My Inspirations and Training

I have been an animist for as long as I can remember.  I remember always feeling as though animals and plants, trees and rocks, cars and televisions could all understand me when I spoke to them, and could communicate back to me in their own ways.  My first experiences that I can remember happened during and shortly after I became extremely ill with strep throat for the first time of what would be two to three times a year, every year, from the age of 5 to the age of 15.  That first time, my fever spiked to 103, and I was delirious for some days.

I remember when I was very young, just after learning to read, sneaking the Encyclopedia Brittanica into my bedroom at night to read about the ancient Gods, without anyone ever having told me about them, much less telling me their stories or myths.  I would pray to them in the only way I knew how, on my knees by the bed.  My, how times have changed!

I began to identify as Wiccan at the age of 12, when I stumbled upon Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft while looking for role playing game books. The "New Age" section in Waldenbooks in the mall was right next to the role playing game section, and the cover caught my eye.  I immediately devoured it, eager to know more, and excited that there were actually others who felt like I did.  About this time I began to attempt meditation and trance work, through whatever methods I could find.  It was also about this time, when I began to have purposeful Otherworldly journeying experiences, that my 2 to 3 times yearly strep throat bouts ceased.

At age twenty, I became the de facto high priest of a coven (because I was the only male in the group at the time I joined) that saw many people come and go over the years.  The high priestess was like a second mother to me, and I learned a lot from her, about magic and about life. Ours was an eclectic group, and everyone seemed to have their own path, while also being able to find a common ground for a group practice.

  Since then, I have explored many different paths, from Buddhism and Hinduism, to Traditional Witchcraft, Celtic Reconstructionism, Druidry, Asatru, Religio Romana, Hellenismos, and Graeco-Egyptian Hellenistic practice. I am a member, or a past member, of various organizations such as the Troth, the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) (1st degree),  Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF) (Dedicant program completed), the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids (OBOD) (Druid Grade completed), Hellenion, Res Publica Romana, and the Society for Shamanic Practitioners.  I have also studied the journeying and extraction healing methods of core shamanism with Micheal Harner's Foundation for Shamanic Studies, after having read and put into practice his seminal book The Way of the Shaman years ago. 

Don't Forget The Hoop

Being a pagan immersed in British Isles lore, I have had to answer the question of the use of animal parts such as fur, hide, and bone.  Many feel that it is not ethical today to use such things in a practice that aims for healing and wholeness.

I have my own reasons why I continue to use animal parts, and this article, linked below, by a traditional drum maker highlights some of them.  I happen to have a synthetic drum, owing mainly to circumstance more than the ability to choose at the time, and my drum and I have been on many an adventure together, but I stand by the idea that animal parts can be and are used today in an ethical manner by many people worldwide.

Personally, I feel that the idea that there is *no* ethical way to use animal parts, is to denigrate my ancestors, their struggles, their wisdom, and their capabilities to balance the worlds of Life and Death, of the Seen and the Unseen, and I refuse to do that.  Some give me the argument that just because our ancestors did something, that doesn't mean we have to continue to do it.  It actually amazes me how often I hear this, as though the person thinks they are the first person ever to have the opportunity to tell me this, as though I've never heard it before, but I would rather follow the ways of my ancestors as closely as I am able, rather than have tons of fossil fuels burned on my behalf to bring vegetables to me out of season from the other side of the planet.

I also find that those of European descent from industrial Western cultures seem to be chastised for using natural hide skins for their drums and other ritual items more often than other ethnic groups, which could be taken as indicating some racism, because if white people "should know better" then shouldn't everyone else? If other ethnic groups get a free pass because they "don't know better" then that is both racist and well as insulting to their ancestral wisdom. If they get a free pass because of tradition, then that is yet another attempt at both romanticizing their culture, putting them in the "noble savage" role, as well as denying European-descended peoples their own ancestral, cultural traditions as shown in the archaeological record.

