I didn't grow up in a church community, though I had a brief love affair with the ritual I found in an Episcopal church in Oregon in my twenties. My legitimate quest to create a spiritual practice was birthed in middle age by borrowing from the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, and the strong connection I felt for the worship of the Earth as taught us by our first nations. In Native American cultures The Great Spirit is a deity intertwined with the fabric of the Universe and the web of the life on Earth. It wasn't until recent years I discovered my Wiccan roots and the pre-Christian possibility that my ancestors were Earth worshippers. When I started this journey I worried because I didn’t know how to pray. Turns out we all know how to pray through our love of and gratitude for the gifts of life. This vault is for those who, like me, hunger for a spiritual practice and are learning to braid their own.

Monday, November 7, 2016

Listening to healing sirens from Mother Earth


I was the only aging suburbanite in the group of six urban dwellers, sitting on a pillow on the floor of the 2nd story, the woody smell of coffee infusing the space from the shop below. The rest were 20-somethings, engaged in banter with our teacher like they were old friends. I was the rookie in a collective who had come to study song and singing, how to lead others in song, and how to connect song to the Earth.