . The song says exactly what I was thinking far more eloquently than I could. I particularly like the line, “Forget the ghosts that make you old before your time.” I don’t think I qualify as “old” yet by any reasonable standard, but when I’m troubled by memories from the recent past, I can’t summon enthusiasm or hope, and the “before t...

I celebrated the summer solstice by getting up at sunrise and going to a park overlooking the city to watch the sunrise. I know I said I wasn't going to focus so much on photos going forward but my photos of the solstice sunrise over the city are so magical that they might actually be worth 1,000 words.

I participated in Global Big Day again this year. I hadn’t birdwatched in too long and the event was good motivation. It snowed on Big Day 2020 and I didn’t see too many birds but this year was a lot more interesting. I submitted three checklists on Big Day itself, plus one the day before and one the day after. Here is my list of species from the whole weekend:

I’ve changed the tagline of this blog every year. I didn’t keep track of past taglines but they were something like “one year of living as Pagan” (2019) and “a second year of Pagan living and learning” (2020). Hopefully they were a bit more catchy than that but that was the idea. At this point I’m 100% certain I will continue to be Pagan. It’s part of who I am. So what to do with the tagline?

I made a concerted effort to have a decent Beltane celebration this year. I wanted to make absolutely sure it was more than just décor and food.

I originally wrote a much longer version of this post, but parts of it are already outdated and it doesn’t seem worth the effort to finish what was probably a pretty boring read anyway. To make a long story short, I haven’t blogged in a while and there are some (I think) very good reasons for that!

I told myself I wasn't going to make myself finish the 2020 sabbat posts before I started posting again but I'm too much of a perfectionist to let it go. So here's Yule!

I took and edited photos for Samhain 2020 but didn't write up a blog post at the time, so this is back-dated. I apparently did a decent job taking photos but I definitely wasn't feeling very celebratory.

I did something new for Mabon this year: went apple picking. It was fun and I’d definitely like to make it a tradition. I couldn’t help but feel anxious the whole time, though, because there were a lot of people around, many of them not wearing masks. I managed to avoid the people, but worrying about staying away from them diminished my enjoyment of apple picking. I hope I’ll be able to try this activity again in a not-too-distant, pandemic-free future.

At Lughnasadh, the Rudbeckia fulgida in my garden reaches peak bloom, putting on an impressive display of bright yellow flowers. The Aesclepius incarnata is going strong, and the Echinacea pallida still has a few flowers. It’s a lovely time of year in the garden, and a lovely time to sit outdoors and enjoy it (especially because the mosquitoes aren’t so bad this late in the summer).

Midsummer is a time of abundance in the natural world, even where I live in the (at times unseasonably snowy) south of the North. It was a time of abundance at the grocery store again, too, which was a relief after a couple months of shortages and making do. I planned a celebratory dinner for the night before the solstice.

On May 9, I participated in Global Big Day , a birdwatching event coordinated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology . The Lab of O encourages all birdwatchers to participate in Big Day by recording their sightings in eBird , the Lab of O’s citizen science project that collects data from users’ birdwatching checklists in order to learn about bird populations, distribution, and migration. Although I’ve been using the Lab of O’s bird-ID app  Merlin  for years, this was my first Big Day and the first time I’d used eBird. While it doesn’t have anything explicitly to do with Paganism, birding is one good way of tuning into nature and developing relationships with the land and beings of a particular place. Through activities like birding and gardening, I’ve come to love the place where I live and be more aware of the changes and goings-on of each season. Notably, this May 9, it snowed. I don’t think I’d ever experienced snow in May before! The snow stuck in the morning but melted by mida...

Where has the time gone?! I started a new job the day before Beltane and I’ve been struggling to focus on things that aren’t work. I’m awfully pleased about the new job—both the opportunity and the work I’m doing—but it’s taking some time to adjust. I’m starting to feel more mentally settled now, so here at last is my Beltane post. Beltane is when spring really gets going around here. The snowdrops and crocuses have been replaced by daffodils, tulips, and flowering trees. It’s still pretty cold—May 1 is our earliest possible last frost date and it was snowing as recently as the last week of April!—but warm weather is on its way. My garden is starting to come to life. The small handful of daffodils and tulips that were here when I moved in are in bloom; the daffodils actually opened on Beltane! I’d love to plant many more spring bulbs this fall. All the plants I planted last year are native perennials. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s grown and spread this year. The...

It’s hard to know what to say about how completely everything has changed—for everyone—since I last posted. A lot of the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic struck my community shortly before Ostara. But my observation of the spring equinox wasn’t significantly affected: as a solitary Pagan, I was going to decorate and eat and pray and make offerings alone at home no matter what. Here are a few photographic impressions of my Ostara celebration. If you’re interested in the history and science of the holiday, check out last year’s Ostara post ; for an explanation of how I’m blogging about the sabbats this year, see my post from Imbolc 2020 . As I mentioned at Imbolc, I’m in the process of making a decorative bunting for every sabbat. The one at the top of this post was the first one I created; it predates my formal adoption of Paganism and was originally intended to be general spring décor. Right before Ostara, institutions in my city, including the university where...