Begins 15 April, 2023

Oppression takes many forms, and there is little use in ranking them. But it is possible that something we see every day looks less oppressive than something we almost never see in real life. There is oppression that becomes normalized, and we mistake that for it being “less oppressive”.

The gulls have been awake for hours already, if they ever slept at all, their calls loud and abrasive in the dark of the winter morning. They suit this place. Their cries ring out, triumphant in the face of winter, or perhaps relishing in it. This is their place after all.

A discussion with Alley Valkyrie on land loss and reconnection

My mind keeps going back to the sight of that sign on the cave floor, warning that someone was watching, the feeling of sacredness I had in the cave, and the sound of chainsaws outside.

A course by Alley Valkryie

Ocean pollution threatens the survival of all marine animals, and ours too. It’s difficult to understand the magnitude of the impact that litter has on our lives when we don’t see where it’s going, and how the path that leads to the extinction of so many aquatic species affects human life.

The first snowdrops pushing their heads up in my garden, emerging in the space of the few hours I'd been away. The evenings are growing lighter, the days lengthening steadily. Even amid despair, there is hope.

you were a spider busy with

consuming the prey, only to suddenly realize that the prey is a part of yourself.

Folk stories and folklore contain the shared knowledge of a collective. They may have their regional differences and several versions, but they convey truths and lessons, often hard ones. Folk stories and folklore are not some passive thing but instead form an active part of our lives today

The city's microclimates alienate animals and plants. But with a reconfiguration of belief systems about what city life can or should be, creating urban microclimates that invite animals and plants to thrive is feasible.

Sliding scale and discounted enrolment

While a genderless society might be the ideal, we don’t live in that society, and until we do, opposing trans rights won’t help us get there. Gender is a social construction, but if we try to eliminate the category of gender outright, then the experience of transgender people living in a cis-normative society is erased.

Beyond the context of Polytheistic Monasticism, creating such spaces is important in terms of providing spiritual nourishment for those of us struggling to survive in a world that is experienced as overwhelming and hostile.

Indigenous peoples have endured rampant assault, starvation and murder for hundreds of years, the fraction which survived are still enduring this paradigm, and the last 4 years are not single-handedly responsible for the injustices these peoples have been faced with, only for allowing business to go on as usual.

It’s tiring though, isn’t it. These issues are ones that we should all be concerned about, are not unique to the UK and are a symptom of capitalism, particularly when the plebs get a bit lairy. I think what can be most tiring is the feeling of uselessness so many of us have.

What if we finally learned to see this land as a family, a home, a partner, instead of a blank canvas? People’s love of P-22 gave me hope that maybe, amidst all the wanton destruction and erasure, that kind of connection was possible.

To be pagan is nothing more and nothing less than to be fully human, fully human in a more-than-human world. The alienating forces of civilization—including Christianity, yes, but also capitalism, industrialism, the Enlightenment, and patriarchy—have divided us from ourselves, from each other, and from the more-than-human world. The work of being pagan today, then, is to reclaim our humanity.

The original heresy is the belief that the earth is not our home, that our real life is somewhere else—whether in heaven or a future technotopia. We embrace this heresy to make sense of that nagging feeling that something is wrong with the world itself. But the real reason we feel this way is because civilization alienates us from everything that makes us human.

The perpetual uncertainty of life in this world is given meaning through poems, and for that we want to venerate our poets.