In the article linked below, the author requests of us, "don't forget the hoop".  Don't forget the circle of Life and Death.  Please take a moment to read the article. I also ask that you, now and in your daily life, not forget the hoop.  Ask yourself *exactly* from where come all the things that you use.  Are your shoes made of fake leather, manufactured from petroleum?  How many animals suffered a loss of habitat for you to acquire those synthetic shoes, shirts, belts, CD's and CD cases, strawberries out of season, etc.?  Find your balance. Be a guide, but be one without blame or judgment. Let others find their balance.  Get out of their way, because you can't force your balance onto another.  It just doesn't work that way.

Ethics of Hide Drums

The Truth of The Deathless and the Sacrifice of Life to Life

Life is a web, forever weaving and dynamic, not a mountain with a peak. Consciousness is a sphere, with all points equidistant to the center, not allotted more to some and less to others like some cosmic pyramid scheme. All things are alive, because all things are conscious. All things are conscious because consciousness pervades all things, and does so equally. All things are beings.

In all of Nature, life is taken to preserve life, all life is sacred, and all life is equal. All life is equally precious. All. From the largest of animals, to every person, down to every blade of grass and pebble and grain of sand, all life yearns to live. So should we all conceive of it. Such should be our perception as well.

This speaks to a great responsibility placed upon what we choose to birth into existence. Does that idea benefit life, or does it encourage needless death or suffering? Does that organization promote the good for all of life, not just for some individuals? Does that piece of plastic really need to be created?

When you can feel the loss, and the awe of the sacred immensity resounding in the depths of your soul, at the death of the tiniest green growing thing as much as you feel it for a human life or that of an animal, and when you can feel the certainty of the debt to life thus created, then you will only have begun to perceive the truth of the oneness of things, and the sacred equality of which I speak.

Understood this way, every moment becomes a sacred moment, with no escape into the "ordinary" to be possible, no escape to the belief that this-and-such a moment is profane and only that-and-such a moment is sacred, and every death becomes a sacred sacrifice and a promise to return a gift fully given. What will that sacrifice call forth for you?

Do the implications of this make you uncomfortable? Does your discomfort make it less true, just to make you feel better?

Fox Walking

Fox-walking.

The first time I heard this phrase, I was intrigued, as you may imagine given the name of this blog.  I was reading Tom Cowan's blog, Riverdrum, where he mentions it.  This is what he has to say:

"Fox-walking is a term for stalking in which you move extremely slow, I repeat extremely slow. You put your foot down on its outer edge and roll it over onto the ball of your foot, and lower your heel. You cannot walk fast doing this. This is more extreme than slow-motion scenes in movies. It will take perhaps five times as long to go wherever you're going to compare to your usual pace. But it is truly ecstatic. You're hardly moving so you feel like just another thing in the forest. Birds don't see you coming and fly away. Chipmunks don't bat an eye. And you notice everything. You see everything partly because you're spending so much time at each step you take, but also because you don't have to look down at the ground. When you Fox-walk, your foot feels the roots or rocks or dips on the earth, and you adjust your step accordingly. Fox-walking frees you up to keep your attention on the 180° scene in front of you. You can spend a lot of time looking at what ever you see."

So, of course, I had to give it a go. What I immediately noticed was that I am not nearly the ninja I thought I was when I was younger.  Eventually, once I figured out that I needed to open myself so that energy flowed into me rather than concentrating so much on noticing as much as I could that I was pumping energy out of me, the animals and birds no longer flew from my presence.

Once I became calm and open to the energies and consciousnesses around me, I immediately became "bigger".  That familiar connection and oneness, that I was formerly only used to feeling in meditative and sitting trance states, rushed into me more forcefully than I had ever previously experienced.  I began to make this as regular a practice as I could from then on, and I highly recommend everyone try it.

Smudging is not Stealing

I think some accusations of cultural appropriation are valid, and some are the result of the accuser's lack of knowledge, or possibly even racism or guilt over past or present racism.


