I always find The Return after a trip difficult. Today is our oldest son’s birthday and earlier today I took a few minutes to lay on my back on his new trampoline and look at the trees against the sky. Fall’s return is crisp in the air. ❤️ And, I saw a bald eagle fly over!
I can hardly believe my first baby is twelve! 
“…When we work together cooperatively, the final product is one of synergy — it is more than each of its separate parts. The pleasure we take in each other’s company finds its way into the medicine we create.”
— Joanna Powell Colbert, The Gaian Tarot
Today was the final day of Gaea Goddess Gathering and my sister-in-law took this picture of me by the lake. It was a re-creation of a similar picture she took two years ago that now graces the back cover of my new Earthprayer, Birthprayer book (published just last week and still waiting for me to write some launch posts about it!)
I’m feeling relieved to be home now from Kansas after five days away. Gaea Goddess Gathering was a multifaceted experience as always. Vending was so rewarding with lots of lovely connections woven and stories shared. Many other elements felt like something we survived! It is quite physically taxing to be there–not enough food, water, or sleep, too much climbing up seventy steps up a steep hillside while breastfeeding + babywearing! And, this year there were weather extremes–first, 90+ degrees, follows by rain and wind, then cool. I couldn’t have done it without my mom’s help with my daughter and with the help of my SIL and my mom with set up/take down of the booth.
Whew!
Time again to dance in a circle of women! Tonight, the main ritual honored the Morrigan and encouraged us all to rise up. As we chanted, the coyotes howled and the fire rose up in a shower of sparks under the crescent moon.
Sleeping baby in Ergo. Notebook full of amazing possibilities. Feet on the grass in my red tent canopy at Camp Gaea with our goddess art and Womanrunes books on the tables. Surrounded by fascinating women, listening to drums… 
We’re at Gaea Goddess Gathering! The Brigid’s Grove booth is almost finished being set up. Very hot today and rain called for tonight. Beautiful evening for the opening ritual though. Crescent moon to the south while the sun was setting in the west as we called in the Morrigan. Now, lightning is sparkling through the dark sky as the bonfire burns.
In my picture for today’s prompt, I set my baby on the table with some of our newest sculptures, plus my brand new Earthprayer book and my two other books. Lots of beautiful harvest to celebrate this year, including my ten month old boy! ❤️
Today is the first day of Joanna Colbert’s new 30 Days of Harvest ecourse. I’m traveling for the rest of the week (Gaea Goddess Gathering in Kansas!) and will have limited to no cell phone access, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep up with my usual 30 Days practice of blogging every day of the course, but here’s a quick post to start it off anyway!
September roses always feel extra special and beautiful to me, the last roses of the year.
My bounty is in reflection 
and story-telling
and deep spaces.
My bounty is in dreams and plans
and refusing to quit.
My bounty wells up from within and
spills over with gusto
and irrepressible hope for
possibility,
and plans,
and endless newness
bright within each morning.
My bounty is in blooms and clay
and gemstones and gravel
in dirt and weeds
raspberries and blood.
My bounty brings the women.
Energy feeds the land.
Words spill forth onto
page,
screen,
memory,
ground.
My bounty is in what I hold
and release.
What I won’t give up on
and what I set free.
My bounty is milky.
Curled eyelashes,
blonde head,
sturdy legs.
My bounty is in conversation
circling the veranda in
steady, strong loops
of raw possibility
hope and wonder.
My bounty is in moments of despair and hopelessness
that break like waves on the shore
and make way for sunrise.
My bounty gathers together broken pieces
and tries again.
My bounty moves quickly
fluttering like a butterfly
and traversing continents of desire
before alighting on a thistle
downy,
purple,
sharp,
and beautiful.
As the wheel of the year turns towards fall, what is your bounty? What have you harvested or are waiting until the time is right to pick? What have you created, birthed, sweated over, discovered, or enjoyed?
There has been a crispness to the evening air and the hint of color in the trees that makes me reflect on the passage of another year. It feels like a time to wrap up projects, enjoy results, and to begin another time of turning inward, moving toward the cocoon-call of winter.
