Pagans are busy Folk-The Wheel Keeps Turning

Pagans are busy folks, conducting Ritual for 8 holidays per year, plus observing full moons and new moons.  That’s a minimum of 24 extra days, which brings us to 32 events per year, requiring some level of attention, or a covered dish for a pot luck.  Then there are the celebrations to mark rites of passage: birth, marriage, death, and reaching puberty.

Honorable Shamans and Fellow Pagans, I have been actively looking at these many celebrations this year, and the four extra ones I celebrate:  Rainy Season, Hurricane Season, Dry Season and Fire Season.  I am walking around the year with all these holidays to see which ones fit into my lexicon, to form my Wheel of the Year.

I left off in my observations at Imbolc, followed shortly by the start of Fire Season in early February  Now the thing about the Pagan Wheel of the Year is that it is an on-going, rhythmic Journey through time.  The Wheel Keeps Turning.  Thus, it is totally possible to turn your back to it and dwell in the mundane world for awhile.  And that’s what happened in my case between the Spring Equinox and Easter and all the way to about now, May 1st, Beltaine.

Easter was early this year.  This means, it fell shortly after the Full Moon, which was right after the Spring Equinox.  That is the formulae for Easter by the way:  The first Sunday following the full moon, following the Spring Equinox.  You’ll remember that now, won’t you.  In my household this year, we had family visiting town from Up North, and family in Florida we visited.  All of them had new babies  and we cooed over the additions to our family.  Here was living proof of the miracle of life, and the deep truths in the birth-life-death cycle.

When I was a kid, Spring and Easter all kind of merged together like it did this year, since Easter is a movable feast.  We decorated hard boiled eggs, and my folks would hide them.  It was usually cold out on Easter mornings, so my folks would hide the eggs in the living room.    My Mom would carefully count them to make sure we had found all of them.  Growing up Unitarian Universalist, we didn’t dwell too much on Jesus at Easter, but we were keen on the Rebirth aspect of Spring.  We were on a daily and active bird watch and bud watch.  Would we see a robin, or the forsythia, first?  What about a Crocus?  Where would they turn up?   The days were growing longer, and the snow would thaw and the earth would, too.  And then we’d have MUD.  (Oh, I love mud!)

That’s a big difference here in Southwest Florida:  our ground doesn’t freeze like it does up north.  We might get a little frost one or two nights of the year.  But it’s  nothing like what happens in other parts of the country.

And here we are in Florida on a lovely Springtime Day, with Bougainvillea blooming …

Share Your Peace with Our Mother Earth and Father Sky, and the Great Waters in between.

(c) 2016, Whale Maiden

Be sure to visit the Earthways Shamanic Path Website.

 

 

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Springtime…is a state of mind

Spring is an undeniable astronomical event.  But where we live guides our perception of it!

When I was growing up in the North East, My Mother used to sing, “When it’s Springtime in the Rockies, you’ll be coming home to me…”

And, she used to plant crocus and daffodil, and forsythia, in her garden.  As you probably know,  crocus and daffodil are bulbs and so we all had a great time each year, waiting for the flowers to sprout each Spring, bulb hunting.  (I think that’s the origins of the Easter Egg hunt, if you ask me.)

This was of course after we had spent a long cold winter, ice skating or playing in the snow, and feeding birds at our bird feeder, and collecting bird feathers.  We longed for Spring, for the flowers to come, and the soft rains and the mud.  I actually enjoyed mud for a day or two until it would freeze or dry (or both) and then it was very hard to walk over those gnarly frozen muddy tracks.

But Spring would come each year and we would enjoy the influx of the flowers and birds and flowering shrubs and budding trees.

Budding Trees, (c) 2014 WhaleMaiden, All Rights Reserved

THIS is a totally different reality from the way we experience Spring in Southwest Florida.  We have flowering shrubs, already flowering:  This is Tri-colored Bougainvillea-

(c) 2013-2014 WhaleMaiden, All Rights Reserved

and of course, we have the Gulf.  It is beautiful.  (A little chilly for me to go swimming in.)

Gulf of Mexico at Dusk, March 2014. (c) 2014 WhaleMaiden, All Rights Reserved.

This is why I encourage you to synchronize your pagan observances with where you live.

Happy Spring!