For instance, often when someone is asked to give an example of cultural appropriation in the realm of spirituality and/or the occult in the modern day that is insensitive to the culture of origin, the example most often given is non-indigenous people continuing to burn sage as a spiritual purifier after being asked to stop doing so by *some* Native Americans.


Now, there certainly are many instances of cultural misappropriation in the world today, but that is not one of them, because Europeans have been smudging with sage for thousands of years. Sage (salvia officinalis) was burned and otherwise used by the Romans as a spiritual purifier and to ward off evil. White sage (salvia apiana), native only to the North American Southwest, is a related plant, and why in English it is called sage. Since white sage is only native to the Southwest of the United States, not even all Native Americans were using it across the continent, because it did not grow everywhere, just like tobacco does not grow everywhere and was therefore not used by *all* Native Americans.


Non-indigenous people are simply using another version of the same plant they were always using, that is at least a bit more native to where they are currently living than a plant from Europe. Besides that, "smudge" is a native *English word. It's the verbal form of the noun "smoke" and means "to apply smoke to something or make a smoky fire". That is why even today when smoke has been applied to something we can say that it has a smudge on it. It is such an old English word that it changes the vowel to change the part of speech, like changing "man" to "men" to make it plural, or changing the noun "road" into the verb "ride". In other words, it was in use before English speaking people were even aware of the existence of the North and South American continents. Most folks don't have a master's degree in linguistics as I do, but their ignorance doesn't make their opinion correct.

Personally, I don't mind if others want to use a word from my ancestral language to describe a practice common to many peoples across the earth, and I'll be continuing to use whatever words I want to describe what I do as well, especially if those words come from my own ancestral language, and I'm going to continue to use in an environmentally friendly way whatever plants that are local and/or ancestral to me that I feel appropriate. I actually prefer cedar/juniper/cypress, mugwort, birch bark, common sage, holy grass, rosemary and lavender, all of which are native to the European lands of my ancstors.


What does burning an herb for purification look like when its a Native American practice as opposed to a European or Middle Eastern practice, so we will know what not to do? Using an abalone shell to hold it and an eagle feather to swish the smoke around? My European ancestors held the eagle to be sacred as well. Eagle was depicted sitting atop Yggdrasil, the World Tree. And my ancestors lived much closer to the ocean, as I still do, to have access to shells than the Native American tribes that lived in the Southwestern desert where white sage grows. For any Native American tribe near the area where I live to use white sage and then say I shouldn't use it, would be like French people living in Paris and using a plant that only grows near Cadiz and claiming that's ok because its "European", and then saying that any Chinese who live in Paris have no right to it for their own traditional rituals that used a similar plant back in China because they are not of European ancestry. It is racism, pure and simple. Others don't have a right to your ceremonies, but they have all the right in the world to use the plant.

This same misconception applies to other items, aspects and cultural trappings that popular culture automatically associates with Native Americans. Sweetgrass is another example. It grows in all circumpolar regions, not only in North America, but also China, Tibet, Mongolia, Siberia, as well as the lands of my ancestors in Scotland, where it is called holy grass, and Scandinavia, where it is called sødgræs.

Additionally, we have actual archaeological evidence that the ancestors of Europeans wore skins and "moccasin" style shoes, wore cloaks made of colorful bird feathers (which in the Gaelic languages of the Celts was called a tuigen) and had bullroarers (dated to 18,000 years ago!) and skin frame drums, both for winnowing grain and playing. It was called a vétt in the Lokasena, and is called a wecht in Scots English, a dialect of English spoken in Scotland that was heavily influenced by the Norse (Clive Tolley, 2016).  The Irish bodhran is skin frame drum, and some very old sources describe the framed skin used for winnowing grain in Irish Gaelic as a "bodhran". In other words, if "white people" use drums and feathers and wear skins in their spiritual practice, they are not appropriating something that didn't belong to their very own ancestors, and having those things forced from them by political leaders who converted to Christianity is not the same thing as our ancestors having willingly given them up, so they are still our birthright.