Last night my family held an abundance and gratitude ritual (+ harvest + autumn + full moon). I had a wonderful time setting up a mandala on our back deck, which we have recently taken to calling the veranda. Life is much nicer with a veranda in it and we regularly make time to sit out there in the morning as well as walk there at night. I got the term “verandahing” from Leonie Dawson and I highly recommend this practice of making time daily to sit outside on your veranda (deck, porch, front stoop, stair, whatever you’ve got, just try it!).
In the mandala, I set gourds and sage that we grew, harvested, and dried. I also used rose petals and hydrangea blooms that are still currently blooming. I picked dittany, sumac, and dogwood leaves from the forest. After the moon rose, we drummed, sang, danced, wrote what we are grateful for on paper leaves and added them to the mandala. Earlier in the day, I followed a prompt from my Sacred Year class to reflect on my “bounty,” as we approach the harvest season. I expected to write more literally about the things I’ve created and harvested this year, but a bountiful, bounty poem emerged instead.
I registered for Joanna Powell Colbert’s upcoming ecourse: 30 Days of Harvest ~ A Daily Sacred Pause of Welcoming Autumn. I look forward to another experience of daily practice with her.
My own Red Tent class began on the full moon, the birthing of the “seed dream” I planted in February, and another Womanrunes Immersion as well as a Divination Practicum begin in October. A bountiful culmination of the year’s work. I am amazed to see what can be generated and grown over the course of a year.
This month has been a busy one for me and I’ve felt emotionally erratic—vacillating between a boundless enthusiasm and a sort of trapped, snappy despair (as I re-read past blog posts, I recognize this as a feature of having a toddler, disrupted sleep, and an unpredictable “schedule”). Last week, I felt moved and very reassured by a quote I read via a post on Changing by Trista of the Girl God:
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
-Alice Walker, Living by the Word
Darkness falls.
I enter sacred space
stepping from holy ground
onto holy ground
only this time I recognize it.
Owl calls,
moon rises,
sun sets,
leaves rustle,
heart beats.Breathing in,
breathing out
feeling the world spin
feeling the earth turn
watching Her weaving at work in the night.
July’s Blue Moon is coming up at the end of this week and my Womanrunes course is carefully scheduled to end on that day. I can hardly believe we have worked through 37 runes already! (I’ve also scheduled the next Immersion for October.) I’ve written a Full Moon ritual to go out with the last email for the course and I will do the ritual myself with my family. I definitely feel the restless energy referenced in this Blue Moon article:
…As amazing as this moon will be, and necessary—it’s going to be one that challenges us on every single level. In the build up to this lunar event we may have been feeling restless, or have had an excess of nervous energy. Our pulses may have been racing, and it may have been harder for us to relax or fall asleep at night.
Our souls can sense that we are on the verge of something big—but it’s up to us to initiate change.
via Unprecedented Blue Moon in Aquarius: Now or Never. | elephant journal.
Last night, I took my new crystal ball with me to the woods to reflect. I asked what I need to know right now, as I am feeling pulled in several directions and between several wonderful ideas, and I drew The Heart. It reminds me to rest for a little while, but also that I act in this world with great passion and intensity and that’s okay.
We are leaving tomorrow for a family mini-vacation at a river cabin. I’m really looking forward to it. Some healing, play, and relaxation after the energetic depletion of the hard work required for me during the last two weeks of my school session.
(Of course, I fantasize that somehow I’m going to finish writing my dissertation during our mini vacation! 😉 )
“She may feel she will die if she does not dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.”
—Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Following the spiral path of maiden, mother, and crone…
Do you want to take a journey into a deeper understanding of yourself? Do you wish to unlock insight and understanding? Do you want to reach out to other women in sisterhood and co-create a powerful circle experience?
This new online program is both a powerful, personal experience AND a training in facilitating transformative women’s circles. You will listen to your deep self, access your inner wisdom and prepare to step into circle as guardian and guide for other women who are hungering for depth, connection, restoration, and renewal in today’s busy world.
This intensive course is limited to 15 women, to allow for deep connection and dedicated attention.
August 29-October 12, 2015
Your online experience includes…
With your registration, you will also receive an incredible resource package valued at more than $100 including:
Kit and Initiation Program. In this collection of essays and ritual resources, you will find a complete Red Tent “recipe,” circle leadership basics, moontime musings, and readings, quotes, and poems to help you facilitate a rich, inviting, welcoming, creative space for the women of your community.After your process is complete you will also receive:
For inspiration on your own path, feel free to listen our local Red Tent Circle singing the beautiful chant Dance in a Circle of Women during our May Circle.
