Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
for 10 December 2022 10 December 1830 is Emily Dickinson's birth-date. In her honor, you might spend the day penning obscure poetry and witticisms. Or you could fall down the rabbit hole that is the search for the "real Emily", a person born nearly 200 years ago today. Apparently, there are questions of authenticity, not… Continue reading The Daily
for 8 December 2022 Green in December fills the graveyard. — folklore quoted in the Hedge Witch Book of Days Mandy Mitchell (Weiser Books, 2014) The Winter Sleep Moon is past full and now waning. At my latitude, we've hit the earliest sunsets of the year, 4:11pm. It's dark by the time I leave work.… Continue reading The Daily
19 November 2022 This weather is not doing things by half, I'll give it that. We went from the longest growing season on record — 181 days, theoretically long enough to grow even protracted growing season veg like okra — with the official first frost date ringing in at 28 October, to... well, there's a… Continue reading The Daily
16 November 2022 I learned a fun medical thing today. Once COVID has had its way with your internal organs, apparently any infection that causes inflammation can trigger echoes of COVID. I started to think that this might be the case when I had strep and it felt disturbingly like the COVID I'd just shaken… Continue reading The Daily
4 October is the feast day of St Francis of Assisi. You might know him as the irreverent but apt moniker, St Francis of the Birdbath, because that is where many of us encounter him. Bare-headed with the monk's tonsure, dressed in rough robes and coarse rope belting, he stands with one palm out, feeding… Continue reading St Francis of the Birdbath
It is the Feast of the Assumption. In the Church calendar, this is the day Mother Mary was taken bodily up to heaven without the inconvenience of dying first. But in the older calendar of Europe, this was the time when it was recognized that the heat of summer was breaking. The Dog Days end… Continue reading The Feast of the Assumption
Except for the flooding... With the month nearly two-thirds done, we’ve had about 1.87” of rain for July in my town. An average July sees nearly 5”, so we’re pretty squarely in drought conditions. Particularly when we take into account the fact that, of that July total, 1.27” fell on Monday. Meaning almost all of… Continue reading Land of Little Rain
The morning glories are blooming. And the agastaches. And the monkshood! While the rest of the country is burning, deliquescing into lakes of molten misery, we in northern New England seem to be gifted with an early autumn. The mornings are cool, sometimes cold. Fog drapes the green mountains, drifting down to the river bed… Continue reading Autumn in July
Hildegard's vision of the cosmos Philosophers and mystics throughout time have been showing us that everything is connected, that humans are part of that everything, that unity is fundamental — and sacred. This tradition is more prevalent and prominent in the East and in most Indigenous cultures, but in the West we have our cosmologists… Continue reading On the Existence of A Man
The latter half of June 2022 will be a treat for sky-watchers. All five of the bright visible planets will be in alignment, in the order that we find them in the solar system, from left to right across the pre-dawn sky. Beginning June 16th, Mercury will also be as bright and high up as… Continue reading The Planets Are Aligned
