Be the one! I just signed this petition:
I’m glad to see that there are so many people supporting this and trying to get politicians to be proactive about the issue.
Archive for green things
Ostara: Goddess and Festival
Ostara as a festival has just passed, it celebrates the Spring Equinox, the 21st of March and secularly is known as Easter which is this year on April 4th.
It is a time to celebrate the changing of the seasons, the fresh warmth of spring and a time to begin planting crops and thus celebrate new life.
Ostara’s month is considered to be April, so I feel it is appropriate to write about her as April is coming soon. She is primarily connected to fertility, prosperity and growth. So, the idea of preparing our garden for fresh herbs has definite appeal. However there is a great amount of dispute as to whether Ostara or Eostre as a Goddess truly exists there are lots of similar tales about her as is written here but she does not appear in the Eddas so is not technically a Norse Goddess, however her origins are said to be Germanic Pagan.
Looking more deeply into the Edda and Norse mythology Idun, wife of Bragi might be considered as a Goddess of spring. Her areas are credited as spring and rejuvenation. She is keeper of the magic apples of immortality which the gods must eat to preserve their youth.
Many consider Ostara to be a good time of year to rededicate yourself to the Gods and Goddesses, which is definitely something that I’m planning to do once the timing feels appropriate.
Blessed Imbolc
I hope everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is having a great Imbolc.
So far we don’t have any great plans for the festival, but I have a feeling that it will be a good time to light our protection totem in the house for the first time given it’s been too damp over the past few days for us to be able to do a fire outside and have some ‘ceremonial’ marshmallows. We do have some sparklers left from New Year perhaps we can use those.
Imbolc is traditionally a festival of light, symbolizing the warming of the weather and the greater power of the sun over the next few months. For many, particularly the Celts the festival is associated with Brigid who is the goddess of poetry and healing. She’s also associated with holy wells and scared flames.
She has several traditions associated with her, in many homes girls and young, unmarried women would create a corn dolly in Brigid’s honor and adorn it with ribbons and other trinkets. Then they would lay her in a special bed and stay up all night with her. It’s also a tradition to lay out a piece of clothing or strip of cloth outside of the house for Brigid to bless so that they would have powers of healing and protection.
So, look forward to the nurturing warmth of the sun in coming months, and plan what you’re going to plant once the season is right. We have a lot of seeds we bought last year that weren’t at the appropriate season for planting when we bought them but which should still be good, so we’ll be working out where we can plant those this year in the hopes we can have a strong harvest. We lost a lot of our lettuce because we didn’t have enough space to plant it and it quickly ran out of nutrients in the small soil dots that we got as a ‘starter tray’ so we best have better plans for this year. I’m looking forward to a lot of fresh produce from our own garden.
Conservation Efforts
The munchkin and I went on a walk this morning, instead of our normal route up the road towards my Mum’s place he wanted to go down the “rocky path” which leads around the side of our house and goes into the woods that are behind our house.
I said “sure” figuring that we could scope out the place for broken branches to restock our wood pile for and we were able to do that but we also wound up “picking up litter” that has been in and around the woods for who knows how long.
The sad thing about that is that in some cases it’s pure laziness. There are only two houses on the path and clearly some of the trash which was McDonald’s soda cups had just been dumped out of their truck window on the short drive rather than taking it the extra 20 yards to their house and putting it in their own trash can.
We picked up a broken beach ball, two soda cans, 2 Styrofoam cups and a plastic cup as well as bits of a bag one of which said “recycle please” on it very plainly despite it being sun-faded. There are still more items there and about but we ran out of hands, so my plan is to go on the walk tomorrow with a trash bag in tow and better shoes so that I can get further back where I could see some beer cans and bottles and shreds of paper towel and hopefully we can get things cleared up.
I know whenever we’re clearing out the dead branches from our own yard I keep finding old beer bottles and cans from the previous owners, and some of these items have definitely been there a while, but others like the McDonald’s cup were very fresh, which is just ridiculous.
I was very glad to be able to not only clean up our area a little bit but also teach the munchkin about the importance of doing so as well.
