How we’re celebrating Imbolc/Candlemas

Content warning: paganism This year, a few holidays fall into this weekend: Candlemas, St. Brigid’s day, Imbolc. Maybe they’re historically related, maybe they’re not—you’ll have to look into that for yourself. Today I’ll just be writing about our plans. At some point in the past twenty years, I found out about Candlemas and the associated practice of eating crêpes (possibly because of their sun-like appearance?). That sounded good to us so we’ve been eating crêpes by candlelight every Candlemas for a few years now.

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I started watching Twin Peaks a few days ago. I know, given my interests and the fact that I’m a Gen X’er, this is ridiculously late. Just finished season one.

Enveloping mist.
Bare trees bloom from the chill gray,
Lonely shapes in black.

Charles Eisenstein: “Economic growth is finding something people used to do for themselves, taking it away and selling it back to them.”

A border collie running an agility course is a being happier than which none can be conceived.

Happy 19th birthday to this kiddo!

Prayer before a fire (stealing lines from both Gandalf and Gordon White):

I am a servant of the secret fire,
The fire of creation.
All fires are the one fire,
And blessed be its flame.

Lovely night for a backyard fire

I finally read that Kingsnorth essay “Against Christian Civilization” and, yeah, it’s a banger.

This article is being passed around in my little circle here at micro.blog. Absolutely worth reading. All of the vigor, these days, seems to be outside the mainstream (i.e., universities, legacy media, Democrats). Rachel and I were watching some videos of Dr Zach Bush this morning. He (and other “alternative health” folks) are clearly out of the mainstream. Yet his vision is so compelling.

I don’t know what to make of his claims (or those of Thomas Cowan) that fall outside the mainstream. Maybe they’re wrong in important ways. But, as I said to Rachel, I’ll take being wrong in details but right directionally. What does mainstream medicine offer us? Depressed and lonely? Take this pill. Sick? Take this other pill. The two pills causing new problems? Here are more pills to handle that.

I’m too dispositionally cautious to go very far into the deep end. But the Recognized Authorities are less compelling every day.