branches up, roots down

It was almost exactly a week ago that I landed back in my beloved city. This afternoon I finally feel fully at home. There’s a barley risotto simmering on the stove and the smell of rosemary, sage, and fresh spring garlic is wafting through the house. Barley is very low on the glycemic index, something that is important if you have diabetes. Using herbs from my garden, it is on its way to becoming just as tasty as the arborio rice risottos I cooked in the past. If you are managing diabetes with diet and exercise, rice, for the most part, is out. This Beltane is a time of change, the barley being one of many. I spent a lot of time today on my rooftop garden, weeding, watering, and cutting the herbs that would go into tonight’s meal. Amidst the plants and with the lovely gnome Chomsky presiding, I mused on all the Beltane energies at play. At Samhain and again at Beltane, the veil is thin between the worlds. At Samhain, the veil is thin between the living and the dead, b...

It's Beltane, and I am in the West Village in New York City. The air is thrumming with life and everywhere there are tulips, hyacinths, and blooming dogwoods. Soon I will be priestessing a ritual for a friend who has for many years tended the dead and the dying. She was chaplain on the burn unit in the hospital closest to ground zero on that day that still reverberates throughout this city. She had one initiation years back into the Craft that focused on death and rebirth but was long on death, short on rebirth. For too long she's had one hand thru the veil, helping others pass. It has taken a toll. Today, the focus is on life, on that green fuse that runs thru the flower, that runs thru everything. Today, I've asked her to put her hand on the pole and feel the power as the ribbons wind, that vibration of the joy of connection, the current in the colorful tangle and pattern of life. Here in New York City, the earth is alive. Death is a current that can be felt, and ever...

In the first week or so of my son attending Catholic high school (what better rebellion for a pagan raised teenager!) he said to me; “There’s a lot of people who have cancer, aren’t there?” In quizzing him on why he said this, I found out that there was a daily go-around in one of his classrooms where each student could ask others to support them in their prayers. Casey was struck by how many of them had family or loved ones with cancer, and that this is what most of the prayers were concerned with. This, along with finding out that every class and event starts with the call of “Let us remember” and the response being “we are in the sacred presence of God”, has softened my resistance to this school he fought so hard to attend. I like him being reminded the sacred is always present. There was a time my feminist witch self would have rankled with the term "God", but Casey has been raised with so much Goddess imagery, I trust that for him, this God that is being invok...