Register via our website or check out via Etsy here.
The color in this picture isn’t edited at all. They really are this glowing color that is so perfect it doesn’t look real.
“And I toil and sweat
And watch and wonder
And am full of love.
Living in place
In this place.
For truth and beauty
Dwell here*…”
While I expected to participate in my own photo prompts for the Womanrunes Immersion course, I didn’t really expect or plan to fully experience the course myself, personally. I am so familiar with the Womanrunes that I guess I didn’t know they still had more to share with me! As I developed the course, I kept saying to myself, “I guess this is my immersion!” When I described it as an “immersion” course, I meant it for the participants—to have daily contact with the symbols, to uncover their own truths, and to be alert for this work and magic in their own lives—but to develop the course materials, I had to be immersed myself for several months. And now, as I read my own words as they arrive in each daily lesson/prompt, I find the immersion continues and I still have more to uncover. As I touched on in my last post, what this course is uncovering for me is a desire, no, a need to reconnect and re-establish meaningful practices and contacts that I have let fall away since my baby was born in October. I also need more gentleness, patience, and grace when faced with the unexpected (which pretty much happens every day). I am receiving that I need to tend my relationships. And, at the same time, I am feeling the tickles of multiple additional course ideas and possibilities and I feel exhilarated and excited about this inspiration. I often feel as if my work comes through me, like I am a channel for it and this fire of inspiration just wants to burn through me…to be expressed and birthed into the world. It is an intense experience and it can lead me to be a little skewed in my personal life—to burn and burn and burn with “just one more thing! I’m almost finished!” rather than heeding my body’s call for rest or food or hugs.
Yesterday morning, in response to the prompt for the Pentacle, Rune of Protection, I took a picture through my roses at the woods leading down to overlook where I wrote the Womanrunes book. I love this place so much.
I was then enchanted by the raindrops on the rosebuds and by my baby’s face, enjoying the light drizzle.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been delighting in harvesting various plants. I made a rose elixir and also started a plantain infusion for salve. I finished drying raspberry leaves for tea and some chocolate mint leaves as well. And, I made four sage smudge sticks from sage that grows in front of our house in the flower boxes. I’m having so much fun lately with this herbal craft. As I mentioned, one of the things I’m recognizing as I work through this course myself is that I really want move these self-care, nurturing connections and practices up in my daily priority. While much of my work takes place online and I am grateful for that, I simply must cultivate more time to be offline, restoring my soul.
I’m also remembering to consciously center in my heartspace to consider what is actually required in each moment. What task actually needs my attention and what is self-generated, self-imposed busy-ness. And, I’ve implementing a daily, one minute grounding practice after being inspired to do so by Enchant Your Everyday.
While I was walking in the driveway on our nightly walk, I came across a gigantic frog. I’ve never seen such a big one! It was the perfect reminder of how this very same patch of ground upon which I spend all my days still finds new ways to surprise and enchant me!
One of the Womanrunes course participants then shared this with me:
Frog spirt animal associated with water:
“Cleansing
Renewal, rebirth
Fertility, abundance
Transformation, metamorphosis
Life mysteries and ancient wisdom.”
Sounds perfect!
(*Past post with the rest of the “I stand on holy ground” poem quoted above: I stand on holy ground | WoodsPriestess.)
Too busy. Too buzzy. Not enough time.
To do. To do. To do.
Scramble. Hurry.
Tight chest
Tight breath
Tight heart
WAIT!
Listen to Summer.
Languid. Warm. Sweaty. Hot.
Petals soften
Juice drips
Kissed by sunlight
Bathed with rain
Sweet stickiness.
Passion.
Summer is heavy.
Hot and ready.
Blooming and dripping.
Unfolding. Becoming. Ripening.
Sweet. Tangy. Biting.
Feel it in the air.
Greet it at sunset.
Throw your arms around it.
Dig in. Hang on. This is IT.
Taste it. Hold it. Enfold it. Be it.
Lick it. Know it. Be it. Embrace it.
This is your life.
This is your life.
Do you love it?
