Category: Rite & Ritual

Deep Ecology, Holy Wild, Rite & Ritual

Participating in Enchantment: Redefining Magic

Alison Leigh Lilly

Magic is not something you do. Magic is participatory consciousness: a consciousness of enchantment. By placing participation at the heart of our magical work, we no longer relegate magic to the realm of anti-religious power-mongering and manipulation. Instead, magic opens us up to relationship. To reverence. To an engagement with an enchanted world that plays a vital role in an earth-centered spirituality that seeks the sacred in the natural forces and landscapes in which we live our everyday lives.

Deep Ecology, Holy Wild, Rite & Ritual

Celebrating Earth Day: Phenology Bingo

Alison Leigh Lilly

Earth Day has long been a holy day for me, and I've marked it through personal and family rituals for years. But this year, I was especially blessed: I had the chance to help out with the Earth Day service offered by my UU church this past weekend. And it was nothing short of marvelous.

art, Holy Wild, Rite & Ritual

Tending to Your Joy: Pagan Lessons from Pixar’s Inside Out

Alison Leigh Lilly

Inside Out is a modern-day story of the shamanic journey into the Otherworld, a journey of both self-recovery and self-discovery. Does sadness have a purpose? Is it just a "negative" emotion that helps joy shine more brightly? That's the question that this movie challenges us to explore, and the answer is more complex than you might expect!

"Glastonbury, Chalice Well," by The Mask and Mirror
Conservation, Featured, Holy Wild, Rite & Ritual

Bless the Waters Thrice: Making Environmentally Sustainable Offerings

Alison Leigh Lilly

We Pagans have a love affair with the past that leads us to try to model the rituals and practices of ancient times as closely as possible. But we live in a different world today. Despite the ornate beauty of certain approaches to ritual, I wince at the wastefulness I see sometimes. Can this really be what the gods want from us? Are we so busy trying to do ritual “correctly” that we fail to do it well?

Holy Wild, Rite & Ritual

Q&A: Do you have a familiar?

Alison Leigh Lilly

I'm not really the New Age type who thinks, just because my cat happens to enjoy watching me wave incense around making a fool of myself in front of my altar, that he has any actual interest in my spiritual or magical development. If he is a wise old soul, he is of a relatively indifferent kind -- I imagine that, of his nine lives or more, this incarnation must be his equivalent of retiring to Florida. He is much more interested in what time I feed him dinner, than he is in aiding me in my rituals or spellwork. Still, there is something about my Cu Gwyn that borders on the magical at times.

Ancestor Prayer Beads Samhain Craft
Holy Wild, Rite & Ritual

Making Ancestor Prayer Beads: A Samhain Craft Project

Alison Leigh Lilly

In my last post, "Honor for the Dead," I mentioned that this year as part of our family Samhain celebration, we crafted prayer bead bracelets to help us connect more deeply with our ancestors. A bunch of you have asked for more details on how to make prayer beads of your own, so I put together this handy-dandy step-by-step tutorial. Let's do some magic!

Beloved Dead Candle
Featured, Holy Wild, Mythology & History, Rite & Ritual

Honor for the Dead: Crafting Relationship with the Ancestors

Alison Leigh Lilly

There is always pressure to either romanticize or demonize the past. As it recedes into the distance of memory, its complexities are all too easily lost in the mists. The veils of time fall across our vision and we glimpse only vague impressions of a landscape, a culture, a handful of faces on the edge of our perception that seem to change and fade when we turn to look again. What does it mean to part this veil, to honor the ancestors?

Holy Wild, Rite & Ritual, story

Lughnasadh: Honoring the Harvest Through Grief and Gratitude

Alison Leigh Lilly

Today is Lughnasadh, and I find myself returning to the strange mixture of work and rest, grief and celebration that always marks this time of year for me. It is the acknowledgement of fear and loss during the most fruitful time of the year that marks this as a holy season. It is this mingling of love and sorrow, hope and grief that transforms the cycles of production and consumption into something more: a sacred harvest. When we forget the hard work of our ancestors, when we distance ourselves from the sweat, blood and tears that connect us to the living reality of those who have come before us, when we anesthetize ourselves to the grief we feel at the struggles they faced and the sacrifices they made — that is when we risk becoming mere consumers. Grief serves a sacred purpose, for we cannot grieve what we have not loved. Grief is one of the fruits of love, even as joy and prosperity are the fruits of labor.

Holy Wild, Rite & Ritual

Frost and Stone: Grounding Energy in Winter’s Dark

Alison Leigh Lilly

There is ice in old Earth Mother's blood these days, and everywhere the ground is as hard as unyielding stone. The winds are biting cold. The sunlight, though still low on the horizon, is bright and sharp. It glints off the edges of every surface, refracted, scattered in a thousand directions. I sit in the shadow of a great evergreen tree outside, struggling to root, straining to bring the manic energies back into balance. The whole world seems to be cold fire and frenzied air. This won't do. I have to find another way...