Tag: relationship

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.

Current Events, Featured, Holy Wild, Pacifism

The Myth of the Neutral Tool: Thoughts on Guns (And Other Ordinary Things)

Alison Leigh Lilly

It has happened again. In fact, it is still happening, even now. If not here, then somewhere, in this country, in this world. There is almost no end to it. There is almost no space between one moment and the next, between the pain and the noise it makes. What do we do now?

Holy Wild, News & Announcements

Why Did The Pagan Go To Church? ยป Nature’s Path

Alison Leigh Lilly

Today over on the Patheos CUUPS blog, Nature's Path, I'm pleased (and, let's be honest, a little bit nervous) to be able to share the first in a series of posts I'll be writing on my experiences as a Pagan exploring Unitarian Universalism for the first time. In this introductory essay, I tell the curious, rambling story of how my spiritual wanderings first brought me to the doors of my local UU church. If I was going to join any kind of church, naturally it would have to accept me as an out-and-proud, enthusiastically polytheistic, animistic, tree-hugging, dirt-worshipping Druid, and not ask me to water down my practice or box in my theology. But it would also have to offer something more than mere acceptance. What did UU have to offer? I wasn't sure... so I decided to find out.

Holy Wild, Muse in Brief

Of Apples and Awen. . .

Alison Leigh Lilly

It's been two weeks since my piece "Gods Like Mountains, Gods Like Mists" set off a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion about anthropocentrism in polytheist ritual and theology. In case you were wondering — yes, I've been busy reading, thinking, digesting and working on a follow-up post (or six!) of my own that I'll be sharing here soon. In the meantime, I wanted to point out some amazing writing elsewhere in the blogosphere. Featuring posts by Sara Amis, Joanna van der Hoeven, Heather Mingo and more!

Featured, Holy Wild, Poetry & Music

In Praise of Boring Sex

Alison Leigh Lilly

I wasn't exactly having any raging hot sex in my mid-twenties. What intimacy there was to be snatched between caffeine-addled swing shifts was difficult and desperate, and always over too soon. Why should love be so hard? The world seemed full of impervious surfaces -- concrete, steel and glass -- against which there was nothing to do but rip myself ruthlessly open to the possibility of contact. To make the foolhardy choice to stay soft and tattered; to refuse to be ground smooth into something polished, invulnerable, inhuman. To choose, each time, to throw myself once more into the harsh, cold waters where the restless waves broke against the rocks. Which might be why, these days, I am still so often surprised by the utter heart-wrenching gentleness of quiet, boring sex. It is a blessing I am still getting used to.

Conservation, Featured, Holy Wild, Pagan Blog Project 2013

Invasives: Enemies or Allies?

Alison Leigh Lilly

Given how harmful an invasive species can be, it's tempting to see them as wholly bad, the "enemy" of a healthy ecosystem that needs to be eradicated. For modern Pagans seeking to live an embodied spirituality grounded in the sacred land, invasives are powerful allies in coming to terms with our own ambivalent role in the ecosystems we inhabit, and the possibilities and choices that lie before us. Too often our modern society encourages us to see nature as fragile and untouchable, and humans as the worst intruders of all. Befriending invasives can teach us valuable lessons about how to be respectful, loving citizens of the planet that we call home.