Category: Featured

Featured, Holy Wild, peace

Chasing the Wild Goose

Alison Leigh Lilly

I think there is power in the metaphor of the "Wild Goose" — An Geadh-Glas — the name in Celtic Christianity for the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is, after all, that Person of the Trinity which is the indwelling Spirit in all things, the immanence of the divine in the world itself. She is the balance and compliment to the transcendent God-the-Father. She is the fire of inspiration, the creative power of eros, the source and sustainer of community, the untamable wildness of hope. When we go on a "wild goose chase," we can feel that we're going in circles, spiraling silly around that which is elusive and mysterious. I can't help but think that my Celtic ancestors knew this about the Wild Goose, too — that those who follow her follow her into loneliness and sorrow, listening to her keening echoing over the solitude of the wilds.

Featured, Holy Wild, Theology

Religious Branding

Alison Leigh Lilly

Are you a good ol' fashioned, All-American Pepsi kind of girl? Are you a fitness nut, chugging down Aquafina by the gallon, sipping your Ocean Spray grapefruit juice at breakfast, maybe indulging in a Lipton Diet Green Tea for lunch? Do you like the caffeine rush of Mountain Dew or AMP Energy to wake you up in the morning? Or maybe you're a bit of a hippie, chilling out with a SoBe or a Tazo? And how much does it matter to you that all these drinks are made by the same company? That's also the problem with branding. It's shallow. It's ephemeral. It's easy. It obscures not only the deep connections that we actually share with one another, but also the very real and more intricate diversity that is a part of any community no matter how apparently homogenous on the surface.

Featured, Holy Wild, Nature Photography

Wild Urban Spring

Alison Leigh Lilly

I'm not sure what these flowers are, but the exuberant, overflowing bush they grow on has clearly been left to run wild for years. Every spring in May these clusters of purple blossoms open, giving their scent to the unheeding speeding cars on the road. It's not a pleasant spot — the road is busy and wide and noisy, the sidewalk narrow and full of potholes and cracked slabs and litter. But every spring, these flowers create a tiny space of respite and beauty to an otherwise rough and man-dominated landscape. My best guess is that they're either wild lupine, blue wild indigo, or some kind of lilac I've never seen before. If any readers out there have a guess, please let me know. I'd love to be able to greet these beauties by name.

Featured, Holy Wild, praxis

Coming Out & Going Down

Alison Leigh Lilly

What has changed in my spiritual life has little to do with the labels I give it. Today I am a Pagan Druid, but that may change in the future as the words evolve in meaning and the community that embraces them shifts and turns about itself in an on-going conversation of creative group-identity formation. What has changed for me, most importantly, is not the name for my spiritual practice, but its depth. I've never really had to "come out" as Pagan to anyone, because my spiritual life is not really about fitting into boxes, or broom closets — it's about deepening. I deepen into my self and my work, through prayer and meditation, through poetry and story, through my time in the woods and my attention to the landscape.

Contemplation & Meditation, Featured, Holy Wild

Etymology of My Gods

Alison Leigh Lilly

That word for god — the breath, the gleaming — the shining days like great columns bearing up the sky, buttresses, rafters. Beams that in their falling, hold. I say the names of my deities, I feel the drop of each sound into silence. They gather on the long, bent grasses in the meadow and the field, *dewos-, the many that glisten in the coming dark. Amulets of sky, jewels of the daylight, coalescing in the movement of my breath, the lingering touch of the wind. They draw themselves, wavering, into the weight and gravity of form. I open the door, and the gods enter the dark interior of my being.

Featured, Holy Wild, peace

Ancient Warriors, Celtic Peace

Alison Leigh Lilly

We consent to our own destruction, with the passing of time, with the changing seasons, with the restless intensity of living and breathing. Above the cold concrete and glass of the city skyline, sharp-wedged forms of birds wheel and tip in the dark, blustering sky. I find myself thinking again that it takes an awful lot of courage to live in this world sometimes, knowing that winter is coming, the dark is coming, and death, too, will eventually arrive to claim us. It takes courage to release ourselves, to enter willingly into the wild dance that whirls in this liminal space between life and death, creation and destruction. In my mind, the image of birds crashing through wind currents and swift-driven clouds commingles with the image of the warrior, poised in grace on the edge of chaos.