Earth Element | The heART of Ritual

The heART of Ritual

musings

Welcome to the MUSINGS room in our digital nest! Here you will find an extensive selection of articles, poetry, prose, videos, recipes, and tutorials that journey the natural cycles, seasons, elements, and archetypes in the Celtic Wheel of the Year, as well as our Irish indigenous festivals, folklore, and customs.

This is lovingly provided as a free community resource, however it is copyrighted content. As such, we respectfully ask that if you share this content outside of this dedicated space, either in whole, in part, or paraphrased, that you credit the author and source. Thank you.

Samhain and the Cailleach

Samhain, the astronomical moment of liminality, is drawing closer. Although Halloween will be celebrated on the 31st of October, the...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'The Thing Is', by Ellen Bass

To love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Sojourns in a Parallel World', by Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions, cruelties, dreams, concepts, crimes and the exercise of virtue in and beside a world devoid of our...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Learning from Trees', by Grace Butcher

If we could, like the trees, practice dying, do it every year just as something we do— like going on vacation or celebrating birthdays,...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Mistletoe', by Walter De La Mare

Sitting under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), One last candle burning low, All the sleepy dancers gone, Just one candle...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Hoar Frost', by Moira Cameron

In icy cover of the dark- too cold, the Arctic air can’t muster up the will or care to gust- strange magic thrives in stillness stark:...

Tale of a Scottish Brownie

There was a Brownie who lived and worked in the house of Maxwell, Laird of Dalswinton. This Brownie was particularly close to the...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'The Lamplighter', by Robert Louis Stevenson

My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky; It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by; For every night at teatime and...

Wintering, and how Trees illuminate the Art of Self-Renewal in difficult times

“Wintering… is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a...

The Complex Root Systems of Plants

Winter is the season of the earth element and earth, and it's hard to speak about earth without speaking about physical roots, our...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'A Wintry Sonnet', by Christina Rossetti

A Robin said: The Spring will never come, And I shall never care to build again. A Rosebush said: These frosts are wearisome, My sap will...

What can we learn from how Nature spends Winter?

Life's adaptations to the cold and dark part of the year demonstrate how time and patience, in the end, teach us how to survive....

Fear and the Earth Element within

Fear is one of the themes that destabilizes our root, the earth element within us. Here are a few powerful words to consider on fear, and...

The Magic of the Earth Element

The forest breathes, it lives, as one. Primordial, intricate, wild. Wild in it's impossible terrain, teeming with life; buzzing, dancing,...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Holly', by Andrew Blakemore

At the edge of the field in a hedgerow so tangled, So thick and so dense where the holly does grow, Berries of scarlet are caught in the...

The Cycle of Form and Formless

We are taken into winter, when the leaves are fallen from the trees and the branches are bare. Winter is this barrenness that belongs to...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'The Warm Glow of Home', by Michael Traveler

I see it in the distance the warm glow of home As the dampness in the air sinks down beneath my clothes As the coldness tries to reach my...

The Winter Solstice and the Birth of Sol

We have almost arrived at the winter solstice, the moment when the most northern point of the earth is tilted furthest away from the...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Mistletoe', by John Bannister Tabb

'To the cradle-bough of a naked tree, Benumbed with ice and snow, A Christmas dream brought suddenly A birth of mistletoe. The shepherd...

Perspectives on Death and Dying

This months BIOPHILIA Mentorship focused on themes of death, funerals, grief composting and trauma amongst other earth element...