I’ve been working really hard for the last month preparing my Womanrunes Immersion course and I feel a little 
unbalanced and skewed off-center. I keep telling myself that it is okay to keep working hard, because I’m “almost done,” and sometimes pushing is exactly what is needed. But, I’ve realized as I participate in my own course, that since there is always something else immediately around the corner, that “break” I keep holding out for never comes. I have to create it for myself. The course is going so well and has been really inspiring and magical so far, while also needing a lot of energy from me. I’ve committed to working through the course myself, not just guiding others through it, and I’ve already had to take a deep look at several issues…feeling on the verge of some kind of breakthrough now. From yesterday’s lesson this reminder:
“When we lack proper time for the simple pleasures of life, for the enjoyment of eating, drinking, playing, creating, visiting friends, and watching children at play, then we have missed the purpose of life. Not on bread alone do we live, but on all these human and heart-hungry luxuries.”
–Ed Hayes (Simple Pleasures)
And, then from another article:
“The more fully we experience life’s beauty, the less regret we have that we didn’t live and love in the ways we most longed to.”
Barefeet, watermelons, and sunburns – it’s summer!
Yesterday in response to my own Womanrunes prompts, I literally went outside to smell the roses.
It was just what I needed and I need to move these experiences up in priority in my day, instead of being the last things I attend to. I’m also participating in this free offering:
Enchant Your Everyday: 108 Day Pilgrimage to Your Beautiful Life – Vanessa Sage.
This is a beautiful world. Don’t miss it!
Deep peace of the singing earth to you
Deep peace of the calling bird to you
Deep peace of the quiet stone to you
(*doesn’t feel right to end a “deep peace” blessing without this line from the original Gaelic blessing)
“…Enough with such questions!
Let silence take you to the core of life.
All your talk is worthless
When compared to one whisper
of the Beloved.”
— Rumi
“The tools are unimportant; we have all we need to make magic: our bodies, our breath, our voices, each other.” –Starhawk
(quoted in Dedicant)
“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”
–John Muir
I stand on the body of the Goddess
I sit on her bones
I breathe her breath
Spirit of Life moving through me
Her voice sings in my blood
stars shine in my veins
my heartbeat a drum
tuned to the core of the planet…
Related posts: Woodspriestess: Body Prayer Woodspriestess: Pelvic Cradle
May you know the warmth of sunshine and of smiles
May you celebrate friendship and solitude
May you open your arms to someone’s first step
May you cry well, laugh often, and feel much
May you feel the deep connection between past and future
And may you dwell in all the fullness of your days.
Most of my posts for the 30 Days of May have centered around nature. Today, I’m centering on the “wonder” in the prompt. Two things have given me cause for wonder today. The first was my feelings of sheer joy after our Red Tent Circle last night. I listened to the recording I made of the Dance in a Circle of Women song we sang and I am just so very grateful to have women to share experiences like this with. I am so fortunate that I can hardly believe it. The second is that my mom brought over some old home movies that were recently digitized by my aunt. These are not just any home movies, but are silent movies taken over 60 years ago of my own mother as a baby crawling and then toddling around with her parents holding her hands. All four of my maternal great-grandparents are in the footage, my great-great uncle, my uncle taking his first steps into my grandpa’s arms, my grandma smiling and eating watermelon, my aunt and my mom playing at the beach. There was a terribly beautiful poignancy to watching them and thinking about how much is lost to memory and to time.
My own little girl set up a “tiny tent” today in the bedroom. She wanted very badly to go to the Red Tent with me last night and was disappointed not to be included. She said we could have a “Goddess Day” today and she got things all set up in a little Cars-movie red tent that we have. Along with the goddess sculptures she collected to set up with candles in the tent, she also dragged in a family of robots. We sat in the tent together and I was watching the baby practicing standing up and looking at my daughter’s smiling face and I could feel the link—the watermelon, the smile, the beach, the tiny tent, all the babies. It is all so real. It was all so real. I appreciate the movies, I don’t know very many people who have seen videos of their own moms crawling around the floor as babies, but it really struck me painfully that none of those moments matter as much as they do when they’re actually happening. No one will ever care about my little baby practicing his standing as much as I do right now (whether recorded or not). No one cared as much about my uncle’s first steps as his parents there in that moment over fifty years ago. I can’t even really explain what I mean without sounding trite. There is a so much to pay attention to, all the time. Right now, I’m nursing somebody’s grandpa, someone else’s history. Right now, I’m nursing my baby…
WoodsPriestess 