How many other accusations are based on a similar lack of knowledge on the part of the accuser, and also of the accused to defend themselves and also align their practice with a cultural root of their own? Maybe not even most accusations, but these few examples still demonstrate that we need to be careful about how much we allow ourselves to be manipulated by our own emotions into attempting to place limitations on other people, and we need to truly educate ourselves on the full story of things, especially if they elicit an emotional response from us. Finally, we should never give up the customs of our own ancestors just to appease another's lack of knowledge or tolerance of our own cultural ancestry.

The Meditation of the Senses and the Drum

One of the meditation techniques I am fond of involves opening one's senses and maintaining awareness of all the stimuli coming into your senses all at once.

Typically, I will first close my eyes and begin by rhythmically breathing. I usually do not count my breaths nor do I try to time my breaths to a count, as in the four fold breath with which one may be familiar. I simply breath at a moderately slow pace and try to keep it as even as possible, just becoming one with the breath as much as possible so that it is the only thing in my awareness.

Then I will shift my awareness to my skin, and to all the sensations that my skin is experiencing, from the wind to my clothing to the surface I am sitting on or the ground under my feet. After I feel all of these sensations firmly, I will bring in everything I am hearing, then also everything I might be tasting and smelling, and finally I will open my eyes and try to keep everything I am seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and feeling in my awareness all at once.

This method has the effect of making me presently aware of my connection to all things, and often I will experience a "rushing" of myself out into and through all of creation, and a rushing in of creation into myself, like the waves of the trackless sea, and I am able to experience in that moment a oneness that all things share.

Last night, I tried out my new drum for the first time, a Remo 16 inch buffalo drum. My purpose was simply to "get to know" the drum, to hear its voice and feel its vibrations, and how it acts and reacts to being played in different ways. I did not expect such a strong experience, as I hadn't even cleansed it.

I played first with the light on. I simply wanted to get used to the drum, and it was very enjoyable to play. Next, I turned off the light and played a simple 4/4 time beat over and over, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, at about 4 beats per second.

I concentrated on merging with the rhythm so that nothing existed but the rhythm. Before long, I noticed the harmonics that were created by playing this rhythm at this speed, like a didgeridoo constantly droning. After about 15 minutes of drumming while maintaining awareness only of the sound of the drum, I beat out a faster tempo for a few seconds and then stopped.

What I noticed immediately was that the trance and feeling of oneness, which I try to achieve through the meditation of the senses that I outlined above, was very clear and strongly present. I could not believe how strongly I could feel it. It had been rather effortless.

A Note About Death, Fear & Otherworld Journeying

Something I read today prompted me to consider the stories people are told about death and how those stories affect them. 

One's understanding of the Death realms and the Otherworld are shaped in large part by the stories we are told about dying and death, and the destination of souls after death. Often we are told stories, as children especially, concerning death and the Otherworld that we take on faith, or that we take on because it is drilled into us.

Right now, hundreds of millions of people are scared out of their wits, too afraid of what they fear death holds for them to even contemplate death and dying to try to make peace with its inevitability, all because they have been told a story of hellfire and damnation. 

Others are told stories of karma and the cyclical return of reincarnation, and this may ease their fears, or it may create apprehension depending upon their personal experiences, actions and constitution. 

The soul goes to its origin. It goes to the beginning. It goes home, and nowhere else. Those doctrines that teach suffering after death have done more harm to humanity than all wars combined. Those teachings helped to cause many of those wars.  There are souls trapped in the between spaces of reality for no other reason than the fear of moving on caused by these teachings, rather than because of actions the person made during their lifetime. 

Journeying to the Otherworlds, called hedge-crossing or faring forth by some, is a perfect way to dispel the fear of death because it also gives intimate knowledge that life after death exists, rather than relying on faith in what one has read or been told. Journeying also gives one the ability to properly navigate the Unseen, both now and also after death. 

Learn for yourself what the Unseen realms have to show you and to teach you. Don't take anyone else's word for it, not even mine. With the aid of your spirit helpers, write your own story...