E- Ellen Dugan Garden Witch

Ellen Dugan's books are a great inspiration to me and they are beautiful and thoughtfully written.  If you haven't checked her out, then do!

She published the Witches Tarot through Llewellyn Worldwide.

Pretty and educational!










Her Garden Herbal is one of my favorite books, and her other garden witchcraft books are wonderful too!

Check out Ellen' site at: Ellen's pages and blog she is my E choice for the Pagan Blog Project.

D- Deer

Can you find two deer in this picture?

I see deer in my yard in the morning because I live in their bedroom.  The dogs look our the large glass doors in the back (through which these pictures were taken) and bark.  And bark and bark and bark.  Deer are smarter than dogs, they look up but soon go back to sleep or have a snack.

Left deer.

I love that they visit me and that they can sleep late because they can't be hunted here so near my house.

I have no objection to hunting though. I have some friends who are pagans AND hunters, and their approach to taking a deer is beautiful, sound and respectful.

Right deer. You can tell she is laughing at the dogs wigging out by my feet.

At least one of them makes offerings to Diana at his place of worship near a small spring. She is ever present with him as he hunts and his offerings of thanks to her this year were truly moving. My friend is a Longhunter, he hunts with a flintlock and so he has one shot and one charge of gunpowder to spend. His skill and patience have to do the rest. Longhunter feels that this deer gives up her life for the hunt to continue and to help keep the connection between the God and the Wood strong.  Some of his prize is returned to the ground before any is consumed.

I have found that I can be both proud and saddened when an animal gives its life for my use.

Here in PA, a lot of jobs depend on the hunting activities. Deer is good food and oh, a bunch of other things...  I'm not meaning to sell you on hunting- if it is not for you I respect your choice to steward the earth in a different way very much.

What I AM meaning to do is represent deer as a path to appreciating the natural world around us.

Deer represent so many good things- they are not my totem animal (so far...) but they are wonderful herbalists- said to lead Native Americans to healing plants and as we can see, they are creative and frugal and good at blending in when needed.  Deer are swift, fertile and live efficiently- all qualities I admire and don't mind being reminded of!  Spiritually, they are harmonious and balanced and interact well with others.  They represent the rut in the Midsummer fertility festivals- that is where we get the term Stag Party!  A deer-like man adorned with an antler crown and possessing some of these qualities would be a good choice to end your chase and mate with at Beltane!

I don't live in the middle of nowhere, my area is solid suburbs. These deer live in 20 foot wide by 600 foot long strips between backyards, occasional empty acres in our town and the wooded areas along the highway.  PEOPLE have crowded them until they have been squiched into that space.  A lot of them don't make it under these circumstances, but I am grateful for the ones who show up and share themselves with us.
I will need to fortify our garden beds around my circle garden with a fence if I want to grown anything other than herbs, because These Gals used my garden as a salad bar last summer.  They even ate the hot peppers!
Garden raiders or not, I look forward to them every morning.

Deer need salad too!

Zambonie (@Zambonieknows) the feathered white Dachshund  takes a break from barking at deer to
practice a  little sympathetic magic.  Her belief in this position is very strong.
  "I can roll up in a ball and the deer will come lay here with me. Please stop typing and take my picture."

Read about other notions and pagan practices that begin with the letter D at the Pagan Blog Project.

Stone wall enchantment

I am in love with stone walls. I have taken loads of pictures of them, made art about them, made offerings to, on and under them.  I have tried to build my own stone walls with limited success and great humility.

Stonework Techniques and Projects.
 Charles Raven

I have gone on letterboxing hikes and found secret messages hidden in many stone walls.







I have a book about them.





I stop to look at the hand-picked stones on bank buildings, pay attention to the kind of stone used in different houses in different parts of this area. Some houses are make of red field stone pulled from farm fields and some from schist quarried in the Philadelphia area.  In Massachusetts  homes are not schist.  There they quarry granite.

I dream of standing near the wailing wall. Not to wail. Just to stand near it and connect with the ancient energy and effort of the builders, who were probably not the ones who planned the wall. That is so often the case with stone.  I would leave a note to give thanks for the cleverness and ingenuity man has to shape and stack stones.

Cape Cod cairn.

I stack stones into cairns whenever I have a chance to. They serve to hold a place on the earth for the memory of my son, for some delight that I am feeling that day or for a wish I make. A cairn is a good repository for a spell.

Bonsai training at Longwood Gardens in December 1012

Stones are everlasting and solid.

They can shape the world around them.

I lay my hand flat against chimneys.  I get thrown off of properties occasionally while taking pictures of bank barns and Swiss barns built of stone.

I think about the ballast stones (called Belgian block around here) in the street in Germantown, a historic part of Philadelphia where battles were fought in among the German homes.  These stones have known the feet of some real heroes and so many other people who came before me.  They are worn and wise and beautiful to see.

Mostly though, for me, its the standing walls. My Barbie dolls were all rock climbers when I was young.  We didn't need or want a pink camper, we made rooms for our dolls in the gaps and empty places in stone walls or rock faces in the woods.  Barbie can climb rocks in high heels and make a meal of acorns and furniture from moss.

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C- Circle

Of course I have to post about circles! I doodle them and find them in nature...

Duloe stones in Cornwall. Amazing feat of worship.

Sabrynth spiral.

When pondering a problem, I tend to walk through my yard in a big, loose circle, picking a weed there and trimming a branch here until I have arrived at my starting place. Sometimes it takes a long time, sometimes not, but I find that the thinking I do while wandering like this often leads me to, or close, to a solution. And it calms me.

I read that studies on how people navigate without markers reveal that people tend to walk in a slow curve, a circle, when they walk alone without a directed path.

Man made, found in nature, man made from things found in nature- I enjoy looking at them all and appreciate the path they offer. When I try to get somewhere and rush forward in a straight line I nearly ALWAYS miss the point of the journey. So many things have been revealed to me while I embraced the journey- very few experiences have been enlightening as I rushed straight past or through them.

Labrynth at UCLA

This is one place I have walked, the labyrinth
 in Grace Cathedral in San Franciso.

Walking on a labyrinth path is walking a lot of parts of a circle, back and forth, around and around. That route is a good metaphor for the journey in life- each step can only go one way- you have to take each turn as it comes. Only by moving forward can you arrive at the end.  In a labyrinth journey you have no decisions to make and can just let your mind go as you walk and turn and walk some more. In doing this your mind can journey too.






When you reach the middle of the labyrinth path you realize that you are not yet there. Turn around and begin to put one foot in front of the other, you have many turns and twists in your circle to go!

One of the best kind of circles- a circle of people.

I've collected pictures of circles in nature over many years, not always with notes about who took the picture. I heartily apologize for this, but some of the pictures are just too wonderful. I want to share them anyway. Just know that they are the wonderful work of other talented people, not me.

Crop circles are fascinating, no matter who made them!