Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
Saturnalia Saturnalia begins today. Time for feasting and merriment. No time for work, it's all play for the next many days. Too much wine. Not enough sleep. All frenetic fun. Much like with Mardi Gras, this holiday is not particularly my thing. But I do relish a breakdown of order... and Saturnalia is time to… Continue reading The Daily: 17 December 2025
Today is the Republican Roman festival of Lux Mundi. Saturday is the feast day of Santa Lucia. This is a time to celebrate light. Lux Mundi translates into "the light of the world". This day honored Libertas, the bringer of light. Libertas was the personification of freedom, metaphorical light rather than actual light, and she… Continue reading The Daily: 10 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
Didn't I say last week that there would be ice on my walkway by this week? Well, yep, that happened. We had a doozy of a storm from Saturday night right through to Tuesday morning. Windy and cold and dark with about 2" of precipitation altogether. Mostly icy rain until Sunday afternoon, then mostly snow… Continue reading The Daily: 19 November 2025
Remembering is an act of resistance. Gaslighting is ineffective against a firm memory. The lies unravel when someone is keeping a close record. Want to be a true subversive? Then get the facts straight and tell the story. Footnotes help, but be wary of the oft-quoted sources. You can see who they're working for... I'm… Continue reading The Daily: 12 November 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
The Harvest Moon west dark yesterday at 8:25am my time. Today, begins the 13th and final moon in my annual round, the Hunter's Moon. Many folks seem to think this moon is named for the hunting season. This is neither temporally nor mythically correct. It is not yet hunting season, if by hunt you mean… Continue reading The Daily: 22 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
As you can see, I've pulled this out of the compost heap and brushed it off. Mostly as a way to force me to write poetry. Because I have become lax on that... and that makes me sad... I also restarted the AllPoetry Wednesday Word contest. But this time I'm keeping the rewards to the… Continue reading The Daily: 8 October 2025
June 15th, the Ides of June, was the last day of Vestalia. With great ceremony, the sanctuary of Vesta was cleansed and closed to the public for another year, the sustaining Vestal hearth-flame hidden behind walls that no man was allowed to pass. This is a slack time, a time when heat is intolerable and… Continue reading The Daily: 15 June 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 