Hearth & Horn - Dreamwidth Studios
one thing about being away from the desk for a while is it resets your habits and relationships to your habits and you see them afresh from the outside, & this prompted me to ask 'when I feel this little stab of distress that prompts me to check reddit, where is that distress coming from? What is distressing me?' & I realised that for me at least, it's the context of being on a computer in and of…
Brain's too fuzzy for actual work, so I will continue to talk about my holiday. After Pinvin, the next stop on the route home was Hergest Ridge. This is Hergest Ridge: I think it's one of the most beautiful place names there is, and that's a lot coming from a man who lives a short drive from 'Lord Hereford's Knob'. Hergest. Looking it up, it appears to be landweird: from Hergest (Herefs) a Welsh…
While planning my route home from a retreat this weekend, I noticed a route could be planned via Pinvin - setting of Penda's Fen , though not the shooting location (though that is very close by, maintaining that specific sense of place). I don't like driving, or coming home from a holiday, so all week this was my treat to look forward to. About an hour before I arrived, I was suddenly and…
Request for Concrit! I have long desired to make a tool for organising my pagan life, week by week. I find setting a time to very actively plan is essential. I've tried it on paper but I worry about wasting it and often forget. My coding skills have improved a great deal, and I'm now on the cusp of creating the tool. What kinds of things do you pre-plan and track? if you used the tool, what…
Top Tip! If you do not keep the Landmother's days when they are due, she WILL flood out your campsite tho no rain was forecast. comments
It seems to be lammastide. I try and follow the festivals in great sweeps - in the case of lammas, I set aside 31th July - 10th August - but wow, I am emotionally unread to let the summer go this year, it's going to be a late observance. I cannot face going up into the hills to grieve. comments
On the aether at KP Radio once each week: PST - Sunday 10am GMT - Sunday 6pm and afterwards, in perpetuity, on the website This week: celebrate the summer’s end with a drop of acid communism: lysergic lullabies, lazy sundays, and long shadows from the sixties and seventies. Naptime. Things are because they are wonderful Plus readings from Mark Fisher’s unfinished Acid Communism comments
Next time I set up a cult, I will be sure to instruct everyone who thinks my words are wise to be on social media as often as possible, so that when it is time to spread the ancient wisdom to fellows new, I do not have to participate in it... comments
The traditional four elements have never worked for me, so when I began the work of making my own system, it had to go. Instead, I started by looking at the landscape and trying to derive from that. It's quickly clear that fire is very different from the other three. When I go about, I see all around me - the sky and the land and the water - and their intertwining processes, of the water within…
One thing I've put within my Sanctuary is a longdreamedof oracle deck. It draws from the gallery as a kind of 'found oracle', presenting three images for the viewer to interpret as they will. I've been interested to note the impact of the internet here: I frequently find the central card is the most important, flanked by two others, perhaps because on the computer the eye is drawn to the center…
I'm reading David Abrams Becoming Animal (whoa!), and it's basically about vernacular mindfulness - he's a nature writer and spiritual person, and large chunks of this nonfic book are him describing everyday occurrances as made newly-strange by an intensity of noticing and sensing. At times, the effect is almost psychedelic So yes, it's very very good. It has a strand of dated fascination with…
In Astercote, it is always 1974, but sometimes - unwontedly - winter comes, and everybody knows that wine is to be mulled, gingerbreads baked, and the old records taken out of storage and played anew. Merry Wintertide all Download Here comments
I think I need to go through and capture all my bits on Pagan Infrastructure, and turn it into a longer essay, as it seems to occupy my thoughts so often, but another thing I was thinking was to what extent are proper world religions actually funded by the devout? vs they are funded by geopolitical strategy & the inherited wealth of such. like, one very liberating thing about being a wiccan is…
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In the dark woods, surrounded by the tall trees, I saw them as I had - the ancestors on the hillside, except now they were all around me - and I thought first, pity that these trees are so young, not like the very ancient beings I am seeing within them; and my thought came back to me, but the gods are young - we are not at the end of days, but in their earliest beginnings, and as our lives are…
When I look out of my window, I see the ancestors in the hills. They walk in a solemn procession, up and up and up and never getting further away. I see them in the lines of trees along the edge between mountain and sky, like caped and veiled and hooded figures - familiar and always there, and yet also unapproachable. One day I will join them - but only then. My sense of them as ancestors is…
Following up on the theme of the last post, here is an (incomplete) list of Lost Gods of the British Isles Sources: Isles of the Many Gods by Sorita d'Este and David Rankine; Wikipedia From Egypt Abraxas Ammon Anubis Bastet Bes Isis Harpocrates Horus Neith Serapis Thoth From Rome, Greece & Syria Aesculapius Anicetus Apollo Atargatis (Syria) Arimanius Attis (Phrygia) Astarte (Syria) Bacchus Bellona…
Structure, not milestones: how to get the benefits of a roadmap (energy, organisation, motivation) without mistaking the map for the work (i.e. staying alert and awake to your experiences with the infinite, instead of to the mortal grades and initiations you are acquiring). Tricky! comments
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I know that land is only cheap in America as part of ongoing colonialisation,&that all these communes sucked for one reason or another (a big theme I'm getting from this book is the biggest barrier to dropping out is not The Man, but the actual men in your commune dumping all the important work on women) but sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, can you imagine waking up on 100 acres of seeming wilderness with…
Color out of Space (2019) is scoring the redo-3-full-rows on the 'how good is this measured how badly my knitting is going' scale comments
It's been a while since I made this, so links may be out of date. Power Of The Witch (BBC, 1971) - ft. Doreen, Eleanor, Alex and Maxine Documentary. In another place, I've seen this credited to 1979 Witchcraft Janet and Stewart Fararar (BBC2, ????) Interview with a studio audience; with the Farrars Witches - Old Religion (Thames, 1972) Documentary, ft. Steward Farrar and others Witches of Wexford,…
The problem with programmers is that they have absolutely nothing in common with ordinary users of their programs, & it leads them to just...not understand how their tool is being used. To me, I feel like programs actually should stay static. Anyone using your tool is likely to have made significant commitments based on the tool, and so delicacy is essential. Updates are often keen to do something…
One of the Landweirdiest things about Penda's Fen - one of the things that struck me as important , unaccountably important, was that it was screened once in 1973 and then lived on only in memory. It's a dense text. It rewards rewatching. Nontheless, for over 30 years, it belonged only to those who saw it and fragmentarily. This wasn't within the material, it was a characteristic of the material…
Left: Norman-era (~1150) font at Brecon Cathedral with Green Man motifs and birds Right: Cover art for Court of the Crimson King (1969) by Barry Godber comments