Tag: death

Conservation, Holy Wild

Salmon, Pagan Stewardship and the Lesson of Samhain

Alison Leigh Lilly

For me, Salmon has claimed her place along the year's wheel at Samhain-tide. The salmon run at Piper's Creek begins by the first day of November and lasts as late as the winter solstice. It is a time of cool, steady rain, a time of death and consummation. It is the in-between time, just after the Celtic New Year, but before the dawn of lengthening days. A time when new life begins in the dark, buried beneath the gravel of the streambed, invisible and silent. I think in many ways, modern Paganism is in this twilight time before rebirth as well. Seeded and kept alive from generation to generation after two millennia of broken traditions and scattered, assimilated cultures. We strive to root our traditions in the land, in a sense of place and in the presence of earth, but the social systems upstream don't make it easy.

Holy Wild, Nature Photography

Solace of Perfection, Beauty of Decay

Alison Leigh Lilly

Let's just say that life has been a bit stressful lately with everything going on. Back in high school and college when life was understandably a bit like being high strung on a high wire, I would throw myself into poetry. I spent long hours playing with words and sounds, line breaks and juxtaposition. Now, since writing is kind of a career for me these days, I find that I need some other creative outlet that I can throw myself into head first without worrying about being good at it.

Holy Wild, Muse in Brief

Saturday Surfing: Protest, Physics and Aesthetics, Oh My!

Alison Leigh Lilly

My gods, where did September go?! Oh that's right, I got married. Woot! Then we had a fantastic honeymoon. Double woot! (More pictures soon to come of both.) And now we're home again, our days laced with the scent of falling leaves and lengthening autumn nights. It's good to be home. As promised, I'm starting a new feature on the blog where I recap some of the most interesting links and articles I've come across during the course of the week, for your perusing pleasure. I'm going to call this "Saturday Surfing" because I am, as you know, a huge fan of alliteration. So check these out!

Holy Wild, story

Yewberry: A Myth Retold

Alison Leigh Lilly

Now it is the end of autumn, I lay my body down. A hush. The hill is still humming with the day's warmth, the sun sinking into the far shore of the lake. For a moment, I can see it, as though with other eyes, submerged, rippling beneath the waters in arcing liquid wings of flame and dusk, flexing, alternating, a thousand of them, wings sprouting from the round, warm body settling into the depths. Then the vision is gone. I creep silently along the shore, my bare feet numb and rustling through the long, dried grasses of autumn. The mud is moist and rough on my soles, each step sending echoes of energy sliding up my calves.

Holy Wild, Mythology & History

Not Really Dead (or, Bigger On The Inside)

Alison Leigh Lilly

We know he can’t stay in his current state of denial — we know he has the potential for greatness that demands he rise to the occasion, to become better than he was before. But that doesn’t make that transformative moment any less painful, nor the grief at the loss of humble John Smith, the old, limited self, any less poignant. The truth is that we grieve the old self because we love the old self, deeply, and the old self was a self of love. It had to be. Otherwise, we could never have been able to transform in the first place.

Holy Wild, Pacifism

Why Aren’t I Happy He’s Dead?

Alison Leigh Lilly

When I look at my own response — even the immediate, uncensored emotional response I had when I first heard the news — there is not even a trace of relief or joy. Bewilderment, yes. But honestly, more than a little bit of cynicism and scorn, as well. There's a part of me that immediately began to wonder what the "game" was that the government was playing this time, how they would turn the event to their advantage, and to what extent the killing of bin Laden was carefully orchestrated for calculated purposes. The seeming rush to dispose of the body, the lack of evidence or corroborating story from any sources outside the U.S. government, and now the rapidity with which the "official story" seems to keep changing, sparked my inner Conspiracy Theorist.

Holy Wild, Mythology & History

Ecstasy of Beltaine: Reflections on Love and Transgression

Alison Leigh Lilly

The significance of Beltaine reaches beyond merely being an agricultural festival focused on fertility and fecundity in service to the community, with romance acting as a bit of grease we can indulge in now and then to keep the Wheel turning. The holy day at the height of spring is also a day of ecstasy in the original sense, a day on which the attraction of life-force can pull us beyond ourselves and into communion with a larger Mystery, beyond tensions that might keep us too rigidly locked into unhealthy or hampering community bonds once they have outlasted their benefit. Along with Samhain, the other hinge of the year, Beltaine serves as a liminal time, a time of thresholds and permeable boundaries. The great ecstatic mysteries of sex and death dominate both these holy days.

Holy Wild, Science & Civilization

The Death of Civilization

Alison Leigh Lilly

If future anthropologists are one day sorting through ancient literature trying to find some insight into today's modern Western culture, they would do well to read this book. Not because it's all that good, but because to understand a culture it's often very useful to look at its worst fears. In this sense, The Road is a perfect artifact, a precise and unself-conscious portrayal of consumer culture's unique nightmare: the end of consumer culture.