Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
Las Posadas begins today. In this Latin American Christmas novena, the community acts out the Holy Family's search for a place to sleep upon coming to Bethlehem for the Roman tax census. Starting nine days before Christmas Eve, a Mary and Joseph, with an entourage of angels and shepherds and others, walk door-to-door begging for… Continue reading The Daily: 16 December 2025
Thanksgiving is not a harvest feast. Puritans were not notably inclined toward feasting. Leadership especially wasn’t, and the accounts we have of their lives is heavily skewed toward the elite men who had the leisure to write things down. Whatever the average New England settler might have thought about celebrating the land’s bounty with merry… Continue reading The Daily: 26 November 2025
The Day of the Dead In Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, he says that a “man” does not fear death. “Fear of death is our animal nature,” he claims. I don’t know that any part of that is accurate. To be sure, we have a very unhealthy relationship to death. We tell ourselves stories of our… Continue reading The Daily: 2 November 2025
All Hallows: An Entanglement Today is All Hallow's Eve, Hallowe'en, with all the sweet treats, riotous good fun, and spooky debauchery that entails. Tomorrow is All Saints Day, All Hallows, a reincarnation of the ancient Irish festival called Samhain, which means “end of summer”. Samhain is one of the few clear remnants from at least… Continue reading The Daily: 31 October 2025
The word pagan is not unlike the word witch. Both were pejorative labels for outsiders. Both would likely earn a body substantial abuse. And both have been reclaimed in late modern times, though it would be more accurate to say that these words have been redefined, almost completely. Witch means nothing of what it once… Continue reading The Daily: 29 October 2025
Odds are few of you are as involved in the pagan community as I am. Though this is the fastest growing spiritual path, both in the world and in my own country, it is still a very small community. Moreover, even within this small community, I am in the minority in thinking that it might… Continue reading The Daily: 28 October 2025
It is the time of year when I am increasingly compelled to define my path. What does a witch do? What does a witch believe? What does it mean to be a witch? I find that the definition often leads to more words in need of definition, bound up as they are with the world… Continue reading The Daily: 23 October 2025
Ever since reading Becoming Native to This Place by Wes Jackson back in the late 1990s, I have sought to define what that means for me. Wes defines it mostly in terms of food production, but there are also elements of spirituality and philosophy even as he writes about farming. Food is certainly the central… Continue reading The Daily: 15 October 2025
October 4th 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 The Daily: 4 October 2024
Sunday’s ramble into dark corners of mythography was triggered by yet another authoritative assertion that the Harvest Lord used to be a bloody sacrifice. But it was also, more subconsciously, inspired by much of the reading I’ve been doing in the blogosphere lately where many people are wrestling with questions of who we are. What… Continue reading The Daily: 30 September 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 