Celtic Clip Art Border by Gunther at Synergy.
'Around the Equinox.'
After a busy (though wet) summer, with the pook swallows starting to gather on the phonelines getting ready to carry summer away south, a part of me wishes I was away with them. I sit here at the keyboard in my library-office, another shower of rain drumming on the tin roof while the landscape beyond my window is grey and dripping wet and the leaves are showing their first hint of autumnal gold, and most of me is just glad to be here in this beautiful place surrounded by family and friends. yes, indeed I feel blessed.
This summer we have hosted a series of events including our midsummer eve campover, which with around 40 guests was a pleasant easy event. Then in August we held our 6th pagan gather (pookfayre), which was a day of workshops followed by a session in the house with a local music star Annette Buckley, with over 50 people attending (including facilitators) it was a real success, and for the first time we actually came out with a small profit.
Then there has been the media attention! Well, what can I say? it is fun and tiresome at the same time, though in truth they seem to have treated us relatively gently, seeing some merit in our intention to make Pook a center of learning for earth based spirituality. To further this end we intend to offer in the next year a series of mostly one-day workshops on many subjects from rune work to dowsing, herbcraft to ritual construction, using teachers from the pagan community to facilitate their own workshops here. We will provide hospitality space and both del and I intend to offer our own craft this way. A list of proposed courses will be published in the coming weeks. One course that seems to have excited much interest is the teaching of the Irish language for ritual purposes. This possibly as a correspondence course with help line and a CD or tape for the phonetics.
All this is in early planning though we do have several workshops in October and early November. (Click this link for details) Of course we hold open house to all who contact us for Samhain, 31st October. This year we feel that our Feast of the Dead will be a large gather in itself as we have much interest shown in it.
On a general news front, there seems to be a less than friendly exchange going on between the Pagan Fed. and the Children of Artemis in England. while I personally would prefer to keep out of such infighting, I do feel that it is worthy of comment, and that it reflects badly on all concerned. Surely we are all pagans together and being divisive is not the way forward. While I have little real knowledge about the CoA (except that I personally know two of their representatives in Ireland, and in fact consider them both to be dear friends), I was for some years a member of Pagan Fed, leaving because of personal difficulties with the management and its representatives.
Again I ask, do we really need any such organizations to represent us? They always tend towards committees and often have a core of rather self important leaders. I believe that the path of personal spiritual growth does not need to be guided by committees, and anyway it seems to me that these organizations only represent a very small percentage of the spiritual community; far the largest portion of which is solitary practitioners who have little desire to belong to any group or faction. The other point I feel valid is that in many cases the very people who want to run such groupings are the last people I would want to allude to as leaders. Who needs leaders?
I feel that we should be about supporting the individual in their spiritual quest, not trying to form power groups. We have enough of politicians in the outside world without having them fighting about who is the valid voice of our spiritual endeavours.
In typical Irish style, the rain has moved on, the sun is now lighting up the glistening fields, and cotton-wool clouds float aloft in a bright blue sky. I'm away to tend the mares.
So on this note I will finish,
wishing all love, luck and wellbeing.
Yours in service
